The Sky Company and The Dead Detective

It looks like he's dead -- I swear it does. He doesn't breathe, he doesn't move, he's white all over; and his pipe is clenched so tightly between his teeth that we couldn't remove it. Is it him, you ask, are we certain? Well yes, we are. No one else could ever dress like that and still command respect, no one but him could bring the police cars all rushing to a humble speck under an angry sky just to look at the crumpled body of a careworn old cocaine addict; most importantly, though, no one else could make the entire city cry like that.

Nightmares are not exclusively held in sleep. They are held in the cruel heart of the cosmos and in the inaccessible and inexplicable corners of our own weakened bodies and minds. In the dead of night when the sane mind sleeps, the gears turn with scalpel precision, working to bring us nightmares that we can only blame ourselves for. The tears that flow afterwards hold no meaning -- trapped in the vortex of our own misjudgement, we slowly but surely sink into the depth of perpetual wrong.

When he was here, he could smell the evil from afar. He could warn us against being too trusting, he could nearly predict in exact sequence the axes that the enemy would line up above our unsuspecting necks. We liked to pretend that we would be fine without him -- but when we see his shadowed ghost floating away, away beyond the aeroplanes and beyond where the stars dwell, we realize that we are lost.