To Quiet the Little Voice - 13. The Morning After

The Morning After

Bobby was slow to open his eyes. He felt sluggish and foggy. If he didn’t know better he would accuse Paul of having spiked the punch.

Maybe he did. It might, just maybe, explain the fiasco that went on between 11 and midnight. Bobby’s groan as he tried to sit up woke Steve.

“Holy mother of stone statues Bobby – what the hell did you put in the punch last night? I don’t remember tasting anything in it, but my head feels like an elephant is sitting on it!”

“Don’t look at me! You think Sherriff Dad would have let me spike the punch? He was sipping on it all night too. I am sure he would have noticed if someone replaced it with high test.”

Both boys sat on the edges of the twin beds in Bobby’s room with their elbows on their knees and their heads in their hands. Suddenly Bobby’s head snapped up. He stared hard at his friend.

“What can you remember about the party Steve?”

Steve smiled wanly at his friend. It seemed to help his mood when he saw his best bud was in the same sort of hung over condition he was.

“It was an epic party man! Your dad was right – it was the best place to have a Halloween party. The tuba kept scaring the shit outta the girls every time it started playing!”

“Yeah, but that was early in the night. What do you remember about later? For the life of me I cannot remember coming in here and crashing, or saying goodbye to any of our friends.”

“Umm, the late night details are a bit fuzzy for me too. Must be whatever the punch got spiked with.”

The best part of living in the graveyard was his room. It was a two hundred year old house, one they used to call “Four Square”. The stairwells went upward thru the center of the house, and the first and second floors were each divided into 4 rooms. The ground floor had a kitchen, parlor, dining room, and a study, while the second had what at one time were four bedrooms. Now one of those had been made into a bathroom. Bobby thought the room was pretty neat since it was so large it could hold a huge claw foot tub his mother loved to soak in, and a walk in shower as well, in addition to the rest of the usual fixtures you would find a in more modern home. He got the entire third floor to himself. One huge floor, it had always been used for storage before Bobby and his family moved in. There were four gables to the roof that effectively divvied up the one huge room into four sections. Bobby had a desk with his computer in one section, twin beds in a second, his dressers and what essentially added up to a huge walk in closet in the third, and a TV and sofa in the fourth.

Both boys jumped when they heard a creaking step on the stairs to the attic sanctuary. They grinned at each other when “Sherriff Dad” stuck his head up over the railing.

“Ok you two. I don’t know who spiked the punch, or even what they used. I couldn’t taste it at all. Let’s go boys, I have let you sleep about as long as I could. Your mom is staying in bed today I think. She is as hung over as the rest of us. The odd thing is she swears all she drank all night was bottled water. Get your buns up and dressed and go start the cleanup. I’ll call you when breakfast is ready.”

Steve groaned again as Bobby glared at his father. He didn’t think anything called breakfast was going to stay put. Maybe supper.

The boys slowly made their way down the stairwells and out the back door. The sight that greeted them was daunting. What looked like the cloak of one of the pirates was draped over the old fashioned gas lamp which marked the corner of the driveway. The huge latex spider Bobby and his dad had settled into a string spider web between the house and the telephone wires had fallen and sat in a heap on the driveway. Jack-o-lanterns had provided a majority of the lights for the party, and about half had been tipped off of the headstones. There were bits of pumpkin everywhere. The place was one huge mess!

“Why don’t you go get the caution tape down off the tuba and from around the grave next to it, then start collecting the pumpkins that are still in one piece? I’ll start with the picnic tables and then get the rakes to get all this pie mix off the ground. After breakfast we can start on the speakers and lights.”

“Ummm, Bobby? I don’t remember caution tape being up last night. We had talked about it, but your dad was afraid someone would run into it in the dark and get tied up and hurt.”

Bobby looked at him with a very blank expression on his face. His friend was right, they had decided against it. He was sure it wasn’t there at least as late as 10:30, about the time the weird old lady had shown up.

Wait – weird old lady? Bobby tried hard to remember the only witch to show up at the party. No matter how hard he thought about it he could not seem to remember anything after greeting the woman. He remembered her screeching at him in character, but that’s about all.

He grabbed Steve by the front of his flannel shirt and dragged his reluctant friend toward the caution tape. There was no way he was going to check it out alone! As they got closer they could see the tape surrounded one of the graves which had a headstone with a nice flat top. Its jack-o-lantern was still intact, the cat and full moon carved into it dark in the late morning sun. As they got closer the pumpkin began to rock and wiggle. The boys looked at each other, frightened to go closer, but too curious to back off either.

Steve worked up the nerve first and reached out, pulling the stemmed lid off of the intricately carved fruit. Both boys screamed like girls as a tiny black cat, well kitten really, popped his head out like some odd black giraffe. She bolted out of the gourd and flung herself onto Bobby’s chest, digging her claws into his heavy sweatshirt and clinging for dear life.

“Shhhh, Shhhh, its ok.” Bobby crooned to the frightened little ball of fur. “What sort of ass puts a kitten into a pumpkin?”

“Damned if I know bro- but this keeps getting weirder every minute. Are you sure we aren’t still sleeping off the booze? I found this wand behind the tuba, and I don’t remember any wizards or anything else that would have had a wand. Look at those bones behind the tape – they look almost real – and like something has been chewing on them.”

“They are probably just the ones those skeletons were carrying last night to make the rattling noise. I wonder what was chewing on them though.”

Steve laughed nervously before replying.

“ The Zombies? I could swear I remember one biting a pretty pirate.”