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Stephen is already sort of regretting going to the concert, and the music hasn’t even started yet.
It’s not his favourite band. They’re good, and he’s heard they’re even better live, but the lyrics of their songs never really hit him, and he can’t quite muster the enthusiasm. He just… really needed to get out of the flat.
He should have just sucked it up and gone out with friends. He would’ve had to find some explanation for being back from Ireland a week early, but he could’ve come up with something. Claimed he got in a row with his parents and didn’t want to talk about it, maybe. Wouldn’t even be that wrong. He doesn’t want to talk about it, and his parents were ticked at him for leaving abruptly with no real explanation, but it’s just… it’s easier to pretend like nothing happened. He had a nice time in his tiny, boring hometown and got back when he said he would. No reason to even ask. It’s easier.
But being alone in his flat had him anxious and jumping the first day, and nearly worked him into a panic attack the second, so, out among people it is.
And people there are. Too many for the small venue. The crowd is annoying now and is going to be cramped as hell and far too hot by the time the band actually takes the stage. It doesn’t help that he still feels anxious, prickly, like every time someone brushes against him they’re liable to… he doesn’t know.
It’s dumb. He’s like two hundred miles away. He should just try to relax and enjoy some okay music. Or he could go home, try to get some actual sleep. The entrance fee wasn’t that much. He wouldn’t be losing out.
Christ, at least there’s drinks being sold, though trying not to spill anything when he’s being jostled around like this is a pain and a half.
When the next person to touch him physically grabs his shoulder, he’s just about ready to bite their head off.
“What?” he snaps.
The guy—tall, way too goth, the shittiest dye job Stephen has ever seen—doesn’t let go. He looks at Stephen like he can look straight through him. It’s bloody uncomfortable. “Sorry, are you here alone?”
What? Jesus Christ, is he being flirted with? He’d hoped transitioning would’ve been the end of that.
“I’ve got friends. Piss off.” He tries to shake the guy’s hand off.
The guy takes a second to let go, and he won’t stop bloody staring. “Good,” he says. “Stick with them. Don’t go off on your own.”
What the fuck. “Piss off,” Stephen says again, and walks away.
He tries to ignore and forget it. Weird creepy dudes are a dime a dozen, and while grabbing him was bloody rude, dwelling on that just gives the dude what he wants, but even walking away and pushing through the crowd, he can feel those eyes at his back like a physical thing.
He can’t help looking over his shoulder to see if he can catch the creep staring. No such luck, though, he’s lost in the crowd, and no matter how much Stephen searches, he can’t see him.
He catches a glimpse of blue.
Panic freezes him to the spot, and someone in the crowd crashes into him and swears about it. He barely notices, just frantically scans the crowd to figure out what that blue thing was, that single flash of the exact same colour as his own jacket, his favourite jacket, the one he’s wearing right now, that he always wears to these things.
There’s nothing. He can’t find it. It’s nothing. It’s coincidence, it’s his sleep-deprived and anxious mind making shit up. He’s two hundred miles away. It’s just some dude who happens to own the same jacket. It’s not that unlikely.
He stands there for several minutes and sees nothing. The crowd is wearing black and red and pastels, very little blue. He spots the creepy goth guy standing near the stage talking to some girl and another guy, not looking in Stephen’s direction at all. That feeling of being watched is pretty much gone. He’s just imagining things, being stupid.
He needs another drink.
There’s two warm-up bands before the main event. The first one takes the stage to moderate applause. They’re some local group, just starting out. He’s never heard of them before, but they’re better than expected. They’ve got some real tunes going on, almost enough to distract him from the fact that he wants to die. Maybe if his heart stops completely, it’ll stop trying to claw its way out his throat. God, he’s so tired.
It's too loud from the music and the crowd to hear anything, and the crowd itself is claustrophobic and awful. If something’s sneaking up on him he’ll have no way to tell. Nothing’s sneaking up on him. That’s ridiculous.
He moves towards one of the fire escape doors mostly hoping to find some air between the press of bodies. He just needs to breathe, get a good look around him, remind himself nothing’s gonna fucking happen. The band yells thank yous at the crowd and he realizes he’s pretty much missed their last two songs to the buzzing in his ears. He takes deep breaths and resolves to look them up when he’s less tilted.
The second band takes the stage and starts off with maybe the worst cover song he’s ever heard. The guitarist is valiantly trying to rescue the bland rearrangement, but the vocalist is just kind of shit, so it’s hopeless.
Stephen tries to listen regardless. Maybe if he gets angry enough at the band, he’ll stop obsessively scanning the crowd. This far it’s not working, but hope burns eternal or whatever. He’s still looking. Still has his heart in his throat, putting weight on his lungs.
The blue jacket isn’t the first thing he sees.
The first thing he sees is the eyes, in the sea of people watching the stage, looking straight at him instead. Then he sees the smile, which he could see in a mirror, but never has, because he never grins like that. Still his face, though. Then he sees the jacket. The exact one he’s wearing now.
Then he runs.
He crashes to the wall next to the door, drops his drink, claws at the handle until it gives and bolts down the hallway.
