The Night Is So Long Before The Dead Begin To Speak

In daylight hours, I like to read stories of haunted towns, uninhabited cities. I stare at the faded photographs, the faces, trying to memorize each detail. Then at night, I lie awake in bed while the whole world permeates sleep, attempting with intense power of concentration to bridge whole villages back to life; imagining their tasks, fears, songs they sang, day-dreams they indulged. I have seen traces of their existence on bruised brick, ruined walls, opened up ceilings. There are ancient cars, now turning into an airy Battenberg of chain-mail, and skeleton keys fit only for a skeleton now. Sometimes their presence here seems more like a myth, a blighted stair going nowhere, up into an endlessly black and annihilating night. I want to know if they ever actually lived, and to know it with something near to certainty. It could be I am looking for assurance only for myself; or perhaps there is the fear I was just foolish enough to believe that sleep was only a partition between days, and that one single night could never out-last lifetimes.