ALKMAAR HORROR STORY
Jens' Apartment: The Devotion
ALKMAAR HORROR STORY
Jens' Apartment: The Devotion
The door opens before I knock.
Jens is already there — filling the entire frame the way large men do when they're not trying to be intimidating and somehow that makes it worse. 188 centimeters of Viking-adjacent calm, wearing a grey henley with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, looking at me with that expression he has where his face is doing almost nothing but you still feel like you've been assessed and provisionally approved.
"You okay?" he says. "You look tired."
"I'm fine," I say, which is what I always say.
He steps aside and lets me in.
The apartment is immaculate.
Not clean the way a person cleans when they know someone's coming over — clean the way a place is when the person who lives there simply does not tolerate disorder as a concept. Everything in its place. The cushions squared. The kitchen counter bare and wiped. The whole space smells like sandalwood and something underneath it, something warmer, and the lighting is doing that thing where it's not quite dim but it's soft enough that your shoulders drop half an inch just from walking in.
It should feel welcoming.
It does feel welcoming.
That's one of the things I keep coming back to.
Jens takes my jacket without asking, hangs it up, moves to the kitchen, and I stand in the living room and look at the walls and the walls look back and —
There's Jesper.
A photo on the wall by the window. Jesper on what looks like a beach, laughing at something off-camera, hair doing that specific blonde thing in coastal wind, impossibly pretty in the way that still catches me off guard even though I've known him for years. Fine. Normal. People have photos of their partners.
There's another one on the bookshelf. Jesper reading, not posed, soft-focused, the kind of photo you take when someone doesn't know you're taking it.
One on the fridge — I can see it from here.
I drift a few steps toward the hallway and catch, at the edge of my vision, a small frame on the narrow shelf above the coat hooks. Jesper again. Sitting in what might be this apartment, this couch, this exact room — eyes half-closed, looking like the world is a perfectly acceptable place to exist in.
I drift back to the living room.
I sit down.
Jens comes back with a blanket — an actual blanket, folded, which he sets on the arm of the couch next to me with the casualness of someone who has assessed that a blanket is required and has therefore produced one — and then he goes back to the kitchen and I hear the sound of the fridge opening, bottles, a drawer.
"You eat?" he calls.
"I'm good —"
"I'll make something."
It's not a discussion.
He brings out food that I didn't ask for and beer that I didn't decline and sits across from me in the armchair like a man who has decided to be comfortable and that's simply that. We talk in the easy way you can with certain people — not performing conversation, just having it — and Jens is unhurried in everything, words included, and the apartment keeps doing its warm sandalwood thing around us, and at some point I notice that the photo on the bookshelf has been repositioned slightly so Jesper is facing the room rather than the wall.
I don't remember it being angled that way before.
I let it go.
Then Jesper comes home.
I hear the key in the lock before I see him and then the door opens and even in my peripheral vision there's that immediate quality he has — like a weather system entering a room. Slight. Blonde. The particular beauty that reads as delicate until you know him well enough to understand it's actually just the packaging on something considerably less so.
He drops his bag. He kicks off his shoes with the specific disdain of someone who finds gravity personally offensive. He looks at me on the couch and says, without warmth or hostility, just pure flat assessment:
"Oh. You're here."
"Hey, Jesper."
He's already looking past me at Jens.
And then — and I've seen this before but it still does something slightly vertiginous to witness — the whole architecture of his face changes. Softens isn't the right word. Opens is closer. He crosses the room and Jens tilts his chin up from the armchair and Jesper leans down and says something too quiet to hear and Jens makes a sound that's almost a laugh, private, not for the room, and for about thirty seconds I am completely and utterly not there.
I look at the photo on the bookshelf.
Jesper, half-asleep, the world acceptable.
We have a good night. That's the honest version.
The food is good. The beer is cold. Jesper, once he's decided I'm tolerable company for the evening, is exactly the kind of person who makes a room feel sharper — quick, a little brutal, funny in the way that means he's assessed your weak points and has chosen, generously, to use them for entertainment rather than demolition. I've always liked Jesper. I think most people like Jesper more than they admit because admitting it feels like losing something.
Jens barely speaks when Jesper's talking. He just watches. Present the way large, patient things are present — fully, without performance, a stillness that isn't absence but is its own kind of weight. Every so often Jesper says something aimed at Jens specifically, pitched lower, different in texture, and Jens answers in the same register and it's like watching two people conduct a separate, parallel conversation inside the larger one, in a frequency the rest of the room can't quite decode.
At some point I check my phone.
Dead.
I've been here — three hours? Four? Time in this apartment does something slippery. I look around for a clock and don't find one, and the curtains are drawn, and the light hasn't changed because it's one of those warm artificial arrangements that doesn't correspond to any time of day.
"My phone's dead," I say. "You got a charger?"
Jens looks at me. "What kind?"
I tell him. He nods. Goes to the other room. Comes back and says the cable he has isn't compatible, apologetic in that Jens way that isn't very apologetic — just factual, this is the situation, now we all know.
"I might head out soon anyway," I say.
There's a pause.
Just a beat. A half-second where something in the room changes temperature.
Then Jens' face does the thing. Just for a moment. Not dramatic — nothing Jens does is dramatic — but the ease goes out of it, and what's underneath is not anger, not manipulation, not anything I can name cleanly. It's more like a door you didn't know was open just showing you, briefly, that it's there.
