House Party

I’m not a good person. I’m not evil, or malicious, but I believe people ought to look after themselves and making stupid decisions hurt is God’s way of keeping us smart. I’ve had time to think on myself as a good or bad guy and I guess that somewhere along the line I realised I’m not a good guy, and on the heels of that one revelation came another – I don’t really care.

People in my situation tend to grow up quickly. You think my dad cared about my maths homework when he was coaxing me through the open window of a farmer’s house so I could open the door for him and his friends to rob it? My little sister’s moved on now, living with an Aunt up north but for a long time it was on me, a kid myself, to keep her fed. It’s weird. There’d be kids speaking shit about me because my hair was too long, or I was rude to a girl who liked me, or I tackled someone a little too hard in football, and the whole time I’d be wondering if I’d go home and find my dad lying half-dead in the tub again like he was the night before.

Over time I started getting a kick out of pulling one over on the kids in my school. You buy drugs off me that didn’t do shit? Not my problem. You take up my offer of cheap car repair and find out six months later it’s been chopped up senseless and half the parts replaced with knock-offs? Not my problem. You give me your phone to jailbreak and it comes back with a keylogger? Trust me to buy tickets only to find I flogged ‘em on eBay? Brag about your dad’s shiny new cigar collection only to find it missing the next day?

None of it was my fault, at least as far as I was concerned.

It’s funny though. I had this huge chip on my shoulder about all these idiots who didn’t appreciate what they had and I didn’t even think twice when James approached me asking for help. I just saw it as another opportunity to fleece a dumbass for some cash, some trusting loser without enough common sense to know better than to trust me.

James was, to quote a few girls in his class, “a total creep”. He never crossed any lines, but he had a way of looking at people that made them feel like a petri dish under a microscope. He had a thick heavy brow, a bean-shaped head, and keen eyes that probed your face and body as he listened to you. He’d do things like eat frozen pizzas for lunch, drink protein shake without ever working out, and cut his own hair in the toilets with a clipper he brought from home. Oh, and of course, he stank like hell, and often boasted of the fact he would only shower once a month. I’d never once spoken to him one-on-one or ever given him any meaningful attention in my whole life, and yet he came to me on the day of his father’s death.

I mean, I didn’t know back then. He just turned up with a bunch of fuckin’ credit cards and a dire need to have fun, make friends, and get “ready for college”. Specifically, James wanted to throw a house party and I was the only way he could think of to make it happen. Everyone else had politics, he said, no one else would hang with a loser like him, or even help him, but only I would offer an honest service in exchange for money.

His dad had left town for a month, he said. I had to get as many kids from our school year as I could to his house, spend whatever I needed to buy the booze and drugs necessary to keep ‘em happy, and in exchange he’d pay me a grand in cash.

Another person might have asked where James had got the cash or why he was so desperate for a big blow out, but I never saw it as my responsibility to look after someone else’s stuff. If he wanted to give me the money I sure as shit wasn’t going to stop him. So I took the cards, emptied them out across a good few ATMs, and spent the following day buying all the pot and booze I could lay my hands on. I can’t say exactly why I actually decided to go ahead and throw the kid his party—I was 17 at this point and seriously tempted to just ditch town with the cash I had—but I decided that there was no good reason not to give him the party he wanted. I really went all out on booze, pot, and invites (the first two being the most important motivator for people), and by the time I rocked up to his place on Friday I remember genuinely thinking that there was 50/50 chance James’d be dead come Monday. The thought filled me with a kind of perverse pride.

But man, there was nothing right about James’ place. He had this big stately home with loads of cool shit, but it was harder to get people up there than you might think. A few teenagers went missing up in those mountains when we were just toddlers, and they were found in a pretty gruesome state. It was a bit before my time and apparently there’s other stories about the woods, stories going back a long time, but most people won’t talk. I know every town has a place like this but at the time I didn’t know an inkling of what was really going on.

