Three Minutes of Darkness

The storm washed out the only bridge, trapping five strangers at the Blackwood Motor Inn—a rotting structure clinging to a cliffside, run by a single, dead-eyed clerk. On the first night, the man in Room 302 vanished. The door was chained from the inside, the windows painted shut, and his luggage sat untouched on the bed. The clerk simply stared at the rain and whispered, "The hollow only takes those who are ready." On the second night, the girl in Room 204 disappeared. Another perfect locked room. Her clothes were still in the closet. The only anomaly was a small, dried reddish-brown smear on the floorboards. Paranoia set in. The survivors barricaded themselves in, too terrified to sleep. They soon noticed a chilling detail: every night at the stroke of midnight, the grandfather clock in the lobby stopped ticking, and the motel's power died for exactly three minutes. On the third night, a third guest evaporated into the dark. When state troopers finally cleared the road, they found the apathetic clerk in the lobby, two traumatized guests locked in a pantry, and two corpses in the flooded basement. The other three people were wiped from the face of the earth, never to be found. What happened during those three minutes of darkness, and who are the bodies in the basement?