Trypophobia

Short story exploration of a psychological condition known as trypophobia. STILL NEEDS EDITING - SORRY FOR SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION ERRORS!

Susan awoke with nails in her eyes and an explosion in her head. She groaned as she rolled over and covered her face with the pillow. How much did she have last night? Too much given the blaring alarms her senses were giving her every time she even thought about moving. And on top of the new medication as well. Medication that she wasn't even sure was effective because she had drunk so much alcohol to hide its effect. But wasn't that the point? She had done this before. The doctors had concerns about her liver, about her kidneys. She couldn't stay on her current medication because it could damage her physically or she just became used to it, two conditions that Susan felt were mutually illogical. But the new medication would be just as good, maybe even better the doctors had said. They lied. Switching to new medications always brought relapses. They always brought the terrors back even if they were more effective over the long term. But Susan didn't care about the long term. She cared about the here and now. She couldn't deal with the relapses. She couldn't deal with the terrors, the waking nightmares, the sweating, the chills, the stomach cramps, the crippling anxiety. She remembered she was once in a supermarket and she was screaming and screaming and screaming and curled up into a tiny ball on the floor with her fists in her eyes until the paramedics came and sedated her. She was in the middle of the fruit aisles. Susan remembered that well. She remembered that because she remembered what had set her off. She remembered what had brought the attack on. Susan had seen a cantaloupe. Cut open in half to display its seeds. To show those disgusting cracks and gaps, those dark places in between and behind the seeds in the very fruit itself. Those unknown, secretive, depraived, shifting places that threatened to jump onto your body and tear your flesh up passing through your very being until everything was vacated. Your intestines, your lungs, your heart, your soul.

 

It was called trypophobia. Defined roughly as a fear of patterns of small irregular holes or bumps it was described as a 'proposed fear' on Wikipedia when Susan had first looked it up. She was trying to make some sense of what was wrong with her. Wikipedia said it was 'proposed' like it wasn't real, like people made it up. Well Susan knew it was real and she knew she had it. It was true that different people seemed to experience it in different ways. Some people were perfectly fine with ordered, symmetrical patterns and well ordered geometric shapes and it was the irregularity that set them off. Some people said they had a fear of what was in the holes claiming to see maggots or indescribable other worldly insects coming from the holes to devour them. Some people just saw eyes in the holes, watching them unblinkingly, following their every movement. This is not how it affected Susan although if she was ever calm enough to consider the spaces for more than a few seconds she did think that she could see shifting shadows and maybe even hear a faint scratching noises coming from the holes. But Susan's symptoms belonged to a different category. Every time she saw the holes she was convinced that they could migrate on to her own body. As soon as they had her attention they could somehow move, as a collective organism and transmit themselves onto her body through her recognition and conscious thought of them. And once they were on her body she was theirs. She became their playground as they worked their way over her flesh stretching and splitting her skin. Tearing cells apart with ease leaving streaming rivulets of blood in their wake. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was when they had had enough of moving over the surface of her body. Once they had finished rending her flesh they sought out deeper pastures. They sank into her abdomen, into her lungs, into her intestines turning her into so much mincemeat. Susan suddenly realised she was sitting on the edge of the bed panting and sweating, her fingers white from gripping the duvet. The hotel room that room that Susan was sitting in suddenly became a threat. She was in between apartments as she frequently moved from place to place staying at well vetted hotels in between. But this hotel hadn't been checked. She had stumbled into this one the previous night after her alcoholic binge. Susan couldn't even remember climbing the stairs or taking the lift to get to this floor. She was suddenly alert. Her throbbing head and light sensitivity pushed to one side as she started cautiously scanning the hotel room for anything that might set off another attack.

