It was more than a year ago, in late January. My friend and I were at a concert, and I can't remember the name of the venue but I remember the band that played: a band no one ever hears about called Drowning Coffins. It took almost an hour drive from the city I lived in all the way to the venue, and we were practically high on anticipation the whole way there. We got dropped off and waited in the long line, then handed over our crumpled twenties to the lady at the tickets window. We headed inside: if you have ever been to a concert, you know that the world is different inside the venue. It was all dim, with brighter lights focused on the stage, where some lame opening acts were already finishing their set. The crowd was thick all around us, heating the air with their bodies, singing and yelling. I was already sweating; I tied my jacket around my waist.
Noise and music and people, and the smell of smoke and sweat pressed in all around us. We started at the back, squeezing our way through clusters of people, and eventually got a pretty decent spot near the front, maybe twenty or fifteen feet away from the stage.
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The crowd was even more dense here, and I felt like I was being squeezed through a straw, but it was worth it. The last opening act finished their set and walked off the stage, and then a large curtain dropped down, concealing the stage from our view. Everyone was murmuring, a sense of anticipation in the air. A tangible tension. Behind the curtains, the musicians teased us with snatches of drums and guitars, and uncomfortable stretches of silence in between. Drums. Guitar, drums, silence. Guitar, silence, drums, guitar. The crowd yelling. More guitar. Silence. Silence.
Suddenly I'm blind as flashing lights flood my vision, and when my sight returns the curtain has disappeared and the guitar line starts up. The people cheer loudly, but the cheering is cut off when people notice something.... Off.
The lead singer is dead.
Not laying dead on the ground, but standing up, the stage lights illuminating his pale, pale skin, contrasting sharply with his pure black hair and eyes. He looks like a living corpse, blue veins visible under almost translucent skin, circles under his eyes as if from decades without sleep, thin limbs like a skeleton. The bones in his wrists are very visible as he grips the microphone, his pale blue lips part against it, and it looks almost like he's kissing it before he starts singing. As his voice washes over all of us, I feel the tension leave. It's just stage makeup. It's all part of the act. How had I been so stupid to actually think it was real?
Everything is just fine. So I focus on the music, the crowd and I sway in time to the music. I feel my troubled conscience melt away until I am only the music, one with the sound, and the music is beautiful, it is all of us, and if it stops, terrible things will happen.
The singing stops, but the instruments don't, and I look up to the stage again. The singer is coaxing a fan onto the stage, the fan eagerly clambering over the edge with help from the crowd. I feel overwhelmed because I want to be up there also, to be closer to the music. My legs will me forward, but the people around me stop me from moving.
The singers veins are doubly visible now, a dark lavender purple. His lips curve upward in a strange sort of smile... And he takes a chunk out of the person's neck with a lighting-fast swipe of his hand- I look away, my stomach turning, my head reeling. Special effects.... Now the instruments are abandoned, in their place the sounds of screaming people. I dare to look again- now in the place of a human body is a pile of ashes, the only other trace being red smears on the musicians' lips. Special effects. It's all special effects. Those are some damn good special effects...
I remind myself that it's all an act, but my pulse still quickens when the ashes are blown off the stage and I taste them on my tongue. As the music resumes, I let myself slip back into that happy trance, once again assured of my own safety. Nothing is wrong, everything is perfect among the melody and flashing lights.
Until more ashes appear, flooding my nostrils with an acrid scent, choking me. The crowd seems a lot thinner now, and I'm not sure how much time has passed. My friend seems to have snapped out of it as well, because she screams as more hypnotized victims are claimed on the stage. The musicians are more scarlet than white now, eyeing the crowd hungrily. In terror, some small part of me wondered how one person (or whatever they were) could consume so much blood.
Instinct told me to flee, so I did, and she followed.
We ran breathlessly out of the venue, stopped in the parking lot, and looked back. "There's still people in there." She said, but her monotone voice already spoke what we were both thinking: none of those people were leaving. They were beyond our help now.
We phoned her parents to come pick us up early, and never spoke of it again, because who in their right minds would believe us? Even you, reading this, believe it to be a work of fiction. And as far as her parents know, we had to leave because of a bad case of food poisoning.
And suffice to say, I don't go to that venue anymore.
