ALKMAAR HORROR STORY
Chapter One: Sam's Mansion — The Debt Collectors (Plural)
The invitation said 7 PM. They showed up at 7:43 because nobody in this group had ever been on time for anything in their lives.
Sam was waiting at the door.
Of course he was.
Perfectly pressed linen shirt, glass of something that cost more than Milos' entire gaming setup, smile so practiced it had probably been rehearsed in the mirror. The mansion sprawled behind him like a statement — limestone facade, climbing ivy, windows so tall you could drive a car through them. The kind of house that didn't just say old money. It said the concept of money was invented for us.
"Welcome," Sam said, opening his arms wide. "Make yourselves at home."
"Already planning on it," Tijjani said, brushing past him without making eye contact. He looked up at the chandelier in the entry hall — a cascading thing of crystal and brass, obscenely large, dripping light. His lip curled. "Bro. If this place is haunted, I'm suing you."
"It's not haunted."
"You would say that."
Milos came in sideways, already on his phone, backpack half falling off one shoulder. "I got my Valorant queue running. Don't start any cult rituals for at least forty-five minutes, I need to rank up."
"No one is starting cult rituals," Sam said.
"Yet," Tijjani said.
Sven stepped inside and immediately took his shoes off without being asked. He looked around with wide, genuinely awed eyes — the marble floors, the oil paintings, the staircase that curved upward like the spine of some grand animal. "Thank you for having us, Sam," he said quietly, and he meant it the way only Sven could mean something, which was completely and without irony.
Sam looked at him for a moment too long. "Of course."
Jesper came through the door with his whole body already in contact with Jens — arm hooked through his, cheek briefly pressed to his shoulder, fingers laced together like they'd had this routine memorized for years. Which they had. "Baby," Jesper said, scanning the visible wing of the mansion with the expression of a man evaluating real estate, "let's find the biggest bed in this place and immediately ruin it."
Jens pressed a kiss to the top of his head. "Anything for you."
"God," Tijjani said. "Every single time."
"You're jealous," Jesper said pleasantly.
"I'm revolted."
"Same thing."
Yuki came in last. He stood in the entry hall, small and quiet and unhurried, and looked around with dark, careful eyes. Not awed. Not amused. Just — looking. The way you look at something you are already trying to memorize.
Sam closed the door behind them.
The lock made no sound.
The dining table was the kind that made you feel like you were in a film. Long enough to seat twenty, set for seven, lit by candles that smelled faintly of something warm and indeterminate. The food came in courses — actual courses, not just "here's three things at once" — and each one was absurdly, almost offensively good. Sven kept murmuring appreciative things. Milos ate with one hand and scrolled with the other until Tijjani reached over without looking and put the phone face-down on the tablecloth.
"Hey—"
"Eat like a person."
Milos glared. Ate like a person.
The wine was exceptional. The kind of wine where you don't notice how much you've had until you try to stand up.
Sam sat at the head of the table, eating almost nothing, watching everyone with that smile — warm and proud and just slightly too still to be fully comfortable.
"Eat," he said, when the third course arrived. "Everything here is yours."
He paused.
"Just know that you'll have to leave something behind."
Milos snorted into his glass. "Bro. Just say you're lonely."
The table laughed. Sam laughed too, or did something with his face that looked like laughing. He refilled everyone's glasses.
They ate. They talked too loud. Jesper and Jens disappeared briefly between the seventh and eighth course and came back with slightly rearranged clothing, and nobody said anything about it because nobody wanted to deal with the response. Tijjani critiqued every decorative choice in the room with the casual devastation of a man who had strong opinions and zero social restraint. Sven disagreed with him gently and sincerely about the drapes. Yuki ate everything placed in front of him and said very little, and at one point looked toward the far wall with an expression that was not quite worry and not quite recognition.
Hours passed the way they do when you're comfortable — slipping through your hands like water, like you're not losing them, like time is just something that happens to other people.
