Oh God, You Have Ended Up At Underworld in Camden

How did you even— you started the night in Preston, for god’s sake – but for whatever reason you have come to and you are swaying slightly, feet glued to the sticky floor, in Underworld in Camden. It smells like a smoke machine had sex with a vodka Irn-Bru. It smells like the steam that blows out of kebab houses learned how to puke. Everywhere you look are dark corners with people writhing fingeringly in them. Everybody within touching distance of you thought the campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to Christmas #1 was both “funny” and “good”. You cannot get phone reception down here and it feels like something ominous might happen – a roof might collapse, for instance, or the floor collapses into the Tube below, or the coat room goes all on fire and the immoveable line around the gridded bar refuses to move to help you run away from it (“Lad, I’ve waited 20 minutes here for a Lagunitas, the fuck am I moving now”) – and you feel a dreadful anxiety, a single dark note of terror that you only ever feel here, in Camden Underworld. Three of your friends are getting off with people and one of them is getting escorted out. Open your hand. In it is a single raffle ticket – "36" – for the cloakroom. But you are already… wearing… your coat? You check the ticket in and you are handed a heavy holdall with a dark sticky stain beneath it. 'How did I get here?' you think, emerging blinkingly into the howling Camden streets. 'How am I going to get home?' This is every single experience at Camden Underworld. You writhe to RaTM, feel a terror unknown before or since, and forget how you even got through the doors in the first place. Nobody knows how they got there and nobody knows how to leave. They are locked there in a screaming nightmare. The kebab shops are closed. The big Burger King is closed. The buses run lightless down abandoned roads. Open the holdall. It’s… full of… minced… human… meat?

YOU HAVE LOST AT FRIDAY NIGHT