 

She kept her head down looking first at her feet and then to the floor. The carpet was an odd green/grey colour with dark undulating lines which formed a wave pattern across the whole surface. Where two of the adjacent waves were of opposite concavity the was a dark dot in the middle, trapped in between the lines. It reminded Susan of the diagrams of plant cells that she remembered from her school biology classes. But the dots here were no threat. They were not close together on the carpet and they were neatly contained within the undulating lines. Susan realised that she had been holding her breath whilst examining the carpet and slowly exhaled letting out a low moan. Her head still throbbed and she could feel a pulsing behind her eyeballs as she lifted her head slowly to take in the rest of the room. The duvet cover that she was sitting on was a plain white and had a velour aubergine sash lying across the width of the bed typical of many hotel beds but which Susan could never see the point in. At the head of the bed was attached a Victorian style headboard which was the same aubergine colour as the sash. It was periodically punched with buttons that pulled the fabric in towards the base of the board but again these dips in the fabric did not trouble Susan. The walls were covered in a light and dark blue vertically striped wallpaper over their lower half. Then a wooden break, patterned and covered in white gloss paint bisected the walls and the top half was plain magnolia paint covered. The ceiling, thankfully, was completely plain and not covered in bumpy artex which was often seen in the cheaper hotels. Susan had refused to stay in those, not because of the poor quality but when the light in the room was low or shifted the patterns ceiling would come alive with a offer a growing threat to Susan in the form of ever creeping shadows. But the ceiling here was fine. Apart from the innocuous looking nightstands that was covered in various clothes and items that Susan had apparently scattered around when she came into the hotel room there was nothing else of any significant threat in the room. Susan sighed and lay back on the bed moving herself up so she could rest her head on the pillows. She stared at plain ceiling and allowed herself to relax her mind slowly being released of the tension she had felt when she realised that she was in a strange place. Her head still throbbed and her eyes stung but if it was only physical discomfort that Susan felt then she could deal with that. After some time, and she realised she had no idea what the time was, she sighed and got up off the bed. Scanning around for something to wear she found suitable clothes that seemed reasonably clean discarded on the floor and went to her overnight backpack, which she had at least had the good sense to take with her last night, to pull out some clean underwear. Dressed in black bra and knickers and a beige knee length skirt she threw a shirt over shoulders and headed for the bathroom. Susan looked at herself in the hotel bathroom mirror and her reflection looked back. The dark lines under her bloodshot eyes belied her relative youth and she felt so much older than the 26 years she had been on the planet. Susan closed her eyes and let herself sag against the sink her arms taking the weight of her upper body. The bathroom mirrors in hotels always seemed to take up half of the room often occupying half of the wall above the sink. It was almost as if this was the room where you had to face yourself. This was the room where you had no choice but to look yourself in the face and lay yourself bare in the harsh unforgiving light. Whether admitting your hopes and dreams or confessing your sins from the world outside this was the stark reality check you had before you got yourself clean, put on your best smile and opened the door to face reality in all its glory and brutality. She opened her eyes and her reflection was still there starting back at her audaciously copying her every subtle move. Susan made a start to wash herself. Just water, never soap. Soap and water made bubbles and Susan had found out to her horror that bubbles can look just like holes if you stare at them long enough. She looked around for a flannel or similar to aid her. Opening a side vanity cupboard she saw a sponge, one of those dried natural sponges that seemed to be the preserve of the trendy London spas that Susan had never visited and seemed oddly out of place here in this hotel bathroom. The harsh bulbs set into the ceiling shone down on the sponge giving a broken light over the surface to show jagged pits and ridges. The play of light and dark was accentuated by the deeper shadow within the vanity cupboard itself and Susan saw the ridges and pits on the sponge start to writhe and crawl. She slammed the cupboard shut and looked back up at the mirror. In the corner of the bathroom was a chrome bin. Susan looked at the reflection of the chrome bin in the bathroom mirror. The bin itself was reflecting the black and white tiled floor, normally so harmless, into a series of tiny warped squares that Susan imagined were trying to twist themselves into holes. Suddenly Susan no longer saw the shapes as a reflected image but as part of the mirror itself moving closer and closer to her. She stood up quickly and put as much distance between herself and the mirror as the small bathroom made possible. Then she noticed the toothbrush standing on the edge of the sink. She must have unpacked it the night before. Although whether she actually used it or not before passing out on to the bed next door she didn't know. The gaps between the bristles on the head looked like holes and seemed to be pointed towards her. They were looking at her, considering her. She imagined if she had used the toothbrush. It's holes would have eagerly jumped into her mouth working their way around her gums, loosening them until...her teeth, oh God her teeth. She imaged her teeth being ejected one by one in series of squelchy pops. And when they fell out they left gaping bloody holes. More holes to join those that had already invaded her being. Toothless, gaping, streaming with blood her imagined self screamed at the mirror her mouth a collection of monstrous holes writhing and eager for more destruction of her flesh. She put her hands over her mouth and screamed as if to eject the holes from her being and the image from her mind.

