Moment in a Party Calamity

Moment in a Party Calamity

The scene around me stopped.

The people around me froze in jovial conversation.

In that fraction of time, the dangers around me bloomed in colour. Blazing red, in an aura of risk.

I’m standing at the bar, a couple drinks and other poisons in, when the stream of lager pouring from the tap stopped mid flow. In a supernatural spectacle, colour drained from the scene. It didn’t disappear, it dulled like old paint on a wooden fence. One colour remained, it burned bright at the scuffed shoes of the balding bartender, red. A bright red that bled light behind the bar, giving it a haunting and murderous appearance. The light by the bartender’s feet was being cast by a red puddle.

I was suddenly struck by the thought, a random and out of the blue flash, that came in a reel of film playing through my mind.

The abnormal scene opened with the bartender walking through the blood red puddle. Small droplets kicked off the heels his worn shoes as he walked to serve another inebriated mess on the opposite side of his bar. As his light foot hit the floor, heel first on the heavy duty vinyl, his step faltered as his foot slipped forward. His body collapsed, falling like a great oak. In a vicious crescendo, the hairless head struck the wooden bar top. A horrid, meaty thud filled the air around. 

Though I’ve seen an outcome, played in what could only be perceived as real time, time still stood in a dull snapshot. Despite being caught in the grip of the frozen fragment of time, I was not restrained in anyway. I pushed myself up from the bar top I had been using as a crutch, pushing myself onto unsteady footing. My head spun but I didn’t have to be fully coherent to understand what was going on around me. I might not know everything but I knew that I was stuck in time and that I could see nothing but danger around me. I recalled the party I had been attending before this break in time locked me in place. My friend from work had hit the big five-zero and we went for drinks at the local watering hole after our back shift at the office. He was a decent person, morally; family man, a dabbler in gentle hedonism, doting husband, hard worker. And while he was a well rounded personality, flawed and redeeming, he wasn’t exactly a ‘friend’ friend to me. But he treated me well, a dependable colleague who would help you however he could, least I could do was buy him a couple pints of the dark brown heavy he liked.

I was drawn away from my reminiscence by a familiar red glow in my peripherals. I turned in my picture world, looking at a different scene than before, and noticed a man had stormed into this bar from the rain flooded streets outside. Before me, a tension filled scenario played out. A door froze in mid swing, a man clad in a leather coat, rain droplets running off the rough black attire, a bright glow of red hidden inside his leather jacket. The grainy filter faded in again, another troubling scenario unfurled before my eyes.

A rough looking figure pushed through the pub doors with purpose. Rain left the jacket soaked, giving off a fresh smell of leather and old man tobacco. Nothing but a quick left to right glance, before he spotted the group he’d been looking for. A group of two women and three men stood laughing and joking by the bar, oblivious to their impending doom.

With no more than short walk, the leather clad stranger crossed the floor of the pub. His hand reached into his jacket, pulling out a heavy looking handgun and levelled it at the head of one of the men. Only a few seconds passed as the gun began its merciless slaughter.

Click. BOOM!

One. 

Click. BOOM!

Two. 

Click. BOOM!

Three.

The bullets ripped holes in the three men’s heads. There wasn’t time for them to react. The hollow booms of the gunshot echoed in the silence of the vision. Blood popped out the wounds left from the evil metal stone, layering the pretty women at the bar with sticky crimson liquid. Between the first shot and last, the women only had time to blink as the viscous blood struck their faces.

Another horrid scene, yet these terrible shows of brutality were his only reprieve from being lock in time.

With that, I return to the snapshot of time. I look at the man in the leather jacket, the man I had watched drop three innocent looking men with only three clicks of a trigger. I look at his face; smooth skin, clean shaven, eyes locked with purpose. If time had run it’s course, would I have noticed the cold steel hidden in his jacket. I doubt it, I wouldn’t have known he was there until I heard the boom of the first shot and I wouldn’t have seen him til after the third. I return to my recollection of our night before this. I drove to work for my shift, as had my old college. We decided to get a taxi together from the office to the pub, fully intending to stumble home in the wee small hours of the morning. Our clothes weren’t what you’d call fancy but we didn’t look like total riots so it was a win. We entered the pub, immediately hit with the stench of stale piss and spilt spirits. It was eleven at night when we crossed the threshold of the beer house, that was when our night of terror began.

Wait, what happened to my friend?

I saw our table in the corner of the pub, my not so friendly friend sat with a look of vacancy glazing over his face. Our other friends must be huddled together in a single stall of the bathroom. I scan the pub in my frozen nightmare, scouring my surroundings for the glow of red danger around. I couldn’t see a damn thing, nothing. I turn back to my friend and take a second. I see a very dulled light burning through his skin, a small dot stuck in his throat. My next sight would include my coworker. Even though we weren’t especially close, the familiarity was a weight my heart could hardly bare.

