Happy Devils, Unhappy Kings

Even Prague midnight is only dark gray, not black. Certainly not blue. Colorless, dim, swathing the landscape with something like balm, but cold, cool, not uncaring, but by no means indulgent.
   They sleep fitfully, their dreams peopled by stern faces, dogs barking in the distance. They wake to cold gray light, not knowing why they remain even for a moment in bed, but only that they do, in some sort of paralysis from which they somehow cannot make themselves recover.
   They come in now, to each other's somnambulant landscapes, in overlit flashes and grainy, decomposing stock: like strobe lights in pornographic films unearthed from bunkers.

from The Book of the Living