RAVE SUPERNATURAL HORROR

“PARTHENON RAVE” BY T.M. KNIGHT 

At midnight was when he’d felt it, in the height of the rave. Hazy lights, smoke in the rain, green strobes through the mist. So vividly he tasted his drink, a clear liquid tinged in green like sweet and tangy nectar. The crowd was dense, bodies against bodies, he could hardly tell who he was partying with. It was a sharp taste in his mouth like metal, a searing pain in his neck. 

He looked down at his cup again. It was completely red. Blood. He shouted and dropped his cup. It fell in slow motion. Before it landed, he looked up, suspended in time. The crowd were all looking at him. Everyone. They’d stopped just to stare at him. Blood ran down the corner of his mouth. They all started moving closer towards him, smiling with their moon white teeth. Then they were closing in, grabbing him, suffocating him, biting him—

Connor gasped awake. His hand immediately went to the side of his neck. That’s where he felt the dreamlike sensation the strongest. It lingered there even when he’d awakened. He’d been dreaming in the bus ride home. An incredibly vivid dream. It almost felt like a memory. 

“Looked like you were having quite a dream there,” a stranger who was sitting next to him said in the late night bus. Connor looked at the guy bleary eyed— he’d hardly gotten any sleep for 24 hours. 

“Huh? Yeah, I guess,” he said to the weird dude. He was one weird dude. The guy wore a pair of neon green pants and a matching shade for a t-shirt, though aside from the searing color, the pieces were both plain and featureless. He had pure black hair and eyes, super pale skin, hollow cheeks, oddly white teeth. Connor was white too, but this guy made him look tan in comparison, a polar comparison given that Connor had blonde hair.

“It started like that for me too. The dreams,” the black-haired guy said. “I couldn’t get rid of them. Night after night I would dream about it. Until I went.” 

“What are you talking about man?” Connor asked him. Then he noticed two girls at the front of the bus. They were glancing over at them and laughing softly between themselves, covering their smiles, only visible when a streetlight would pass by the window in the dark of the night.

“The rave of course. It gets under your skin, it even gets in your dreams. Until you have to go. Can’t do anything about it, once it calls you.” The guy was explaining all this conversationally, but to Connor it made him question if he was even still awake. This couldn’t be normal. "Name's Jonathan."

“...Connor," he returned Jonathan's introduction with a slight frown. "How did you know I was dreaming about a rave?” Connor looked at the girls again; the moon came out as he did. They’d turned their backs to them now which showed their pure white hair, nearly translucent.

“Don’t worry we’ve all been there, good old Connor. Life’s just surreal sometimes, isn’t it?” Jonathan stood up. He was really tall, almost as tall as Connor. And he had that look about him even with his green clothes. Made Connor think he was a model like he was. The girls were trying to get Jonathan’s attention now. Jonathan looked over at them, held out his arm, then nodded. They knew each other?

“Listen, you ever heard of the parthenon?” Jonathan asked him. 

“What, the parthenon here? In Nashville?” The bus was getting to the end of the line now, but Connor wanted to know what this was about. 

“It’ll change your whole life.” Jonathan trained his void eyes on him again. Connor's ear started ringing, and the lights of the bus suddenly were brighter to him. With a flutter to his vision, he focused on Jonathan again, almost entranced. 

“Really," Jonathan continued. "I went there once and I was never the same again. Literally.” Jonathan’s face transformed into a smile, like that had been some private joke. The girls came over to Jonathan as the bus braked to a stop. When the girls passed closer, Connor saw their long nails were sharpened to a point and painted green, the same shade of green Jonathan was wearing. One of the girls' skin was so thin he could see the blue veins that branched out down her forearm. 

“Hope to see you there man. Can’t walk around this world looking all depressed and tortured by nightmares on the night bus now, can you?” Jonathan flashed him his stark white smile before he stepped off the bus, closely followed by the girls.  The trio disappeared into the darkness of the public park.

Connor was seriously confused as he headed back to his shitty apartment in the dead of the night, almost disturbed. It was way past midnight when he checked the time. They were clearly party people, but by far also the strangest group of people he’d ever met; he just couldn’t place why. Was Jonathan really talking about a rave? In the actual parthenon? That place was just a museum, there’s no way something like that could happen there.

But when Connor got to his room and booted up his PC, a window flashed up out of nowhere.

Seriously, no program had even been running to receive that. His email was closed too. Maybe this was some kind of fashion party. Connor was a model for a living, so on rare occasions he had gotten some really outlandish invitations before, sometimes even freakish, but this surpassed anything he’d encountered. If it was a fashion thing, it wouldn’t be too strange to think that whatever company or agency was involved had rented out the parthenon for a private event. And those people were all good-looking, almost unnaturally so, as he remembered from the girls’ pure white hair and porcelain skin. 

But he didn’t know… something about what Jonathan was saying, how those girls looked like they knew a secret he didn’t—that most people didn’t for that matter— was it all the parthenon rave? Connor was on a pretty strict contract at the moment, no drinking or anything. But surely he could still check out the rave anyway without all that stuff, no? 

“It’ll change your whole life,” Jonathan’s words echoed through his head like fine sand. 

Without further thought, he clicked the green tick to accept the invite. A few seconds after he did, a blue spark came from the back of the old PC and the boxy monitor, along with all the electricity in his shoebox apartment, went dead. He was too tired to care though. New York fashion week had destroyed him. God said light’s out. 

Connor crashed facedown on the bed, which was too short for his tall frame, fully facedown with his legs hanging off the end and immediately fell asleep.