THE AFTER PARTY

 

THE AFTER PARTY

(c) 2024 

By Gerard E. Thornton

 

               Stu didn’t know anyone at the party.  There were a few faces that were vaguely familiar.  Some were men whom he had seen on the beach chatting with his mother on occasion, some were women who rode the elevator with he and his mother, kvetching about the weather or else prattling on and on about nothing in particular.  Regardless, Stu couldn’t regard anyone in the apartment as being family or even a true friend.  They were merely acquaintances, as he had heard the term used.  It seemed to fit.  People whom you kind of knew, but they were people you wouldn’t really miss if you never saw them again.  He made his way past the bodies in the room, stopping to look at his mother’s prized Lloyd’s stereo, its red power light gleaming like a cyclops eye in the darkened room.  A stack of records lay on the side table, and the turntable was spinning with the high alto voice of Eddie Kendricks coming out of the speakers, singing about keeping on trucking.  Whatever that meant.

               “Stu, be a dear and get mom a glass of ice.”  Stu’s mother’s voice called out of the din.

               The boy looked down at the rock tumbler suddenly thrust out at him.  He studied it for a moment, took it in both of his hands, and threaded his way between the hips of two women who were sharing a cigarette and laughing.  He finally passed out of the living room and into the kitchen.  He waited for a man with a blue paisley shirt to pour a drink from a clear bottle that stood on the counter before he finally was able to reach the refrigerator.  He pulled on the door, opened the upper freezer compartment and tugged out one of the plastic ice trays.  He upended the tray and gave the thing a twist.  Nothing happened.  He squeezed again, harder this time.  Again, the ice remained lodged in their little cells.  His eight-year-old arms just didn’t have the strength to dislodge the cubes.  He shook his head, disgusted with himself and was about to try again when a pair of hands reached out from behind him, and clutched the ice tray.  The hands balled into huge fists, and they twisted angrily.  The tray rotated into a spiral contortion that it was never designed to encounter, and Stu could hear the plastic splitting from the torsional stress.  A row of clear cubes suddenly popped out, several of which dropped into his mother’s glass.  Startled, Stu turned around and saw a middle-aged man, his body stout and muscular, grinning in a most unnatural way.  The smile did not reach the man’s dark eyes, and his face looked in a way, menacing.  The man wore an African style Dashiki, with a band of bright colors circling the neckline of the tunic.

               “Th-thanks,” Stu stammered, his voice not rising above a whisper.

               The man didn’t say anything in return, he just remained standing there, his fists still clutching the ice tray.  Stu noticed that the man’s pinky nails were extremely long and were hooked at the end like fangs.  It gave the man’s hands an unsavory, almost bestial look that Stu found very disturbing. 

               Stu turned on his heel and searched for his mother, suddenly welcoming the prospect of becoming lost among all the other bodies in the room.  He heard the volume of his mother’s stereo surge, and it seemed as though everyone in the room began to dance at once. 

               Soon, the noise and the smoke became too much for Stu.  He grabbed a handful of pretzel sticks from one of the bowls on the coffee table and searched for his mother.  One of the smoking girls from before saw him passing by and ran a hand through his hair and chuckled.  Stu looked up at her.  Standing in her long boots, she seemed to tower way above his head.

The woman smiled and bent down to get a better look at the boy.  Her eyes were mere slits, circled in dark eyeliner. 

“My, my, my, who do we have here?” 

The woman’s dark brown eyes were glassy, and it seemed that she was having a hard time focusing by the way they darted first to the left, then to the right, but never squarely locking on his own eyes.  He felt himself lean back ever so slightly, uncomfortable with the woman entering his personal space.

“I’m looking for my mother,” Stu said timidly.

Seemingly oblivious to what he had just said, the woman suddenly stood straight up, raising her arms up over her head, and began pulsing her hips to the beat of the music.

“Oh I love this song…”

Stu cleared away from her, then spotted his mother standing near the television.  She was accompanied by a large man, and they seemed to be in deep conversation.  His face was close to hers and she was nodding in agreement with whatever he was saying.  The boy’s heart lurched in his chest when he recognized the man who was speaking with his mother.  The man wore a bright Dashiki.  It was the man who helped him with the ice cube tray.  Stu mustered up his courage and walked over, tugging his mother’s sleeve.  It took a moment for his mother to realize he was standing by her side.

“Oh it’s you, honey.  Can mom get you some soda pop?”

Stu looked up at his mother.  She looked pretty out of it.  Her eyes were glazed over and her hair was out of place.  She had an almost wild appearance that he didn’t like at all. 

“I got your ice.”  Stu held up the glass.  Some of the cubes had begun to melt after he had been clutching the glass in his hand for longer than he had realized.

“Ohhhhh, that’s sweet of you, honey.” Her words were slurred, her face vacuous.  “…but my friend got me a drink already.”  She gave her son an aw shucks expression, her lips pursed.

Stu looked up at her glass.  It contained red wine.  He was very surprised because he knew his mother never drank red wine, at least he never saw her drink wine.  He now turned his attention to the man, and tried to give his best scowl of disapproval, but whatever expression he had been going for, froze.  The man was looking down his nose at him with the most withering sneer he had ever seen.  The face was terrifying.  The man placed an arm around his mother’s shoulder, exposing that hideously long pinky nail, and then he whisked her away back to where the people were dancing.  His mother didn’t look back. The man did.  His eyes were filled with contempt for the boy, full of silent threats.  The two soon got lost amongst the others, leaving Stu standing there with the glass of melting ice still in his hand.  He placed it on a side table and stood in the corner, his mind clicking over.  He wished he could kick everyone out of the house at that moment.  He wanted this party to be over.  Just then, someone discovered the latest Spinners album and put it on the turntable.  Stu gave up and headed to his room.