 

Staggering from the bathroom Susan hastily threw more of her scattered clothes, her phone and purse into her backpack and ran out of the hotel room not bothering with returning key cards or any of the other niceties associated with a civilised check-out procedure. She had to get out of there and quickly. She ran down the corridor towards a glass door marked fire exit. She felt as if the hotel was some kind of monster and she was running around its insides trying to get out before it closed its maw and she was trapped forever. Pushing the door open hard with complete disregard for its glass fabrication she ran down the stairs taking the last two flights two steps at a time until she almost stumbled on to the ground floor. Choosing to use a service exit rather than face the lobby of the hotel she spilled on to the street and ran off ignoring the confused looks of the cleaners and maintenance staff near the door that she had just departed hurriedly from. As she ran she wondered how she had got to this point in her life. How instead of leading some kind of normality it seemed a better alternative to go on alcoholic and drug fuelled binges and not even remember checking in to the hotel that she was now fleeing from.

 

When she first saw a doctor at the age of around 13 her parents were told that there wasn't anything specifically wrong with her. Her first experience of the condition came when she was out with her father and sister. Her parents were divorced and her father would usually see Susan and her sister every other weekend and take them somewhere nice to try and make up for not being at home. This particular weekend they had gone to the annual fair that was being held in the large park near the centre of the city. Everything had been going fine and she had been playing with her sister on the coconut shy when their father had suggested they have some candy floss. Standing next to the stall that served sugary delights to the eager fair goers Susan noticed the large, clear rectangular canister that held the popcorn, already cooked and ready to be served out to yearning children and not so reluctant parents. Something about the popcorn held her attention. Initially she was simply captivated by the container full of popcorn with its contrast of the light fluffy insides and the dark outer shell of the kernel left behind in small clumps after cooking. She was starting and starting at the small mountain of the stuff, vaguely aware of her father's voice from somewhere in the distance, when something happened. The shapes in the container seemed to jump, to move of their own accord. Susan later realised that this could have simply been someone scooping some popcorn from the rear of the canister and not visible from the front but for the young Susan it was like the dark shapes were coming alive. They crept and swirled and looked like they were trying to form shapes. Not faces or the outlines of imaged monsters but persistent geometric patterns which then moved in unison. These patterns seemed alive to Susan. They seemed alive and hungry and it was as if they were pressing at the front and the sides of the canister to be closer to Susan. Finally the sound of the bell signalling something's strength from the hammer behind her broker her concentration. She looked around and then quickly back at the popcorn and it seemed normal. There were no patterns trying to escape and get her. She gave a nervous laugh but felt that if she stared at the popcorn for long enough again it would stir once more into life. More unnerved than scared she was impatient to leave and pulled her father away from the stall without any treats, her sister trailing in tow with candy floss already stick around her mouth. That was a long time ago and Susan had many such experiences, increasing in intensity, before her parents jointly decided that they should seek specialist help. It was shortly after her fourteenth birthday, a year after first seeing a Doctor, that she officially became one of many diagnosed with the umbrella term of anxiety and was prescribed with broad spectrum anti-depressants, a hallmark of the vaguely diagnosed and misunderstood. Doctors after all had patients to see and quotas to fill. So as a fully paid up member of the legally drugged up population she had worked her way through several medications as a teenager her life lurching from situations of severe panic to periods of numb productivity the memories of which were vague and had no real meaning or reference to time in her mind.

