Mirror Ball Madness

***Content Warnings provided at the end, please read those first if you have any concerns and won’t mind possible spoilers***

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. But I wasn’t the only one. There were about a dozen of us standing shoulder to shoulder in the club’s restroom fighting for a glimpse of who we had become.

An hour earlier….

Silas pointed to the mirror ball. “Look at that thing! It’s a thousand tiny broken mirrors. That’s got to be like seven thousand years of bad luck. I told you I don’t like this place.”

“Huh?” Tammy was too busy fussing with the straps of her new dress to take in what he was saying. She finally got the dress to lay correctly on her shoulders then looked up to where her best friend was pointing.

“It’s atmosphere, Silas. You’ve got to live a little. Here, take one of these.” She handed him a yellow pill.

“Is that ‘mother’s little helper’?”

“Yeah, it’s all I could get on short notice. Now, are you going to take it or stand there with your dick in your hand?”

Silas swallowed the pill, washing it down with the last sip of his club soda. He was used to Tammy taking charge. She organized their escape to New York City from the small Iowa town where they grew up. When the other kids at school would bully him, she’d always stick up for him, clean his wounds and then she’d say, “We’ll get outta here one day, puddin’. These folks are just ignorant. Your light shines too bright for them. It hurts their eyes. You know what they say, the bigger the city, the brighter the bulbs.”

He didn’t know anybody else who said that, but he hoped it was true. For all her wisdom, Tammy was a bit of a wild child. Silas had to get her out of a few scrapes back home. As friends, they really complimented each other. Here in New York they shared rent on a ridiculously small apartment on the lower east side. Silas got a job at a record store and Tammy waited tables at a high class restaurant in midtown.

“Is it just me or does it smell bad in here?” Silas tried to whisper, but he had to shout to be heard over the music.

“We’re standing in the middle of fifty coked up strangers dancing vigorously in polyester suits. It’s gonna stink no matter how much Jovan Musk and Hai Karate they splash around.”

Silas started to relax into the music with a little help from ‘mother’s little helper’. The song changed from Chic’s Le Freak to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Tammy and Silas, being one another’s default dance partner, settled into the perfect groove, but that tranquility wouldn’t last long.

It was Silas who noticed it first. The little starry projections began growing and changing shape. It was at that point he realized the mirror ball was descending towards the dance floor unassisted by any sort of cable or pole or other mechanism. It appeared to be floating and spinning several inches above their heads like a lost planet.

Silas gasped in disbelief, grabbing Tammy by her sweaty shoulders. “Tammy, look!”

“Hey!” Tammy objected to Silas' disturbing the straps of her dress that kept slipping out of place, but her annoyance turned to shock when she witnessed the strange sight now only a couple of inches above her. The song continued, but it was a part of the song that neither of them recognized. The beat dropped, buzzing at a strange new frequency, the vocals were thin and distorted. One Valium couldn’t produce this kind of hallucination. This had to be real.

About half of the dancers in the room begin to form a circle around the shiny floating orb. They looked haggard, exhausted even, each of them drenched in sweat. The others kept dancing and clapping along, believing this circular formation to be part of a hot new dance. But the participants had such vacant looks in their eyes. The swirling colored lights cast garish shadows on their gaunt faces. Tammy and Silas had never seen anything like it, especially coming from the mid-west. New York was weird, but not this weird. The friends instinctively receded to the edge of the dance floor.

The ball opened up like the segments of an orange. The circling dancers suddenly came to a dead stop, tilted their heads back at a ninety degree angle, and opened their mouths wide. Reflective pyramid shaped prisms about the size of a tortilla chip began to emerge from each gaping maw, then floated on a beam of light into the mirror ball, while their human hosts dropped dead on the floor. The bodies were heaped on top of one another like empty discarded husks. Everyone else ran screaming for the doors which they found locked from the inside.

Listen at your own risk...

Contains the following possible triggers:

1. Death by exhaustion

2. Death of a large group

3. Body snatching