Sizzle

The crackling scent of rendered fat and gristled flesh permeated my senses to the point of delirium. I couldn’t remember when I had last eaten. The memory, like most other thoughts, was a blur of confusion and depravity.

The smell was at the top of the hierarchy, followed closely by sound. Sight was not an issue because I had none. So, I closed my eyes, extended my arms into the darkness, and followed with my active perceptions.

There were walls in this dream of darkness. I seemed to be surrounded by stone. I turned slowly, tentatively, awakened to the possibility of a tactile egress.

I shuffled around the perimeter of my cell, touching, dragging, feeling. It was all stone, from foot to head, the room barely bigger than my outstretched reach. I was trapped.

But the smell came from somewhere, carried on some breeze that originated beyond my confines. I stopped my shuffling and took in as much as I could. I kept hearing shuffling, awkwardly realizing it was not coming from me.

I held my breath and listened outwardly, focusing on the faint hiss of movement. And then, as another wave of grilled meat wafted from some unseen heavenly plane, I reasoned what I was hearing was not the shuffling of feet. I listened more intently, drooling just a little, and yes, there it was.

Beastly essence dripping from crystalized fat puddling onto a nest of smoldering embers, gasping its spirit into the ether. It all became so intoxicating. I was engulfed, from flared nostrils to rigid ear hairs, senses erect with primal desire. And yes, I was erect, inflated by orgasmic possibilities, throbbing with a pulse that began to overtake my hearing.

It beat inside my skull, deafening out all external stimuli. My heart had risen to my cranium, clawing and bouncing from bone to muscle to grey matter. My brain was uncertain how to allow the accompaniment, if it was kind and patient enough, which it was not. It gave my heart a good cold stare, stopping it in its tracks, then nodding it back down to where it belonged.

All things seemed to be well enough in alignment, as best I could tell. I breathed. I’m not even sure how long I had been holding, or if I had simply ceased entirely, or maybe it was all a delusion, a hallucination brought on by dire hunger. But, I breathed nonetheless. Heart and mind acknowledged the intake of air, and then my eyes flew open, and I beheld a wondrous sight.

I seemed to be in a circular room, with a very high ceiling, so high I could not see the summit. It simply disappeared into smoky nothingness. My hands were on the wall, not far from a small alcove that a person would have to crawl through to transverse this space. There were faint marks on the floor suggesting my ingress. It seemed I was forcibly placed here, amid the ashy floor, the blackened walls, and the impossibly high chimney.

I blinked, then I blinked two more times. A chimney, the ash, the char. The smell of rendered flesh.

I knew this place, from some nightmare memory of a fairytale gone bad. I saw the picture, from the book, just behind my flickering eyelids. A forest of spires. Chimneys. And then the memory fluttered away.

I turned toward the center of the room that was now growing brighter and hotter and fell to my knees and hands, dry heaving, nothing, at first. My body convulsed in waves of spasms, working up an artifact of a ghastly past, from somewhere deep within my soul. Webs of sticky salivation made contact with the ash floor, absorbing its darkness, the eviscerated remains of a thousand lost souls.