Tick tock. Tick tock.
There are two clocks in the room. Their ticks don’t line up. The sounds of their out of sync ticking seem to slow time down. The couch is nice, but it’s uncomfortable. The brown leather still looks new, it hasn’t been lived in. Hasn’t experienced the rite of passages of spilled drinks and crumbs of food. There aren’t any indents from people claiming the same sports for years. The coffee table is nice, but the edges are sharp. All tables are sharp, but the corners on this one are lethal. The lines come together, whittled to a point. The whole room is filled with corners. Angles only, even the couch is odd, almost gothic. The room wants me to go crazy.
Tick tock. Tick tock.
There are three heart beats in the room. There is mine, which I can feel accelerating by the second. Every second I spend in this space makes me more and more anxious, my body easing into the fight or flight response. Counterintuitive but I can feel it, my eyes seeing more and more every moment. There is the glass paperweight, inside a petrified insect of some sort. There’s the door, which feels like it’s getting farther and farther away by the second. The second heart beat is the man across from me. He knows he’s in charge here. The confidence radiating off of him is doing nothing to ease my anxiety. There’s something peculiar about the smell radiating off of him, there’s the heavy odor of cologne which is overpowering and almost nauseating, but I can smell something metallic hanging around him. The last heartbeat is the room itself. The noise of the clocks that just won’t stop. I clear my throat, and look the man in his eyes. He may be in charge of this room, but it stops there. This is the dragon’s lair, but I’ve slayed worst beasts in the past.
Tick tock. Tick tock.
The clocks are now but a distant memory, soon to be hopefully forgotten. I left the man with my head held high, and his peculiarity still following me. I start to walk a little quicker, the liveliness of my step has begun to return. There is nothing that Dr. Jekyll could have done to stop me. I am not the enemy, I am simply the messenger, and I know he understood that. I only work the University, I am not the apex predator, but a slave to the higher ups just like he is. As I’m walking longer and the streets begin to empty, I hear footsteps. They’re just like mine, but a little bit out of pace. I clear my throat, and quicken and so do the footsteps behind me.
Click clack. Click clack.
I begin to run.
Analysis:
I chose to write a creative piece for my creative project. This piece was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and I modeled my writing after the gothic horror aspect of the novel primarily. For my writing I decided to primarily reimagine the office that Dr. Jekyll would occupy if he worked as a researcher in a university. At this point he has already begun his transformations into Mr. Hyde and the work he has done for the university has been subpar. I wrote from the perspective of Dr. Jekyll’s supposed higher-up who has arrived to tell him that his research is no longer being funded.
The main basis for the tone of my writing was inspired by this line, “She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.” I decided that this line would be a great starting point. I wanted the office to really embody the spirit of this line, a place that is very pretty on the surface level, but upon closer inspection you realize that there is something that is not quite right about the office. That sense of slow growing horror is what I really wanted to model and that even with these seemingly blaring red flags, people will often give someone the benefit of the doubt to appease societal norms. The notion of evil being so apparent on someone’s face but still noting that her manners are good is very interesting and was a key line in my writing.
The other main line that inspired my writing was, ““If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.” This line was important to me as I wanted it to be clear that the hierarchy of the world is still in place. The narrator falls into this trap easily, and even sinks lower down the food chain due to his fear of Dr. Jekyll. I wanted it to be clear that there is a hierarchy in the world that is still being obeyed, but Dr. Jekyll is actually breaking through this hierarchy. While the narrator does not quite understand what is going on, he can feel it in the air that the natural order of the world has been disrupted.