That whole damn mountain is fucked up. Back then all I knew was that it was riddled with these old derelict buildings half buried under dense thickets of roots and treetops. They form these nasty little trenches hidden along the windswept mountain that make great cover for anyone who wants to drink or smoke in peace. At least, they would if anyone went there regularly.

One time I went up there when I was 14 and looking for places to get high, gleefully ignoring the warnings from older kids to stay away. I found three of those buildings with bricked up doorways, the occasional loose stone revealing black stairs descending deeper into the darkness. Some were just fragments of old houses that looked like they’d been real homes ones, others were these brutalist concrete bunkers that made you think of illegal government experiments. The whole place made you feel like you were enduring an awkward silence, but I ignored the trembling anxiety in my stomach and trekked deeper until I came across a crumbling grey wall haloed by the black roots of a fallen tree. It was pouring with rain so I couldn’t see much of it. But I approached, wondering if the tree belied a drop down to one of those trenches that offer cover, when I saw bright red letters graffitied over the wall, their colour borderline fluorescent amidst the gloom.

“Alice Lanlin was raped right here,” it read, with a crude arrow pointing a large hollow just below; a space that was just about big enough for a person to lie in. It felt… it felt genuine, I guess I’d say? It felt mocking, the letters appearing almost cruel in the grey dismal light. And even though I had no reason to, I believed the words. It was enough to break me. I left, ran even, ran all the way home gripped in a terror and instinctive belief that if I lingered there too long something terrible would wake and come for me.

In a way, I was right.

I spent so long stealing and being a little shit in school that I’d started to think of myself as a bit of a wolf amidst sheep, as the smartest person in every room. All I thought about was how easy it was going to be to milk James for cash.

The night I arrived, the sun was just setting and spring had already started dragging the sunset further back into the night so that it was a mild pleasant evening with the trees cast in a warm amber glow. I found James on the front lawn, quietly listening to a group of girls talk. He looked out of his depth so I sat down beside him and waited for a lull in the conversation to compliment James’ house. The comment brought out a flurry of similar cries from everyone and within minutes the conversation turned from the house to James himself, where everyone told funny (and occasionally awkward) anecdotes about the poor kid. But it got him involved at least, and after a few drinks he started hitting back with his own stories and jokes about the others. It felt like a small step in the right direction and I was happy with it.

And yet despite that, I didn’t feel like actually joining in with the fun. At the time I couldn’t figure out why but I felt a terrible knot in my stomach just being up in the mountains, so I hung around outside for most of the night, smoking and chatting while one-by-one people went off and joined the fun indoors. I couldn’t blame them. Everyone was there, easily over 150 kids with more than enough room to contain them. James’ house had a pool, cinema, tennis courts, trampoline, and even a damn quad bike for anyone stupid enough to ride one. They drank, got high, screamed, shouted, cried, threw things, smashed glasses, and I heard all of it sitting on my stoop with nothing but a quarter ounce and my thoughts.

I was left alone like this until James came stumbling out of the door behind me, laughter braying recklessly into the night. There were two girls with him and one was giggling while the other quietly flicked through the pages of a strange book.

“Hey, man, hey,” James hissed, drunkenly slurring his words through his bottom teeth. “Hey, hey, hey. We’re gonna go in the woods. Wanna come and do some black magic?” His eyes flashed wide on the last word so that I was left with the lasting image of the white irises like headlights in the dark.

The girl beside him added,

“Reckons he can show us something real, says the woods are really haunted!”

The other girl, who I knew as Elin, was still fixated on the book and muttering,

“This book is nuts. It looks like the real thing.”

“Alright,” I said, flicking a roach into the bushes. “But then I’m gonna shoot off, okay?”

I didn’t much like it up there, and I had a sneaking suspicion that if any cops came James’d drop me in it all too readily. He made a few plaintive efforts to keep me around, but he was too drunk to make much of an argument and I set off into the woods with the others, impatient to get it over with.

