ALKMAAR HORROR STORY
Jesper's House: The Pact
Jesper texts back in under a minute.
Sure. We're home tonight.
No punctuation drama, no delay, no let me check with Jens — just that, flat and immediate, like he already knew I was going to ask. I stare at it for a second, thumb hovering, and then I pocket my phone and grab my jacket and don't think about it too hard because there's nothing to think about. It's Sunday. I'm tired. Jesper and Jens have a warm house and good drinks and the kind of easy company that doesn't demand anything from you.
Simple.
The house is exactly how I remember it.
Plants everywhere — trailing from shelves, sitting fat and healthy on every windowsill, crowding the corners in terracotta pots — and the lighting warm and low, that specific amber that makes every room feel like late afternoon regardless of what time it is. Expensive candle smell. The good kind that doesn't announce itself, just sits underneath everything like a foundation note.
Jesper opens the door before I knock.
He's wearing an oversized cream-colored sweater that hangs off one shoulder and his hair is soft around his face and he looks, as he always does, like an argument you're going to lose before you've started. He looks me over once — the full-body assessment, quick and merciless — and then steps back.
"You made it," he says. "Come in."
Jens is behind him. Of course he is. Jens is always behind him, or beside him, or in the direct gravitational field of him — 188 centimeters of Nordic solidity standing in the hallway of this bright, plant-crowded house like a bodyguard who also happens to live there.
"Long day?" Jens says.
"Yeah," I say. "Kind of."
They look at each other.
It's fast. A half-second exchange, the kind that happens between people who have their own language and aren't particularly trying to hide that they have it. Something passes between them that I am not translated into.
Then Jesper turns and walks back into the house and I follow him in.
The takeout is already on the table.
I didn't order anything. I didn't say what I wanted. It's just there — the right thing, warm, plenty of it — and Jesper is already pulling containers open and Jens is pouring something into three glasses and the domestic efficiency of it is slightly surreal, the way it always is, like visiting people who have already fully figured out the business of living together and have no gaps left for anyone else to fill.
"Sit," Jesper says, not looking up. Not rude. Just — informational.
I sit.
The evening is easy. That's the only word for it. The food is good and the drink is good and Jesper is in a sharp mood — the kind where his wit has an edge to it that's more entertaining than wounding if you're not the target of it, and I'm not, tonight, so I lean back and let him run and it's genuinely funny. Jens doesn't talk much. He never does in a group. But he watches Jesper with that expression — the one I first saw in his apartment, the I can't believe I get to have this expression — and occasionally his hand finds Jesper's on the table, or his foot presses against Jesper's under it, and Jesper doesn't acknowledge it with anything more than a fractional softening of his shoulders, and the whole thing is so fluent and so completely not-for-my-benefit that I keep almost forgetting I'm there.
They kiss too much. Not obscenely — just constantly. Small ones. Jesper making a point and turning to press one against Jens's jaw mid-sentence, Jens tilting his head down to Jesper's hair between words, like breathing. Like it doesn't count as an interruption because it's as automatic as blinking.
When Jens gets up to throw something away, Jesper's sentence stops.
Just stops.
He picks it back up in exactly three seconds, when Jens is back in his seat, but those three seconds are a fact I file somewhere without knowing why.
When Jesper goes to get more ice, Jens's hand is flat on the table in the space where Jesper was, and he's looking at the doorway.
Not worried. Not anxious. Just — oriented. Like a plant.
I almost say something about it. I don't.
I excuse myself to use the bathroom.
The hallway is the same — photos, plants, the faint smell of whatever candle they burn in there — and the bathroom is spotless and I run cold water over my wrists for a second because the wine is warm and the house is warm and I feel slightly overheated in a way I can't entirely attribute to the food.
I look in the mirror.
My reflection looks back at me normally. I stay there a second longer than I need to, for reasons I can't articulate.
Then I go back down the hall.
The living room has changed.
Not dramatically. Not furniture-moved, room-rearranged changed. Just: the overhead light is off, and the candles are on. Not one or two — everywhere. Every surface that can hold one. They throw the room into amber and shadow and the plants along the walls look different in this light, fuller and darker, and the windows are black with full night outside.
