He’s out there again, waking me up, and always on the night before an important morning. The constant muttering and scratching and spitting. He doesn’t stop, oh no, he does stop, but only to yell out in his maddening tongue of barks and babbling. I hate him. I’d grit my teeth and bear it, force myself back to sleep through sheer willpower, but whenever I’m woken up I’m already clenched into a full body, sweaty palmed, fist. I grit my eyes, my teeth, and my neck, always aching. Tears of frustration would leak from my eyes but that would mean I’d have to open them, and opening my eyes just to see the disappointingly bright blue darks of the early morning will mean that he has beaten me. The sky is never black when I need it to be the most, it's always that awful blue. Blue is nice when you’re Van Gough and chucking paint at a canvas, but when you have the steely taste of you tongue between your teeth and your eyes wrenched open by a stiff jaw, it's more of a cursed ceiling sunrise. 

And still he is out there, punctuating my self loathing with an almost cunning ESP to his oration, interrupting my thoughts with his weird sounds. He leaves eventually, he always does, but by then it is too late. Like the ticking of a clock, he scuttles away, with just as much commotion as if followed by an especially clumsy horse. At this point you either fall back to sleep and wake up late, missing anything you may have had planned, or wait until the next night to be disappointed by insomnia again. I could not fall asleep until around 2am on this night, I bet it’s around 4am now, so I will be stuck here in this bed for hours unrested and apprehensive. Always the day before something important. I lie in my shack of a bedroom with that beast outside on the streets taunting me. Every time.

My morning was pleasant, in contrast, since for once I was wide awake. Pleasant, though, only through ambivalence. It was nice to float through the early hours of the day at an appropriate time according to social norms. I won’t feel any shame in saying I had enough time to eat, wash, and settle into wokeness as I usually don’t have the opportunity to. All being because I am a serial lark. A shame I would usually feel as I skip my breakfast, haphazardly splash water across my face, and lumber my way out of the door in a rush. Of course this ambivalence tips towards weighty insomnia rather quickly. I swear to myself, as I do every time that this happens, that I won’t let this unproductive kind of night have a chance to repeat itself.

But as I lie here again, throwing myself into sleep, I think about how I can’t trust my body. My body that plummets into lethargy in the waking hours, dulling my wit in front of those important figures I couldn’t afford to lose any face to, and the body that betrays me the moment I sit, bringing me to sleep then instead of when I needed it to happen before. I bitterly and hardheadedly renounce my unhelpful partner in all of this and assure myself that sleep will arrive promptly now. A deal that my gormless cohort, I now find out, seems to have rejected. Sleep isn’t some kind of heavy labour, so why do my joints creak and why am I so hot and sweaty? Why am I so dehydrated and why is my stomach moaning? It’s 4am again. This time, however, I can’t blame the awful old tramp. This time I’m just awake. But I can’t help but contemplate, if that freak who visits me on these nights when I need to be asleep the most were to have never started yelling, would I be wrapped in these rags right now, wishing for my much needed rest? Again I’m reminded of the ineptitude of these cheap curtains that seem to follow me throughout my life. They never seem to be capable of blotting out the blue in these late hours of the morning. Nostalgia like the aftertaste of a chilli pepper passes through me as I lament the high frequency of which I’ve been paralysed like this since I was a school child. Except now, as an adult with the privilege of being a rent paying tenant, I get to sleep on the ground floor retrofitted living room facing the street. I’m gifted with a puppet show of early morning commuters taunting me as they rush past, already rested. As I frantically shift my positions I can’t help but catch glimpses of them. One is particularly frustrating. They lean on my window and don’t stand up straight. Their hunch, just the sight of it, makes my already groaning neck feel like rotten wood. All I can see is their shoulders. Just stand up straight!

But I’m prepared for this next night. I’ve made sure to drink plenty of water, don’t want to wake up dry after a heavy sweat, and have eaten at an appropriate time. No sugar after 4pm. My body will be conquered. I’ve stayed out of my room all day, I’ve read that it's harder to sleep the more time you spend in bed while awake. Now if I wake up again, I’ll get out, wait, then try to sleep again. My sleeping space won’t have a chance to conspire with my anatomy on this night. And if that man makes an appearance again, oh that decrepit ancient thing, then I’ll have to do something about it. I set a glass of water to my bedside so even if I do get thirsty I don’t have to leave my bed. It’ll also be useful in case I get too hot, because you know how these things go? You’re always far too hot on the inside, and freezing on the out. You’re somehow sweltering under the sheets, but the moment a lick of air can get to your skin you are frozen to the bone. Frozen, but only in that one spot. Truly maddening. For this reason I’ve also bought new sheets. The old ones were rags compared to these, these new ones are specifically and scientifically designed for sleep. Not like the old ones, those were thick and heavy, but also thin and lumpy. No such thing as a consistency in them. As well as this, it also seems that no matter how often you wash them, a worn in set of bedding like that never quite gives up the stench of the sweat, and the piss, and the faeces you’ve soaked into them. Preparation has me feeling good for this one. 