Even just a few metres into the trees and I didn’t like it. It seemed to my ears that the only sound as we walked was the crunching of my footsteps, but from up ahead came the fleeting drunken laughter of the others that occasionally distracted me. The moon was out in full, covering the floor with an undulating silvery light. And yet it was still uncomfortably dark and when James turned on a flashlight I finally cried out,

“James man how fucking far are we gonna go?”

He muttered something I didn’t hear but stopped anyway and let me catch up with him. When asked again he replied,

“There’s a spot by here that will do.”

For someone who was drunk he walked with surprising ease across the uneven mulch, carrying us away from the path in a perpendicular direction for a few hundred yards. “Remember,” he cried out as we emerged into a small opening, “you picked this one.”

He winked at me and a knot formed in my stomach. One-by-one we filed into the small space like a herd and as I took the details in I suddenly felt as if I’d been dropped into a surreal dream.

“Jesus Christ,” one girl cried. “That’s a fucked up thing to write.”

Beside me, I watched the girl with the book momentarily look up and mouth the words I so clearly recognised from my last trip into the mountains. She paused, reflected on them for a brief second, and then cried out, “Fucking hell!”

“Some dark places in these woods,” James said, sitting cross legged without a care in the world on a small hill near the hollow. “This is just one of them, but it’s an ideal spot nonetheless.” Quietly, we joined him on the floor. There was an awkward pause leaving enough time for me to look over my shoulder and suppress a shiver at the darkness between the trees. It seemed at once both still and endlessly changing, and the forest air felt home to an unseen threatening presence.

“Is this real?” Elin asked, holding the book open for us all to see.

“Oh no,” James replied. “That book is a total fraud.”

The girl paused, taken aback by his answer.

“You said it’d be the real deal!”

“It will be real.” he said. “But the book is just a prop. We can read from it if you like. It is here to give things an authentic feel.”

“For like, the ghosts?” the other girl asked. “To… to bring them out?”

“No,” he replied, eyeing us darkly. “It’s for you.”

“Why would we need a prop?”

One by one James looked at us and I felt a chill pass over me as if his glare was leeching my soul. All of a sudden, alarms long-since buried deep within my lizard brain flared. Get out they cried. Run now. Leave. Nothing else matters. Flee.

“How else was I going to lure you out here?” he replied, and just like that Elin disappeared from my eye-line, crumpled into the floor with a hideous crack. Her head had been seized by a strange arm reaching out of the darkness, its heavy inky palm so large it could have held her skull like an egg. The muscled foremarm was pallid, quivering, and so close to my face I could smell the rancid heat of its Earthy sweat. Ellin wasn’t even making any sound, she’d been killed instantly, snapped and broken like a twig in a single motion.

Slowly I craned my head over and saw nothing but a wall of arms that rolled like waves in the darkness. I could have sworn I was dreaming, right up until one of the hands reached out and grabbed the edge of my jacket. The illusion broke, I started screaming and kicking as it dragged me away, only freeing myself from the jacket at the last moment. I looked up to see it pulled back into the wall where it was torn to pieces, and following close came the longest arm that carried the swaying, broken, corpse of Elin.

Every hand groped for her, and within seconds she had disappeared from sight, pulled into impossible depths that defied all logic. I sat there paralysed, dimly aware of the sounds of footsteps as the other girl sprinted into the open woods, only to be shocked awake by her hysterical screams as she was snatched into the inky shadows. Finally, I pulled myself to my feet, switched on the light and marvelled at how it banished the shadows and the arms, dismissing them from reality like those strange illusions that flick between one image and another. I took the chance the light offered and fled, catching a fleeting glimpse of the girl’s head trapped in a shadow, her skull being crushed like an apple by a grossly over-sized paw.

The next thing I can remember clearly was clearing the trees to reach James’ house. The bassy cacophony had died down but I could still hear people screaming and crying. They were desperate howls of terror and pain, and I ran straight to my car, ignoring any thoughts about warning the others. But I was left in despair when I shoved my hand into my pocket and felt nothing there.

