The one thing I wanted to do most while in Vienna was visit the Vienna Opera House. One of the most prestigious opera houses in the world, it easily beat those I’d visited before. Of course, luck would have it that I had to wind up being late to it. I wasn’t the type of person to be late to events, least of all to something I love as much as the opera. It certainly hadn’t happened when I’d attended back home in the States. I knew how to get to places on time. But that day in Austria, I’d gone off by myself to do some sightseeing across the city, visiting both St Stephen’s Cathedral and the Hofburg Palace. My friend Jenna, who I was visiting the storied city with for a week, had agreed to split up for the day so she could spend it shopping for clothes. We were meant to meet back up at the Vienna State Opera House and attend the show together. Unfortunately, there was an unexpected traffic jam on the streets leading to the opera house. Perhaps I squeezed in seeing a bit too many sights that day, which meant I didn’t have a lot of wiggle room time-wise. Reaching the palatial, hand-carved building that looked like a colosseum, I was now far too panicked to appreciate the visual. I hurried my way out of my taxi, through the grand entrance and into the lobby. Each glance at my watch told me I had one minute less to get there before the show started. But I still had a few. It was just barely 8:30pm, and things wouldn’t start immediately, surely. A scan of the ornate foyer told me that Jenna had already gone into the theatre after waiting outside for me. I felt awful that I’d made her wait, and the anxious text messages we’d exchanged as I’d trundled my way through traffic hadn’t helped my guilt. I’d apologise and make it up to her once I got inside, I reassured myself internally, clutching my ticket—fortunately she’d had hers separately. But, as I thrust my ticket towards the usher by the closed theatre doors, my vain hopes of smoothing this delay over were dashed. “My ticket for…Messa De Requiem for you…sorry I cut it so close” I breezily panted, my heartbeat still recovering from running here. “I am sorry sir, but you are too late to be admitted to the performance tonight” the usher coolly but professionally replied. Dressed in a bowtie suit, his accent bristled with the slightest hint of judgement. “But—it’s only 5 minutes after start time” I tried to argue. “My friend is already inside. Couldn’t you please just make an exception?” The usher was unphased. His stoic facial expression told me that this wasn’t a rare scenario for him. My heart fell before he spoke. “Our venue has a strict closed door policy, sir. Latecomers are not to be admitted, so as not to negatively impact the viewing experience of other attendees and performers.” Well, that was that. Jenna was gonna be alone in there. “I’m afraid you will need to watch the performance remotely in one of our dedicated viewing rooms for latecomers” the usher recited sternly. “As this concert does not have an intermission—within which you could enter the theatre—you will need to listen in the viewing room for the entire duration. Follow me.” With that, he whisked me out of the illustrious and spacious foyer into a series of relatively blank and narrow corridors. Instead of an opera house, I felt like I was heading down the hallways of a public school building. I tried to stay optimistic the whole way, biting back the urge to scold myself for messing up. So I was in there for the whole show, okay. I’m sure me and Jenna could laugh over this crazy turn of events afterwards. Finally, we arrived at the room in question. If the usher hadn’t told me we were here, I might have walked past it. It was so unremarkable—just a plain room, about the size of a waiting room, with white walls, dimmed lighting, tiny speakers and rows of plastic chairs. And, of course, a mounted close-circuit TV screen at the front for us to watch the opera on—technically a concert, not an opera. “This is the viewing room,” the usher whispered. “Please take a seat and kindly take care not to disturb the other listeners. Enjoy the show—we hope the music makes an impression.” I looked around for the ideal seat after he left, closing the standard-looking door behind him. The room was nearly empty, with just two people already there before me. Both women were seated apart in the sea of chairs so they’d both been individually late, too. My first impression of the room was that it felt like a room you’d have detention in. Hell, it felt like we’d been put in detention full stop. Up on the flatscreen ahead, which felt bizarrely too small for the room’s purpose, I could see that Messa Da Requiem was beginning. There was a static, unchanging wide shot of the hall on the screen—this