 

Susan's sister didn't see her anymore. Since having children she had said that she didn't want to see Susan for the sake of the kids. She said that Susan's attacks scared her and she wouldn't expose her children to that. Susan's father was in America for work and although he would e-mail and they might Skype chat occasionally those times had become more and more infrequent and Susan felt like he was a stranger just feeling obliged to communicate with her as some recompense for a lost childhood relationship with her.

 

After years of being disappointed with the lack of a formal clinical diagnosis Susan started her own research into her condition. There was some attempt at explanation online. It wasn't very well researched but one theory that made some sense proposed that holes or bumps displayed the same extreme contrast of light and dark or that were seen in nature as a warning of danger. The yellow and black of the wasp or bumble bee. The red and black of the East Javan poisonous tree frog. Sets of colours, usually in pairs, that humans had readily accepted as their own warning of danger, the corrosive chemicals, the poison, the edge of the platform. Highly contrasting colours was nature's way of saying danger, back off and trypophobia, it was suggested, was an extreme flight or fight response to these contrasts that are seen in everyday objects such as cantaloupes or pepperoni pizzas. Although this made some sense to Susan it didn't quite fit what happened in her mind when an attack came on. She wasn't triggered by bumble-bees or workmen' signs. It was true that in many of the things that did trigger an attack there were clear contrasts in light and dark but Susan knew that wasn't all there was. There was something else, something the she, and apparently the rest of the world, couldn't quite explain. There seemed to be a recent glut of celebrities who claimed to be suffering from the condition. In an age where mental illness was more openly talked about and accepted it seemed to have reach a ludicrous progression where it became almost fashionable to have a mental illness. Many celebrities would talk openly in television interviews about their struggles with depression or this phobia or that anxiety often just before the release of a big movie they happened to be starring in. The TV host would quip 'you look so well, we're glad you're all better now'. But those people with real mental illnesses knew that there was no 'you're all better now' there was only managing on a day-to-day basis for the rest of your life. Every single day was hard work. Every single day was a struggle and it made Susan almost gag at the thought of sitting comfortably on a sofa dressed in a cocktail dress next to the most recent popular television host discussing her attacks to an audience of millions. Managing a mental illness was like papering over the cracks. And every day a new layer of wallpaper had to be added before the old one fell off. It had to be pasted on to the warped and roiling surface underneath in order to be able to function in everyday society. To be a normal, productive member of society. But if you weren't careful then eventually the wallpaper would start peeling at the end, start wearing through to reveal the cracks in the wall underneath. Cracks. Susan thought about their linearity and the darkness of the space in between. In her mind she could see a wall with cracked and split plaster covering it completely. In her mind she could see the length of the cracks contracting, shrinking down so that the gaps in the wall became small, irregular shaped holes. Holes. They were back. And if they were there in her mind they could get to her brain. The holes could rake into her brain like a cheese grater turning the soft grey matter into pulp. Susan gave a small yelp as she shook herself from her reverie startling a passer-by who looked at her like she was crazy. And she was wasn't she? This wasn't normal. Susan wasn't really sure what normal meant but this wasn't it. The few friends she had didn't think like this on a daily basis. They could function, they had lives, good jobs, a house, a family, hobbies. Susan had none of these. She lived almost from day to day renting a succession of squalid bedsits each one becoming uninhabitable as she discovered parts of the abodes that could act as a trigger to her condition. She couldn't drive. Even if she was able to obtain a license she couldn't risk it. Once as a passenger in a car an attack was brought on when it had started to rain. The droplets of water forming on the windscreen cast a mottled pattern of light and dark and Susan had again thought of the holes, squirming and teeming on the windscreen. She had screamed at the driver to put the wipers on but even then, in between the wiper's action across the windscreen, the droplets had gathered waiting to turn in to the holes and as soon as they had a chance to fully form again they would come after her.

