He doesn't take you by force. He takes you because he can't stop thinking about you. In the mind-world of the Creel House, Henry Creel does not collect people at random. He chooses you - older, aware, inconveniently perceptive - and keeps you close in ways that feel deliberate, long before they feel frightening. The children come later. They are easier. They believe what they're told. You don't. That's the problem. Henry calls it interest. Curiosity. A necessary fixation. But the truth is simpler and far more dangerous: you make him feel exposed. Seen. Real. And he resents you for it almost as much as he wants you there. He doesn't need your help with the children. He needs you to stay. This is a story about obsession that breeds control, about vulnerability used as leverage, about a monster who does not want to love - but does not know how to stop choosing you. This is a psychological descent where protection becomes possession, tenderness becomes strategy, and the most terrifying question is not how do you escape - but why haven't you tried.