Caveat

Barrett is vague when he offers Isaac the job. There's a niece, an island, an empty house. She needs someone around. It pays cash. Isaac has no money and, more usefully, no pressing reason to refuse — his memory has been unreliable since an incident he can't fully reconstruct, which makes him easy to talk into things. He takes the job.

When he arrives, the terms become clearer. Olga is not simply troubled; she is volatile and has been alone in the house long enough that the silence has settled into her. She will tolerate Isaac's presence under one condition: he wears a leather harness attached to a chain that runs along a ceiling-mounted track, confining him to one half of the building. Her half remains hers. He agrees. The chain is bolted. Barrett leaves on the boat.

The house is damp, rotting at the edges, and full of things that don't quite add up. Olga moves through her territory in near-silence, except for the toy rabbit — a battery-powered drum-beater she carries or positions nearby, its mechanical tapping the only consistent sound in the house. Isaac begins to notice evidence of a previous occupant. Someone else was here before him. That person is not on the island anymore. Barrett did not mention this.

Isaac's memory surfaces in fragments that don't help him when he needs them. The chain, which he accepted as a reasonable precaution, becomes the central fact of his existence — it governs where he can stand, what he can reach, how far he can run. Olga has a crossbow, and she has used it before. The power dynamic that seemed like a simple arrangement quietly inverts: Isaac realizes he is not watching over Olga. He was brought here to be kept.

What follows is a slow contraction toward violence. Isaac tries to understand the house, the previous occupant's fate, and what Barrett actually intended by sending him here. Olga becomes actively dangerous. The confrontation is brutal and claustrophobic, fought within the geometry of the chain. Olga does not survive it. Neither outcome feels like a victory. Isaac is wounded, alone, still tethered to a house on an island that Barrett is not coming back to. The mainland is unreachable. The rabbit is somewhere in the dark, still drumming.