08 May Party On

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on May 8, 2022

“Party On”

Written by Dale Thompson
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 17 minutes

Rating: 9.50/10. From 2 votes.

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We sat stoned out of our minds. Dewey was seeing the ghosts of ancestors. He wasn’t sure if they were actually his ancestors or not, but he was wild-eyed and making cooing sounds like a dove. He was no dove, but he was tall and stoic. Dewey was like our prophet, but he very seldom said anything. When he did spill out an oracle, it was a spiritual elevation of heavenly proportions, but today was not that day.

Romey had a buck knife in his hand and swore he could sever his own head. We all watched him carve on his neck in awe. I think I was star-struck at first. I had never seen a god removing his own head with a sharp blade. Now that I reminisce, I am not absolutely sure that his knife was sharpened. He was pressing the knife into his flesh, but I didn’t see any blood. Surely if one cut off their own head, there would be plenty of blood. I was too numb to move. I was trippin’ bigtime, lost in a tunnel of funk. I was staring right at Romey. He was certainly determined and undeviating. I figured it was difficult to take off one’s own head. It must be tough sawing through the flesh, the tissue, the ligaments; I imagined the muscles must be insanely hard to carve through. The anterior, lateral and posterior muscles, the determinants…

Carnell was grinding his teeth so loud I thought a freaking beaver was loose on our table. I gave him a quizzical glance, and in his hammered condition, he looked notoriously humorless. He pushed himself up from the table with spaghetti arms, gave me a distant look as if he saw my future, and then he ambled away to another room. Meanwhile, Romey was bleeding out. I rolled myself off the couch where I was lying and staggered into the bathroom, seeing double, seeing triple, but still with the wherewithal to know I had to stop the bleeding. I looked in the medicine cabinet for anything that might be helpful, but all I found were superficial band-aids. I thought, ‘so be it!’ I brought the box and began peeling the backs off the little suckers. They were sticky, but I quickly learned they would not stick to blood, especially the amount that was squirting from Romey’s severed artery. Romey was poorly singing some Beatles classic off-key; I can’t recall now what it was, but it was fitting for the moment.

Guthrie, who was bred for adventure, yelled out for no apparent reason, “The British are coming!” I did not know what he meant by that, but it sounded like a warning, an alarm.

Romey had made some sort of excuse and exited the room leaving a blood trail that a scentless dog could follow. It probably would have been good for Romey if wolves were tracking him because they could do him in quicker than him detaching his own head. I was fascinated by this beheading act, so, like a hound, I followed the blood trail until it spilled upon the ground outside of the residence. My goodness, that is a lot of blood. I weaved my way through what I now know was an illusionary minefield. I became paranoid that the Nazis had implanted explosives in the ground. It was at the time of my avoiding blowing myself to Kingdom Come when Arlo and Hyme arrived.

They were kind enough to have brought homemade moonshine. I thought, yeah, Kentucky Moonshine, on top of everything else we had done, this night was getting righteous. This was the first time I recognized that the room was filling up with people. A girl we called Mutt, for what reason I could not dare say, was filling up paper cups with this Kentucky moonshine. I moseyed over and got me a cup. My head was already immune to what was coming next. I took great care with the cup, taking a cautious sip. My lips instantly burned, and my tongue swelled forthwith; when that fire-water washed down my throat, I felt the lava burn. The magma singed the back of my throat, the punishment of an intentional scald cascaded down my esophagus, cauterizing my stomach with fervent heat. I took another big gulp, not playing now; it was a man-sized mouthful, and I swallowed it like any good tipsificator would. Again, I subjected myself to the relentless scalding combustion of engulfing conflagration. For a mere second, the pyrotechnic being unleashed in the pit of my gut woke my mind to a reality without the superfluous wasteness that I had become.

That is when I saw that Romey was on the floor and Guthrie was performing some new-founded form of CPR on him. Others had gathered and gotten themselves good vantage points for this attempt at saving Romey’s life. But he was covered in his own blood, and from what my gartered eyes could see was a hopeless scene of Orwellianism. This was a people all standing on the slippery slope of bystander apathy.

The scene of Romey’s demise gave way to greater bewilderment when Mutt suddenly cried out, “Fire!” There was a mad scramble of zombified walking corpses in their gaunt anorexic broken gait, exiting the room. It came to light that Mutt was lighting her bong carelessly when the rug she was sitting cross-legged on burst into flames. At present, it did not appear that Mutt herself had been burned, but the rug was a complete loss. My parents would not be happy about that.