would seemingly be the experience for the whole viewing as there was just one permanently-mounted camera streaming the hall. At least it showed the full choir, orchestra and much of the audience—although there was no chance of me glimpsing Jenna. Meanwhile, through the minute speakers on either side of the screen, we heard the mixed-group double choir’s harmonic chanting to Kyrie. Despite the mundane, secondhand way I was hearing it, the music was still evocative and beautiful. At least I could still get some of the majesty of the opera from this experience. “You can sit anywhere, you know,” one of the women in the room whispered to me in an English accent, turning in her seat. I was shaken out of my reverie and realised I’d been standing watching for a little while. “Oh yeah, thanks” I whispered back, sitting in a chair towards the back. “Can you believe this is for real? Like I was only 5 minutes late.” “You think that’s bad?” she grimaced back. “I was just 2 minutes late. Guy still said I had to watch in here. Effing sucks but it is what it is.” We resumed listening to the performance, letting the soaring intensity of the instruments and vocals wash over us in the room through the basic speaker setup. I wondered to myself how common it must be for operagoers to end up in this room. I’d heard about latecomers being locked out of performances before but never about a “tardy” room for them. There was one more person who arrived after me, a man, who stomped into the room 9 minutes late for the show, flustered and upset. Yeah, there was no way they were letting that guy in if we hadn’t made the cut. While the gorgeous, dramatic symphonies of Tuba Mirum, Liber Scriptus and Quid Sum Miser echoed from the speakers, I wondered what Jenna must be feeling inside the grand theatre. I felt ashamed for leaving her inside alone, especially since I was the opera house lover of the two of us. Truthfully, I’d wanted to ask her out before booking this trip, so we could go as a couple. She’d even dropped hints about it, pointedly saying the Volksgarten garden would be the perfect place for a man to ask a lady friend out. But it went over my head at the time. In a way, I was always leaving her waiting, always too late. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGH!” Suddenly, my wistful thoughts were interrupted by a deafening, bloodcurdling scream—coming from the audience over in the theatre hall, and being transmitted to us via speakers. Except it seemed so much louder and real than those cheap speakers could emit. I jammed my fingers in my ears along with the other latecomers, also startled and confused. Why was the performance not stopping? Why weren’t the ushers stepping in? While the solitary roaring wailing continued, Dies Irae continued being performed by the musicians on-stage, as the TV feed would indicate. How on Earth could the opera house us entering late was a disruption but that this bloody murder howling somehow wasn’t? The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on me. Just as I was about to pull out my phone and phone the Vienna police, I noticed the horrifying escalation. The sound was growing. The screams were growing. One by one, audience members in the hall were emitting their own guttural screams that sounded nothing like any scream I’d heard before. And even as more and more joined in, us glimpsing more of them doing so on the monitor, the concert continued like business as usual. No one that wasn’t screaming yet seemed to care. The orchestra kept playing, the choir kept singing, the audience kept listening. I sprang up from my seat only to find the doors to the room locked. Removing my fingers from my ears was painful to do with the cacophony of now hundreds of screams. I was about to start pounding on the door when the others in the room shrieked in horror at what they saw on-screen. Turning back, I saw on that rectangular monitor that an unfathomable sight—audience members all gushing blood from every orifice. Their ears, mouths, eyes, fingernails, nostrils. All of it, and all while flailing and screaming, spraying blood across the plush seats. Every attendee in that hall was joining in the screeches now. And the reason we could see this? The camera angle of the shot was now changing, rotating through different close up angles of the audience. That couldn’t be—the live camera was fixed in one location, a long shot of the theatre. There weren’t meant to be multiple. Who or what was filming this? As the camera angle changed in the now impossibly loud room, filled with an entire audience’s screams, we were treated to the sight of the orchestra, choir and conductor bleeding too. Blood spilling over their robes and instruments. Yet, they still continued