dc comics: news update
[Cut for dead things, length.]
Art, she murmured, on rails through flesh, singing in gray matter. Art. There is an older drive, one for the purity of the lord's work, the good old God of the old testament, but now something pagan mingles in, something that moves through the trees in darkness and feels mud in its toes, something older than bibles.
The man is found as people begin to tidy up after the nightmare ends, as they roll away stones and set chairs upright. He's in a back room at a local mall, of all places, antiseptic flourescents overhead, stock all around him on the shelves, and alone.
He is smoking.
There is smoke curling from his blackened nostrils, from the shriveled gaps of his ears, from the a chink in his skull, turning over his head like a question mark. He's been dead at least three days, killed sometime when the lights were still off in this part of the city. But still, he smokes. Nothing left to burn, but he smolders. When the medical examiner touches the body, it collapses, like a a delicate, air-celled meringue of ash and bone.
Aside from the corpse, nothing else is burned. The chair isn't even singed. Comparisons in the news are drawn to the impossible death of a couple in their apartment by isolated, freakish drowning a few months back. The public is tired of bad news, though, after what it has just been through, and only the strangeness of the murder gets it into the news, before it swiftly fades from the public eye.
What's left of the corpse is taken in for testing. The signature at the crime scene is held back from the press - a dove, drawn in heavy-pressed white chalk, the lines carefully arranged on the floor outside the chair legs, hemming in the corpse.
When the police arrived, embers glowed in the skull, peering from its hollowed sockets. They moved like eyes over those that approached, animated and desperate, until the corpse collapsed.