Party All Night

   The police kept it quiet for a long time. They even held me in protective custody for a while so I wouldn't talk. It was so bizarre that they felt it would cause a panic, and they couldn't have that. But now, I'm out, and I'm gonna tell it all to whoever will listen. Fuck the police.

   This whole thing went down two weeks ago at the Bernard house on Glass Street. It was supposed to be the biggest party of the year. People were handing out flyers left and right, a week in advance. It was getting close to Halloween, actually. Yeah... it was a costume party. Go figure. No one would ever think to do something like that, right?

   So, anyway, Lucille Bernard, the most popular girl in school, was throwing it. Her parents were loaded like a hundred-round fifty cal'. If I remember correctly, when I first walked into the drive, I saw five different Porsches and a Lamborghini. She kept on saying that it would be the most memorable party of all time. I had no idea what she was talking about, though. If the party was going to be as great as she claimed, I figured people would have a hard time remembering. You know how those things go, after all.

   On friday, the night of the party, she had a few jocks sneak into the administrative office of the school to announce it over the intercom. "Hey! Camden High! Party at Lucille's tonight! Party 'til ya die! OWWW!" Their words were all too appropriate.

   Me and my late best friend, Roger Jandel, weren't gonna go at first. We weren't really a part of the "in-crowd", but I tutored Lucille during study halls, because I had been assigned to her as a teaching assistant. On the day of the party, she passed her Biology test and so she extended an invitation my way. "Bring a friend, it'll be rockin'", she said. "Hmm... I suppose I could swing by. Got nothing else to do tonight.", I replied.

   We parked just a few houses down the street so we wouldn't have any problems leaving. I didn't expect to be there long. I nearly fell on my ass because of how far up I had to look to see the very top of her house. It was more like a mansion. We were greeted at the door by a buzzed Frankenstein (The scientist, not the monster). "Come on in, bros! Grab a beer, it's time to get down!" We brushed past him and headed over to the back patio where a few of our acquaintances were rambling on about something that I can't quite remember. It might have been the newest Murderking game, but that's speculation at this point.

   It was truly a wild party. The music was loud. The amount of alcohol present was mind-boggling. Honestly, I don't know how the police weren't called in before the massacre happened. The kids at my high school have no common sense, because there were already people blacked out on the lawn by 9:00. The debauchery proceeded through the night.

   It wasn't until about 11 that I noticed I hadn't seen Lucille once during the party. I figured that I should have at least thanked her for inviting me, so I began to look for her, leaving Roger behind in the yawning maw of teenage socialites. I searched all the way around the pool and the first floor before squeezing my way upstairs. It was a different scene entirely up there. The air was... menacing. And it was completely dark, except for a tiny strip of light glowing under the last door on the left. Now, I know how parties are. I've seen enough movies, so I took caution and knocked on the door. You never know what kind of sick display is waiting for you on the other side.

   The knock went unanswered, but I couldn't hear anything, and by then I was just curious. Cracking the door ever so slightly, I announced that I was entering. Still, the room was silent, so I went on in. Apparently it was Lucille's room, or what was left of it. What I saw in there was just horrible. There were five badly-cut people sitting around a pentagram drawn with a grease pencil on the hardwood floor. I approached them and checked to see if they were alive. None of them were. I couldn't see who they were because of how bad their faces were destroyed. It was almost as if something had chewed each of their heads up with a thousand tiny teeth, giving them the appearance of ground beef.

   The only way I was able to identify the host of the party was her gold necklace. It was Lucille, alright. Laying lopsided with her guts strewn all over the place. She was missing most of the fingers on her left hand, as well. I couldn't even begin to imagine what had gone on. It seemed like they might have been doing some kind of weird seance or ritual, and it had gone horribly awry. The only thing that didn't make sense besides this terrifying shrine of gore was the fact that Lucille would never have done anything remotely like this. She was basically one of those airhead cheerleader types that slept with the whole football team and went shopping with her friends on the weekends. There was never any indication whatsoever that she was a patron of the occult. Things only got stranger.

   I started to head out of the room, when I heard a foreboding hum. It seemed to come from the very walls of the house. The hum got louder and deeper every second, and almost sounded like an agonizingly slow chant made up of words that didn't sound like they were compatible with the human mouth. I didn't like it one bit, so I darted out of the room and down the hall before it could get any worse, but that was nothing compared to what was going on downstairs.

