The Prologue (story)

The air had a slight flavor to it, if you could pay enough attention.  The taste of deceit laced the air like a gaseous poison, a bitter and tangy twinge if only you stuck the tip of your tongue out, catching the particle's memories of the deceptions that occurred earlier in the evening.  The deceptions that reverbrated, even now, to a wooden house with a stone door.  The make of it was an odd craftmanship; rough-hewn and ugly, broken, incomplete, a paradox of stone, wood, plaster and plastic, things without names.  The house was an impossibility; for it was wood, the door stone: windows were fake, painted in melted plastic that bubbled and burned - or at least did at one time.  Now it was still, molded on the outside, touching the partial-roof of plaster and tar, still sticky despite the moss and mold that covered it.
The house was rusted, as well; hinges and corners, and random blunt spikes of a metallic nature; turned to rust.  It was old and ugly, a broken child's toy that was left to burn and crack for a thousand years.  And here, if you were tasting the air, the trail of deception led.  Soft, hushed voices whispered in it, the deception thick within, though almost tasteless without.
For the house exuded a sort of strange power, a block to outside forces, locking that which was in, inside, and that which was out, outside.  It was locked, time-locked, in its own bubble.  With a firm little echo there was a demand to be let out, a demand that was thoroughly refused.  It seems the deception had turned back around on the deceiver, as a cry reverbrated throughout the bubble.

It was a full week before the decaying body was found.  The eyes were closed, as gentle and graceful in death - if not more - as they ever were in life.  Her hands rested demurely on her stomach, locked together in an elegant and modest way.  She was dressed in a beautiful robe, her feet bare and her stomach covered up.
It was clear that her killer had an art with the corpses, an art he took great pride in.  Or was it a she?  Any killer with an art of corpses could be any sort of thing, and art was a ladylike pastime in such lands.  But the Lady lay resting, her robe green silk, and she prettier then she had ever been in life.  But there was a mark on her ankles, identical mirrors of betrayel.
For anyone who dares hold an art of corpses always makes clear the reason of the corpsehood.  And this had thorough meaning.  One does not need a Bible to know that adultery is a cruel act that deserves an equally terrible punishment.