Flesh in the Dark

The spoon clinked coldly against the china bowl, its sound shattering the stillness of the warm room, ricocheting between mahogany panels and polished glass window panes. Tiffany’s: only the finest. A gift from his first marriage, before he met her. Flickering flames writhed upwards, slithering out of the gleaming brass grate, curling and twisting up, up to the vaulted ceiling. Shadows stretched grotesquely towards him, warping into a choking, suffocating, silent barricade between them. The unspoken words between the couple anchored their fate. The woman she had replaced, whom he had loved and lost. His first wife.

He ate. Slowly. Deliberately.

Her eyes remained set on him, dark and deep, her hands resting on the chair, fingertips bleeding as her nails dug into the solid wood with quiet intensity. This was her house now. No ghost could take it from her. Every movement he made seemed uncanny: the slight tremor of his hand as he raised the spoon to his lustful lips, the consistent confusion within his startled, vacant gaze. Each movement mirrored memories she would never possess, but lived eternally in technicolour within his mind. Every meal she shared with an imitation of his past - new to her, yet a painful echo to him. She inhabited the ghost of Emelia. She was a stranger in her own home. Each hallway, every room, every flower seemed stained like a Poiret dress ruined by the careless touch of a white lily. Tainted. Permanent. She danced in Emelia’s holy shadow. 

The vegetable broth was made just as his first wife had - perfected in just the same way, the recipe found at the bottom of a long forgotten drawer within the morning room. The flavour of the soup wrapped around his thick neck like a choker, the rich scent simmering and spitting from hours of boiling over a burning fire. Her eyes had not shifted.

He drank.

Still, she watched him like a serpent watches a mouse, her nails penetrating the wood harder as his rough lips parted, releasing a satisfied sound reminiscent of a sweet serenade of pure gluttony. He was savouring far more than the food; he was a puppet, repeating a ritual he couldn’t understand, obsessively. Compulsively. Her lips curved into a mockery of a smile. Forced, cold, bleak.

“You’re still here,” he observed, his voice low, as though surprised by her presence, as though he hadn’t seen her there every evening, religiously watching him devour her meals. She had never left - never faltered in her duty to the life they shared. Her presence was ubiquitous, more so than the air filling their decadent home, inescapable and omnipresent. The smile tightened, an almost pained expression upon her face; the smile never met her eyes. It never would. She said nothing for a few moments, contemplating his short, uneducated words in the silence.

“I always am,” she eventually replied, matching his blunt speech pattern with precision, her attention slipping as she witnessed the broth slide easily into his throat like a throbbing knife into water. A slight rush of pleasure surged through her veins at the sight of him enjoying the meal she lovingly prepared for him, cheeks blooming as her body temperature rose. A thin layer of sweat caused her to glow ethereally like winter sun in the light of the soothing fire.

He paused. His spoon met the bowl. Clink.

For the briefest moment their eyes met across the long table, his gaze confused, chasing a thought that would always slip away. He would never catch it. He would never name it. And she would never leave, never change, never become anything other than what she had always been.

“Just like before… the same…” he murmured finally, abandoning whatever thought he’d been chasing, the same way in which he had tried to abandon his love for Emelia. His words were thick with a heavy sorrow she would neither understand nor comprehend the weight of. She couldn’t empathise. Empathy didn’t exist within her calculated and meticulously controlled world. Her eyes narrowed at the mention of Emilia’s name. She didn’t answer - not yet. The walls of silence built themselves higher, the stodgy broth their avant-garde cement, suffocating the pair of them within their isolation.

“I should’ve known better,” he whispered, so quietly it was barely audible - barely a breath, but she heard it. She always did. Every whispered regret, every unspoken thought, every remark, she absorbed it all; a sponge for his frailty. Her smile became tauter, never faltering. Her omniscient obsession only grew stronger.

She watched him, waiting. The flush in her cheeks heightened to a swooning maroon as he took another tantalisingly slow bite, savouring it, unaware of his new and perverted palette. Her stomach tightened: a strange, faint euphoria rippled through her before it snapped like an overworked rubber band. He would never understand what he was consuming. But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t meant to. 

The first time she made the meal was the ultimate sacrifice to her own sanity: monotonous chopping, each vegetable cut perfectly into soft pucks, a painstakingly assembled mosaic of the Earth’s gifts in one perfectly orchestrated stack. She scooped it into a large metal pot, placing it precisely over the heat. It began to murmur: simmering. Sweet. Fatal. She stirred the malicious mixture as if she were in a trance, staring blankly at the wall for hours until the broth thickened, its rich essence rising in hot tendrils, water evaporating, vanishing into the innocent air. Then - suddenly - she’d find herself in that dining room, sitting opposite him, watching him begin to devour his soup. She’d sip at hers, slipping in and out of consciousness, her mind flicking through a haze of fragmented thoughts, regaining awareness as she caught him reaching for seconds, clumsily trying to pick out a particularly hard chunk from his new bowl.