   Roger was standing at the foot of the stairs with his hands hung over his head like a marionette doll. "Rog, what's going on?", I said, "Lucille and some other people are dead, up in her room. What are you doing?" He had a very tortured look on his face, but his body started dancing. As a matter of fact, everyone else was dancing too, but they looked very bad. Their skin was an unhealthy shade of green, as if they all had some mysterious gout-like illness. Roger had to struggle to speak up. "Dude, I don't know what's going on! I can't stop dancing!" I was confused, thinking that maybe he was playing a joke, but the look on his face didn't do a good job convincing me. "What the-" is what began to come out of my mouth when the stereo system started a new song.

   It sounded amazing. The song that started playing seemed like the best song my ears had ever beheld, but the words were in that strange language again, and I couldn't understand any of it. I wanted to dance, myself, but I was able to resist the urge. The beat picked up slow, and everyone danced in rhythm, doing strange and uncomfortable two-steps. Because this was a costume party, I literally saw a whole dance floor full of monsters and movie characters. They looked like they were crumping... or maybe having a seizure. It was some sort of happy medium that went perfectly with the music.

   I tried yelling at the top of my lungs. "Lucille's dead! Everyone stop dancing! Someone call an ambulance, now!" But no one stopped for a moment. Some of them seemed to notice what I was saying, and a few of them even had worried looks on their faces, but still, they commenced their strange shuffle. I ran up to Roger and started shaking him by the shoulders. "Roger! What the hell are you doing? I know you heard what I just said! Knock it off and HELP ME!" He was looking dead at me, moving from side to side and popping his shoulders skywards. "Dude... Can't... Stop... " was all he could muster. It was then that I realized this wasn't something I would be receiving assistance with. I ran to the nearest purse I could find, which was sitting on the kitchen counter, and dug a cell phone out of the maze of lipstick and concealer. The attempt to call the police was a nightmare all by itself, because when I dialed 911 and held it to my ear, all I could hear was garbled laughter. It sounded just... evil. It was strange, too, because it sounded like it was coming from the speaker of an old 1940's living room radio. You know, the kind that people used to listen to teleplays with. The whole family circled around to hear The War of The Worlds, and thought a real alien invasion was taking place back then. Now, I realized, another invasion was happening. Only this time, it was real.

   I ran out back to the pool to see if there was anyone who hadn't succumbed to the calypso from hell. When I got outside, I had to bend over and vomit, because what I saw made my stomach retch. The pool looked like organ soup. There were tons of bodies and guts floating in the water, and the cement all around the pool was cracked up and smoking, as if there was a pool of lava just under it.

   When I came back in, the rhythm of the song had picked up to an amazing speed and sounded much more menacing. People were keeping up, but their bodies were spasming now. I saw people dancing on broken legs, with their bones sticking out all helter skelter, gushing with blood. I pushed my way towards the middle of the dance floor to find that it was the eye of the storm.

   The people closest to it had formed a nearly-perfect circle around a spot on the floor that was quaking. I kept my distance from it, shoving people out of my way if they got too close. Then, the floor started to crack like the concrete outside. Flames were licking out from beneath it, through the crevices. I slowly continued to distance myself from the spot where it was happening, but I wasn't far enough to avoid catching a piece of tile in the forehead when it exploded.

   I must have been out for a couple of minutes, but I don't think it was very long. The tile that had hit my head put me out pretty good, though. I sat up, reorienting myself and trying to sharpen my blurred vision by squinting my eyes. People were no more than blurs now. They moved so fast, that the blood sprayed out of their wounds and splattered on the walls, making them look like a strange piece of folk art. Something had come out of the hole in the floor, but I couldn't understand what I was seeing. Even now, I'm not very confident in how to describe it, but it looked like a whole bunch of floating black spots and it had a set of yellow teeth that went on forever. I figured it must have been the thing that chewed on the people's noggins upstairs, who now laid pulverized on Lucille's floor. It seemed to be laughing, in a disturbing way. Sounded like a choking cow to me, but somehow I knew it was entertained by the scene.

   I couldn't move. I was just petrified. The thing kind of floated into a nearby dancer, a senior I hardly knew who had come dressed as Tom Cruise in Risky Business. You know, the button-down and whitey-tighties getup. His voice was amplified by the thing inside him. He spoke aloud to the crowd with a greedy sort of glee. "Dance, my lovely children! Dance and Party! Drink up! Be merry!" I was very afraid, but in spite of my fear, I crept up to him with a kitchen knife in hand and spun him around so I could stab him in the face. The blade sunk into his cheek, in between the top and bottom rows of his teeth, but he was unphased. He continued to shout commands of celebration to the guests, while staring me down. There was a gleam in his eye... yes, I saw something there that doesn't exist here on earth. It was something from the dark pit of flame, I'm sure. His voice was noticeably lower when he spoke to me. "What's the matter, kid? Why don't you have fun?! It's a parrrrrrrrr-ty!" My body was shaking all over. "What.... what are you? Why are you doing this?" As I asked him the question, a junior from my social science class in 3rd period twisted his body so hard that his torso was separated from his legs. The legs just jerked about on the floor, pooling blood at the waist, while he dragged his upper body towards the keg, leaving a slug trail of crimson in his wake.

