Funny thing, time—relentless and undetected, all that death and destruction, and everything just kept going—the implacable ticking of time. Authorities insisted there had never been a "humanoid typhoon", or "plants", or a "July", and that the "lost technology" was a fairy tale. In some forgotten village there was a dark-haired man tied to a stake in a pen that some charitable souls kept for him. He had been put there ever since the day he burst into town raving that "she" had been for nothing and that they were trying to cover it all up and that every single blasted day was Tuesday.
When the local sheriff tried to talk some sense into him, he only responded with: "I died on the shores of Demetri" and to any question his answer was a marvel of incomprehension, so the patient man abandoned him to his fate. After that, they kept him in the yard. They tried to erect a shelter for him but he seemed completely insensible to climate. He had the forlorn look of an emaciated animal in the rain. He ate whatever they gave him and in the end seemed so harmless and helpless that they untied him. It mattered not because he never left the spot by his little shed.
On one occasion he was observed to speak to someone, but the other participant in the conversation was not visible to anyone else. They only heard him shout: "Nicholas! You've come so far!"
Not long after that, a mysterious man arrived, a rambler whose feet seemed to be unsure of the actuality of the ground. He was dressed in a simple black suit and carried a little black book with golden keys in which was written all the holy days and the names of the saints. When they inquired of his origin he simply said "I descended from one of them." Perplexed, they asked him why he had come there. His answer to this was just as enigmatic.
"I have come for the dirges of the angel."
The next day, the man in the tattered red coat died in his pen. It was of no real consequence except that the pen was suddenly imbued with the aroma of gunpowder which would never go away even when it was coated with lye. Out in the streets a soft shower of red geraniums fell all day and all that night so that housewives were exhausted from sweeping them off the stoops in bucketfuls and dogs had to be brought in so that they would not be suffocated in their sleep. They could not bury the body because no sooner did they touch it that it seemed to disintegrate like sand and where he had laid there was only a pile of grimy, damp feathers mixed in with the red geraniums.