playing, singing and conducting, even as they bled before an audience that was all screaming. Oh God, was this—was this also happening to Jenna right now? The other three in my room voiced their terror about their own loved ones who were inside that auditorium, their worried cries barely hearable in the din. But I somehow made out what they were saying—maybe it was the acoustics of the room. Or maybe the room wanted me to hear their fear. One worried about her boyfriend, another about her children, the last about his friends- the loved ones who they’d been separated from by arriving here late. In turn, each of them slowly reacted to the sight they dreaded as it flashed on the screen. A shot of their loved ones exsanguinating bodies overflowing with blood, whilst screaming their lungs out in apparent agony. Their reactions to this were as devastated as you’d imagine. It was clear now—it had to be the continuous music that was having this violent effect on them all somehow. Us being separated here in this room, not hearing the music directly, was shielding us from it. Then, at last came the sight I was dreading—there on the screen I finally saw Jenna’s own inexplicable close-up shot, her writhing in her bloodsoaked sweater and reaching out her hand in desperation, gurgling cries still coming from her mouth. “JENNA NO!” I called out her name against the score of screaming but of course she couldn’t hear me. For the next hour, that’s how it was. We were forced to listen to our loved ones slowly bleeding out and dying amidst hundreds of others, backed by an orchestra playing the pieces we’d come to hear in diminishing capability. Lux Aeterna. Libera Me. Requiem. Screams. Blood. Grief. Why? Why would the opera house do this to their own attendees who had been on time, and let our lateness spare us? The horrifying sounds echoed on and on in the small room until finally the concert was over. The performers that lasted this long now looked like corpses, pale and drained of blood. They slumped over and dropped their instruments, as dead as their audience who had long stopped screaming. Last was the conductor, who fell from the stage into the pit in a splash of blood. There was finally silence. The TV screen cut out, leaving us staring back at our sobbing, ear-ringing, traumatised faces. With the doors now unlocked, we stepped out of that deceptively mundane room and began making our way down the corridors. Not knowing how we would face seeing the bloodbath in the main auditorium. I was going to have to travel back home from Austria alone, tell Jenna’s family what happened, find words to describe the incident to the news when they interviewed me. All while knowing I’d been too late to save Jenna. We entered the foyer and….there were the attendees. Filing out of the auditorium happily, looking completely fine like absolutely nothing had happened to them. I looked past them into the auditorium—not a drop of blood, no deceased bodies, some orchestra members packing up their instruments. “Oh there you are Sean!” came Jenna’s beaming voice. I spun around, still wracked with disbelief, and saw her standing there. Brunette head unscathed, beautiful as ever and happy to see me. “I feel so sad that you missed the show, it was so lovely just like you said it would be! Did they at least let you watch in another room?.” After an hour of calling out to her futilely, I now found myself lost for words. “Are you okay?” she asked, registering my sweated-through clothes and baffled expression. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Have you eaten? Why don’t we grab a late dinner, there’s this great little restaurant I read about…” Jenna continued chattering blissfully while the reality of what happened dawned on me. Wherever otherworldly punishment the opera had inflicted on its patrons, it had indeed been on us tardy folk, not those in the hall. I was never the same after that experience. I tried to be for a while after we returned home, even went for it with Jenna and gave being a couple a go at long last. But I could never look at her the same again. Every time I did, I saw that bleeding, pleading face of hers, heard her animalistic screams, all to the accompaniment of a symphony orchestra playing Messa Da Requiem—and a chorus of mass death. She understandably didn’t know what was wrong. And I understandably knew I couldn’t convince her. Not only did my fateful, belated trip to the Vienna opera ruin my relationship with Jenna, but it ruined my relationship with opera music. Maybe that’s what the punctuality-obsessed Vienna State Opera House wanted, or maybe not. But one thing is certain. I will never let myself be late to an event ever again.   submitted by   /u/GuyAwks   to   r/nosleep [link]   [comments]