Jens and Jesper are on the couch.
Sitting side by side, turned slightly toward the door. Looking at me.
Not with alarm. Not with performance. Just — looking. The way people look when they've been waiting for something to happen and it has.
I stop in the doorway.
"...What's happening?" I say.
Jesper's mouth curves. Soft. Almost gentle, which from Jesper means something entirely different than it would from anyone else.
"You're right on time," he says.
I laugh.
It comes out slightly wrong — half a beat off, a little thin — but I commit to it, because the alternative is acknowledging the way the candlelight is doing something to both of their faces, flattening the familiar out of them, making them into something slightly other.
"Okay," I say. "Enough with the weird vibes. What is this, a seance?"
Jens doesn't smile.
"You don't remember?" he says.
His voice is the same. Quiet, unhurried. He asks it like a genuine question.
"Remember what?"
Jesper's eyes catch the light. There are too many candles. The shadows move and for a second his face looks like a painting of itself, too precise, too composed.
"This isn't the first Sunday you've been here," he says.
The headache arrives without warning.
Not a gradual building — just there, suddenly, behind my eyes, a pressure that makes the candlelight strobe once before settling. I blink.
"What are you —"
Images.
Not imagination. Not the soft vague shapes of something half-remembered. Sharp ones. Specific.
The table — this table — with the same candles, and me sitting at it, and something dark in a glass in my hand. Jens's hand covering mine, the weight of it. His face, looking at me with that same steady, unhurried expression. And Jesper — closer than he normally stands, Jesper who maintains ironic distance as a personality feature — Jesper close enough that I can remember the exact color of his eyes in the candlelight, and his voice low and direct and —
Just say yes.
I hear it.
I hear myself say it.
I take a step back and my shoulders hit the doorframe.
"No," I say. The word comes out almost inaudible. "That's not — that's not real."
"You did say yes," Jens says.
He says it the way he says everything. Like it's just information. Like it's as simple as the beer is in the fridge or the couch is comfortable. Factual. Uncontested.
I look at Jesper.
Jesper is watching me with an expression I have never seen on him before. Not sharp, not sardonic, not the pretty-faced cruelty he deploys so effectively on everyone who isn't Jens. Something patient. Almost — and this is the part that makes my stomach turn — almost fond.
He stands.
They both stand. Jens rising slowly, unhurried as everything he does, and they step toward me and they're not rushing, there's no aggression, there's nothing I could call threatening except for the candlelight and the plants and the way the room has closed itself into something smaller without the walls moving —
"Every Sunday," Jesper says, "we gather what we need."
"What does that mean," I say. "What does that mean."
"Your presence," Jens says.
"Your memory." Jesper.
"A little piece of you." Jens.
It's too synchronized. The alternation is too smooth. Like something rehearsed so many times it became instinct, or like a single thought distributed between two mouths.
"I want to leave," I say.
Jesper shakes his head.
Soft. Gentle, like I've said something slightly incorrect and he's correcting it without wanting to embarrass me.
"You never do," he says.
I run for the door.
I know exactly where it is — I came in through it twenty minutes ago or three hours ago or however long this evening has been, I realize I don't actually know, I can't find the number when I reach for it — and I cross the room in four steps and my hand hits the handle and I turn it and —
The couch.
I'm on the couch.
My back against the cushions, the blanket from before across my lap, and the drink is in Jens's hand and he's holding it out to me, patient, expression the same as it always is, and the candles are all lit and the room is amber and the plants are along the walls and everything is exactly as it should be.
"Drink," he says. "It'll help you relax."
My eyes are burning.
I look at the glass. Something dark. The right kind of dark.
"Please," I say. My voice has gone very small. "Please let me go."
Jesper is sitting on the arm of the couch. He's looking at me. The fond patience is still on his face, and up close it's worse — it's real, that's the thing, it's not performance, he actually feels something like tenderness toward me right now and I can't figure out why that's the worst possible thing he could feel —
"It doesn't matter," he says, and his voice is almost soft the way it is with Jens, not quite but aimed in that direction. "You'll forget again by morning."