Stephen never believed in magic. He wasn’t one for demons or ghost stories or fairies in the woods. He didn’t go into the woods alone, sure, but that was because of wild animals and strangers and the possibility of tripping and being stuck somewhere with a broken leg or whatever, not because there might be monsters. When a friend in school when he was fifteen said she had prophetic dreams he tried not to roll his eyes too hard, and wasn’t too surprised when none of her predictions ever came true.
He was never scared of horror movies and wasn’t even that scared of the dark as a kid. He never made shit up and spooked himself and was always pretty sure he knew what was what. So, when he was at his hometown’s miniscule shopping centre while visiting over summer break, and a mannequin in a shop happened to be wearing his exact outfit, he thought it was funny, not creepy.
Not so funny when no one else was looking and it turned around and was wearing his face as well. Not so funny when it got down from the platform and started walking at him. He’d run then too, got the hell out of town. He should’ve known it wouldn’t help. Not when nothing else did.
The door at the end of the hallway leads out into a back street. Cold air is a shock to his lungs. It’s dark, there’s no one in the narrow street and no streetlamps turned on to light it, the pavement at the back of the building is stacked high with folding chairs, taken out to make room for the crowd.
He nearly trips over one, stumbles around a stack of chairs and legs it for the next street, then screeches to a stop when someone turns the corner ahead.
Not a creepy magic mannequin, just a person. A man, vaguely familiar, dressed like a grandma who’s heard of this new punk thing and wanted to give it a shot. A cigarette hangs half-smoked from one hand and the other has a mobile pressed to his ear.
His eyes alight on Stephen and he nearly shouts into the phone, “I see him! He got through!”
What? No, what the hell, what the fuck. Is this a person?
Does he have the time to run the other way instead? He’s between the guy and the door. The guy is short and scrawny, but he doesn’t know if that matters when it’s all magic bullshit anyway.
“I don’t- just get here faster!” the guy shouts into his phone, then hangs up. He waves at Stephen to go past him with the cigarette hand. “Keep running! Go on!”
“Wha… What…?” What does he do? What’s safe? Which way gets him home alive?
The guy brushes past, making Stephen stumble back, drops his cigarette and… picks up a folding chair by the legs. He shoots Stephen a tense and annoyed look. “You started running, either keep running or grab a chair!”
“A… chair?” No, no he should run, he can run. He’s got a free line to the end of the street now, he needs to run. “What are you…?”
The guy jogs up to the door and stands next to it with the chair raised over his shoulder.
The door bursts open, the thing wearing his jacket steps through, still grinning—shit, shit, shit—and the guy swings.
The mannequin crashes to the street like a sack of bricks.
Almost exactly like a sack of bricks. Walking, it moves like a person, but it falls like a loosely connected collection of hard parts, clattering on the asphalt. It stays down—rictus grin crushed into the asphalt—for a second before it twitches, arms reattaching and limbs twisting, pushing it up at just the right wrong angles to look like the world’s worst spider.
Stephen wants to cry, or throw up. The thing has his hair. He wants to run but his legs aren’t listening.
Thwack. The guy hits the thing back down with the chair.
“What the hell is going on?” Stephen gets out. He feels sick. The thing just keeps twitching, keeps trying to drag itself up. Its head has turned slightly and he’s looking at his own face again.
Thwack. “Will you grab a chair or not?”
Stephen grabs a chair.
He’s shaking almost too hard to hold it, and can barely make himself step closer, but between every hit it’s getting up faster, and the panic at what will happen when it does drives him forward until he can smack the chair against the thing’s legs. It’s wearing his shoes.
It’s working. By some miracle, it’s actually working. Every smack sends it back to the ground. “I’ve seen this thing walk off being hit by a car!” He must sound hysterical. “Why do the chairs work!”
The guy doesn’t look panicked, just grimly determined as he keeps hitting the thing with the chair.
His voice is strained when he answers. “It’s a meme, about—” Thwack. “—pro wrestling, which is Stranger-adjacent—” Thwack. “—but not disturbing enough to—” Thwack. “—enough people to get a proper hold—” Thwack. “—so it’s not all that effective actually—” Thwack. “—but it works as a deterrent if you’re lucky—” Thwack. “—and all you need is to buy time.”
“Buy time for what!”
Thwack. “Backup, hopefully!”
Soon after he’s said it, the door opens again, and out comes the creepy goth guy from earlier and the girl he’d been talking to. That… explains why the guy with the chair looked familiar?
“You took your sweet time!” the guy with the chair says.
“Did you see the crowd in there?” the goth guy says, grabbing a chair of his own and taking over for the first guy, who steps back and shakes out his arms.
Stephen’s arms are burning from swinging the chair too, but he doesn’t dare even think about stopping.
The girl roots around in a giant purse and comes up with a can with a nozzle on the top. She starts spraying the mannequin with what is probably lighter fluid.
It snaps its head all the way around. Stephen recoils and nearly falls on his ass. The first guy swears and jumps back. The girl just says, “Oh, gross,” and keeps spraying. The goth guy smacks the thing directly in the face with enough force to break the nose.
