This empty bed is a tomb.

In the five minutes between the alarm clock's initial report and the snooze alarm's follow-up, I journeyed through space and time, and saw the man who kills me. He wears a black double-breasted pea coat, swollen with misgivings and wrong turns, with tufts of grey hair like a defeated crown on his flaking, sun-marred pate. Dark brown leather shoes, dark brown like blood dried on wood, click-clack on bleak pavement: the cadence to my fall. As he approaches me, closes in, I should be able to make out his face, but I cannot. Where a visage ought to be there is instead a swirling abyss, a gaping chasm, an ineffable gulf, the underlying, inevitable nothingness that patiently awaits each and every one of us, swallowing whole all matter intrinsic to me, imprisoning it forever and always in the frozen burial of a tan turtleneck. There calls a hollow howl; a ball of ice thirty thousand miles long hurls through the blackest ink at fifty million light years per second and strikes the full face of the moon: the knell to begin the harvest of darkness. From the burgundy, piss-stained carpet: maggots, spawn of filth, sowers of disease, harbingers of calamity. A hand is raised and a bony finger is pointed at me. Shadows take definitive shape and an emaciated jaw forms around the vast emptiness. The abyss clears its throat; pellets - the surviving remains of ensnared virgins young - rattle in its unfathomable depths. A fetid word is uttered: 'You . . .'; with the ellipsis, tangible and ad infinitum, like smoke from the barrel-end of the yawning void. There is no escaping, now, the destiny that awaits me. Soon I will have to wake up and go to work.