I know this feeling.
That's what breaks through everything else. Not the headache, not the room, not the images that keep surfacing and dissolving behind my eyes. The feeling — the specific texture of it, the warm-dark-amber quality of dread that doesn't arrive with fanfare but is just already there, has always been there, familiar as furniture —
I have been here before.
Not guessing. Knowing.
I look at the glass in my hand. When did I take it? I don't remember taking it. The drink is the dark color from the memory-flash and my hands are shaking and the candlelight does something to the surface of it.
Jens and Jesper are looking at me.
They're not afraid. They're not excited. They're not even particularly interested, not the way people are interested in things that might go differently than expected. They're watching me the way you watch something inevitable. With patience and with something that might, in another context, look like affection.
Jesper says: "Thank you."
His voice is quiet. Genuine.
I don't know what I'm being thanked for. I don't know what I've agreed to, or when, or how many times. I don't know if the door actually goes anywhere or if the door opens onto this room every time, if it has always opened onto this room every time, if the going-home-and-driving-and-sending-the-text and arriving is also part of the loop.
I don't know if this Sunday or any Sunday came before it or after it.
I look at the glass.
I look at them — Jesper bright-eyed and patient on the arm of the couch, Jens beside me still and warm and absolutely certain — and I think about Jesper at the door, you made it, come in, and the look they shared that I couldn't read and the table that was already set and the takeout that was already the right thing —
Every Sunday, we gather what we need.
The glass is in my hand.
I close my eyes.
They say every pact has to be agreed to willingly.
The word willingly does a lot of work in that sentence. It assumes that when you said yes, you knew what you were saying yes to. It assumes that the first time is the first time and not the fifteenth. It assumes that consent requires memory, that agreement requires context, that you can't bind someone to something they've already forgotten agreeing to.
They have a very warm house.
The candles are always lit on Sundays.
And somewhere on a Sunday — some specific one, the first one, the one I can't reach no matter how far back I go in the flash-images and the headaches and the particular texture of that dread — I must have looked at the glass and looked at them and opened my mouth and said it.
Yes.
I don't remember leaving.
I know I must have, because I'm writing this, and I'm not there right now, and the morning light through my own window is the flat grey of the right time and the right place and nothing is amber-warm and there are no plants turning to face me when I move.
I'm home.
I don't remember the door. I don't remember the walk or the drive or the goodbye. I don't remember if Jesper smiled when I left or if Jens held the door, if there was any ceremony to the exit or if I just — wasn't there anymore, one frame to the next.
You left when they were done with you, something in me thinks.
Not unkindly. Just: factually.
My phone has a text from last night. I scroll up to find where I texted Jesper. I find it — hey are you free tonight — and then I find his reply, and I stop.
Sure. We're home tonight.
Time stamp: 6:14 PM. Last night.
I scroll down.
There's another text. From Jesper. Sent at — I check the time — 11:52 PM.
Good Sunday. See you next week.
No question mark.
Not maybe see you next week or we should do this again or any of the soft optionality of social nicety.
Just: see you next week.
Like it's scheduled.
Like it's been scheduled.
I set my phone face-down on the table and I sit in the flat grey morning light and I look at my hands and I think about Jesper's voice saying thank you and meaning it, and I think about Jens holding out the glass, patient, certain, and I think about the table already set when I arrived and the right takeout already ordered and the text back in under a minute because he already knew —
It was never an accident you were there on Sunday.
My hands are steady.
That's the worst thing. I'd feel better if they were shaking. But they're perfectly still, resting in my lap, and I feel fine — rested, emptied out, the same hollow-clean feeling of having slept too long and too deep — and somewhere in Jesper's warm, plant-crowded house, the candles have been blown out, and they're curled together in their single bed in their closed perfect circuit, and next Sunday is already on the calendar.
And I already know I'm going.
The part of me that would say no —
I think they have it.
You came because you thought you were welcome. You stayed because you thought you could leave. You left. But you never really did.