“You didn’t disappoint!” James cried, and I turned to see him standing by the open front door while jingling a set of car keys. “You would have let me have them all, wouldn’t you? But I’m afraid you of all people won’t be getting off the hook that easy.”

He disappeared into the house, and I was forced to follow.

The house was quiet. All the lights had been cut and the darkness was so heavy it turned my torch into a strangled pale misty beam. I slowly began making my way down the hall, and stopped briefly to look at the dining room, the grand oak table running nearly its whole length while chairs lay scattered around the room. It looked bled of colour in the torch’s light, all except for the startling bright red display of a bloodied shoe alone on the tabletop.

From further down the hallway scream rang out and I followed it to a nearby utility room. A guy around my age was hanging out of the washing machine, calloused soot-covered hands grabbed and pulled at his body, but he had two arms braced on either side of the hole and I could see that it was all that kept him alive. He was shaking from the exertion and looked at me with panicked eyes.

“Help,” he whimpered and as if on cue he was yanked through the opening and into shadow. I ran forward and shone the light in but there was nothing but a gory tumbler rotating to a slow stop, stalactites of blood and gristle dripping from top to bottom.

I was in a nightmare. As my torch moved from side to side desperate arms would reach out of the darkness only to recede once more. In a fugue state I carried on through the house, feeling detached and isolated from the bizarre things I saw: lone eyes hanging in unbroken lightbulbs, people screaming for help from behind glassy reflections, fingers probing desperately from within empty beer cans, their owners pleading to be let out.

There were other survivors, glassy-eyed teenagers huddled around what few sources of light still worked, their faces soaked in the blue light of malfunctioning televisions and computer screens. One girl I found beneath the stairs, her hands clutching an iPad to her head as those demonic hands stroked and caressed her cheeks and hair in an almost playful, sickening way.

“I can’t put it down. I can’t put it down. I can’t put it down.”

She was hyper-ventilating, and I went to help but she snatched the iPad away and kicked out at me.

“Mine!” she screamed. She pulled the iPad back close to her head and I watched as throne of arms enclosed around her even further until only her face was visible amidst the undulating dark.

There were stranger things still on the upper floors. I found rooms with barricades, strange tallies counted up on the wall, beds made of clothes and rubbish. I found a lithe desperate man—no one I recognised, and he was easily in his mid-twenties—but at the sight of me he lunged out of the darkness, laughing and crying in hysterical joy.

“You’ve found me!” He sobbed, just before his own torch faltered and something awful ripped him between the slats of the floorboards. “It’s been so long!” were his final words, wrenched painfully out of his lips before he was practically liquefied by the force of his death.

Once again I was left stunned before a bubbling pile of gore, but it wasn’t done. Yet another arm rose out of the filth, but this one was different. It looked real, raw; twitching muscle wrapped in newly birthed skin. Unlike the wretched hands that writhed in the confusing shadows this hand looked fresh, glistening, and meaty. For a few seconds it fumbled against the floorboards until it found purchase.

It started to pull more and more of itself out of the quivering flesh of its victim, and I realised the arm was being reknitted from a mishmash of whatever gristle and bone was near. By the time I saw a second hand emerge, it dawned on me that my flashlight did nothing to hurt the arm, and that it just kept on heaving and pulling until a bald screaming head started to emerge from the impossible space. It was like watching an adult man be born whole, and eventually inside me clicked and I ran away in terror before I could see the face.

“Yum yum,” it cried out after me, its voice like a talking beehive. “Yum yum!”

I was half-way to the next floor when I turned and saw the misshapen torso tear itself free with a pained grunt. It was little more than a gaunt set of ribs hanging over a distended malnourished belly, the strange arms so long now that their elbows knocked the broken light fixture and framed the wretched monster the way a spider’s legs frame its body. It saw me staring, it’s face nothing but a featureless stretch of broken hole-riddled skin. It looked like bisected bone and the thousands of strange openings whistled, blaring spit all over the floor as it spoke those words once more:

“Yum yum!”

