At the top of the stairs a leggy Korean Dominatrix is waiting for them. Phen, the hostess. She scours, arms crossed in front of a strappy leather corset. A horse whip dangles from her wrist.
She cordially thanks them for coming, leads them into the apartment. Carved pumpkins glow orange beside the doorstep. Fake cotton cobwebs on the doorframe, wispy and clinging to wigs and hair.
Phen does the introductions. “Get yourself a drink,” she says. “We have punch.”
A large plastic skull is propped back, jaw gaping, filled to the brim with red. A pink-painted ladle leans against the molars - the lolling dead tongue. The remainder of the table is piled high with gothic mise en scène - dripping candles, stained silver candelabras, an assortment of nylon autumn leaves, red and orange and gold. An artistically carved jack-o-lantern sneers opposite the skull.
It’s still early, the music is low key, there’s room to maneuver around the apartment.
There’s Harland, Williamsburg arty type, done up like a nineteenth century gentleman explorer, leather boots and vest, monocle and pipe, his moustache waxed. Jill and Kepp, siblings, Mario and Luigi. Anastasia the pirate wench, Daria the slutty angel. Zeb the film noir drunk.
The back patio is open, cold air rising up the rickety rust fire escape, two zombies smoking cigarettes.
The sink is overflowing with ice and longnecks, a few strands of fake cobwebs dipped in the wet corners, melting into hairy white globs.
Adam arrives, full on glam rocker with working guitar, heeled leather boots, spandex pants, red webbing up his thigh. His eyeliner is heavy, lips fleshy red, questionably androgynous.
The superheroes and monster and painted whores pack tight, an exotic parade of heels and furry slippers clicking on the hardwood.
Phen’s boyfriend is waddling around in tight leather pants and a dog collar. Phen grabs his leash, playfully smacking him with the horsewhip.
“This is Ben,” she says. “My bloodslave.”
“Woah, bloodslave?” exclaims Lilly. “What the hell is that?”
“We’re BDSM vampires,” Ben replies. “She can suck my blood whenever she wants.”
It’s then they notice two red lipstick dots on his neck, artfully painted into dripping blood. Phen pulls back her lips, revealing the plastic fangs. “I shtook dem out earliersh. Shtoo hard do dalk. Moud fillsh up vid shpid.”
“And I thought regular sex slaves were kinky enough,” smirks Jill. “Now you gotta go and get all Dracula on his ass.”
Snap of a hefty cane, gaudy fedora removed, flowery bow. “I must say I’m impressed with what you’ve done here,” Byron says to Phen, gesturing. She leans closer, listening, fiddling with her riding crop.
“I mean, we have some decent set design in the studios,” he continues. “But most of it’s kitschy. Holiday special crap from 80’s access television. This is top notch. Peter Jackson stuff.”
“Thanks,” Phen returns, bored. She sips her flute of faux-blood. “I got tired of the fake Halloween. All that plastic junk the tourists buy. It’s just recycled tropes year after year, regurgitating itself.”
“Disneyfied,” Byron says, name-branding her thought.
“I’m interested in a deeper horror. Fear that goes beyond fun.” Byron raises and eyebrow, sipping his glass. “Think there’s any merit in that?” she asks.
“What, like Lovecraftian, nihilistic shit?”
Phen doesn’t really nod, just that bored smirk on black lips. Pouty, sadistic.
“Sure,” he continues. “But it doesn’t really sell. Everything Hollywood did ended up wooden sets, too much rain, cheesy bogeymen in rubber suits.”
“Maybe,” Phen accepts, tipping her flute. “But maybe it just requires a little imagination.”
Byron arcs his eyebrow again, fake tan, patronizing. “Good punch by the way.” Then he saunters off in his purple striped suit - Deniro’s Al Capone.
Across the room, Kepp leans against the large LCD television. “What are you supposed to be?” he asks a guy in a shredded suit, blocky pocket protector and bathroom towel cape. “Some sort of super hero?”
“Cubicle Man. He was an offshoot of the Marvel cannon in the early 90s. Deadpool had a collaboration with him...”
A Trappist monk, complete with donut-hole bowl cut, hefts a large stein of Belgium ale, toasting a David Koresh/Jim Jones hybrid cult leader. Appropriately, the two are chattering about the historical source of Halloween.
“It’s Samhein,” interjects a green jacket Leprechaun, cheesy cloverleaf stamps on her cheeks, “A celebration by the Celtic druids to close out the harvest!”
