The Boogeyman's Lullabye

The Man With Gold Hair

  I didn't feel that I was expected to know how to react, or to understand what the man had just said.  So I stood and waited, jaw clenched and trying so hard not to think about those words.  'Your mind'.  The air around us felt sticky, the world surreal and intangible, and the floor below was cooling off.  The man huffed a breath, and then another, and I tried to speak but couldn't think of words, couldn't comprehend the response I was supposed to give.   And the man knew.  He knew, and for once calmed  down with the swipe of a hand over his face.

"It's very complicated, and I know you want an explanation, but I can't give you a good one, alright?  So I am going to give you the best one I can, and when it's not good enough you aren't going to say a word." He said, pointing to me tiredly.  I nodded.  He nodded right back, almost to make sure that what he had said held  true to himself, and then looked around a moment.  There was a pause, and then a decision told all by his shoulders that twitched and turned, and finally lunged forward.  I followed.

  The street beneath my feet was uneven, and hurt the soles of my feet to try and balance on each of the bloated cobblestones.  I couldn't imagine a horse or buggy trying to traverse such a street.  But, not wanting to be lost in a place I didn't feel entirely secure in, I did my best to keep up to the man who seemed to have no problem stomping on and off hunched stones.  I took note of his quick pace, of his sudden determined and yet head-strong demeanor.  He was just walking down the street, looking left and right with a stony look on his face, as if that child-thing had not just been here.  And as dangerous as it seemed, his confidence gave me a sense of...almost safety, but not quite.  Teetering on safety.

  I remained silent as he suddenly veered to the right, only noticing that a sign had been tacked haphazardly and more than once to the front of a grey-wooded building.  How he'd made out the word 'Tavern' I had absolutely no idea, me only seeing the faded words on thread-bare paint when I was almost directly beneath it.  There was no staircase leading up to the door, just a foot-thinned doorstep and then the door itself, made almost comically incorrectly with no way to fit in the door frame correctly, permanently propped open by the uneven width.  When he shoved open the door, it made a cry of pain that was almost painful to hear.

  There were few sounds inside as the man held the door open behind him, waiting until I stood next to him to allow the screaming door to slam shut again, sealing us into a dusty room of strangers.  He didn't even give me a moment to look around, to see every stranger in the dim light, hunched at tables and hunched at the bar to our right, hunched serving drinks and hunched in groups or alone.  No one was sitting up.  That was all I could tell.  

  He walked forward brusquely, as if he knew this place, and no one questioned him about it.  In fact, no one lifted a head, no voices were raised above a raspy whisper.  It was almost as if we didn't exist.

  I barely kept up with him, half-stumbling along behind as he reached the other side of the room and pushed open a door that had something written on the front, but it was in blue paint and had faded away to obscurity.  

"Do you know this place?" I asked, wondering why he would barge into a place without rhyme or reason and act as if it were his home.  He ignored me, which I was growing disturbingly accustomed to, as he led me around a corner and into a room even hazier than the last.  If all the dust in the world could be brought into one place, then this was it.  It floated in the air and settled on tables and chairs, covered the two, yellow-tinted windows to our right.  The only places it didn't touch were sparse footsteps left by the one sleeping man in the corner, his back to the corner of the room and one foot on the rung of his old wooden chair, the other thrust out and displaying a greyed toe sticking out of a frayed seam.  

  The dust even seemed to collect on him, falling onto his brown jacket and shielding his down-turned face, an unhealthy snore coming from him that let me know he was, indeed, in a deep sleep.  This didn't bother the man, who noisily pulled out a chair from a solitary table in the odd back room.  As he sat I stood, looking around uncertainly.  It was a room that seemed like it was meant for some purpose that people all knew and never mentioned.  A room for secrets and lies and drinking alone.  Which maybe was what the sleeping man had just done.