So I get in, lie straight, stretch my limbs one last time and articulate my jaw to loosen it up. I won’t be waking up with that trademarked groggy slime of a taste in my mouth this time! And this time, it seems, is the time things work out. The stars have aligned so that the street outside is still. The light doesn’t creep in and the task of keeping my eyes closed seems to be infinitely easier. Nothing to distract me from what will be a long awaited occasion where I fall asleep on the date before the one I will wake up on. Eyes closed. Still air. Good temperature. Body unintrusive. Hours of laying down with my eyes shut in this liminal space between cloud nine and the land of the living. The weight of consciousness lifting from my body. Eyes shut. Still air. Good temperature. Body unintrusive. Everything silent. Sounds in the kitchen. Everything good. No, wait, that tapping. From the kitchen. Did I leave the tap on? No, it wouldn’t have taken me this long to notice. Then what is it? A leaking pipe? A dripping gutter from otherwise phantasmal rain? It isn’t anything because I can’t hear it. But then, hidden behind the distant winds from beyond my window, creeping through my house, it’s a scuffle. But I refuse to hear it still. Jaw clenched ever so slightly, blood rearing through my ears. There is nothing to be heard. But again; there is. Is it wind? Tapping on the kitchen window, a scraping out in the back garden, and the sound of thin soled shoes on the concrete. I swear, to whatever ultimate power there may be, if it's that old man here to ruin my one night of good sleep, I’ll frown even more. 

I feel my hands now, for the first time in hours, as I clutch onto the sheets in anger. I can’t force myself to ignore it anymore. I hear him out there, looking through the bins, scratching through the drains. He’s like a rat or a wild dog. That beastly thing, I can see his greasy, long, awful hair now. I can see it tangle off of his head and into whatever tattered mess of clothes he’s draped on himself. No, I’ve never seen the man, just his odd silhouette, but I can see him in my mind’s eye plain as the day that I know is creeping up on me again. I snap upright. I’ve had enough. No thought put into this, just sitting up. Getting out of this bed and launching myself into the back rooms. Damn him. I’m tensed. My neck alone rigid enough to crowbar a car wreck. I feel the clawing hands of Bedlam squeezing all over me, a taut flexibility. 

Like a lion, or probably more accurately a hippo, I’m instinctually driven. A libidinal drive to oust this vermin. It's late enough into the night to be wonderfully dark. Perfect darkness for a normal rest, making this disturbance more infuriating. My cramped and awkwardly furnished sleeping space, owing to the landlord’s careless hodgepodge of anti feng shui, would be a tatter of obstacles and unintuitive paths to anyone else but me even in the daylight. However, at this time of night and when you hope to be back to sleep soon, you avoid turning on the light so as not to ruin your vision. You have your minds eye and hands stretched out as feelers to preserve your sight here. Stretching out into the dark abyss in front of me, I clumsily fold my fingers against the door. Closer than I imagined it being and exacerbated by its dark colour in this low light. It lets me into the hallway nonetheless. Proven by the uncomfortable slap of a foot on the cheap laminate flooring. One embossed with the sickening and specky grit, hair, and detritus common in such entryways. An uncleanliness I put on hold for now as the rapping of fingers against a window, or the dropping of drips of water, serve as my unholy invoker while I pass into the communal living space. I’m uncivilised as I ricochet off the sides of the fake leather sofas like a dodgem and scuff my feet on more cheap wooden flooring. Balance sacrificed in haste as I make my way towards the kitchen at the back of the house. All while stumbling like an ape but an ape with the knowledge that this will soon be over. My eyes, or rather my fingertips as it is still too dark to see properly, are set on the kitchen in the next room.

My frame lurches into the doorway. I’m braced for confrontation. No fear could pulse through me as I was too preoccupied with frustration. A frustration I’m reminded of by my constant chewing of my own teeth and the moaning of my perpetually stressed joints. As I look into the room hoping to catch the first glimpse of my adversary the streetlights shine from behind the back alley, lighting up the room with a cosmetic white lunar light. The window at the back glimmers black with the shining stars of thumb marks and splashed water from the tap that together puke up makeshift constellations. Other than this dull haze of city lights pushing shadows past the arching tap and the mess of unwashed glasses stood beside it at the back of the room, I was alone. The smell of past meals barged into my nostrils as I took my bearings, a jarring phenomena to be reminded of this room’s purpose outside of this witching hour, haunted by my own previous activity. The darkness was re-contextualising the mops standing up on the right hand wall as a mess of monstrous cobwebs and distorting the shape of a chair so as to make it appear closer than it actually is. But this otherwise terrifying grayscale was barren. All except for the sudden sound of a dragging honk from the back garden. 