Here is the kicker: Hamish, a real farmer from what I have been told, proved without a shadow of a doubt that he was no fireman. Without question, undeniably true, Hamish verified that he was just the opposite of a firefighter. In his reckless attempt to squelch the flames, he foolishly, with the fulness of his ignorance on display, doused the flames with the moonshine he had held in his hands. There was a delayed flashover, then boom! The fire on the rug chased the source of the liquid which had been splashed, and when that fire got the scent of Hamish, it ran up the fumes and took a nasty hold of Hamish’s hand. I can only say I have never seen anything so nonchalantly careless. Yes, indeed, Hamish was gravely on fire, and Romey was stone-cold dead on the floor. Now, mind you, this was early in the night. This accursed party had just started and, in a short period of time, in my view, had become convincingly odious, substantially legendary. Nevertheless, “Que sera, sera,” I say.

I don’t want to be pharisaical; I know I am part of the problem too. I decided I better extinguish Hamish before he completely went up in a ball of flame. I snatched up a large pillow from the floor and charged Hamish like a rugby union player. I took him to the floor and pressed the pillow suffocatingly on his severely burnt hand until I was confident that the fire was snuffed out.

My instincts were to get water on his hand immediately, but the rug was still on fire. I pushed myself off Hamish, who was rolling around abysmally on the floor, writhing in pain. Ignoring him for the moment, in a stupefying yet dizzying disassociation, I dragged the burning rug across the room, leaving particles of gleaming spectral particles in its wake, and slung what remained of Mutt’s meditation rug out into the yard.

I turned back to Hamish, who was completely zooted and without a doubt was the most vulnerable person in the room. I couldn’t really deal with this right now. This Friday night party was beyond expression.

By now, I estimated that there were at least 30 people here. I ascertained that 90% started their party before they arrived, based on the body language and the abstract expressions smeared on everyone’s faces. I thought I was sozzled, but some of these people were truly off their tits.

I managed to support Hamish and get him to the kitchen sink and instructed him the best I could to hold his hand under the cold water as long as he could. I couldn’t babysit him; I had to make plans for the removal and disposal of Romey’s lifeless body. When I returned to the room where Romey lay, the surrealism of the moment finally demystified. Mutt, who had started the fire that burned Hamish, was sitting cross-legged next to the body of Romey, uninjured. Romey, being dead, did not realize that Mutt had placed several candles on his chest and on his forehead. The candle wax was guttering down his body on his cold, dead skin. Mutt was a bit of a mystic, caught up living in the wrong decade. I always felt that given the choice she could have easily become one of the Manson girls. In my current condition, there wasn’t anything I could do to preserve the body, and it did not appear there was any desecration happening. I just figured Mutt was caught up in some esoteric spiritual behavior. It was abstruse to me on every level, but ‘no harm no foul.’

I needed another drink.

Given the recent events, I could only imagine that there was going to be some sort of police investigation later on. I was positive that no one had called the police yet, and I would be damned if I did. Then I would be a Judas Iscariot, or an Ephialtes of Trachis who betrayed the 300 Spartans. Carnell was going through some kind of metamorphosis. I am not sure what he had gotten himself into, but whatever it was, he was not on this planet. His eyes were wide open – and white! He had no pupils. When people say that someone’s eyes rolled back in their head, this was the perfect example of someone reading their own brain. He was standing in some sort of flamingo pose on one leg, arms spread out like he was about to fly off a mountain. I was amazed that in his condition he was able to hold that pose unwaveringly for so long.

I had myself another moonshine, which pretty much was the end of that. Everyone had gotten some, and other than a few people, I would say everyone was feeling pretty good. They felt good, for at that moment, Hebie had just arrived. Hebie was like a one-stop shop for everything illegal and anything you wanted. He came today bearing gifts and samples. You see, this is how you become an addict. Some punk like Hebie comes in, hands out some multi-colored pills, introduces some powder and wham, he has you hooked, chasing that high, and he gains new customers. Hebie was incontrovertible, and his inclination was to peddle his homemade medicines. I knew that some of these people came for a good time, but Hebie was going to take this to a new level. Yes, Romey was dead, and Mutt got Hamish burnt, but all in all, the party was fun. Hebie, with his perplexing impression, was hard to read. I didn’t want to be pretentious, but something was not right with him. The music was booming, people were dancing, it was a good time.

I could see that eldritch darkness, like a plague, all around Hebie. He sat on the sofa with a couple of girls that I had never met before. I wasn’t sure, but they might have strolled in with him. His type lures them in like bees to honey. Hebie had what appeared to be a medical bag; yeah, that’s classic. The doctor was in, I thought to myself, edging my way over to get a closer look. Others started gathering around as if they had emerged from the walls. The room was packed. Where did all of these people come from? Just when I thought the party had gone intolerably prosaic, I heard someone behind me raise their voice. They sounded angry. My first instinct was to move to the other side of the room in case someone was about to lose the plot. My comprehension was chemically skewed.