Grainy film, unsettled feeling and the knowledge I was about to watch a man I know die in front my eyes.

My friend is sitting in a dark corner booth, his hand gripping his pint glass lightly. His eyes shift, side to side, wild with mischief. He is a generic man, no one has interest in watching his day to day, so there is no one to watch him slip the small baggie out from his trouser pocket. The little baggie burned bright red from the little pills within. Popping the baggie open, tilting a single pill into his palm and swallowing it dry. Time began to skip and glitch, my friend switched back and forth between his healthy, well put together and usual self to another haunting version of himself. His body convulsing, tensing and twitching, eyes rolling into his skull, blood foaming at the edges of his mouth. The evil little pill had reacted in my friend, burning and blistering his stomach. This was the most heavy vision I had had and, now that I had experienced the worst scenario I could imagine, I gave a guilty sigh of relief. The graininess began to lift, the feeling of overwhelming fear started to subside.

My friend, I can see him now as how he is between the time after taking the pill and the time before he started bleed from the inside out. He sits, ignorant of his impending death, waiting for that little magic rock to make life a little more exciting.

We arrived without much notice from the varying severity of drunk patrons and ordered the first round in, they lasted not two minutes. Our next round, two drinks each plus a shot glass of something strong and translucent. More of our work friends arrive, we evolve from having a mate date to having a party in the corner of a scabby pub.

The party rolls into the early hours of the morning after. We take turns running to the bathroom in pairs, hiding in the tight stalls and taking long, thin rails of white snow from the cistern of the toilet. The burn of the chemical, quickly replaced with the numbness that follows. We insist on singing karaoke, even though the fine establishment we have to decided to hassle this night doesn’t have karaoke. Our night had been great, until now. Until I was bound in time, cursed with watching the innocent souls around me perish in brutal and bloody ways.

The grainy filter return, thought this time it was accompanied by the a strange sound. The sound was rhythmic yet not musical or purposeful. This vision felt different. I begin to look around the bar and I am shocked.

The horrid visions I have watched before all the kind folk in this pub, they play now in constant motion and in infinite repetition.

I watch the old bartender slip and heard the sicking thud, over and over again.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

I hear the boom from the gun; once, twice, three times, the bodies drop and the scene reset.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

My friend. I see him sprawled across our table, blood dribbling out from his mouth. His time shifts, future and past colliding. He is fine, then he isn’t. It is a wildly upsetting experience; confusion, fear, anger. A rollercoaster of emotional chaos.

Still I hear that rhythmic tap.

My mind shows the only sound I know that it may be. An old projector, it’s spool of tape has finished. The loose end of the spool spins gently; tap, tap, tap as it whirls round and round. The sound isn’t coming from inside the pub, it’s coming from outside.

The fearful scenes around the pub play on their constant loop, I navigate these evil echos of demise and make my way outside.

The sound of the spinning projector becomes clear as I push through the doors and into the street, it’s rhythmic tapping coming in a clear as a whistle. Why am I out here? What am I to do?

I get a feeling, a gentle tug from destiny telling me to turn around. I whirl on the spot and I’m greeted with the most sickening and terrifying sight. A helicopter came into view, I’m on street level and I am looking at a helicopter in mid flight not fifteen feet in front of me with its nose aiming straight at the roof of the pub. The helicopter, I can gather, is out of control. It isn’t moving, it too is frozen, but the pilot within the cockpit is stuck desperately pulling his stick back and trying to raise the bird’s front. But it won’t work.

I see now. 

This was a night of terror, one that no one escaped alive from.

The bartender, Old Mick as he was known, slipped and died from brain trauma. He had worked thirty years behind a bar and now, he’d die behind a bar.

The three men who were shot, turns out they weren’t so innocent. The men were big shot businessmen who had mistreated a vulnerable drunk woman a week or so prior who’s brother had now shown up at the bar to even the score.

My friend, Nigel. A good man, a loving family man, who only sought to brighten the gloom of ageing with a sparkle of nostalgia.

Though it wasn’t only those listed who paid the price of life. I watched as the helicopter began to fall, slowly. I was free from times grasp but my fate was sealed. I might have been watching from the outside, but my body was trapped within.

This was a night of terrible tragedy.

There is no explanation. There is no satisfaction.

Accidents happened, choices were chosen and mistakes were made.

Death is omnipresent and invisible and we are never safe, that is all we have learned.