“Let me, dear,” she would softly command, floating over to him, flicking the shard of bone from his bowl - her voice a shard of steel tangled in soft silk. She had tried adding chicken this time, she would say. The same candles were lit each meal time, flickering, their trembling flames conjuring spectres of his gluttony onto every mahogany panel.

Each month his appetite grew, and he was soon greedily reaching for thirds. She knew the ritual was developing when his pallor began to worsen, his skin glowing with a jaundiced yellow - sickly - before she even lit the candles. He ate slower, savouring each bite. He swallowed.

“I can smell… iron,” he said, brow furrowing, “have you used a new pot?”

She nodded, smile unchanging as he ate, eyes focused on the gradual fading of colour from his lips, now tinged with a greyish hue.

“Isn’t it perfect?” she said, her tone oozing a strange sweetness, demanding compliance. Her answer came from him reaching for yet another portion, most of the soup nestled comfortably in his stomach.

That night she was awoken by his feverish perspiration as he slept, muttering to himself while his body tossed and turned. She distinguished one word: Emelia. He repeated it like a chant. Emelia. Emelia. Emelia. The sound drove her half to insanity, gnawing at her resolve, pressing her into a deep, infuriated sleep.

The next dinner he was hardly sentient, seeming woozy and confused, no colour left in his cheeks. She doted on him, dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth. The first meal time she had left her throne was to tend to him like a psychiatric nurse. His hair, falling out in chunks, was dampened from more sickly sweat, dripping onto his paling brow.

“Thank you, my Emelia…” he murmured, not correcting his words - they felt right to him. She continued to treat her patient, stroking his hair sweetly, raising the soup to his lips to save his shaking hands the job.

“Emelia? Who is Emelia?” she replied smoothly, her voice a careful equilibrium of innocence and veiled curiosity, asking the questions as casually as she could. But he looked lost, his eyes vacant, devoid of thoughts.

“I… I had a dream about someone named Emelia. We were having dinner. Soup. This soup,” he slowly said, having a lot of trouble articulating and remembering words.

“Don’t be daft, dear - it's just me. It’s always me,” she laughed softly, the sound a deceptive lullaby, before planting a slow kiss upon his cheek, his skin clammy beneath her plump lips.

“Yes… I think I must be coming down with something…” he trailed off, not identifying his sudden illness as his slip into an insidious life. She smiled. He swallowed the soup.

She spent each day nursing him through spring, kissing his hands, suffocating him in warm embraces. The house had grown eerily quiet. Dinner time again: the fire grew weaker each day, shadows barely manifesting, the room dimming more each night. He hadn’t been well for some time, but the feeling of something wrong in the air, something too still, gnawed at him like a rabbit caught in a trap. The room felt too small now. She was too present. His breath echoed in the mind-forged manacles he was contained in.

The days blended into each other. He lost his sense of time. All that remained consistent was the strange sensation that something had… shifted. Something unseen, something lurking in corners: something that was always there, but remained anonymous. He was paranoid. His body was a foreign cage in the process of decomposition, isolating him within his own home. Yet she insisted he was getting better. She was always there - always watching, her presence a persistent weight upon his body that he wasn’t strong enough to shake off. She hovered, lingering in doorways to hide the unnatural grace of her movements and words. Her gaze rarely strayed from him, but he felt she had grown stranger. Colder. The food had changed, too - he was sure it had. Subtle shifts in flavours caused a heaviness that exhausted him, weighing upon his feeble chest after every meal. He noticed it, but he didn’t know what it meant; he just knew he needed it: he couldn’t resist that same broth. His appetite had become all-consuming. Ravenous. Insatiable. It tasted familiar - too familiar, like a forgotten belief buried deep within the deepest pits of the soul. But he never questioned it; it was just soup. Soup he ate because it was there - because it filled him - because without it he was hollow.

Nine days later - or maybe twenty, he’d lost count - he noticed something new: the only new thing in the history of their sacred meal times. A Scar. Her hand, resisting delicately on the table, had a burn mark in the shape of a foreign symbol. He was sure it hadn’t been there before. But nothing felt certain anymore. Her skin was unnervingly smooth, as if it hadn’t been weathered by time, like a baby’s.

“Did you hurt yourself, darling?” his voice was hoarse - a croak. She glanced at her hand with an unreadable expression.

“No, dear,” her smile resumed, too perfect. Too rehearsed. “It’s nothing, don’t worry about me.”

It wasn’t nothing. His stomach churned unexplainably. The scar dimmed from his view, and his body betrayed him, consuming the soup without his mind’s consent.

