He had never been in a place like this before. And it made him uneasy. This feeling wasn't helped by the gentleman dressed as a clown, stood in the corner in deep conversation with a brigitte bardot in a slander blue dress, her eyes the colour of the sea, her smile just as dangerous. The young man looked away hurriedly, intrigued by her smile yet afraid of her beauty. The clown looked on with mirth. Situated in his right hand the clown grasped a glass of blood red wine, his painted tears smiling in a semi drunken stupor but his eyes seeming and alert as ever. Sat on his shoulder, crowned in a black, a stately raven, eating piece of raw meat, looked on with the eyes of the devil.
The clown walked across the room and opened the door and in stepped a gentleman in a bowler hat with a cane and a curled moustache painted onto his upper lip. He smiled thinly at the clown who pointed at the young man and the gentleman turned his cold cruel smile onto the young man.
As the clown and the gentleman entered into profound conversation the lights flickered and dimmed casting shadows across the faces of those present. Only now did he see the hunter, dressed in khaki, with a musket who had the appearance of an old English explorer, speaking to a crazy eyed savage with a spear and a shrunken human head, (that seemed in the light to be screaming silently), dressed only in a red loin cloth who blended into the shadows, his skin a black nightmare with a heart of darkness.
The young man tore his eyes away in fear but they lingered on a cat lying in the corner, the eyes shining with the scent of the kill, moving only to avoid the feet of the mathematician in animated conversation with a philosopher, a princess and a witch about the formula to create a perfect religion as the handmaiden practices backgammon against a dirty orphan to the sound of the poet urinating in a bottle while declaring his plans to have it published as poetry.
A priest and a gimp move across the mirrored floor, admiring the reflection of their high heeled boots, the gimp appearing to be trying to convert the priest and are both oblivious to the detectieve with his big book of mysteries trying to unravel the bardot's blue dress and work out the geometry of lust and dreams.
A vampire wrapped in his cloak ordering dinner from the young beautiful asylum seeker, working to pay her educational debts where she learnt the greater sum of international conspiracies, taught by a man who lives on a grassy knoll, where he lives with the countess who has organised the bar tab for a monk whose date today is a monkey. Moving closer and closer towards the young man until he is backed into a corner with no hope of escape. The monkey's eyes focused on the young man, blood on his mind, fear and pain an inevitability, surely...
Today was the dress rehearsal for the play. Everyone was in costume, feeling excited and nervous but part of the nervousness was focused for who was the young man watching there every move, with darkness in his eyes.