“Hate the Stranger,” the goth guy says. “Ooh, look at me, I’m a little clown and I’m gonna sneak into your room at night and eat your toes, just stop.”
“It was gonna what?” Stephen shrieks.
“What? Oh, nah.” He chuckles. “This thing was probably just planning to replace you. Seems the type.”
Great!
The first guy hefts his chair again. “If it helps, there is most likely just the one, this time.”
“Probably, yeah. Might be more, but they won’t be going after the same target.”
The absurdity of the whole situation has pushed Stephen past some sort of limit. They’re so blasé about all this, it’s taking the edge off his fear.
The girl lights a match, says, “Don’t put this out,” and drops it onto the mannequin.
It catches immediately, engulfed in sudden flames. It writhes and thrashes on the asphalt, making a loud clattering noise and nothing sounding even remotely human. The heat is unbearable, but when he stands back and stops hitting it, it fails to get up anyway, writhing too hard to get the balance.
“I… I think there were more,” he says, eyes glued to the nightmare contorting itself into pretzels in front of him. “Mannequins, I mean. B-But only one with my clothes.”
“Hm. Where?” The goth guy still has the chair dangling from a hand, but he has his arms crossed, leaning back and looking at the thing burning like it’s the most normal thing he’s seen.
Stephen tells him where.
“Ireland, huh,” the girl says. She digs a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and offers them around. “That’s a bit of a trip. Easier if we’d known earlier.”
The goth guy accepts a cigarette, and steps aside so the other guy can get one too. “Yeah. Christ, last chance to hang before you’re off for lectures again, and we’re missing the show for this.”
The other guy laughs. “In all fairness, we’re hardly missing much. This is easily the most atrocious cover band I have ever heard.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“No, he’s right. You’re my best friend and I love you, but this is genuinely awful music, and if I hadn’t hated the thought of having to push through the crowd I would’ve escaped when Jon did.”
The goth guy rolls his eyes, smiling. He’s so casual, almost relaxed in the light of the writhing fire.
Stephen walks backwards into a stack of chairs, barely avoids falling, and then sinks down to sit on the ground. His legs are shaking too much to hold him. All of him is shaking.
After about a minute, the girl sits down next to him.
“Hey,” she says.
“…Hi.”
She holds the pack of cigarettes out. “You smoke?”
He considers trying to hold a cigarette with his hands shaking this badly, and shakes his head instead.
“Probably for the best. I’m thinking of quitting myself. It’ll kill you, you know.”
His laughter probably sounds a little hysterical.
“What’s your name?”
“Stephen.”
“Hi, Stephen. I’m Georgie, and those two are my boyfriend Jon and our friend Gerry.” She points to the two guys, who look bizarrely like they’re at a barbeque, frowning and smoking and occasionally poking the grilling, writhing thing with chairs. “You doing alright?”
“No?” Everything smells like burning plastic. “I don’t know. I thought I was going to die.”
“It got pretty close yeah. But now you won’t. Crisis averted, right?”
“R-Right.” That’s it, huh. Just a normal Saturday evening.
Slowly, the writhing seems to subside, until all that’s left is a still pile of smouldering plastic. The goth guy—Gerry?—pokes it a couple times more with his chair and says, “It’s dead.”
Stephen is pretty sure he’s going to cry.
“Sweet.” Georgie stands up and brushes off her trousers. “I think we can still catch most of the show, if we go now.”
“No way we’re getting back our spot at the front,” Gerry laments.
“Might be for the best,” Jon says. “I think I prefer not being crushed by the crowd. Are you coming with, or will you stay out here?”
It takes Stephen a moment to parse that the last bit was directed at him.
“I… I’m…” He thinks about going back into the building and having to deal with more strangers now, when he really just wants to have a good cry and a few hours of sleep. “I think I’m going home.” He thinks about going all the way home on his own, and fear claws at him again. “W-Wait, what if… what if you’re wrong?”
He looks between them, eyes landing on Gerry.
“About what?”
“About… there just being one of them. What if there’s more? Or… Or what if there’s something else?”
The three of them exchange looks, small shrugs. Then Gerry pulls out a… small stack of post-it notes and a pen. Scribbles something down and hands it over. “Only call if there’s actually something, alright?"
GG+J, it reads. Then three phone numbers.
It’s something. It’s better than nothing. It’s… God, they saved his life. With folding chairs.
“Thank you,” he says, and here comes the tears, finally. “Th-Thank you, thank you. I’m… I don’t… I’m sorry I thought you were a creep, I just…”
“Uh. Yeah, don’t worry about it. You’ll get home safe?”
He has no idea, but all he can do is nod.
“It was nice meeting you,” Georgie says with a wave of her fingers.
“Take care,” Jon says, and with that, they leave.
Before the door has even closed behind them, they’re talking about other things. Something about the logistics of organizing a trip with their new hectic schedules. Stephen isn’t listening.
He’s still sitting on the ground with three phone numbers on a slip of paper in his hands. The power to turn nightmares into common coal.
He sits there until the flames die down.