Another voice challenged the first voice. It appeared one of the guys was a boxer, and the other guy a typical bully, and a challenge had been made. I am a peaceful guy, and this sort of thing really drives my anxiety to a whole new level. Sudden and unheralded fear impaled me, and someone uttered a ghastly ululation. I got a glimpse of the two guys. The bully appeared to be a rough-looking guy with a badly pitted, chiseled face. The boxer, well, he looked angelic with a divine eidolon face of a cherub. This led me to believe that this boxer guy didn’t get punched often. The fight, as it were, was over in one cataclysmic second. The bully was flat on his back.

The squabble – as I would call it – was so anticlimactic that Hebie never paused his business. These types of incidents just didn’t concern him.

Respectively, I turned my attention to Hebie. The store was open, and he was describing the loot from his bag by color and potency. I was agonizingly aware that I would have to indulge myself. One would be rude to turn down a gift. There was some order as a couple of lines formed, and Hebie, with the generosity of a saint, graciously handed out his color palette. He was handing out two capsules at a time. Every color was represented, even some mysterious black capsules. None of us knew what we were getting, but I accepted a black and a red pill. I figured I was about to become disconnected from the Matrix. I knew once I swallowed, it was irrevocable, and yep, I would most likely be unplugged from the reality around me.

I needed something to wash the pills down, so I held them in my hand and looked for a cooler for any drinks. I located one, and, chilling in melting ice, was a half-bottle of tequila. If it had been full, I most likely would have confiscated it and nursed it for about an hour. Half a bottle would be no problem at all. In went the capsules, and here came the tequila. I emptied the bottle and looked for a good place to sit. When that tequila alone hit rock bottom, I did not want to be standing.

I plopped down on a different sofa than Hebie in the den. The walls were adorned with a small library of books. Even if I was tempted to browse through them, I would not be capable of reading them. I was going somewhere now without moving. This was when I heard sobbing, uncontrollable weeping. The cries were contagious, and others became inconsolable. They must have taken the blue pill or yellow, I thought.

I did not feel sad or mournful. I was actually callously sedated, I think. To be honest, I was unsympathetic to anything. Wars, dying babies, abused wives, killers, funerals, yeah, I just didn’t care. I felt nothing. I had become impervious, soulless, indescribably nonchalant. I had never felt more euphoric.

It was as if my parents or friends were being mutilated, slowly tortured, I would not stir a bit. Empathy meant nothing to me. It was now a word that did not exist. I had no emotive response.

I wondered if this is what death feels like? Nah, I saw death earlier in the evening when Romey bled out. He looked worried the whole time he was attempting to saw off his own head.

My eyes had been closed, soaking in the alcohol and drugs, trying to control them. But no matter how hard I tried, I was deeply under the spell of intoxication. I opened my eyes. An avalanche of strained emotion came out of nowhere like a dam bursting in my chest. Something or someone was standing there, leering at me. I felt a sickening qualm choke my throat. It was as if death was literally at my heels, but I was unable to run, move, or defend against such a malignant presence.

“She’s dead! She’s dead!” Someone was out of their mind screaming about death in a tremulous voice. I knew death all too well; it was standing before me. I managed to turn my head away from the awful, difficult-to-interpret thing. I was mortified by the chaotic scene before me. Two things; first, I was scared out of my wits that this creature was looming over me. Secondly, I could not raise myself up at the moment.

Actually, there was a third thing; I passed out.

When I awoke, I thought I had pissed myself, but I soon recognized that I was being doused with water from a girl with an annoying, pedantic voice. She was saying, “get up, get up.” I was thinking, ‘I would if I could.’

The music was loud. I felt like I was trapped in a jukebox. The screaming girl’s name was Delma. She was a skeleton of a human being with black circles around her bulging eyes. She was the authentic and credible expert about how to use the needle and not die. She should have been dead a hundred times, but this ol’ gal was solid. She always reminded me of a drowned rat, greasy hair patted flat on her skull, and although her fingernail polish changed from week to week, it always looked like she needed a new coat.

With cotton mouth, I tried to speak, but the words balled up in the web of my mouth. This maleficent, looming, dark ‘thing’ could not be real. At first, I would have sworn it was a real thing; now I realized it was a hallucination caused by my internal metabolic disruption. The manifestation of this ‘it,’ this ‘thing’ was a forced perception caused by a disturbance of my visual cortex. This was just a blur, a misinterpretation of my mind. The pathways of my mind, yes, that was it, something to do with dopamine and glutamate, I think.