“I appreciate the history lesson,” returns the cult leader. “Can I interest you in some Kool-Aid?”
Angelique the slutty angel sidles up next to the Karr, the werewolf. “How do you know Phen?”
He’s taken off his mask and holds it under his hairy armpit, but his heavy black eyeliner makes him look like a raccoon.
“Actually I know Ben. He invited me. We work together.”
“Oh?” she nods. “The sub vampire?”
“Yea. We’re chemists. How is that punch by the way?”
The angel giggles. “Not bad! Very sweet. I can’t tell if its vodka or tequila.”
“You’re an expert in liquors?”
“I think I usually am! Or I should be considering how often my clients take me out for martinis. This is my fourth Halloween party so far...”
Flashbulbs fire like a paparazzi swarm.
Pirates of the Caribbean, aliens from the planet Tramalfadore and red horned demons embrace, gleam sharp teeth for the shutter. The girls simulate sexual acts with a number of cheap plastic props - swords and axes, umbrellas, pimp canes. The males wave hand signals that were once intellectual property of exclusive west coast intercity gangs. Phen has Ben crouch, planting her boot on his back, her whip posed high. Decibels and inebriation rise.
The energy of the party reaches a peak. The conversation overwhelms the soundtrack, hardly even the baseline riding through, just a throbbing pulse in the sternum. Semicircles and tripods are sprouted, arms half cocked holding drinks, lazy flirty stances, shoulders leaning in. The absurd masks have been set aside, better for drinking and seductive glances. Already there’s a few exploratory gropes, fake drunken stumbles and recoveries, offers for refills of punch, exchanges of contact information, silly digital snapshots. All simultaneously burbling about the cramped room, branching between the small atomic units of conversation, long recursive molecular chains of reaction, overwhelming the natural urge or segregate, isolate, shyly box away.
And yet there’s another current riding through the party, something genuinely weird. It starts as just a feeling, an aura that something is not quite right. Then - “Wow, that lamp is melting.” The strange current coasts along the unsuspecting minds and many of them shrug it off to the strange surrounds, the eerily realistic decoration, the rush of new faces.
So when one of the videogame characters rushes for the bathroom, white power glove covering his mouth, they’re a little relieved. Vomiting noises ensue.
“See, I’m not the only one wheezy,” Harland says. “Maybe it’s something in this oddly delicious punch.”
“It really packs a punch!” jokes a petite football player, shoulder pads and booty pants, snorting at her own cleverness.
Ben pulls back his shiny latex glove, checks his wristwatch, nods to Phen.
“I think Luigi ran out of lives,” whispers the pirate wench to Phen, the claws of her stuffed parakeet tottering dangerously close to cleavage. Under her breath, “koopa troopa!”
Phen looks at her bloodslave, unclips his leash. He strides through the room, shoulders sideways, careful not to disrupt the delicate balance of conversation, the cradled drinks, red fluid running low, lips stained.
He steps down the side hall where the bathroom lies, lit only by the orange glow of a devilishly carved pumpkin. He opens the bathroom door, unlit, cavernous, stuffy. He steps inside and closes the door.
And then he screams as loud and long as his lungs allow.
Confused silence as the stereo is muted, conversations flickering out, breaking from the rolling roar, a few drunks farthest from the bathroom chuckling. Then, concerned there’s some room-wide joke they’ve missed, silence themselves as well, staring around wide-eyed. Phen folds her arms. Out through the fire escape, distant cabbie horn, the wind.
Another scream, as loud and horrible as the first, one of those agony-laced shrieks of pure terror. Blood curdling. Loud enough to rip vocal chords, buckle knees, simmer spinal chords to jelly.
A bang and Ben tumbles out of the bathroom, crawls into the crowd.
“God...” he moans, rolling over. His hands flitter like tiny claws along the sides of his latex, jiggling like a victim of epilepsy, scraping his cheeks and hair. His mouth gapes, saliva dangling like stalactites, eyes bloodshot. “So horrible...”
“What is it?” they press down on him, crouching, attempting to steady his feverish mania. “What did you see?”
He breathes deep, the muscular shell under his skin tightening, a prelude to rigor mortis. The bones in his jaw stand out pulsing, nostrils flaring, pupils wide and black, pried open by hateful rusted speculums.
He sits up, begins to speak in fevered recitation, his voice scrolling forth, quick: “It was a...formless mass, a black amoeba pulsating with an life...coated with growths, sharp spines and hairs. Gelatinous eyes oozing along the creases...a horrible corpuscular glob...gazing out with a hateful red glare. Then...it opened its maw...a deep fissure into its entire fleshy core...splitting in two...dripping into and over itself...black pulsing gore. It belched...smell sickly sweet...rank like incense and sex and rot.