It thundered towards me and I didn’t wait to see any more. I ran up the stairs and reached the upper floor just in time to see a hairy knuckled arm slap down on the bottom step.

I turned to flee only to run straight into a guy I recognised from the party. He was in shellshock, most of this hair had been torn out and his scalp was bleeding. His face was battered and bruised; one eye so swollen he couldn’t even see out of it. In the light of my torch his skin looked the colour of a yellow bruise, and the slick patina of sweat across his face made him look ill and feverish.

“It keeps coming,” he mumbled, before vomiting all over me. I might have retched or cried out, but I could just about make out movement in my periphery and I pushed him aside and ran. “We’re dark inside!” The guy cried out just in time for me to notice that the stringy bile that dripped down from my hair was thick with bloody fingernails and human hair. It was shocking enough to cause me to fumble, tripping up over a shadow hand that was there one second and gone the next.

“We’re all dark inside,” the guy sobbed before throwing up once more, and this time I noticed strange probing fingers gripping either side of mouth to hold it open as a torrent of teeth and other human effluent poured out of him onto the floor.

And then, just like Elin, he was crushed with an effortless blow from above. That thing from the floorboards had climbed the stairs, looming over the broken body of the spewing boy and looking down at the splintered remains of head and chest like a child eyeing up a toy. It’s gorilla like hands nudged the mess as the face continued to whine and whistle like a thousand blue-bottle flies trapped in a dumpster. It had no legs for the oddly human abdomen terminated in a thousand shredded strips that twitched like writhing cilia and I noticed them curling and writhing like the tentacles of a sea anemone.

Without any further hesitation it planted its face into the pulped remains of the boy and began heaving, slurping the liquefied gore into its head. I couldn’t bear to watch it feed and I ran without looking back until I stumbled onto a ladder. Seeing an opportunity, I climbed it, opened the trapdoor above, and then pulled the ladder up and sealed the opening as quickly as I could. I didn’t know if that thing had seen me, but I felt it was the best I could hope for.

When I finally took stock of my surroundings, I realised I was trapped in a spire that peaked out over the treetops offering clear sight of a bruised and colourful night sky.

“Do you like it?” he said, gesturing to the lurid stars. Beside him was a corpse dangling from the rafters, the face bloated and grotesque. It was a man and after a second or two I recognised the distorted face.

“That’s how you got the money,” I said. “That’s your father.”

“He did what I think many people would do in his situation,” James replied. “Stuck up here with these fucking… things scuttling around in the dark and all for what? So you can run around stealing cars and selling pirated DVDs? So some prick can kick a ball really far and get laid for it? So our teachers can spend their time celebrating the mediocre and the stupid? It’s just so… boring. And you,” he laughed. “I mean the others they’re at least at peace with their own bullshit but you honestly genuinely think you’re better than everyone else but you’re just… you’re just another moron who’s life consists of jerking off and getting high.”

“What the fuck is going on!?” I cried.

“This is what our sacrifice is for!” he screamed, startling me. “My family has been up here for 400 years reading dusty books and painting stupid sigils on intersecting ley lines and why? So you losers can post fucking TikTok videos!? I mean it was one thing when it was all about keeping the army of miners and loggers safe but now it’s just… it’s just momentum or inertia that keeps us up here. Some stupid tradition and for what? And one little slip up, a few dead kids, and no one will forget about it, about our failure as a family when it’s us who are putting ourselves on the line. I watched my father go mad over those missing kids and now…”

The energy drained from James, his long winding rant coming to a sudden halt. He looked at his father with grief and resignation.

