Dream Of An Insomniac: The Barber #1

This was from one half of a dream I had a week ago. We lived on a barnyard. Our friends were the cold black mud, steel rain and mad winds of ice and an endless black gloom that was the night. The sun could never shine again because mother earth had given up on us. So we were left by ourselves to plod through the flood in our boots and ponchos and oil lamps. Our weekly ritual of music-making by fireside seemed to be the only reason to carry on living in this sordid excuse of a world. Ever since the dawn of man, we had always found excuses to keep ourselves going against the odds: art, truth, justice, knowledge, beauty, music, sex, love, God. Whatever. We played only for the sake of existence. It was no celebration because there was nothing left to be joyous about. There was no more reason, no more purpose. The notes from our lyres rang out our last sigh before we were left to embrace judgment and the yawning grave. A group of children dressed in sackcloth sat by the crackling wood and chanted to a monophonic mantra while the women watched, their eyes shifting every now and then, away from the hope that is their children into the endless void of the night. They were expecting the dread, waiting for the end to come. They could feel the chill in their bones. The day seemed too long and empty for its own good even though hardly anyone was awake for more than four hours; it was pointless to do anything in this weather. The sullen rolls of thunder followed by the rustling of dead nature gave us the queue to put out the lights. But something was different about the night. The air was heavier. The shroud was drearier, the fog was faster, the gloaming was nearer. I could feel the end approaching us; you could almost hear it galloping like the black, bloody-eyed horses from Hades. "Back to your slums, back to your slums," the wind whispered like a ghost siren. The men gathered their families and scurried blindly through the twilight. The children let out their squeals and whimpers and clung on to their mothers who were equally terrified by the imminent but inevitable. "Here comes the flood...here comes the flood..." I had decided to stay in the gray just to see what else would come forth. The storm ceased momentarily and the leafless branches halted to a standstill. A window for pin drop silence was shattered by the sound of crushing ice and heavy leather dragged across stone. The dense mist in the air suddenly curdled as the rumbling of an army of boots trudging in our town's direction resonated through the black forest archway of lifeless oak and sequoia. And there he was, in full form, just like the horror stories we hear each year after his departure. But this was the first time I have seen him in the flesh. He was death personified: gray shoulder length hair, pale azure scaly skin. Fingers longer than the length of his palms. His breath was fuming hot with poison, each exhalation a fiery tongue of flame from the depths of the underworld. Eyes of scarlet and ruby that could peer through every corner of the soul of a man, that if you looked at him in the eye your flesh might melt like hot wax. He donned a deep violet velvet trench coat which had a longer cape than usual, with splints of steel armor accentuating the frame of his shoulders. A preserved goat's skull tied to the back of his head, its bony antlers jolting out his back like a pincer of a scorpion. Underneath his cloak was a bronze belt stained with dried blood wrapped below his waistline, sporting a number of shaving blades and gleaming knives - his harbingers of fate. The townsfolk were scattering back to their own sheds and stick houses as he walked swiftly through our little ghost town. My eyes tried to bring themselves to his face as he brushed past a group of us, but

as soon as he felt my gaze his head turned slowly in my direction while stopping in his tracks. My heart died and my skin froze. I could feel the jelly of my eyes turn hot all of a sudden while the hair on my body started to brim with static. Immediately I tried looking away from his face, staying as inconspicuous as possible. But somehow I knew that I was meant to face him, and the message was clear. My time had come. Tonight was my turn to visit The Barber.