 

Previously on good days when her medication was effective she could function much like a normal person. She could go shopping, she had a few friends although none particularly close. She was even able to hold down a part-time job although this had never been for very glamorous work mostly call centre work or menial office jobs where the pay was low and conditions poor but she has still been able to do her bit as a functioning member of society. But she felt that she could only do that through the haze of the medication effects which made her feel numb, like a pre-programmed robot going through the motions just because that was what it was instructed to do. She was simply surviving on those days. She wasn't living, she was just passing the time. In trying to take part in the reality that most other people took for granted she was somehow detached from it. Her reality was to see danger in small clusters of holes. That was her life. For some reason her brain was made that way and it had been decided that was how she should have to perceive the world. But Susan was tired. She was tired and she was scared. She felt she was constantly being chased, being hunted by something that was always with her and she could never get away from. The best she could do was try to stay one step ahead.

 

As she walked briskly along the street, keeping her head down, she kept getting glances of her passing surroundings. She gave sharp intakes of breath every time she thought she saw something that would turn into the vicious holes pursuing her. The cracks in the pavement were too linear to bother her. The black and white stripes on the zebra crossing she hurtled across, paying no attention as to whether traffic had stopped for her, held no horror for her. She ran through a food market trying to keep her eyes to the ground. Although she could not see them the thought of the cut one cantaloupe that had stirred such fear in her all those years ago was enough to make her shudder. Outside the market she stopped at a kerb. Alongside the road were little bumps arranged as to give a warning to the visually impaired that a road was nearby. As she waited Susan thought the bumps were turning towards her, shifting and moving closer, grouping with a common intent and violent purpose. She ran across the road ignoring the blaring horns and screeching brakes behind her. Running past the window displays full of designer clothes and in demand goods she glanced up at a fashionable popular boutique. The headless mannequins were sporting the latest this season had to offer and amongst the flower display accompanying the main exhibit Susan saw, of all things, a collection of dried Lotus flowers. Their pitted heads once containing the seed of the flower were now a collection of gaping holes with what looked like tiny eyes in them that stared at Susan as she ran past. Susan was in utter turmoil. It seemed she couldn't look anywhere without something triggering an impending attack. The pebbles in a large plant pot outside a hotel. The small black and white tiled frontage of a Polish butcher's. The pattern on a manhole cover. Susan stopped running and clamped her hands to her head. Stooping on her haunches she screamed at the floor 'stop it, please, stop it'. After about a minute in this position she slowly opened her eyes and stood up. As she did so she saw that she was standing next to a newspaper stand showing various versions of the day's events with dramatic headlines designed to hook the reader into buying a publication of otherwise mediocre reporting and familiar stories. Ignoring a gaping onlooker obviously disturbed by her behaviour she stared at the covers of two or three of the main daily newspapers all showing the same image. She stared and she felt like time had stopped. Her breathing slowed, her pulse steadied and she moved toward the newspaper stand unable to tear her gaze from the image that had caught her attention. What she saw on the front of two or three local newspapers made her senses narrow and sharpen as they scrutinised the images. It was beautiful. It was immense and perfect and beautiful. And it was a solution. It was a way out. Quickly Susan grabbed a newspaper and ran off down the street ignoring the cries of the vendor angry at the brazen theft in broad daylight. After putting some distance between her and the newspaper stand, she couldn't deal with an altercation right now, Susan hailed a black cab. After almost shoving the newspaper into the driver's face to indicate where she wanted to go entered the rear of the taxi and sank back into the crumpled and faded leather seats. Susan closed her eyes while the black cab crawled its way through central London traffic the laborious journey punctuated by angry beeps and counter beeps. The driver was saying something her as she pushed herself into the back of the seat. She saw his animated head from behind and his eyes in the rear view mirror displaying a range of emotions from initial joviality to questioning to annoyance and finally to apathy. Eventually the black cab driver gave up on trying to communicate with Susan, for which she was very grateful, and went back to the business of driving probably wondering if he was going to get his fare paid from yet another crazy Londoner in the back of his cab. The car made its way through Clerkenwell, the recently affluent Shoreditch, through Aldgate and south of the river heading out of London eastwards. After another 10 minutes or so of surprisingly traffic free travel Susan could see, from her huddled position in the back of the cab, the green borders of rural London rush past the cab window as the cab now headed south. A little while further and she saw the signs for the M25 orbital come into view and an excitement grew in Susan's stomach as she knew that they were nearing her destination and her salvation. The cab escaped the worst of the M25 traffic and continued to head south, past the brown field sites that many developers had now acquired offering up some hope of less expensive property for the tens of thousands of London commuters hoping to move closer to the capital. At last the sign for Norwood Hill presented itself Susan knew she was mere minutes away from her final destination. Susan felt the cab slow down and as it came to a stop, its tyres crunching on loose gravel, Susan threw herself out of the car not before throwing her purse at the cab driver much to his surprise. The cabbie started to protest but Susan was already away walking briskly over the rough ground nervous and excited about what lie ahead. After only a minute or so Susan pushed herself, almost on hands and knees, over a small rise of sparsely vegetated ground. And there it was. It was beautiful. Even more beautiful than Susan had thought when she seen the image in front of the newspaper stand what now seemed like a lifetime ago.

