Jesse’s curse By Jack Tope
You just got back home. You head straight to the bed and sink into it. Your legs burn with exhaustion. Your friends are all planning to gather at the pub a train’s journey away from your place. Despite everything telling you to stay in tonight, it’s been a while since you’ve seen them all.
Long story short, you meet up with them. After a few hours pass, you realise you hadn’t spoken as much as you wished to. It was as if the conversation was too fast and too powerful to step into. You wait patiently for a chance to speak. When it comes, you don’t know what to say, so it passes. It’s good to be sitting down at least. The evening draws to a close.
It’s getting late and you’re thinking about heading home soon. Meanwhile, a change in plans had been set upon by your friends. A decision was casually revealed to you as everyone walked out; they were all going to go to “the club not too far down the road,” said with a confidence that you would join them.
This is when you first feel it properly that night, a feeling you already knew too well.
You feel the precsence of something moving behind your back. You hear it shift and twist behind you and down a nearby alleyway. You dare not look at it directly, you don’t even really want to acknowledge it was there.
If you’re lucky, it’ll leave quickly.
You hastily reply to your friend. “Sure! Why not?� your voice wobbling as you spit the words out.
Your friends mock and laugh at each other the whole trip down. For some reason, you cannot hold a smile anymore. Your mouth will not stay curved up for long before jittering up and down. You can still feel it nearby.
And over the course of that night, it only got closer. When you pay to get into the club, you heard it brush the entrance door. When your friends all order their drinks, you hear it scuttle on the wooden floor. It was inside the building with you.
You try gently to let your friends know that you were “tired” and “weren’t feeling up to it”, but they tell you “After this drink!” or “Come on Jesse!”. You feel your heart gradually sink into your chest.
This all came to culmination when your hand is dragged towards the dance floor. Your friends, clearly inspired after the batch of cocktails they ordered, pull you towards the mass of people. You can tell it’s in there. You can tell this is a bad idea. You don’t want to ruin the evening by disagreeing though.
The dancing crowd jumps up and down, throw themselves to and fro, pressing up against each other with their arms flailing in the air. Your friends disappear into noise and chaos. You catch a glimpse of it at someone’s feet. You know that this is too close for comfort. It’s time to get out.
The music begins to change, slowly gaining louder percussian and more solid drum beats. The crowd are moving violently to the new music. They press up against you, bouncing off eachother and pushing you around. There’s no way to move past them.
As you try to jump up above the canopy of dancers and locate the way out, you lock your gaze on it properly for the first time: The long beast that’s worming its way through the sea of raised hands. There are no breaks in the crowd for you to push through, in fact, as far as you can see the crowd doesn’t end. You can’t even see the walls anymore. The beast is snaking around you in circles, slowly constricting and bridging the space between you and it with every coil. It’s eyes are locked on you.
You try to gasp for air above the crowd, but you’re squeezed tightly now between the surrounding dancers. You cannot move, and soon, as the scaly body begins to spiral around you, you cannot even see anymore through the waves of hands and bodies crushing into you.
The crash of the doors of the club bring you back to reality. You must have just barged out because the doors are swinging behind you and your hands feel numb from impact. Some people are looking at you, confused. The music is inaudible from outside and you hear how heavy you are breathing. You abandon the club and rush home.
The panic doesn’t leave you for hours.
You haven’t gone to the club since. When your friends ask what happened that night, you shrug it off. You say that you had to go home for something or that you had an early morning and needed the rest.
Even now, you can still feel the wrapping body of the beast.
A book inspired by the effects of agoraphobia and the responses received in an online fear survey. Jesse is asked by her friends to go out to a club, but she’s busy trying to ignore the encroaching threat.
UCA Illustration Made by Jack Tope 2020 Instagram: @topeart topeartstudio@gmail.com