When Marcus Ashford returns to his childhood home, he expects strained reunions and unfinished conversations. What he doesn't expect is the gap in his memory: a lifelong tradition of weekly dinners with "old family friends" he can't picture. Can't name. Can't recall at all, no matter how hard he tries.
Marcus begins to notice small things that are not quite right. Guests who never eat. Reflections that lag. Shadows bending the wrong way. Wine glasses that stay full no matter how much is poured. His mother has spent decades protecting this household from a truth too dangerous to speak aloud.
Every question has a cost. Curiosity gets paid for in blood. In memory. In pieces of yourself you don't notice missing.
The Hospitality is a gothic horror novella of inherited bargains and generational sacrifice: haunted house unease, ritual horror, the slow suffocation of family silence.
Perfect for readers who love:
Gothic and haunted house horror
Quiet, psychological dread
Uncanny guests and ritual horror
Folk-horror and cosmic undertones
Stories about memory, inheritance, and family curses
For fans of Shirley Jackson and Susan Hill. For anyone who knows the worst hauntings are the ones you're not allowed to mention.
When Marcus Ashford returns to his childhood home, he expects strained reunions and unfinished conversations. What he doesn't expect is the gap in his memory: a lifelong tradition of weekly dinners with "old family friends" he can't picture. Can't name. Can't recall at all, no matter how hard he tries.
Marcus begins to notice small things that are not quite right. Guests who never eat. Reflections that lag. Shadows bending the wrong way. Wine glasses that stay full no matter how much is poured. His mother has spent decades protecting this household from a truth too dangerous to speak aloud.
Every question has a cost. Curiosity gets paid for in blood. In memory. In pieces of yourself you don't notice missing.
The Hospitality is a gothic horror novella of inherited bargains and generational sacrifice: haunted house unease, ritual horror, the slow suffocation of family silence.
Perfect for readers who love:
Gothic and haunted house horror
Quiet, psychological dread
Uncanny guests and ritual horror
Folk-horror and cosmic undertones
Stories about memory, inheritance, and family curses
For fans of Shirley Jackson and Susan Hill. For anyone who knows the worst hauntings are the ones you're not allowed to mention.
Friday, October 11th — Arrival
The guests had come to dinner every Saturday for twenty-six years, and Marcus could not picture a single one of their faces.
That was what struck him first, standing at the end of the drive, bag slung over one shoulder. The house looked smaller than he remembered. The door had fresh green paint. But the gap in his memory where the Saturday dinners should have been—that he couldn't stop noticing.
The house waited at the end of the drive, still as it had always been.
Marcus walked toward it. Three years since he'd been home. Lecture halls. Rented rooms. Libraries where dust settled on everything including him. And now here he was, back at the beginning. The intervening time might have been a dream he was only now waking from.
The gravel crunched beneath his feet. Everything was familiar, but the familiarity felt thin—a language he'd spoken as a child but could no longer quite recall. The hedges had been trimmed recently. The roses were in bloom, fat and red and slightly obscene in their perfection.
That was the lie the house told.
His mother opened the door before he reached it. "Marcus." She stood in the doorway, not moving to
embrace him, not stepping back to let him in. Just his name, and then a pause that went on a beat too long. "You're early."
"The train was faster than I expected."
"Was it." Her tone made it a statement. She studied him the way she used to when he was small—that searching look that meant she was deciding whether to believe him. Then she stepped aside. "Come in. Your room is ready."
The hallway smelled the same. Beeswax. Old wood. Something else underneath—he'd never found the right word for it. He'd always called it home. He had not missed it, exactly. Had not thought about it at all. But now that he was here, breathing it in, his shoulders dropped.
"Your father's in the study," his mother said, already moving toward the kitchen. "Dinner's at seven. Saturday, so—" She stopped. Turned. That look again, assessing. "You remember Saturdays."
"The guests."
"The guests." She nodded once. "They'll be pleased to see you."
