I tend to think of it as a hospital/hotel run for an invalid (in two senses of that word) humanity that cannot deal either with the real world or with itself.

Think of having a nightmare of what it is like to be a human being, and then wake up to find out that it is all true.  Welcome to the Hospice, where we are all tied by our ankles to our various habits, and are certainly doomed (each one of us!) to have such assorted roommates as the proprietors deem appropriate.

Maybury (might we bury all hope, or at least the false promise of May?), our protagonist, gets by in life by following a given route, and not deviating from it, until he follows a so-called short cut recommended by all the fellows in the firm.  Now he has gotten lost, ("Most of us here are lost," says the sad-faced lady), and is surely at "the outer edge" by now.

Maybury reaches a "bifurcation".

    "It was impossible to make any reasoned choice, and he doubted whether it mattered much in any case."

Now comes a recurring image in Aickman's stories.  Something shoots out from the tangled wild undergrowth, and attacks an ankle (or leg).  [Revision:  On rereading again:  Maybury does have a choice here, such as it is.  He continues along the way from which the cat/phantom/thing attacked him!  By the way, it is not stated that this is the road to the left, but the cat-thing came from the left, attacked Maybury's left leg, and even the chained diner is held by his left ankle.]

Maybury wonders if he should seek a hospital, but what he finds is advertised in the shape of a club.  It has "a solid Victorian door" but the "ceiling ... had been brought down in the modern manner as if to serve the stunted."  We will find that even some of the staff here are disturbed.

Great insistence is made on eating.  The turkey arrives.

    "It was an enormous pile, steaming slightly..."

Oh, my.

When Maybury protests that he has eaten "quite enough", the overly-motherly waitress says inexplicably, "That's not necessarily for each of us to say, is it?"  Say what?  (Well, at least she's *trying* to do a good job.)

In Aickman's stories, children often jump about aimlessly.  Here we have a youth, still with an "untroubled" face, but his energy has run down.  He merely stands about a lot.  He seems well on the way to becoming one of the screwed-up adults.  Especially if the sad-faced lady doesn't leave him alone.

The trouble is, we have lost all reason for 'being here'.  We have no meanings we can believe in anymore.  We have lost our connection with anything real, we are cut off from anything real.  We are fit only for the hospice.

But never mind, it will all end soon enough.

    "One of the undertaker's men said that he should not have to wait long."

[Addition after rereading again: Two additional points.  Falkner  has internal telephones, "between my quarters and the proprietors".  Who are these proprietors?  Also, I don't think we are paying nearly enough attention to the saving grace of Angela's thrice-repeated alarum cry, "Wake up!  Wake up!  Wake up!"]