I was scanning the room as it happened, but my head still caught it with an instinctual twitch to correct my focus. Something was out the back. I was sure of it now, I could no longer deny it. But my approach had changed since the denial as now I was steadfast to end this quickly. My aching body sauntered towards the window as I sparsely gazed into it’s glassy void. The patting of my bare feet rhythmically in tune to his fingers I could still hear dripping onto the windowsill. Now my own war beat. I lean with both of my hands on the worktop by the sink and bend into the window to get a better look. 

Immediately I stopped. My bravado is over. I see it there. There’s someone on the other side of this glass staring straight into me, and I’ve clumsily walked up to face them without thinking. Indescribable as I stand there for what felt like minutes but in reality must have been milliseconds. The sound of blood fills my ears, my back arches like a cat’s and my body is reduced to petrified wood. Immobilised I stand there gazing into this thing I’ve glimpsed that sacrifices no greater detail the longer I look at it. It’s a ghoul or a ghost, stupid I know but a valid primal fear. Even so, if it isn’t supernatural, the type of person to encroach on another’s space like this, another’s time, another’s sleep, that type of person may, in the moment anyway, be equally as eldritch. And worse; there may be more of them. Home invaders. I dare not look behind me because I know an accomplice stands there. At the same time what I look at now is too awful. I can’t even blink because that will give me away. I haven’t seen them, that thing looking back at me, I have to convince them of that. Blinking would be a liability. Oh but it’s too much! I can’t bring myself to stare at it any longer. Tears are welling up and distorting it even more. The devil grows even more hideous. My eyes are dry!

Then I hear it again. The plastic screech of what sounds like a lawn chair on the ancient concrete outside. I blink. I’m limber now and can see the thing outside for what it is. I fall back into a straight posture and my arms loosen up as they hang off of my shoulders. A silhouette of a person about my height stands in the garden just beyond that pane of glass. I’m going out and ending this. I know who it is now too, because as my eyes rested from my sudden fright, I could see the outline in better detail. The person out there had no head, they were standing in that awful hunch of the babbling man. It fills me with rage how he can stand with such an extremely uncomfortable posture. Nevertheless I darted backwards and reached out for the door. I unlock it with no trouble and push it open. The silence of the kitchen filled with only the muted whispers of outside is ended abruptly by the loud unsealing of the door. The mechanical kiss sound fills my ears as I gaze out onto the sodden concrete and brick garden. More sound is thrown at me as if the orchestra prepares their instrument but this time it is rainfall. The stench of the stagnant drains and wet concrete acts as the precursor to my wet and reckless strides out into the rain, half naked and barefoot, towards my nemesis. I’m ready for an outburst, and maybe violence, but as I turn the corner there is nobody by the window. An old rusted pole that was once used to fasten a clothesline and a rotting white plastic chair sit there mocking me. Plain as day loitering in the moonlight. The tap-tap-tapping of the rain spittles onto the side of my face. I can see that a part of the gutter is jammed and the water is hitting the window. Almost disappointingly I walk back inside, lock the door, brush my feet of dirt and walk back to bed. 

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And so, I lie here again, absent of victory but at least partially comfortable. “I’m a fool” I think to myself whilst grinning in bed. A nice change from my usual sneer. I’ve been torturing myself and that’s why I can’t sleep. My imagination has gotten so used to this disturbance that it makes them up itself now. It has become normal for my sleep to be interrupted so I did it to myself when I thought it wasn’t going to happen naturally. But I’m comfortable again. The bed feels less occupied and fresh again like the start of the night. Ready to go back to sleep I close my eyes. I see it again. For a brief moment between closing my eyes and catapulting myself upright again. The face. I did see something there, I really did, I forgot it in the moment and convinced myself I was being silly but it was there. Printed onto the back of my eyelids like a photocopy burn. A simulacra that will sit with me forever, even when I push myself to forget it. A hideous and tight face. It was as pale as the electric light from the lampposts and the blacks hidden in its creases as glossy as the winedark window. Bald and fleshy it stared back at me with a rubbery and unnaturally round head, just outside of my home, with nothing but a single window between us. A being of pure malice reflected back at me. It’s sunken eyes were pits of darkness but the whites shone back as perfect circles. It looked as if the skin on the back of it’s head was being pulled back by a meat hook. That was the indescribable and terrible grimace that I saw in the kitchen. That was the rancid visage that stopped me from sleeping for another night. 

