You want to hear the true story of what happened one night many moons ago when I discovered that party drugs are Satanic evil harbingers of self-destruction. Someone offered me a drink of tea that had been brewed from mushrooms collected out of cow dung after a summer rain storm. When I ingested the odd-tasting elixir nothing happened for about a quarter of an hour, then I started feeling weird.
The weird feeling got even weirder as time passed until I lost all concept of time. I began hearing disembodied voices. A red-haired girl was sitting in the fashion of a Yoga meditator on the cold floor of a darkened laundry room staring vacantly through the open door of an empty clothes dryer. The little light at the back of the dryer drum seemed like a candle burning. Her face was luminous with an eerie expression.
She motioned for me to kneel down beside her. Overwhelmed by drug-induced curiosity, I complied with her creepy summons. She bade me gaze into the clothes dryer. I shouldn't have looked into that dryer because when I did, I was suddenly overcome with a wave of stomach churning queasiness. The back of the dryer appeared to move rapidly away into a great far distance. The space inside the dryer was cavernous.
The dizzying abyss inside the dryer gave me a staggering sensation of drunken vertigo. The red-haired girl asked me if I was hearing the voices calling my name. When I listened into the gaping dryer, I realized the origin of the disembodied voices. I heard a chorus of droning voices chanting my name repeatedly as if calling me to join them in the deepening cave of the clothes dryer. It was ghostly haunting.
I was on the verge of tears when the red-haired girl said something disgusting that terrorized me so badly that I jumped up and ran from the shadows of the icy laundry room. She said "Don't you want to rip steel and watch it bleed?"
She must have been a powerful evil witch. What healthy mind would ask such an appalling question? I ran past droves of people crowding a hallway. I stumbled into a room so jam packed with people that I had to force my way through to the door.
The people gyrating in that cramped smoky room didn't look right. It was like being surrounded by mindless zombies. I was trapped in a room of the dead. The gross fleshy people were grabbing at my arms and the door seemed to be getting farther away. The harder I struggled to reach the door, the harder all those freakish corpse people grabbed at my shoulders and arms, and the farther away the door moved. "Where are you going, Sean?" I heard them saying. They were pulling on me and shouting my name in my ears.
The music was so loud. The huge woofers were hammering Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb into my spinning skull. I was going completely out of my mind. The maddening experience was horrifying. I had to get to the front door and get out of that ill-omened house but the door was tiresomely distant and the gruesome hideous people were squishing the air out of my lungs. I felt like I was caught in the mosh pit of a heavy metal concert.
By this time I did start weeping. I was literally crying like a hurt child because I was so afraid of those ghoulish people that were mashing me and holding me back from the dwindling door. The mushroom tea in my bloodstream turned the corpuscles in my veins into little dancing tea cups that were laughing at me and mocking my name with rude insults like "Sad little Sean drank some tea, then cried and begged on bended knees, he wanted a drink and so he had it, now he's falling down a hole with a red-eyed rabbit!"
I despaired of my life at that point. The monstrous people mobbing me was too much pressure for my lungs to endure and besides that the door had moved hopelessly distant. I was literally facing an unspeakable death by insanity and suffocation when all of a sudden a force like a tidal wave slammed into my back and I felt myself being blasted toward the door at breakneck speed.
The door somehow flew wide open and I tripped over the threshold landing face down in the shrubbery beside the front step. The force that had mercifully impelled me from a doom of smothering psychosis was two big dudes who had gotten into a fight with each other. One of their fists grazed the back of my head as I was staggering to my feet. Even though the shot just did clip the posterior of my cranium it sounded like a gong went off inside my head. My eyes crossed and I staggered forward from the momentum onto the grass that was damp with dew of the late night hour.
I could hear shouts and much vulgar language coming from behind me along with the revolting thumps of knuckles heavily colliding with human flesh. I didn't dare look back. I staggered and stumbled through all the cars in the driveway until I found my blue pickup truck. Fortunately, no one had blocked me in. Fumbling with my keys I unlocked the driver side door and crawled in. I closed the door and locked it making sure I had the windows rolled all the way up.
I drove out of the dark neighborhood and when I hit a street that led up through the center of town, the lamps on the utility poles were blazing in my eyes like stadium beacons. I was struggling with blindness when I noticed an automobile beside me on the road. It was an old Stingray Corvette. The occupants of that car motioned for me to roll down my window. They appeared to be puffing on weed and they were wearing T-shirts with AC/DC and Bad Company logos on the front. The passenger said, "Hey man, you're only driving 13 miles per hour. You better adjust before a cop notices you." Then they sped off.
I glanced at my speedometer and saw that I really was driving at only 13 miles per hour in a 45 mile per hour speed zone. Then the speed limit sign indicated the zone had changed to 35 which greatly relieved me because there was no way possible for me to drive 45 miles per hour with those millions of miniature tea cups laughing and taunting in my bloodstream. Driving 45 miles per hour would have felt like doing 90. As it was, it seemed like I was going way over the speed limit when I managed to force myself to ease up to 25 miles per hour. The buildings and utility poles were flying by as though I was jetting down the street like a bat out of Hell.
I willed my leg muscles to put more pressure on the accelerator pedal but my foot trembled and refused to push down any harder. Just then I saw a glowing Burger King sign up ahead and the result was that I began to feel very hungry. After another moment or two of staring at the big red fast-food sign I felt like I was starving to death, so I pulled into the Burger King drive-thru. When I got to the place where the lighted menu is on display, I braked to a stop. A booming voice blared out through the speaker hole. I almost made a mess in my pants and those hateful mocking tea cups were rioting in my veins.