At some point the candles burned lower. At some point the conversation softened. At some point someone said what time is it and someone else checked their phone and couldn't make sense of the number.
Sam stood up.
He raised his glass.
"Payment is due."
It landed strange.
Not threatening — that was the thing. He said it the way you'd say the check is here at a normal dinner, casual and inevitable. Jesper rolled his eyes on instinct.
"Oh nooo," he said, hand to his chest. "The bill. What do we owe, Sam, our firstborn children?"
"Not money," Sam said.
The candles flickered. All of them, at once, like something had exhaled. The chandelier above the table swayed — barely, just a tremor — and the light shifted into something yellower and older and not quite right.
Nobody laughed.
Tijjani set his glass down. He looked at Sam with narrow eyes — the look he gave to problems he was trying to calculate. "What does that mean."
Sam didn't answer. He just looked at them, one by one, with something on his face that might have been tenderness. Might have been apology. Might have been the expression of someone who has decided, long before the evening began, how it was going to end.
"It means," Sam said, "that you've been here long enough."
They tried to leave.
Obviously they tried to leave.
Milos found the front door first — or found where the front door had been, because now there was just wall. Smooth, papered, hung with a landscape painting of somewhere that looked like nowhere. He pressed his hand against it. Solid. He knocked. The sound that came back was not the sound of a door.
"Okay," Milos said. He turned around. "So the front door is gone. Just putting that out there."
"What?" Tijjani was already across the room, already running his hand along the wall. "What do you mean the—" He stopped. Pressed. Knocked. Heard the same wrong sound. "You have got to be kidding me."
Jens was already on his feet, Jesper's hand in his, moving through the corridor with his jaw set and his eyes sharp — not panicked, just focused, because Jens didn't panic, Jens solved. He tried three more exits. A back door that opened onto a wall of dark so dense it had texture. A window he tried to open and found painted shut and then tried to break and found did not break. A servants' entrance that looped back, inexplicably, to the dining room.
He came back to Jesper.
"Working on it," he said.
"I know," Jesper said.
Sven had gone very still in the parlor doorway. Not frozen — still. The way he went still when he was understanding something he hadn't wanted to understand. "It's taking from us," he said, softly. Not to anyone in particular. "That's the cost."
"What's taking from us?" Milos said.
"The house."
"The house."
"Yes."
"Sven, buddy, the house is taking from us."
"Yes."
Milos stared at him. Looked around the room. Looked back at Sven. "Okay. Cool. Great."
Sam's voice came from somewhere that was not a specific location — not above them, not below, not from any room they could point to. It was just in the house, the way the smell of old wood was in the house, the way the warmth was in the house.
It's only fair. You stayed. You enjoyed. Now you pay.
Tijjani said, to the ceiling: "You're so annoying, Sam."
No response.
Yuki, who had not moved from where he stood near the base of the staircase, looked up at the landing with those careful dark eyes. His expression had not changed. He looked, almost, like someone who had expected this.
He said nothing.
He had known since the first course.
He had chosen to say nothing.
Some debts, he thought, in a language none of them would understand, are old enough that running from them only makes them larger.
They didn't fall asleep. That was the strange part. There was no transition — no heaviness, no closing of eyes, no moment where someone said I'm going to lie down. One moment they were in the corridor, trying doors, and then they were elsewhere.
Each of them, elsewhere.
Tijjani found himself in a room he didn't recognize that felt like somewhere he'd been a thousand times.
The walls were covered in framed photographs. Him, mostly. Younger. In kits. On pitches. Stadiums with roaring stands. He walked along them slowly, hands in his pockets, jaw tight, cataloguing — this is a memory, this is a trick, I am not affected, I am not—
He stopped at one photograph.
A kid, maybe nine years old, standing on a patch of scrubby grass with a ball under his arm. Massive grin. Gap in his front teeth. Eyes like they owned the whole world.