I woke up the following morning late again. I went through my routine like a zombie again. I prettied myself up and fed myself so that I could put up a facade of normalcy for the day. Again. But a dry mouth to some toast is closer to defecation than eating, and lost time, lost day time anyway, can never be rectified. For a while after my sleeping schedule fell back into a consistent cycle. Of course it was still off balance with the timelines of others, but at least it was something. Late nights of patient waiting, and early mornings of agitating alarms. The exhaustion and anxiety continued but I became acclimated. Before long the mood this state put me in became commonly accepted as my standard setting in my social circles and I myself integrated it as part of my personality. Nobody really noticed and eventually it became just another monotony. A new normal, however, means stability, and I feel optimistic that I can turn this into a solid foundation to help improve things. I don’t want to be left behind in this loathsome state reserved only for the lazy ones who are beneath me. On another night I will try again, but for now I will accept this liminal timeline for myself. Yet that night would never be allowed to carry through to morning. 

Car lights flash by like lighting. In a Gothic novel this would be ample mood setting for my torture. It’s another night, with another important morning, disturbed. It started earlier than usual. Thanks to exhaustion I managed to get to sleep around ten pm the previous night and, until now, had been slumbering like a baby. Natural, unimpeded, and effortless sleep. But at around two, my traditional bedtime up to this point, I was torn from sleep abruptly. It was painful and is still biting at me even now. You see, as I laid in bed sound asleep, a hellish racket roared past my window. A sudden and abrupt devil of a sound that shredded the stagnant air around me and instantly had my heart clawing and panicking inside my chest like the rat in the wooden skirting it is. As quickly as it arrived it was gone, but I was still left alone with my lungs stuttering to catch my breath for a good while. I would later reason to myself that it must have been a compensator in a car or the bin lorry, but this didn’t stop me from pleading for madness or anaesthesia in the meantime. Anything to take away that brief but acute pain. I give up. It’s a sad fact that I’m thoroughly defeated. I muttered to myself and slurped on my tears and snot in a way uncannily familiar. This resemblance was deeply upsetting. 

A resemblance so strong it seemed to summon the man. In my state as a scattering of limbs interspersed with pillows and sheets, the oppressive blue bruised black that was squeezing me as if a layer of wet concrete laid atop me and the sickly mute sound of the room were interrupted. The clip-clop of a horse broke the silence and cleaned the pallet. The tired and rotting stench, and taste, and sight of the room were attacked by this minty cleanser. And so too this acquiescence at my fate as an insomniac. The shadow of a large creature filled the corner of the royal blue theatre of my window. The horse must have had its head to the ground or it had walked in reverse into this current position because I could see no head. Just a clumsy and thick silhouette sent to frustrate me. As I squinted at this new presence, hoping to gain some clarity through a wrenching frown, the silent canvas was ruined once more. Breaching the ambience of this idle horse was that incursive voice, seemingly as loud and awful as that previous demonic squeal in the night. Now I was angry. Now I was no longer willing to give myself up to fate. Now was going to be the first time I would look at this man and confront him for all he has done to me. Now is when I scratched the curtains along their rail and tainted the night with my own voice. 

What I see is the man on the other side of the street. No horse. He is kicking the bins and babbling like a greasy, waxy, twig-like infant. He wears a pair of baggy jeans littered with tears and stains that consume shoes that themselves fan out at the sole. They’re pulled tight around his waist with some kind of makeshift cord stained brown with filth. The size of his trousers clash greatly against how hard this belt is fastened against his skinny frame. A juxtaposition continued in his coat. A large waterproof thing the same colour as the awful blue that leaks through my curtains in the morning intermingled with reflective silver stripes that project the moon towards me in antisocial flashes as I look at him. For the first time I realised that this man I had hated so deeply was no beast, but a person. A homeless man with circumstances far worse than my own. There is no melancholy like the kinship I felt towards him in that moment or the help I wished to give him. In reality I am so narcissistic since the only thing I felt more than my pity and my apologies was my shame. 

At least until the rage came back. His mutterings became mute as my teeth cracked and moaned under the strain I put them. He had seen me, I know he did, so why couldn’t I see his face? That awful face was good only for looking him in the eye as I confronted him but he was split over into his hunch. In this darkness I couldn’t even see his head. At which point, his indescribable yammering and vandalism increased. All positive emotions left me. I have never so much as peered through the curtains to look at him before, and already tonight has blown that out of the window, but now I feel myself drawn with intent to the door so that I may challenge him proper. All sympathy is gone.