Recovering from the shock, I ordered several food items from the lighted menu. When I got to the window to pay, I couldn't count money. I just dug into my pocket and gave the girl whatever I had, which turned out to be a hundred dollar bill. She said she was giving me change of $50 and something cents, so I must have ordered fifty bucks worth of food.
After that it seemed like I waited at the window for a long time but then the girl started handing stuff to me. She kept handing bags out the window to me until it felt like I was running out of room in my truck. I started to panic because I was getting worried that she could hear the tea cups mocking me, their squeaky little voices were getting louder and louder. I had to get away from Burger King but the girl at the window kept handing bags to me. Finally, she stopped but then handed me two straws wrapped in paper and two big drink cups full of I don't know what.
I drove slowly forward from the window and looked both ways up and down the street. It was very late by this time so even though it was a Saturday night, there weren't many cars on the road. I couldn't stand the ferocious glare of the thousands of looming painfully bright street lamps, so I headed for a secluded wooded spot on the outskirts of town, but that was the worst mistake I ever made besides drinking that nightmare tea in the first place.
When I first arrived at the secluded wooded spot everything seemed all right. I figured I had found a place where I could let the psychedelic drug wear off and get rid of those sadistic tea cups that were now screaming bloody murder in my veins. I left my engine idling and I left my headlights on.
It was summer and the Dog Fennel was growing head-high and fluffy. The beams of my headlights were aimed right straight at a thick growth of Dog Fennel. The song playing on the radio was Paranoid by Black Sabbath, but it wasn't the radio station, it was a tape I'd left in my truck stereo. It was on autoplay, so after one side ended, the tape would automatically flip over and start playing the other side.
I began digging into the food bags like a ravenous animal, but right about that time Paranoid went off and Planet Caravan started. I had opened a double Whopper with cheese and was just taking a big bite when I noticed something odd about the Dog Fennel. The odd thing about the tall eerily lush plants is that they were no longer Dog Fennel. The grim flora had morphed into sinister figures wearing white holocaust cloaks. Their faces were obscured in shadow and they were singing Planet Caravan. The cloaks slowly began oscillating like slimy eels swimming their wiggly way through water.
My guts retched because it felt like the big bite of Whopper I had chomped down on was turning to powder in my mouth. Dry powder. I started coughing and gagging because I had a mouth full of stinking smelly desert-dry talcum powder. When I looked at the cheeseburger to see what I had bitten into, the lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese, and meat patties were oozing with fat writhing maggots. By now the tea cups in my bloodstream were singing Planet Caravan with the colony of cloaked figures that undulated lasciviously in the headlights of my pickup truck.
In the terrorizing shock of panic about what was in my mouth, I opened my driver side door and spit the powdered maggots out into the darkness. Under my truck skulking things leered and watched and waited. I started grabbing all the bags of food and throwing them out. When I had gotten rid of all the vermin-infested food, I closed my door and locked it, but another fright beset me. The position I was sitting in before I opened the door was tense. I had been bracing my left leg against the closed door to keep myself from falling out of the driver seat, but without realizing it, I had moved my leg back a little while I was tossing out the vile rotten food so that when I closed the door again my leg wasn't braced against it which made me feel like I was falling helplessly into a cosmic vacuum of horrifying purgatory out of which not even light could escape.
I kept falling and falling. I grabbed the steering wheel to hold on, but something was pulling at my legs. The whole truck started vibrating wildly. The violent shaking caused my clammy palms to slip from the steering wheel. Below me I could see the flames of Hell and a marauding legion of hateful angry demons waiting to tear my soul to pieces and devour my flesh. I could hear the haunting lyrics of Planet Caravan "We sail through endless skies, stars shine like eyes, the black night sighs, the moon in silver trees, falls down in tears".
Everybody was singing those murderous mind-twisting lyrics - the psychotic witchy tea cups, the eely holocaust cloak colony, the raging fire-breathing demons.
The louder they sang the harder it was for me to hold on to the very last ragged shred of my sanity. I was being mercilessly dragged down into the Bottomless Pit. My life was over. I was facing eternal torment in a subterranean dungeon of demonic horror.
I don't know how much later it was when I woke to the sound of light rain on my windshield. I was still parked in the secluded wooded spot. Low rumbles of thunder seemed to press the early dawn down and mute it, heavily weighting the atmosphere creepy and murky with hopelessness and despair. My mouth was pasty. I was so thirsty. An unpredictable sudden wave of nausea hit me. I jumped out of my truck and vomited hard, but it was dry heaves because there was nothing in my stomach.
After a crying agonizing time in which I thought I was going to suffocate from not being able to breath any air while ensnared in the abominable clutches of the relentless spasms that wracked my tired trembling body, I finally got a reprieve from the violent yacking. The cool foggy dawn rain soaked my clothes and brought much needed relief. I crawled back in my truck, drove home, went upstairs to my room, showered, then passed out face down on my bed. I slept all that rainy day and all the following night before I had fully recovered from the poison I had ingested at the party.
Since that awful horrid nocturne of seemingly endless nightmare I no longer drink booze, take drugs, or go to parties, and I NEVER listen to Planet Caravan.

The published books authored by Sean Terrence Best are available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other booksellers.