I refused to let this neurotransmitter of confusion warp me any longer. Yet, in this synaesthesia, I could smell colors and taste sound. Now that was a weird thing to happen, which had never happened before. Disoriented and weary, I managed to get to my feet, brushed past the looming ghoul, and made my way unsteadily to where Delma was trying to get someone to listen to her. This is when Carnell squeezed my arm and pulled me close. He was behaving oddly. “Listen,” he said with an arbitrary delivery, “something here isn’t right.” For the first time , he bore the stark appearance of a man with gravity and genuine judgment.

“I know. Are you seeing weird stuff too?” I needed to know.

Carnell glanced around like an American spy in Russia.

“Seeing things, feeling things, living things. Demons, aliens, not sure what to make of it.” “What is Delma screaming about?” My voice raised to combat the taste of music in my mouth.

Carnell answered me without emotion, concern or curiosity. “She said there is a dead girl tied to a tree in the backyard.”

“Do you think we ought to look?” I asked. I did not want to go alone.

With earnest expectation, he replied, “Yeah, I’m right behind you.” Carnell and I put on our homicide investigator hats; this, of course, is a figure a speech; we did not literally have hats of any kind. We eventually found the back door. I was still wet from being doused with water earlier, but Carnell didn’t ask about it. Once we left the house, it was like being born again. I had forgotten how fresh the night air could be. Carnell and I walked in the dark down to the lower half of the expansive property. The ambiance of a brilliant night lit by a bluish-tinted moon sobered me some. We spotted the only tree in the backyard and pursued our lead. Yep, Delma was telling the truth. By George, there was a girl bound hand and foot, fully clothed, tied to a tree.

“What do you make of this?” Carnell wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, so I did not dignify that with a response.

I walked closer to make sure she was dead. At the precise moment I laid my hand on her head to feel if she was cold to the touch, her eyes popped open like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming tractor-trailer. “Good Lord! You’re alive,” I exclaimed. My attention to the reanimation was drawn away by a growling dog behind Carnell. Carnell began to say, “Good boy, good doggie,” but that dog, half German Shepherd, half hound from hell, was not playing the good doggie game. The nasty beast was showing fangs and drooling like a phantom demon from hell. I gave Carnell a furtive glance as if to say, ‘You’re on your own.’ I was barely able to stand. I think the black pill was kicking in. Considering the situation, I could understand why Carnell gave me a look of trouble and indignation. That is when Carnell did one of the stupidest things one could imagine. He ran. It was imperative that he did not move, so now his situation was grave at best. Last time I saw Carnell , he had leaped a barbed wire fence and was paving a path up a steep slope with that hound on his heels. Oh well, back to this mystery girl bound to a tree.

She said her name was Oretha. Odd name nowadays, but I accepted that and untied her. She was pretty intoxicated and said that Boozer, who was really too old to be at this party, had brought her out back, and all she could remember was she must have passed out.

Boozer was just that, a real boozer and a loser who wanted to hang out with people half his age. He was trouble with a capital T. I couldn’t stand that idiot, but I doubted if I could handle myself against him. He looked like a pit bull, lived in the gym, spent some time in the clink. I didn’t see his sorry face anywhere. I told Oretha we should be heading up to the house and mingle. Boozer wouldn’t try anything in a crowd.

“What about your friend? You know, the one running from the dog?” Her concern was heartfelt, but I still had no true emotions. I just responded with, “Oh, him? He’s not a friend.”

Back inside, the stifling house was ripe with rotten smells and perspiration. The music had gone from a poppy dance vibe to some sort of Black Death Metal. But here is the kicker, everyone in the house was standing, shoulders hunched over, chins on their chest, simply statues, still breathing. I was gorgonized with wonder and visibly shaking. Meanwhile, Hebie and Mutt seemed to be inspecting everyone like they were shopping at a window display at the mall. This was highly irregular to see, even in my narcotized frame of mind. I instructed Oretha to become wallpaper and not to move. I eye-balled the two of them the best I could as they weirdly examined the partygoers, who were in some state of erasure.

In frightened remonstrance, I held my tongue. This was simply repulsive. Hebie and Mutt were touching everyone like they were delicious meat. With what could only be described as some practice of psychometry, they were touching Barry, a potbellied wild-haired guy about 19 years of age. He always reminded me of an unevolved man; atrophied legs and stick arms, birthed from the bottom of creation.

