Occupied

Carl Bennett is driving home alone from a school reunion with a head full of awkward conversations and a stomach full of cheesy enchiladas. By the time the cramps hit, the tired little service station beside the A-road looks like salvation. He buys a large coffee, leaves his phone charging in the car and hurries into the public toilets.

An hour earlier he was telling old classmates that life was going fine. He almost believed it when they smiled and moved on. Now the last person to see him walking freely is a cashier who barely looked up. Carl has no remarkable strength to draw on. He is an ordinary man who chose a convenient stopping place, and that choice is becoming impossible to undo.

Two cubicles are taped shut. The third contains a gleaming Japanese-style toilet that looks far too new for the crumbling washroom around it. Carl sits down. A few minutes later he tries to stand.

He can't.

At first, the explanation must be simple: numb legs, a seized back, some idiot's glue on the seat. But there is no edge where his skin ends and the porcelain begins. A scratch on the white glaze sends pain through his hip. Blood appears on the toilet instead of his body. And as the afternoon wears on, the thing holding him starts to spread.

People come and go. Carl asks them to fetch help. They hear a man in a toilet cubicle insisting that he's stuck to the seat. Some laugh. Some think he's drunk. Others decide he's taken drugs and hurry away. Every attempt to make himself understood leaves him sweating, shaking and looking less believable than before. His phone is only a short walk away, and it might as well be on another continent.

A woman nearly believes him. A young attendant brings water and promises to tell her boss. Their kindness buys him time, but it does not loosen the grip beneath him. The longer he waits, the harder it is to describe what has changed. He wants someone to witness it before he loses the words for his own body.

When the station closes, its owner demands that Carl leave. His fear sounds like an excuse; his anger makes him sound dangerous. The police arrive expecting to remove an uncooperative customer. Only when they try to lift him do they discover that his body and the toilet have begun to share more than a surface.

Now the people who doubted him have to work together to save him. The cubicle fills with paramedics, firefighters, lights and tools. Each attempt to separate him reveals another connection. Scraping porcelain hurts. Moving the fixture makes him bleed. Beneath the floor, something pale has taken hold of the building itself. No one knows whether they can bring Carl out without bringing part of it with him.

Occupied is a claustrophobic twenty-four-hour horror story that begins with an embarrassingly ordinary emergency and becomes a nightmare of flesh, porcelain and disbelief. Its terror grows in the gap between what Carl feels and what anyone is willing to see. As Sunday afternoon approaches, rescue will demand a terrible choice. Even if they manage to move him, how can anyone be certain they have taken all of him?

Mark Adams is 43 (so he says) writes fiction that's dark, funny, and occasionally smells like grave dirt. Specialising in fantasy and humour, he crafts stories full of sentient paperwork, malfunctioning resurrection systems, and the kind of dungeons that would give OSHA an aneurysm.

He's currently working on Norman Reed (Not Reedus)-a gloriously grim and graphic series following a grumpy gravedigger, his undead sidekick, and the broken respawn system that ruined everything (again).

When not knee-deep in plot holes and sarcastic footnotes, Mark can be found arguing with goblins, sharpening metaphors, or misplacing important plot devices in cursed filing cabinets. He believes a thesaurus is a weapon, not a tool, and has no intention of writing anything "normal."