What future is enshrined in us, you base pretenders to our pain? What makes you mortals put us on that we the worn might live again? You schemers and you squanderers, you walkers in the garb of flesh, how can you love us, we the dead to whom you speak in darkened rooms, when profits warm your outstretched hands the more with every cold untruth, compelling you to whisper now and evermore to those that grieve? You speak by the right hand but act from the left, then cry false feeling down the wind, yet who among you, kin to none, will say in truth the lies of men? So see you, then, the mockery that is this life’s immortal truth? You Fanny Conants, William Mumlers, peddlers of the spirit all, who flout the very love you seek, so seek we all in mortal clothes, with leaden shoes and glowing paints and counterpane tableaus of doom and harps and horns and weeping strings and chiffoniers with players stocked and braided hair and shattered glass and phantoms lurking in a box? And yet we spirits ask you now, you innocents of boundless dark, resounding with such grim echoes as only spirits, grimmer, mark, how little matters if at all the good or else the ill of men when all go to their slim reward, their puppetry, their endless ends and none the wiser to regard, across the void, where they began? And so why speak we dead at all? Why squander this, our eloquence? What smoulders in us, we the snuffed, that we should beggar heartlessness when hearts in us by darkness kept as well beat once if ever beat, that slow and falter, gloam and swoon, until they cease and cease and cease?