"No," he says. "Stay. Please."
And the please lands in a way I don't have a category for. Not desperate. Not commanding. Just — absolute. Like a fact he's stating that happens to take the grammatical form of a request.
Jesper looks at me from across the room with an expression that says obviously you're staying and then goes back to his phone.
I stay.
They give me the couch.
The blanket Jens already brought out is here and he adds a second one without being asked, and Jesper appears from the bedroom with a pillow that he drops on the cushion beside me without comment, and the apartment settles into night and the lights go low and there's the sound of the door to the bedroom closing and then —
Quiet.
For a while.
I lie there in the sandalwood dark and look at the ceiling and feel the particular awareness you get in someone else's space late at night — the way the silence has a different texture, the way you can feel the walls, the way your body knows it's not home.
I try to sleep.
I almost do.
And then I don't.
The sounds start soft. I'm not going to describe them in detail because some things deserve their privacy and also because the specifics aren't the point. The point is the sounds, and that they come through the wall in a way that makes it clear these walls are thin, and that whatever is happening in the other room is happening without any apparent awareness or concern that I exist on the other side of it. Which is —
Fine. Normal. People forget their guests exist.
Except it doesn't feel like forgetting.
It feels like — and I know how this sounds — it feels like remembering I'm here. Like the sounds are partly for me. Not in a salacious way, nothing so deliberate — more like the way some animals mark their territory around a thing they want you to understand is theirs.
I pull the blanket up. I stare at the ceiling.
On the shelf across the room, barely visible in the ambient dark coming under the curtains, the photo of Jesper faces the couch.
Faces me.
I close my eyes.
I decide to leave in the morning.
This is a decision I make clearly, consciously, before I fall asleep. I will be polite about it. I'll say I have somewhere to be. It won't be a big thing. I'll leave and walk out into whatever the morning looks like and that will be that.
I dream about the apartment.
I dream I'm looking for the front door and every hallway I turn down opens onto the living room again, the couch, the blanket, the shelf with the photo, and each time I'm back at the beginning the photo is slightly closer to where I'm standing, and Jens is in the armchair, and he's watching me with that patient stillness, and he never says anything, and his face never changes, and I keep turning down hallways.
Morning comes sideways through the curtains.
I sit up. My neck is stiff. The apartment smells like coffee already — which means someone has been up for a while — and the sounds from the night have been replaced by the quiet domestic register of a household in its morning mode. Water running. A cabinet opening.
I fold the blankets. Stack them. Find my shoes and put them on. Shoulder my bag.
I walk to the front door.
Jens is standing next to it.
Not blocking it. Just — there. Leaning against the wall beside it with a coffee cup, barefoot, like this is simply where he happened to be when I happened to arrive at this spot. He looks at me with that expression that does almost nothing and somehow communicates everything.
"Stay another night," he says. "We like having you here."
We.
And I notice it this time, cleanly, the way you notice something that's been true the whole time but your brain has been sliding off it — he never says I. Last night: we'll sort something out. We have enough. We like this. Now: we like having you here.
There is no I in this apartment.
There hasn't been since I walked in.
I look past him at the door. Normal door. Handle. Hinges. Exit.
"I have somewhere to be," I say.
He holds my gaze for a moment. That half-second thing again, the temperature shift, the door behind his expression showing me it's open.
Then he nods. Steps aside. Reaches past me and opens the door, easy, no resistance, just opens it and the morning air comes in cold and real.
"Come back," he says. Not come visit. Not don't be a stranger. Just: come back.
I step out.
I'm halfway down the stairs when I realize I left my charger cable.
Then I remember I don't own the charger cable. It was never found. My phone is still dead.
I stop on the landing and I think about that — about seventeen hours with Yuki and the tea still warm, about walking into rooms and the logic inside them being different from the logic outside, about how Jens' apartment was warm and smelled good and the food was good and the beer was cold and I had a perfectly fine night on a comfortable couch and I am walking down these stairs right now, that is a thing that is happening, I am leaving.
I left.
I pull out my phone. Dead. No way to know what time it is. No way to know how long I was up there.
The cold air is real. The stairs are real. The street at the bottom will be real.
I keep going.
But I think about the we.
I think about Jesper's face when he walked in — closed to the room, open to Jens — and Jens' face watching him talk, and the photo on the bookshelf repositioned slightly and the photo above the coat hooks and the photo on the fridge, and I think about how the whole apartment was a closed system, sealed and complete, and I was in it for — however long I was in it — and the whole time I was there I was never quite a guest and never quite anything else.
We like having you here.
The part that stays with me, that I keep turning over on the walk home with my dead phone in my pocket and the morning doing its cold indifferent thing around me — the part I can't set down —
Is that I almost said yes.
When he asked me to stay another night, standing by the door with his coffee, barefoot, patient as a wall —
I almost said yes.
And it wouldn't have been fear that made me do it.
It would have been the blanket. And the food. And the beer. And the sandalwood. And the way the apartment made the world outside feel like a problem I didn't have to deal with just yet.
That's the thing about a closed loop.
It's not that you can't see it from the inside.
It's that from the inside, it looks like home.
It was never "I." It was always "we." The door opened when he decided it opened. The terrifying part is you didn't mind.