Predisposed with terror, I lost sight of Oretha. She was either blending in really well or she had exited out the back door. I thought maybe that was what I should do; abandon this distortion of organic humanity with the murder and blood, and find freedom.

Wait, I thought I saw something. I did see something.

It was Boots. Boots was a tall guy, a real man’s man. He didn’t take any guff from anyone and usually made good decisions. It looked like he was sneaking up behind Hebie. Hebie was focused entirely on Barry. He pulled out a long knife, and Mutt giggled. She took Barry’s arm and stretched it out to his side. Barry did not even groan. He was totally pixilated. Hebie took aim with the knife. He was about to either remove Barry’s arms or take a good size chunk from it. That is when Boots reacted. He tackled Hebie with a devastating hit that ranked up there with the Lawrence Taylor hit on Joe Theismann, which ended the quarterback’s career. It was as good of a hit as Pete Rose taking out Ray Fosse in 1970. The knife went flying in my direction, but I did not want it. Instinctively, I picked it up and gave it a sling toward the kitchen without thinking, and I heard someone yell out in pain. I thought, ‘that didn’t sound good!’

Boots kept pummeling Hebie. Hebie’s appearance began to change in a way that was not the disfigurement of the beating but transforming into something else altogether, not of this world. I lost sight of him as Boots kept pounding him in the face until Hebie didn’t move. To my shock and surprise, Mutt also morphed into an unnatural form. All I can do is describe what she morphed into: a lizard! Yes, she was now a freaking lizard person. These drugs are crazy stuff. But it looked so real. I was looking at a Gila Monster! She had a deeply forked, fleshly heliotropic tongue.

Carnell stumbled into the room with a look of harrowing shock and a knife in his chest. Good Lord! What had I done? Before I could say a word to him, Carnell yanked out the knife. I knew instantly that was a colossal mistake. Hadn’t he learned anything from the ghastly death of The Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin? ‘You got to be kidding me,’ I thought to myself. ‘What are the chances of that?’ I did not feel remorse; I still had no emotions at all. Sympathy was just not in me to give. Must be the black pill.

Boots finished with Hebie. I was pretty sure he had killed him. Mutt fully transformed now into this lizard thing and had jumped onto his back. Like I said, I didn’t really care what happened to Boots or anyone else, yet I still had the natural instinct of self-preservation. Plus, I could not be sure in my current temulence of debauchery and self-defilement if what I was seeing was real or imagined. For all I knew, any or all of this could be some sort of mind trip, a paranoid bit of lunacy? I hesitantly picked up the bloody knife, convinced myself that none of this was real, and charged heroically, yet spastically, out of step even with myself, to aid Boots, who looked like a man with a lizard on his back. I plunged the knife into the lizard as deep as it could go. I felt it penetrate the integument, the keratin, cracking the scales into pieces. I had seen somewhere that if you use a knife for murder, be sure to twist it once it is in. This lizard was tough. I had to use both hands for the gory twist. The lizard emitted some sort of hiss, then an echo of indescribable distress. The lizard dropped dead from his back. I fell backward on my rear to the floor. The black pill must have been wearing off because the weight of the night’s events was suddenly crushing me. I prayed to God that this was over. How would I ever explain what had happened? Boots was uninjured and thanked me for reacting as quickly as I had.

For the next couple of hours, my then-drugged mind began returning to me. While I was coming back from wherever my mind had been forced to go, Boots removed both dead lizard people, Romey, and Carnell from the premises. I did not bother to ask where he delivered them to. By the time Boots had managed his miraculous clean-up, all of the partiers had come back to life. They filtered out one by one until all that remained were Boots and I. I doubted any of them would remember a thing.

“What’s next?” I asked.

Boots smiled and answered, “When are your parents returning?” “Oh, they won’t be home for the next two weeks,” I informed him. Boots was about to ask me something when Oretha entered the room. Boots looked afraid, as if something wasn’t exactly right. I couldn’t imagine what could be wrong. Oretha said nothing. She just stood stoically as if her presence was all that mattered.

“What’s happening, Boots?” I asked, not knowing if I wanted him to answer or not.

“Oretha was tied up for a reason. I had Boozer tie Oretha up. I was going to take care of her myself, but because you’ve helped her escape, I’ve lost the opportunity to rid the world of her.”

I was stunned, “What do you mean, get rid of her?” I looked back at Oretha whose parietal eyes were clear. What was she, I wondered? When she blinked, it was something I had never seen before. She blinked sideways! Not up and down like humans do. She had nictitating membranes. My blood ran cold.

I made a deal with her because I am selfish that way. Boots is now gone. Oretha was grateful that I had saved her life, so she let me live. She even promised me more black pills if I would hold more parties for her.