Never There

By the time they got to where we never were we hadn’t been there. And while they did, in fact, by the very nature of their purposes, become the source of the crime they came to investigate — the corpse they found was made not of living life or flesh — but stones. Books and skeletal remains, marked with the cyphers of a madness too pervasive to find notice, a plague too common to demonstrate the necessary remarkability so as to be understood as disease, rather than standard. By the time they got to where it hadn’t happened, their errand was it happening. And while their course invented itself with maps they brought as if sealed in otherworldly ice, the meanings thus emergent had less of verity than vice. Some pernicious representatives of a fictive species whose livid processes have about them the reek of the gibbet and the mind of the abattoir. The nascent location was an evanescence dissolving away before them like the misty tropes of a fading dream. The reflection there is of the sky, and patterns in the clouds — not words and accusations; nor weapons, courts and law. Skeletal remains, marked with the cyphers of a madness too pervasive to be less than intellect, and too virulent to be more than malign. By they time they got to where never had become our absences, the source of the crime had gone into them; their eyes saw little but its strange and distant purposes; their hands became its holy agents. Frankly, we were never there.