And so we die.
One misfortune follows another follows another, and one by one the bodies are strewn across the graveyard like the final scene of a Shakespearean tragedy. As the curtain falls, I am the only man left standing.
It does no good in moments like these to admit to our earthly passions, to repent or to plea or to fall before the cross and beg your Good Lord to guide you through.
All one can do is stand... and watch.
The whispers outside flutter through the windows as moths drawn to a flame, the rustle of the story in the papers in their hands. They talk of sin and murder, a hideous body with Dorian's rings, a leather suitcase stamped with Basil's initials and devoid of all his things. They lower their voices and I hear of azure eyes glazed over with opium-den smoke, glisten-white skin and red, red mouths, scars and bruises and blood lust wounds no one wants to admit.
I know better now. There is only one sin, a crime for which we may be eternally punished, tethered to this earth for ever – a crime so grievous that neither heaven nor hell will accept its perpetrators. It is the sin of those who are indifferent to life and the living: it is the sin of those who worship nothing.
Instead we chase after empty banners and empty words, voices high and hoarse for ever in that air for ever black, miscreants who never were alive and who are, yet, unpermitted to die. We roam the earth until the end of time, this ante-chamber of hell, cigars in our mouths and blood in our eyes, trying to forget the way the tears fall on maggot infested ground.
We are the angles who rallied for neither Lucifer nor God, and so, alone, we watch them die.