The Last Toast

It was the night before my colleague Mark’s birthday, and we’d planned a surprise party at his flat. The place was a cramped studio on the third floor of an old building in the industrial district, where the streets were lined with shuttered factories and the only light came from a few buzzing sodium lamps. Mark’s roommate, Dave, was in on it, and we’d arranged to sneak in after midnight, about twenty of us, carrying cheap vodka and a store-bought cake.

By eleven forty, most of the group had already crept up the metal staircase, their footsteps echoing in the stairwell. I stayed back with my friend Sam, the last two, waiting to haul up the booze and the cake. We stood in the narrow alley behind the building, leaning against a graffiti-covered wall, sharing a cigarette in the dark. The air smelled of diesel and wet concrete, and the only sound was the distant hum of a ventilation unit.

‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ Sam said, exhaling a plume of smoke. ‘Twenty people in that tiny flat? Dave’s going to kill us.’

‘It’s worth it,’ I said, though a knot of unease was tightening in my stomach. Something about the empty street, the way the shadows pooled under the parked cars, felt off. I tried to shake it off, blaming the late hour and the lingering taste of the cheap whiskey we’d had at a bar earlier.

We finished the cigarette, ground it out, and Sam picked up the cake box while I grabbed the bag with two bottles of vodka. We started toward the building’s rear entrance, but as we reached the door, I heard a faint, wet scraping sound from the dumpster nearby. I froze, and Sam looked back at me.

‘You hear that?’ I whispered.

‘Probably a rat,’ Sam said, but he didn’t sound convinced. He pushed the door open, and we stepped into the musty stairwell. The light flickered, a fluorescent tube buzzing overhead. We climbed to the third floor, and I could already hear the muffled laughter and music from Mark’s flat.

Dave opened the door before we could knock, a grin on his face. ‘About time,’ he said, taking the bag from me. ‘Everyone’s here. We were getting worried.’

We stepped inside. The flat was packed, people sitting on the floor, on the single bed, spilling into the small kitchen. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of body spray. I made my way to the window, which looked out over the back alley, and that’s when I saw it again. A silhouette, barely visible, standing near the dumpster we’d passed. It seemed to be looking up at the building, and I felt a chill run down my spine.

I turned to Sam, who was talking to a girl from accounting. ‘Sam, look,’ I said, pointing out the window. But when I looked again, the silhouette was gone. Sam shrugged, dismissing it, and handed me a plastic cup of vodka.

At midnight, we all shouted ‘Happy Birthday’ as Mark blew out the candles. He looked genuinely surprised, maybe even a little embarrassed. We cheered, and someone put on music. But as the night wore on, I couldn’t shake the unease. Every few minutes, I found myself glancing at the window, but the alley was empty.

It was around one in the morning when the lights flickered. Just a brief dip, but it was enough to silence the room for a moment. Then the music continued, and people went back to talking. I saw the clock on the microwave blink 1:03, then 1:04.

Then the knocking started. It was soft at first, a slow, rhythmic thud, as if someone were knocking on the wall outside. The sound seemed to come from behind the refrigerator, which was tucked into a corner of the kitchen. I noticed the room slowly go quiet as others heard it too. The knocking continued, steady, like a heartbeat, and it seemed to be getting louder.

‘What is that?’ someone asked, but no one answered. The knocking stopped abruptly, and then a new sound emerged: the low, wet scrape of something being dragged across the floor, just on the other side of the wall. Dave, trying to keep things light, laughed and said, ‘It’s probably just the pipes.’ But his voice was shaky.

The scraping trailed off, and after a tense silence, a woman screamed from outside. It was high-pitched and cut off as suddenly as it had started. We all rushed to the windows. The street below was deserted, but in the flickering light of a streetlamp, I saw a dark shape moving, too fast to be a rat, toward the entrance to the factory across the road.

Then the lights went out completely. The room plunged into darkness, and panic erupted. People were shouting, fumbling for their phones. I heard someone call out, ‘The door’s stuck!’

We were trapped. The main door, which had been hanging open moments before, was now jammed shut. We pushed and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. And then, from the kitchen, came the sound of glass shattering. One of the vodka bottles had fallen to the floor, spilling its contents, followed by the smell of alcohol and something else, something metallic, like blood.

That’s when I saw it, in the dim light of a phone screen, a figure standing in the kitchen, hunched over, its head tilted at an unnatural angle. It was tall, skeletally thin, with skin that seemed to glisten wetly. It held the broken bottle in its hand, and it was staring directly at me.

I couldn’t scream. I just froze. The figure took a step forward, its bare feet leaving glistening footprints on the linoleum. Someone finally screamed, and that broke the spell. We surged toward the windows, but they were barred from the outside, the metal grates we’d never noticed before. We were trapped.

In the chaos, I saw Sam grab a chair and hurl it at the window. The glass shattered, but the bars held. The creature moved through the crowd, ignoring the others, heading straight for me. I backed away, knocking over the cake, which spilled onto the floor like a grotesque parody of our celebration.

The creature stopped, looked down at the cake, and then back at me. A grin spread across its face, revealing rows of needle-thin teeth. And then it spoke, a voice like gravel grinding, ‘The last toast is always delayed.’

I woke up gasping on the cold pavement of the alley. The sun was just beginning to rise, casting long shadows across the cracked asphalt. I was alone, covered in soot, and the building before me was an empty shell, burnt out from within. There was no sign of Sam, no sign of anyone. My phone showed a single message from Dave, sent at 2:15 AM: ‘Don’t come up. Whatever you do, don’t come up.’

I never saw any of them again. The police called it a gas explosion, but the building was intact except for the third floor, which had collapsed inward, as if something had torn it apart from the inside. And to this day, whenever I hear a rhythmic tapping on my window at night, I can’t help but wonder if it’s the last person to toast, still waiting for me to join them.