I strode through the room. Unlike the previous night I was smooth and strong in my movement. All of my confidence, however, was underpinned by a small paranoia that I may lose my bravery just like that other night. But it was an inkling that didn’t have the full opportunity to write itself out in full because my hand was on the chain already. It shinks across the latch. The lock of cold brass was next, a small knob inside this obnoxiously large door, stiffly spun. It is unlocked and ready to swing open. Despite its weight it felt light in my hand as I shot out of the barrel of my hallway into the open night. I must have not been wearing much at all. To anyone else watching what is about to happen I may look just as, if not more, unhinged than my adversary. The familiar splattering of my bare feet against the rain damp concrete floor of outside heralded my own vocal onslaught aimed towards the man like a railgun. The arillery of my coarse yet loud words, I feel, hit him squarely. I stand now, legs apart in a stance of power. My spine uncoiled and my joints spry. Even my eyesight felt more deliberate and clear. But he didn’t flinch. In spite of my almost superhuman courage and whit, he didn’t even acknowledge me. My jaw dropped aghast. This, however, had the disturbing and baffling side effect of putting out tiny vibrations into the air. My heart was drumming in my chest and forcing out a vomit of beats. My teeth rang in their gums, finally allowing a respite from my constant clenching of the jaw, and putting out their own little arpeggios. The buzzing of my molars was like a dentist’s drill who’s fracking crew consisted of mosquitoes. This was backed up by the deep humming of my heart, something akin to radio static or white noise on an old television. My stress and anxiety had become material as the air around me coalesced into electrifying spirals. My own Will-O-Wisp like a blood splattering of Tipp-Ex. Now he could see me. See may be too inaccurate a word though. I was finally beheld. 

My small fear had come true. I was immobilised again. Just like the night before when I saw that face. The anticipation was what killed me. He shambled around to turn to me. Still hunched he swept his left foot forward, not allowing it to leave the floor once, and precariously planted the broken shoe there. He bends his second knee and hops forwards. Why does he walk like that? And why still hunched so extremely that even now I can’t see him? I attempt to swallow out of fear but I gag instead. The stench is unholy and creeps up my nostrils in the same broken way the man himself now approaches me. The spirals of my vibrating are broken by these devilish red vapours. A special mix between filth, sweat and something more. Something even worse. He stunk of damp, and spit, and urine, and death. He was some kind of cadaver. This realisation cemented my full defeat. No thought I could ever think could be strong enough to wrest me out of this man’s influence as he points his crooked hand towards me so as to grasp me. Still his head is nowhere to be seen. In all of my terror and complete submission that small hatred of his posture still afflicted me. But as he slurried forward like a slug I realised something integral. He wasn’t just deformed or decrepit but much more. My head convulses once again as part of my series of migraines and body aches. A thick wave of muscular contractions crease up my head and provokes another gagging from my heart and stomach. Tears and snot bleached the skin with cold as they streamed down my face. He grasped my arm, apparently coming into touching distance while I was distracted by pain. This is the last time I ever looked at him. As my head shuddered upwards, bringing my line of sight from the road to his own, I saw that he was not slouching. There was no face because there was no head. The monochrome darkness expunged all blue from my vision as he mumbled one last time, but this time with a screeching like nails hammering into my ears, I gaze into the fleshy and wet crevice where his neck once would have been. The sputtering of his stench in liquid form christened my face as the screeching could be felt all along my skin save for my wrist still in his dusty and rough grasp. The cartilaginous pipes weep. They pulsate. They speak this hellish language of the Dullahan towards me. 

I woke up on that last morning stinking. I’d been woken up earlier by a passive aggressive housemate complaining to themselves about the front door being left ajar, but managed to slip back to sleep. I could feel a slug trail of my own staining my bed with sweat and other bodily excrement. The same shame and pity I felt in that dream hits me but rather being aimed towards myself as I realise that I thoroughly soiled myself. With my head still ringing and beating like the heart in my chest, I sit up. A migraine unlike any I have ever had and a morning sickness that outdid any other multiple times over burned into me. I raise my hands so as to massage my sockets with my thumbs in an attempt to ease the pain, but at the moment that my hands would typically reach my face I realised that my eyes aren't closed but rather I couldn't see anything. A revelation that was far too late and couldn’t save me as my hands pushed beyond where my skull should have been and instead dove into a fleshy hole of my own, squelching down my throat and fingering at food bits and half-digested pieces. Deep down my neck. From soft to rough, into my chest. I have no head.