   "OH GOD!" I screamed. The possessed "Tom Cruise" just laughed and grabbed my face with his blood-soaked hands. "Don't be so down, Charlie Brown", he said, "The party's just starting! And there ain't no party like a sacrifice party, 'cause a sacrifice party don't stop... until everyone is dead! Hahaha!" I couldn't believe it. A sacrifice party? I mean, come on. This was a party at Lucille Bernard's house! I slipped out of his grip and ran screaming out of the front door, finally deciding to abandoned my poor, doomed classmates. I had gotten pretty far into the woods after half an hour of running, and all I could manage to do was sit on a tree stump and stare at a fallen log that was rotting in front of me.

   I was in shock for hours. The first rays of the next day were winking through the canopy of the forest by the time I snapped out of it. For a while, I was sure I had just snapped, and I went back to the house to see if Roger had waited on me or just left. I got to the front door, and everything appeared normal, so I knocked. I got no answer, and a part of me was content with leaving and putting it all down to dementia, but I wouldn't be completely satisfied until I knew for certain that it had all been in my head, so I tried the knob, and the door squealed open. Immediately, an even stream of coagulated blood came pouring off of the doorstep. I jumped back with a shriek and then peered inside. I couldn't see the floor, because it was completely carpeted with body parts, and a thick wave of the scent of death hit my nostrils and knocked me off my feet. I fell into the puddle of blood that had accumulated on the walk with a splash, and slowly crawled out of it. I was able to get onto my feet, but I was soaked with blood everywhere. All I could do was shamble down the driveway and into the street, going nowhere in particular.

   Finally, about a quarter of a mile down the road, one of Lucille's neighbors saw me and called the police. They pulled next to me and slammed me onto the ground, handcuffing me easily enough once they saw I wasn't putting up a struggle. The first officer who had been on-scene questioned me about why I was covered in blood, but I couldn't speak, and wouldn't for hours. Eventually, I told them about the house, and they went to check it out. About three hours later, a detective came into the office where I was being held and asked me if I knew who did it. "So, you're telling me that you were completely out of it while this was happening? You can't remember a single thing?" I was zoning out, looking at the floor. "I just... I don't know how it happened. That's all I'm saying. You simply wouldn't believe me if I were to tell you what happened." I said. "Try me." The detective fired back.

   So I told them everything I saw, and the whole time, their expressions got more and more disbelieving. Later on, after they had conducted a full search of the house, the detective came back to me with a weird leather-bound book. "I found this in Lucille's parents' room. At first, I didn't believe you. I thought you were completely nuts, kid, but the stuff in this book, which is apparently a family album, is beyond belief all on its own. Here, take a look." I took the book and opened it up. There were a lot of normal pictures at first. Lucille and her folks at a picnic. At a lake.... But towards the end, there were horrors unspeakable, captured on photo. I saw one picture of Lucille and her father standing in front of a basalt altar. On the altar, there was a naked man with three sharpened crucifixes sticking out of his chest, and yes, he was dead. There was another one.. a family portrait, if you could call it that. Lucille and her parents were surrounded with a whole bunch of tall, thin people with goatish faces, wearing black robes. They all had horns. It was just terrifying to see. I kept imagining Lucille cheer leading at the football games. The whole time... what had she really been? That wasn't the worst part, though.

   On the last page, there was a family tree diagrammed onto a piece of ancient cellulose. The letters weren't the same as the ones in the English language, but some of them were close. The only ones I could pronounce were Lucille's and her parents'. The true shock was at the top of the page. I'm not completely sure, but at the very apex of the tree, just above the point, which was garnished with a pentagram, much like the one I found on Lucille's floor the night of the party, was a word that made my blood run cold. "Lucsifaer".

   I won't go any further, because I'm scared to speculate. Especially since, now, I'm afraid for my life. But I'll let you make of it what you will. As for me... I think I'm gonna go into hiding... Somewhere far into the mountains. With a Bible under my arm.