She disappeared through the kitchen door before he could ask what she meant. Marcus stood in the hallway, bag still on his shoulder, listening to the particular silence of this house. The clock in the study. Old wood settling into itself.
The Saturday dinners had been a fixture of his childhood, as unremarkable as church on Sunday or the way his mother always set the table with the good silver on certain nights. The guests came, the guests ate, the guests left. He had never questioned it.
But now, reaching for those memories, he found only blank space. The same unsettling absence that had troubled him on the drive. The dining room, yes—he could picture that. The candles. His mother's particular tension on those evenings. The smell of the roast came back to him easily: lamb with rosemary, filling the house by late afternoon. Her laugh changed when the
guests arrived, becoming lighter, more careful. And he remembered the feeling of being watched, of conversations that went quiet when he entered the room.
But not the guests themselves. Never the guests.
And once—he was twelve, maybe thirteen—he had tried to draw one of them. The morning after a Saturday dinner. Sitting at the kitchen table with his sketchbook while his mother washed dishes, he'd wanted to capture the man's face. Edmund, he thought the name was. He'd sat across from Edmund for years, watched him eat, listened to him speak. But when Marcus put pencil to paper, his hand wouldn't move. His fingers knew where to go but the pencil stayed still. As if the memory itself refused to be fixed in place.
His mother had seen what he was doing. Had crossed the kitchen in three steps and taken the sketchbook from his hands. She'd said nothing. Just torn out the blank page—the page where Edmund's face should have been—and burned it in the sink.
He never tried again.
His room had not changed.
The same books on the shelves, spines faded. The same poster above the desk, corners curling away from the wall. His mother had not touched anything in three years. It was a room kept for someone who was expected to return.
On the desk, his phone buzzed. London, waiting for him to come back. The interview on Tuesday, the flat in Crouch End, Sunday mornings at the farmers' market with coffee going cold in his hand. A life with no room for the things he couldn't explain.
He didn't answer.
The house waited around him. Patient. Familiar. And he knew—had maybe always known—that he had been lying to himself. He hadn't come home for a visit. He had come home because something was calling him. Had been calling for years—a low hum beneath his thoughts. He'd buried it under applications, interviews, the busy work of building a future elsewhere.
He'd never told anyone about the dreams. The ones where he stood at a table set for six, watching candles burn sideways, listening to voices that weren't quite voices singing something that wasn't quite music. The ones he'd been having since he was twelve years old.
Since the day his mother burned the blank page.
He'd spent his whole adult life running from this. Building a life in London where the strangest thing was a cracked tile in the kitchen. Now, standing at the window of his childhood bedroom, that life felt like something glimpsed through water—still visible, no longer reachable.
The garden stretched out below, immaculate as always. His mother's domain—the roses she tended every morning, the hedges she had shaped over decades into forms that enclosed rather than decorated. They made walls. Green walls within green walls, paths that curved back on themselves, a maze disguised as a garden.
The hedges gave way to fields, then woods. The village lay somewhere past the treeline—close enough to walk to, far enough to forget.
The Ashford house sat at the center of its own small world, ringed by land that had belonged to the family for—
How long?
Marcus frowned. He knew this. Had always known it. But when he tried to grasp the number, his mind slipped. The same blank wall he'd hit when trying to recall the guests. A fact he should know, sliding away like water through fingers.
Three hundred years. The number dropped into his mind like a key into a lock. Since 1693, when Edmund Ashford had bought the land and built this house.
Edmund.
The same name as the guest. The guest whose face he couldn't remember, couldn't draw, couldn't hold in his mind for more than a moment.
He didn't know why he had forgotten. He didn't know why remembering felt so much like being reminded.
Dinner was at seven. Not the Saturday dinner—that would come later. An ordinary family meal in the small dining room off the kitchen.
His father was already seated when Marcus came down, a glass of wine in hand, the evening paper spread before him. He still read the paper. Of course he did. Robert Ashford had always believed in knowing the news before forming an opinion. Even if his opinions, once formed, were gentle things that rarely troubled anyone.