“It was...devouring him. Kepp. I saw it. A slow gulping. Unceasing and mindless. Like a deep-sea creature from the nameless dark of the abyss...driven only by consumption and digestion. It’s mass hefting itself first over his feet and legs, higher still, each gulp pulsating along its entire black bristling length. All while staring on with those horrible dim red eyes...like the glow of dying stars.
“A shoggoth...”
As the strange words leave his lips Ben begins to convulse again, foamy spittle filling his jaws, teeth clasped in epileptic frenzy.
“What the hell is going on?” barks Karr. “Is this some kind of sick joke?
The werewolf charges towards the bathroom, vaulting Ben with his huge hairy slippers. Another scream rings out, clear in the cold, followed by a hard thump, the noise of a flushing toilet, gurgling water.
All eyes fixed at the darkened hallway, the single glowing jack-o-lantern leering out from the closet.
And then, at the floor, the werewolf. Or what’s left of him. He still holds his mask in his hand, the snout flattened into a crude mass of wet black fur. Half his suit has been ripped off, dragged behind in a wet trail of furry red gore, blubbery snakes that can only be entrails. And behind, a thick jelly, molasses black as the lightless night, oozing unceasingly into the room.
“Help me...” Words he manages to cough, the last of the air in his deflated lungs. Then a new wave of black washes over him.
Screaming erupts like a banshee storm. All assortment of furniture, wall hangings, potted plants, cameras, purses, jackets, bottles and cups are abandoned. Beer foams on the floor, yellow fizz on the blonde hardwood. The sultry angel falls, tangled up with her celestial foil - a pitchfork-toting succubus. They pull each other’s hair, struggling to rise as a wash of capes, coats and costumes swirl past. The black sludge inches closer. Further screaming explodes as the stampede is unable to open the door to exit the apartment, the hinges pressed tight under the surge.
A few souls step back into the living room, catch sight of the black horror and it’s digested victims, yelping out the back porch, down the rickety fire escape.
One of the stronger guests, a big shirtless man painted Incredible Hulk green, shoulders his way through the banshee wail, roughly elbowing them to the ground, jammed into the narrow shotgun hallway.
“Move back, damn you!” he screams. “For the love of god, please, move back!” Forceful but afraid, voice cracking.
He snaps the deadbolt, cracks the door and it’s immediately wrenched open, pounding the wall, flooding the hall with white sterile light. The crowd surges out, nearly falling down the four flights of stairs in a mad rush of limbs, cheap cloth and plastic. They burst into the street in a wild torrent, propelled on screams of mad tortured glee.
Back in the apartment, Phen switches on the light. “Perfect,” she says, slowly begins to clap. “But lets get that stuff cleaned up before it stains the floor.”
Karr the werewolf is stripping off his ruined wolf suit in the middle of the room, shoving it into a large garbage bag along with raw sausage and marinara. Ben removes the bloodshot contacts and spits out chunky bits of alka seltzer, swishing his mouth with a swig of water. “Nice job, all.”
Phen gives a hand to the slutty angel, helping her remove the crumpled wings, offering a pair of baggy sweatpants.
“It’s cold out,” the dom says. “And you got a run in your tights. Good fight though, devil girl fought like hell.”
“When’s the video going up?” asks Kepp, emerging from the bathroom, lugging two buckets of black muck. “I missed most of it. First victim sucks.”
“Gotta edit first,” says Phen, grabbing a bucket, careful not to slosh it. The stuff stinks. “There’s what, twenty cameras? We’ll add some narrative to it, give some character to all the screaming maniacs in the last ten minutes.”
“Gonna show it to Byron?” Ben asks, carefully ladling the red blood punch into a glass mason jar.
“He’s a know-it-all prick,” Phen spits, draining the remainder of the skull in the sink, rinsing the cranium. “But maybe I’ll send him the link. Anonymously.”
“You know you should wear gloves when you handle that stuff,” Karr says. Now changed into jeans and a t-shirt, he still has the lope and upper body form that screams lycanthrope.
“Says you, after personally handing it out to all our guests.”
“Hey Phen, I don’t want you having nightmares.”
“Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” she says, grabbing Ben around the waist, running a finger along the red flecked skull. She then presses it into her blood slave’s mouth, sucking together. “There’s nothing better than a good scare.”
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