It is pouring rain, and Eric moves through the downpour searching for shelter. He fashions a makeshift umbrella from a soaking newspaper whose headline reads, “Slasher Claims 7th Victim,” the ink bleeding down the page. As he hurries along the darkened sidewalk, he bumps into a passerby and knocks the man’s sunglasses to the ground—odd attire for the middle of the night. The man, Servan, retrieves them, giving Eric a clear glimpse before slipping them back on. Beneath a soft-brimmed hat, rain pouring off the edges, stands a tall, cadaverous figure with burning eyes, no hair, and a scar like a jagged lightning bolt running from his brow through both lips. Eric asks for directions to the Braine Hotel. Servan silently points. When Eric turns back to thank him, the man has vanished.

Eric reaches the Braine Hotel, a six-story relic nearly eighty years old, and steps gratefully out of the storm. The desk attendant, Marda, pops up from behind the counter and startles him, teasing that he deserved it for scaring her first. Eric asks about Skorzeny, having heard rumors the monster once stayed there. Marda confirms she knows the name, but when Eric insists on checking the register, the only entries he finds are oddities and impossibilities—including the signatures of John Wilkes Booth and his brother dated November '63. No answers.

With nowhere else to go, Eric is forced to take the only available room: a shared one. As Marda leads him upstairs, they pass a woman standing in a doorway with a shadowed figure lying on a cot behind her. Marda quickly closes the door and continues upward. Eric finds no roommate in his room, falls asleep, and is soon plunged into a nightmare—a corpse in a morgue drawer suddenly coming alive as a wolf. He bolts awake to the soft click of the door. A knife glints in a sliver of streetlight before being sheathed. It is Servan. Still wearing sunglasses in the dead of night. He asks whether Eric had a bad dream about a werewolf—as if he somehow knew.

Before long, Eric learns the horrifying truth: the Slasher is far closer than he imagined—sharing his room. And Marda harbors a deadly secret of her own. Between the killer within the walls and the stranger who moves like a phantom, Eric must escape this decaying hotel before either of them makes him the next victim.