 

The giant sinkhole was on land off Horse Hill, Surrey for which a license had been acquired to for fracking. A vertical exploration well was drilled in October 2014 and after the core sample suggested that up to 11 billion barrels of shale, tight oil could be present under the land work had started to turn it into a full scale operation. The recent news story had been about a controlled explosion that had taken place deep in the well to remove large deposits of Kimmeridge Clay which was hindering progress. But something had gone wrong. The explosion had set off the collapse of a series of previously unknown pockets and caves close to the dig site until eventually a sinkhole had opened up which was hundreds of metres deep. Work had obviously stopped at the site and Susan could see hastily erected warning signs and tape warning members of the public not to approach the hole. Susan walked slowly towards the giant hole, still some hundred or so metres away, never taking her gaze off its dark and mysterious beauty. Susan heard the sound of planes overhead, Gatwick not three miles away from the site, and it brought her attention slightly back to the reality she has been trying to avoid. She was vaguely rising concern in the her mind and her pace quickened as she remembered what she had been running from. The gravel on the approach to the sink hole was mottled light and dark grey in colour and Susan saw the familiar holes form quickly on the ground. They seemed angry. As if they knew what Susan was intending. Not quite closing her eyes but trying to shield them from the ground she ran towards the sink hole ducking underneath the security tape, striped orange and white, that was surrounding large sections of the site. As her shoes crunched noisily on the gravel she thought she could feel the holes cluster together and lift up lapping against her legs as she ran. In her mind's eye she could see the holes leap up at her back and try to stop her. She felt them spray across her lower back and legs and start tearing maniacally into her. To cripple her, to finish her there and then. She screamed as she ran the final few feet to the lip of the giant sink hole and without pausing threw herself off the side and into the darkness that beckoned below. Susan fell and fell and fell watching the sides of the hole as the light abandoned her surroundings. She could see broken, leaking pipes, discarded rubbish, rubble and rock from the adjoining collapsed mine all getting darker and more indistinct as she fell further and further. Eventually she could see nothing at all except vague forms and shapes moving past her. No holes could follow her down here. She was falling into one giant hole and no holes could ever exist in another hole. Susan felt like she was floating rather than falling. She felt she could continue falling forever and ever and had time to contemplate life and the mysteries of the universe before she was even halfway to the bottom. Imbued with drugs and alcohol and pure ecstatic joy she couldn't even feel the cracking of her bones and pulping of her soft body on the rocks below as she hit them. And for the last few seconds of Susan's life she was happy. As her brain slowly shut down after irreparable damage to her body she had no thoughts of creeping holes and the fear they brought her for most of her teens and all of her adult life. She was in a world so deep that the terrors of the world she left behind could not follow her. Slowly, as life fell away from her, her torn muscles worked one last time to bring a smile to her shattered face. And then she was in nothingness, she was in oblivion, she was in Heaven.

Author's Note

STILL NEEDS EDITING - SORRY FOR SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION ERRORS!
Is possibly going to be part of a larger story where Susan's condition is explained/rationalised in the context of that story.