"Marcus." Robert glanced up from the paper, his face opening into welcome. That was Robert—warmth without calculation. The face of a man who had never had to make hard choices about the people he loved. "Good to have you home. Tell me about the train. Any interesting fellow passengers?"
Such a Robert question. He had always been fascinated by strangers on trains. The small glimpses into other lives. He collected their stories the way some men collected stamps, retelling them at dinner parties with delight that never wore thin.
Marcus sat. His mother appeared with a casserole dish. "It's nothing fancy," she said, setting it on the table with careful precision. "I didn't have time to prepare."
"It smells wonderful," Robert said, and meant it, and his parents performed the rituals of a long marriage. His father held the dish while his mother served. She passed him the salt before he asked for it. They murmured things to each other that weren't really words. Marcus saw what he had been too close to see before.
His mother was tense.
Her movements looked smooth, her expression pleasant enough. But her shoulders sat wrong—held up instead of
resting down. A fraction of a second's delay before each response.
"Saturday," he said.
His mother's fork paused over her plate. A tiny pause, barely perceptible. Then she resumed eating. "What about Saturday?"
"The guests. You said they'd be pleased to see me." "Did I?"
"Yes."
"Well." She took a bite, chewed, swallowed. "They always enjoyed your company. When you were younger."
"I don't remember them very well."
The silence that followed had weight to it. His father had stopped eating too, fork suspended, responding to what he saw in his wife's posture without understanding it.
"They're old friends." His mother set down her fork. Chose her words. "They've been coming for years. You'll recognize them when you see them."
"But what are their names?"
His mother's attention fixed on him and held.
"The Harrisons," she said. "Edmund and Clara Harrison."
The names meant nothing to Marcus. They should have—God, if these people had been coming to dinner every Saturday for his entire childhood, he should have known their names as well as his own. No spark of recognition. Just blankness.
"Old family friends," his father said, reaching for the wine. "Known them forever. Part of the family."
"Part of the family," Marcus repeated.
"More wine?" his father asked, and the conversation moved on, and Marcus let it move, but he did not stop watching his mother's face.
She didn't relax for the rest of the meal. And when she thought no one was looking, she glanced at the calendar on the kitchen wall.
Saturday was circled in red. The same red as the marks on every Saturday for as far back as the calendar went. He saw it now.
He wondered how he had ever missed it.
Marcus Ashford has sought a new life as an adult in London but, as The Hospitality begins, returns to his family home. There is familiarity, yet things that do not line up with his memory. The house becomes a character within the story. It watches and breathes. Marcus feels its presence. The ritual of Saturday evening suppers has become a long-time fixture. Recollection exists, but there are things Marcus cannot quite put his finger on.
Luna Asli Kolcu incapsulates the modern Gothic story with a constant state of dread and foreboding throughout The Hospitality. His parents are opposites when it comes to the weekly suppers with “old friends”, The Harrisons. His father, Robert, seems to be apathetic to the entire process, merely existing, showing up and making conversation. His mother, Eleanor, by contrast, carries the entire load of preparation, keeping everything the same every single week. In the vein of Shirley Jackson, who often wrote of the horrors of the home, it is a storytelling of the unnoticed and unpaid labor most stay-at-home mothers and wives carry every day, and its toll on the body and the psyche. Marcus notices the physical toll, and when he asks his father about it, Robert can neither answer questions nor explain. He would rather not ask questions of his wife and prefers to remain out of the loop in the why.
Their regular guests, Edmund and Clara Harrison seem familiar, but not normal. Marcus raises questions, including about his grandmother, but his mother succinctly shuts them down. Every question he presents adds weight and tension to the story woven by Kolcu. The climax is a masterclass in the weight of unspoken family trauma and the damage it can do. Marcus’s questions require him to decide about the consequences of his answers. What he must do has far reaching consequences.
Luna Asli Kolcu will ensnare fans of Gothic hauntings and folk horror with The Hospitality.