He shut the door to his bedroom and got changed for bed.  He knew it would be impossible to sleep with all of the racket from outside of his door, but he figured he would try anyway.  He looked over at the clock on his nightstand.  It read 11:33.

Stu shut the lights, then climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin.  The smell of smoke, the sound of voices, and the surge of the music throbbed in chaotic unison just beyond his room.  His mind replayed some of the events of the evening.  The sight of the smoking woman, the man in the blue paisley shirt, and his mother seemed to be characters from a late-night movie, or from a bad dream, where no one looked quite right, and no one was behaving normally.  Somehow, despite the noise of the party, Stu felt his conscious mind slipping away, descending into the shadow realm between light and darkness, crossing the threshold of sleep.  Then the face of the man in the Dashiki came to him, like one of the visages carved on a frightening totem. His body shuddered involuntarily.  He tried to resist the weariness that descended upon him, somehow feeling an overwhelming urge to leap out of bed and find his mother again.  He needed to reach her.  He needed to warn her.  But it was too late.  He sighed with resigned departure as his body relaxed, giving in to sleep.

At some point during the night, Stu suddenly snapped awake.  His eyes clicked open in the darkness of his room.  He wasn’t sure what triggered his rapid return, but it was as if a loud crashing noise had broken through his dreamworld.  However, there was no loud noise that had stirred him.  On the contrary, it was the complete absence of sound that had registered somewhere deep within him, that roused him.

It took him a moment to realize where he was.  His surroundings felt alien.  He turned his head towards his clock.  The bright green LED numerals now read 3:18. The details of the night began to manifest in his mind.  The people, the music, the party.  How had he slept for so long, he wondered.  He sat up slowly, then swung his legs over the side of the bed.  He needed to pee.

Stu rose from his bed and opened his bedroom door.  The hallway outside was completely dark.  It took him a moment to get his bearings.  A dim light glowed from somewhere in the living room.  As he padded his way silently towards the bathroom, he caught a glimpse of the detritus of the spent party.  Ash trays stood overflowing on the coffee table in front of the living room sofa, the contents scattered like gray turds on the glass top.  Glasses and cups stood abandoned on every ledge in the room, some still full, others empty, or else doubling as ash trays, with denuded butts sitting drowned in the remnants of whatever drink had been contained in them.  A cold streak ran up his back when he realized he wasn’t alone in the apartment.  In the half-light, he could see someone sitting in the arm chair next to the stereo.  The red eye was still illuminated, blazing out over the wastage of the living room.  A repeated hiss was coming from the speakers.  From where he stood, Stu could see a record was still spinning on the top of the stereo, however instead of the arm automatically retracting and returning to its cradle, the needle was stuck on the end groove of the vinyl, continuously skipping in its soundless coda on infinite repeat. 

 

Click, ssst, click, ssst. Cick, ssst.

 

Stu could see that the person in the chair wasn’t his mother.  Cold dread swept over him in a wave as he saw the face that had haunted him.  It was the man wearing the Dashiki who had twisted the ice cube tray.  He was sitting completely still, his hands resting on his knees.  Stu could see the long pinky nails protruding from his hands.  The man was staring right at him, eyes fixed and burning, as though he had been waiting for the boy all night.

Stu felt a lump rise in his throat, his knees beginning to quiver.

“Who are you?  What do you want?”  the boy asked timidly. 

The man didn’t answer.  The silence in the room was absolute, as though nothing alive was there.  As though it were a tomb.

The boy was on the verge of panic, yet he could tell his legs would not answer his order to flee, and he felt his bladder begin to twitch, threatening to spill its contents down his leg at any moment.  He knew that he had only one hope to reach safety from the threatening form that sat across from him.

“Mom?”  Stu’s voice was choked and dry, and the words sounded as though they dropped to the floor as soon as they left his lips.  They dropped like the ice cubes that had fallen from the mangled ice cube tray.  A tiny voice called out from the boy’s subconscious.  The voice began to bleat a warning.

“Mo-om…” he called again, this time with as much force as he could muster.  To his own ears, he sounded terrified, and he was.  There was no avoiding that fact.

Stu looked to the doorway to his mother’s bedroom, which opened off the hall diagonally across from his own room.  His mother’s door was open.  From where he stood, he could only see his mother’s legs on the bed.  They were uncovered, the feet facing upward.  That was odd, Stu thought, his mind trying to make sense of what his eyes were registering.  He knew his mother never slept on her back, and she never slept without her comforter surrounding her, especially on a chilly night like that night.  He craned his neck, but he couldn’t see any more than the tops of her knees.  Despite the darkness of the room, Stu thought that his mother’s legs looked extremely pale.  They looked awful.  A streak of red was visible running up towards her thigh on one side.

Stu turned back towards the man.  A sudden primal instinct exploded within the boy as he saw the man in the middle of a flying vault, arms outstretched, hands clutching, with those hideous pinky nails extended like talons.  But worse than the nails, far worse, were the man’s eyes.  They flamed with hatred and evil.  Just as the man was upon him, the man’s mouth opened with a hellish grimace.  It opened wider, and wider, and wider.

The boy felt warmth flow down in his nether regions.  His mouth opened to call for his mother one last time, but this time, no sound emerged.  The last thing he was aware of was the red cyclopean eye of the Lloyd’s stereo, its speakers scratching with each turn of the spent record. 

 

Click, ssst.  Click, sssst.

 

 

THE END