He stared at it for a long time.
He couldn't remember the gap-toothed kid's name.
He couldn't remember that the gap-toothed kid was him.
Sam appeared in the doorway. Not threatening. Just — present.
"Choose what to keep," Sam said. "The rest is mine."
Tijjani turned on him with fury so fast it should have been terrifying. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare touch that—"
"You already let me," Sam said, almost gently. "When you sat down. When you ate. When you enjoyed it."
The photograph flickered.
Tijjani's pride was a well-known quantity. His pride was armored and loaded and had never, in living memory, been successfully breached.
His pride had also, it turned out, been the softest possible target.
He reached for the photograph.
His hand went through it.
Sven's room was quiet.
That was all. Just quiet. A chair, a lamp, a window with soft light coming through it — not daylight, not moonlight, just light, sourceless and warm. And in the chair, his mother. Looking exactly as she had looked the day he signed his first professional contract, when she'd held his face in her hands and cried and laughed at the same time and said I always knew, Sven, I always knew.
He sat down across from her.
She smiled at him.
He understood, immediately, that this was not his mother. That this was something wearing the shape of that memory. That the warmth he was feeling was not warmth but a mechanism — here, feel this, want to keep this, pay for this.
He sat across from her anyway.
Because even knowing that, it felt like her.
He was the only one who understood what was happening clearly enough to refuse. He was also the only one who understood that refusal, here, did not mean what it meant in the outside world. You could not opt out of the cost by naming it. You could only hold it, and feel it, and watch it go.
"It's okay," he said, to his mother who was not his mother, in a voice almost too quiet to hear. "I know what you are."
She kept smiling.
He wept.
And in weeping, paid something. And in naming it, paid less than the others. And in paying less than the others, got to keep the outline of her face, if not the weight of her hands.
It was the best deal anyone made that night.
It still cost him.
Milos' room had no windows, no art, no particular charm. Just a kitchen table. Linoleum floor. A birthday cake with seven candles.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it with every bit of ironic detachment he'd ever cultivated in his eighteen years of being a certified menace to society.
"I don't care about memories," he told the room. "I'm built different. I live in the present tense. The past is cringe. This is cringe."
The room did not respond.
He walked to the table. Looked at the cake. The frosting was slightly lumpy and the number 6 was written in red letters that had bled a little at the edges because whoever piped it had not been a professional, had just been someone who loved him.
He couldn't remember whose hands had made it.
He sat down on the linoleum floor.
He didn't make any noise. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and sat very, very still, and the tears were a surprise because he'd genuinely believed himself when he said he didn't care. The worst thing — the actual worst thing — was not the grief. It was how quickly he would be able to get up. How easily he could walk back out into the corridor and say whatever, it's fine, it was just a memory, I'm okay. He could already feel himself preparing to do it.
He was seventeen steps ahead of his own pain, preemptively burying it.
That efficiency was the saddest thing in the room.
Jesper had been certain, going in, that he was immune.
He'd told Jens so. He'd said — actually said, with full confidence — "I can't be bought. Whatever this house is doing, it's not going to work on me, because I don't care about things enough to pay for them."
Jens had looked at him with an expression that was very quiet and very full.
Jesper hadn't understood the expression at the time.
He stood now in a room with a window overlooking a summer garden, early morning, the light golden and particular and specific to one day that had happened once and could not be replicated. He knew the garden. He knew the quality of that light. He knew that there was someone standing just outside the frame of his vision — someone whose hand he had been holding.
He could not remember the person's name.
He could not remember the face.
He remembered the warmth of a hand. The specific feeling of a thumb tracing across his knuckles. The way some part of him had thought, that morning, without making it a thought: this is it. this is the thing.
He stood in the doorway of the room and he thought: I can't be bought.
And then he thought: I don't even know what I lost.
And that — not the loss itself but the not-knowing, the blankness where something enormous had been — was the thing that finally cut through him.
Sam did not need to appear in Jesper's doorway.
The room did the work entirely on its own.
In another room, Jens reached for Jesper through a door that was not a door and felt only air.
He stood there for a long time with his hand extended.
He did not ask for anything back. He did not bargain. He did not threaten Sam or the house or the architecture of this particular horror with the considerable force of his actual physical presence. He just stood there, hand extended, because the instinct to reach for Jesper was so fundamental it did not require consciousness to operate.
Sam appeared.
"You cannot both keep it," Sam said.
Jens looked at him.
"The memory of how you met. Only one of you can hold it."
Jens' face was very calm. This was not the calm of someone who was not afraid. This was the calm of someone who had already done the calculation, in less than a second, and arrived at the only answer that made any sense to him.
"Give it to him," Jens said.
"It doesn't work—"
"Give it to Jesper."
Sam looked at him. For the first time all evening, Sam's expression fractured into something unreadable and too complicated and possibly the realest thing he'd shown anyone. "Jens—"
"Give it to him," Jens said again. Flat. Final. Not a request. "He can have mine too."
The moment flickered.
Dissolved.
Jens stood in an empty room.
When he tried to remember the first time Jesper had said I love you, there was silence where the memory had been. A shape in the dark — something was here, something warm was here — but no image. No voice. No words.
He stood in the empty room and breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth.
He has it, Jens told himself. He kept it. That's enough.
He walked out.
Yuki's room was the simplest. A window. Morning light over rooftops he recognized — the particular shape of a neighborhood he'd grown up in, Aichi, the texture of it, the smell he couldn't smell but somehow knew was there. He stood at the window for a long time.
He had known since the entry hall. He had known the way you know certain things — not in words but in the body, a recognition so old it didn't require explanation.
He watched the light over the rooftops.
He thought: some memories are stones. carry too many and you cannot swim.
He thought: perhaps the house is not only cruel.
He thought: perhaps I should have said something.
Sam did not appear in his doorway. Sam appeared beside him, at the window, standing almost at his shoulder, looking out at the same light.
"You knew," Sam said.
Yuki was quiet for a moment. "Me know," he said. "Me not say."
"Why?"
Yuki looked out the window. Something moved in his face — not grief exactly, not acceptance exactly, something in between those things, something that had been aging inside him for a long time. "Some memories," he said slowly, working around the edges of the language, "better… not to have. Me think."
Sam stared at him.
"Me think you thought same thing," Yuki said.
Sam's mouth opened. Closed.
The window went dark.
They gathered in the entry hall at dawn.
No one had found the exit. The exit had simply appeared — the front door, back in its place, ordinary and solid, a little ridiculous actually, just a door. They came toward it from different corridors, different staircases, carrying themselves differently than they had arrived. Lighter, but not in the good way. The way a suitcase is lighter when it's been emptied of the things you packed.
Pale. A little hollow-eyed. Looking at each other and doing arithmetic — I know this person. I know this person. Why do I know this person.
Sam was in the entry hall. Immaculate, as always. Hands folded behind his back. His smile was the same and something behind it had shifted and he had not slept and perhaps he had not expected — despite everything, despite setting all of this in motion — he had not expected it to feel like this.
He had taken memories he thought made them less. He had curated. He had chosen things that seemed like deadweight, like pain, like unnecessary noise in lives he found beautiful. He had genuinely, completely, with his whole sheltered heart, believed he was doing something for them.
He had watched their confusion and told himself: I'm helping.
He looked at their faces now.
Nobody remembered how the evening had started.
Jens looked at Jesper. That was the first thing he did. He looked at Jesper the way he always looked at Jesper — gravitationally, involuntarily, the way objects with mass orient toward each other. And Jesper looked back at him with eyes that were open and unguarded and — not empty, Jesper was never empty — but missing something. Searching.
"Sorry," Jens said. His voice was rough. "Do we… know each other?"
Jesper blinked.
The silence lasted four seconds.
It was the four worst seconds Sam had ever experienced in a life that had been, largely, excellent.
"I don't—" Jesper started. He looked at Jens' face. Tilted his head slightly, like he was listening for something just below hearing. "I think so," he said slowly. "I think we do. I just don't know—" He stopped.
Jens held very still. Waiting.
He has the memory, Jens reminded himself. He has mine. He should know.
But you cannot remember something that has been taken from you even if it was given — the house doesn't work that way, debt doesn't work that way, Sam had not understood this part and now he did, standing in his own entry hall watching the damage accumulate.
Sven made a small, involuntary sound. Almost inaudible. He pressed his mouth together.
Milos was staring at his phone like it might tell him something. Like there might be an answer in the notifications. He looked up. His expression was doing that thing it did — closing off, becoming casual and unreachable, the drawbridge going up. He was already past it. He was already prepared to be past it. Seventeen steps ahead of his own pain, moving away from it at speed.
Tijjani said nothing. He stood with his arms crossed and his jaw set and the particular kind of silence that in Tijjani meant something enormous was happening that he was absolutely refusing to let anyone see. He looked at Sam. His eyes were dark and direct and said nothing and everything.
Sam met his gaze.
"What did you take?" Sven asked.
His voice was quiet. Not accusatory — Sven was incapable of accusatory. Just asking. Just needing to know, with that steady, open-faced, terrible sincerity of his.
Sam tilted his head. The smile was still there — smaller now. Tired around the edges.
"Only what you loved most," Sam said.
The words sat in the entry hall.
Jesper made a sound that was not a word.
Jens reached for his hand. And Jesper let him — immediately, without knowing why, the way you pull a coat around yourself against cold without deciding to, pure instinct, pure body memory, the mechanism of them so deep in the muscle that not even the house had reached it. Jesper looked down at their joined hands like he was looking at something he was trying to remember the name of.
He couldn't.
But he didn't let go.
The front door opened.
They walked out into dawn that was grey and cool and ordinary, the kind of morning that has no opinion about what happened to you the night before. The street was wet from somewhere — rain that must have fallen while they were inside. The city was waking up. A tram somewhere. Pigeons.
The door clicked shut behind them.
They stood on the front steps and did not speak for a while. Six of them, then Yuki, who came out last, unhurried, and stood slightly apart from the group in his usual way.
Milos sat down on the steps and put his head in his hands and then immediately lifted it again, rolled his shoulders back, got up. Performed recovery so fast you'd miss the grief if you blinked.
Tijjani was still not speaking. He would process this alone, in a room, at an undisclosed time, in a manner he would never describe to anyone.
Sven had both hands in his pockets and was looking at Jens and Jesper — who were still holding hands, who were standing slightly too close for strangers, who were looking at each other with the baffled intensity of two people trying to solve a problem they can't fully name.
"We'll be okay," Sven said, to no one specifically.
He wasn't sure he believed it.
He said it anyway, because he was Sven.
Yuki looked back at the mansion. Its limestone face, its tall windows, the ivy, the chandelier just visible through the glass — still lit, impossibly, though they had been gone from that room for hours.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Some memories, he thought again, are stones.
He thought about saying it out loud.
He didn't.
They walked down the front path in ones and twos, into the wet grey morning, back toward a city that did not know what had happened to them and would not ask. The debt was settled. The books were balanced. Sam, inside his beautiful mansion, stood alone in the entry hall with everything he'd taken from them — the roaring stadium, the mother's hands, the birthday cake, the summer morning, the four worst seconds — gathered somewhere in the house around him like a collection, like treasure.
He was not happy.
He had thought he would be.
He stood there for a long time.
He could not, precisely, remember how the evening had started.
No debt is ever settled when you enjoy it too much. The price of luxury is yourself. Nothing in life is free.