“I’m getting weaker.” he said one evening, voice trembling: his skin had become sallow and gaunt, cheekbones threatening to pierce through. His eyes - bloodshot and sunken - just stared vacantly into space.

“You’re growing stronger.” she replied, her gaze too soft. “Eat.” Her voice was sickly and sweet, nauseatingly inhuman. His stomach churned: he picked up the spoon. He ate. He no longer tasted the food - only the raw, animalistic pull of it, a catalyst to his mortality yet he could not wrench free from its grasp.

Days slipped by. His mind began to slip, too. He woke from nightmares whose contents slipped away, her perfume suffocating as she comforted him. When the fog inside his brain cleared he could only remember one name. Emilia. He’d heard it before, hadn’t he? He couldn’t remember where. His thoughts shattered like broken glass whenever he tried, so he abandoned her, like smoke running from a fire.

She descended the stairs in a beautiful navy dress and matching shoes, but they didn’t fit her: the dress was far too tight, warping to fit her curves, and the shoes were so wide they were slipping. Each movement she made was a haunting mimicry of someone else’s. But she had to: she had to wear Emilia’s dresses, her shoes, her rose-scented perfume. The first time she wore one her reflection startled her; the way the lace spilled out over her bodice, the way her body seemed to melt into the fibres of the dress, sublimating into the fabric as though it had always belonged to her. She’d watched herself with a twisted fascination, manically laughing at the reflection. She was Emilia. Her body floated towards the table - light as air - the navy dress sculpting her like the sadistic embrace of a dangerous lover, each step an unintelligible whisper of rich silk. The room seemed to contract around her, squeezing the life out of him. Flickering candles cast trembling shadows that clung to her, rendering her a spectral silhouette of forbidden lust. He was staring mindlessly at his chipped bowl, the metallic scrape of his spoon pushing a dull echo into the cavernous silence. His gaze was the foggiest it had ever been - his eyes yellowed, mirroring his weakening complexion.

“It’s always the same…” he sighed, his voice monotonous - almost dreamlike - as if he were speaking from a long forgotten hollow, deep in the woods. Her eyes, deep black holes in the poorly lit room, watched him with a patience that was borderline predatory. A faint smile ghosted across her rosy lips, a delicate crescent of amusement found in this ritual.

“Yes,” she whispered, voice smooth as velvet, “just like she used to.”

The spoon faltered in his grip: his tremor betrayed his feelings of unease which he had been using his remaining strength to attempt to hide from her.

“It’s familiar… but something is… different,” he said, his voice hoarse, dissolving into the oppressive stillness.

Her smile deepened; a Mona Lisa enigma. She leant forward, her movement unnaturally fluid, and her eyes still remained on him.

“It should be familiar, my dear,” she said through her robotic smile, eye sockets widening. The room grew even darker. Her tone had been hushed - reverent - laced with something sacrilegious and carnal.

“She is still with us.”

His brow furrowed, lines of confusing etching into his ghastly, gaunt face as if a demon’s hand were tugging at his flesh, attempting to rip it off like a mask.

“With us?” he repeated, his voice thin, face stretched taut like a canvas on too large a frame. His eyes, glassy and searching, jolted upwards to meet hers, pleading for sanity. She drifted closer, her presence suffusing the room with an unbearable weight. The walls warped, seeming to grow even taller: the ceiling was a black pit.

‘Yes,” she purred, her voice a delicate lace of blended seduction and menace. 

“She’s here. In every meal. In every bite. Her flesh… her spirit… they nourish you. They complete you.”

His breath caught, spoon slipping from his fingers, falling into the broth with a muted splash. Green fumes oozed from it, penetrating his eyes, clouding his vision further. His eyes widened as the truth dawned, a grotesque flower blooming deep within his stomach. Her smile only grew wider, practically splitting her face in two.

“No- no!” he spluttered, his face draining of colour, leaving him ashen and trembling as the blood retreated from his cheeks.

Her hand, pale and delicate, soothed his burning skin with sharp caresses.

“You’ve known it,” she whispered, her breath warm and fragrant with primality, “somewhere deep within, you’ve always known.”

She ignored his protests: she didn’t hear him call her a monster; she didn’t hear him accusing her of damning them both. Her breath, heavy as death, caressed his neck, seeping into his bones like cyanide. Her lips brushed his ear as she whispered to him softly. 

“We are one now… you and I… you and Emelia.”

His body convulsed with a spectacular fever as her words devoured him - he couldn’t flee. Something unbreakable held him down. She had forced herself into his being, chaining herself to his soul, chaining him to this house. Distorted shadows danced and stretched like grotesque creatures. The air was thick. Suffocating. They were locked in a cruel charade, bodies close yet trapped in eternal separation. