I’ve been goth for pretty much as long as I can remember. You know the type, black clothes, black hair, black tattoos, black eyeliner, black cat. The whole nine yards. Even as young as primary school you can find old photos of me adorned in spiked collars and combat boots. For a while my family tried to get me to branch out, my grandparents especially abhorred the whole thing, but after a while they all gave up on changing this part of me and it became to some degree normal- or at least something they stopped bringing up. This may not seem too important, but the point is being goth has been a consistent and pervasive part of my life for years and has never really caused me any problems aside from the occasional dirty look from older couples on the street or my neighbor’s teenage son, not unaffectionately, nicknaming me ‘La Llorona’. That is, until recently of course, which is why I’m bothering to write this all down in the first place.
I moved to a new city this summer, for my graduate program. I want to be a programmer, not that you care, but it hasn’t exactly been easy to make new friends as a goth programmer in a male-dominated field. At least, it hasn’t been easy to make friends who are lacking in… ulterior motives, namely making me their ‘big titty goth girlfriend’ or whatever the fuck. For that reason I had, in the last couple of months, made a habit of hitting up underground goth and punk clubs in my city on the weekends. They aren’t nearly as hard to track down as they probably were back in the day, even without knowing the right people. All I really had to do was look it up, and I found a pretty comprehensive list of events catering to alternative scenes in my area. I was pretty nervous to go on my own the first couple of times, but the people were friendly and welcoming and by the first couple of events I attended I had already met some cool people that I could look forward to seeing.
A couple of weeks ago me and a few of my new friends had planned to meet up at the Forgotten Attic, our favorite venue. Ironically, it was in fact not an attic and instead was located in the basement of a self-proclaimed anarchist pizza shop after hours. For this reason, it was a pretty popular spot, the owner would sometimes open up the shop upstairs for concerts and sling pies to drugged-out alternative college kids. Plus - the basement smelled damn amazing, but I digress. On this particular night, a couple of local goth bands were performing alongside a group of performers toting some kind of ‘bondage demonstration’. Not exactly my thing, but I had been invited and didn’t want to shirk my place in a new friend group right as I had gotten it. A couple of the girls were planning to take some molly and it sounded like it was going to be a pretty fun night regardless of my reservations.
The night started out normal enough, me and my friends grabbing some drinks, dancing, flirting, you get the idea. It was a great event, but I found myself overtaken by a sense of unease as soon as I had gotten there, like I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me or something. I couldn’t relax, looking over my shoulder constantly, but I was only ever met with the same crowds of drunk and high punks that had been there the whole time, all of them wrapped up in their own conversations or dance circles and paying me no mind. I even asked a couple of my friends if they noticed anything weird only to be brushed off with a hint of what seemed like annoyance. Eventually, I found myself unable to track down any of the people I had met up with, all of them breaking off from our group to mingle or perhaps just get away from the standoffish, paranoid mood I had been oozing from the start.
I couldn’t help but feel I had ruined my own night and began to feel a pang of resentment toward myself for not being able to let loose and have fun. I considered just calling it quits and going home, and it was as I turned to make my way toward the exit that I noticed him. I was a bit surprised I hadn’t noticed him around until now, he didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the crowd in their short black skirts, bondage pants, and leather jackets. A man stood almost flesh against the wall nearest the staircase marking my exit, and he was dressed in an ill-fitting trench coat of a color I couldn’t quite determine under the pulsating laser lights of the club, and a large pair of jet-black sunglasses that were so dark they seemed to suck in all light that hit them. The strangest part though, is that even with his sunglasses I could tell that he was staring RIGHT at me, and his mouth was moving quickly like he was mumbling something under his breath, not to me, exactly, but at me.
At this moment the weirdness I had felt all night bubbled up into intense rage, this creep must have been staring at me all night, he had to have been the cause of the paranoia I had been feeling since I had arrived, I just knew it. So I marched on over to him, ready for a confrontation. Regardless of my aggressive body language, the man seemed to regard my approach with a sense of casualty, almost as if he was expecting me. When I asked him what the hell his problem was, he only smiled placidly at me and asked, just loud enough to be heard over the music: “You must enjoy the darkness, don’t you?” This caught me off guard of course, and my rage sizzled into discomfort. I was pretty used to being asked dumb questions like this, men in my classes making jokes about how I ‘sure do love the color black’ and ‘what are you, a vampire?’, but what this man said seemed… different, in a way that made me unconsciously tense up.
I didn’t know what to say and felt mounting anxiety begin to overtake me, wanting nothing more than to get away from this weird, staring man. I managed to mumble out sheepishly that, yeah, I guess I did enjoy the darkness, and tried to inch my way towards the staircase he now seemed to be blocking, despite never moving from his spot along the wall. If he understood that I was trying to bolt he did not show it, and asked me something again, quieter now, too quiet for me to hear, and when I paused for a moment trying to register it he took a large step closer. His voice seemed as calm as it was before as he asked me, “Would you let it consume you?”. I stared at him for a long time after he asked me this, feeling suddenly very dizzy as I tried to make sense of what he was talking about, and the longer I seemed to stare at him, into his sunglasses, I felt frozen in place, a deep sense of dread trickling down my back. I stood there for what felt like forever before I pulled myself away with every ounce of mental strength I had, hurrying up the stairs and down the street a ways before looking behind me to make sure he hadn’t followed.
After all of that I simply called a Lyft and went home, texting my friends that I had started to feel ill and that I would hopefully see them next week. By the time I got home, a deep exhaustion had settled over me and I was almost able to forget my unsettling encounter at the Forgotten Attic as I curled up with my cat Percy, turned off my lights, and settled into bed. I was almost asleep when the man’s words echoed back in my head, asking me if I would let the darkness consume me, and turned to flip my lamp back on before drifting to sleep. The next morning it took me a while to notice. It was so subtle I probably wouldn’t have even realized if I hadn’t gone to put in my contacts, a ritual long ingrained in me even if I had no real reason to not just keep wearing my glasses for the day. I realized then, pulling up my eyelid to insert the plastic disk, that my pupils seemed just a little bit too large. I furrowed my brow and brought my face up close to the mirror, examining my eyes. Sure enough, both of my pupils looked blown, taking up more space in my iris than they should, the way that they might if I had taken some kind of party drug.
I was confused, as I hadn’t taken any drugs last night, and even if I had, the effects would have worn off by now. With a sickening twist of my stomach, I wondered if someone had drugged me the night before. Maybe that had been the cause of the weird feeling I had all night? Maybe the strange encounter and dizziness I had felt were nothing but symptoms of an unexpected drug dose? I texted my friends to ask if anyone else had reported feeling weird or having something slipped into their drink, but no one knew anything and didn’t offer much help- going as far as to say I was probably overreacting. I know it’s stupid but I didn’t know what else to do and told myself that my friends were probably right, and went about my day as normally as I could. After all, even if someone had drugged me, it’s not like anything bad happened, I got home safely. I would just be more careful to watch my drink the next time I went out, I guess.
I tried not to think about it too much those next few days, the weird man, the possibility I got drugged, my friend’s dismissal of it all. But my pupils never seemed to go back to the right size. In fact, over the next 48 hours they seemed to get even bigger, the blackness seeming to consume the green iris of the rest of my eye. I noticed something else too, while sitting around at my campus tech support job, the lines of my tattoos weren’t quite right. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it seemed like they were… expanding? It wasn’t the normal tattoo blowout you might see, more like the edges were seeming to edge, just slightly, into the rest of my skin, ink creeping from the original lines. I didn’t connect any of this to the weird man and his questions about darkness though, at least at first. I just thought I was having some weird mental break after moving to a new city.
Over the next week and a half though, things have gotten really weird. My pupil has overtaken my iris completely and has seeped into the white of my eye as well, leaving nothing but black holes where my eyes once were. No one has seemed to notice, and when I bring it up my classmates and friends look at me like I’m crazy. My tattoos have started to overtake my skin, reaching like vines across my flesh and suffocating it in darkness. Wherever I go lightbulbs seem to short out, hall lights on campus, street lights at night. I’ve replaced my light bulbs 7 times in the last week and a half. Pervasive black grime seems permanently wedged under my fingernails, no matter how much I clean them. My roots should be growing in from the black hair dye now, but where it’s grown seems to be even darker black than the dye itself instead of my natural light brown color.
All of this has, of course, been extremely frightening, but it’s not what drove me to make this post. Last night my cat, he… disappeared. And I don’t mean he ran away, or I can’t find him, or anything like that. He. Disappeared. One minute he was stalking around a darker corner of my room that lamps couldn’t fully touch, the next minute he was just… gone. But the shadow in the corner seemed to grow… almost like it… ate him. When I tried to tell my mom she told me she had no idea I even had a cat. She got him for me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if the mumbling, staring man at the Forgotten Attic put some kind of curse on me, or if I’m just going completely crazy. I’m too scared to sleep with the lights off but no matter how many lights I leave on I wake up in the dark. So I’m posting here in hopes that someone might know what’s going on. I want to go confront the man from the club but I’m too afraid to go out at night, and I don’t even know if he’ll be there. I’ve been looking up all sorts of things on the internet but I haven’t found anything that can help me yet. I’m so scared. I’m so scared that the darkness is going to consume me, and the man’s words repeat in my head over and over again. I don’t want to disappear. Please help me. I’ll try anything. In the meantime, I think it might be time for me to change up my aesthetic.