“He couldn’t live with the guilt. But I don’t think he ever had anything to feel guilty over. He didn’t make this place evil, he just helped keep it in check. It’s always been waiting, ready to burst. It’s so… it’s so eager. You just put flesh in the right place and… boom it all just comes tumbling out. Well, you saw what happened. No words of power, no cursed runes, just two girls in the right place and… and my intent to feed them to the darkness.”

“James,” I said. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re on about, but if you’re saying there’s a way, some rituals or magic that we can do to reverse this, just tell me what to do.”

“There’s a library on the third floor,” he said. “You can read up on the rituals there. You’ll have the time.”

“What?” I cried. “What do you mean?”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you why you haven’t died yet?” he said, his face screwing up into a condescending smirk. “Are you for fucking real?” he burst out laughing. “Jesus Christ you really are something special. Oh man, I’m glad I picked you. Remember that when the survivor’s guilt kicks in.”

The trap door behind me flew open as if struck from below. I cried out and began to back away, my heart beating so hard it felt like it was going to stutter and fail and I would fall to my knees, gasping for air and life. One of those disgusting arms reached up through the opening and with little hesitation or messing around the monstrous meat-thing dragged itself up. James was laughing, his demeanour borderline hysterical.

“A lot of worlds intersect here,” he cried out as one of those hands grabbed my ankle and pulled me to the ground with a single gesture. I started screaming and found myself unable to tear my gaze away from the monster that pulled me closer to its face. But James was still there, taunting and laughing. “I’ve got a lot of places to pick from, a lot of worlds to see. Maybe one day we’ll speak again. The good news,” and as he said this he crouched over me so that I could not escape his glare, “is that I know exactly where to find you. Don’t forget to chlorinate the pool, by the way.

“Oh and try to keep the overlapping realities separate. This one isn’t even that bad. You just have to be patient but some of the others… I mean… well, you saw the message on that tree-stump. Isn’t even the half of it.”

After that he left with little ceremony, although I’m still not sure where or how he got out of the spire. He just abandoned me with that thing, that desperate heaving whining thing that pulled me close until it towered over me and I finally came to terms with the fact that I would die. With terrible slowness it lowered its enormous head down to within an inch of my own, and I saw the gill-like openings on its face quiver and vibrate as spit dripped down onto nose and cheeks.

It inched forward once more and pressed the broken skin against my entire face and I felt those strange holes pucker and twitch. Suddenly it took me up into its arms and hugged me, its oversized arms trapping me like steel bars against the pink sweaty chest. It held me there, quivering, giggling, crying and muttering to itself for hours.

The whole God damn night… I nearly went insane, kicking and crying to be let go but it held me like some twisted mother until finally morning came and it just… disappeared into nothingness like the shadows once had.

Since then I’ve found myself surprisingly alone. The town pretends that this place isn’t real and that extends to whatever poor soul is left up here. When I tried walking outta here the cops picked me up and brought me right on back. Sometimes an older man will answer my calls when I try to ring my family. He doesn’t answer my questions. He just tells me to do my job. I think I was set up from the start. I think James told them about his plan to stick the job on me long before he buggered off, although I don’t think anyone knew it was his plan to send half the town’s teenagers to a slaughterhouse. Then again I can’t be sure, no one will speak to me anymore.

First night after the party and those hands came back, but like James implied they just left me alone. Still, it wasn’t exactly fun so I did what he suggested and hit the library. It took weeks to find some of the stuff he was on about but sure enough, a couple of words and a few symbols in the right place and they went away. Of course, every day after that was a lesson in some new perverse horror. It’s been a year or two since then and I don’t I’ve touched the surface on what the fuck is going on here.

This isn’t the life-calling I had in mind. At least the father had detailed notes, that helped speed things up. They were these quick guides on things to write or say and they help keep it quiet, or quiet-ish at least. I think what I hate the most is that over time I’ve started to sympathise with James, despicable monster that he is. He may have put me here but it’s that town that won’t let me leave.

They’re the ones who made this arrangement, but for some reason I’m the one who has to pay.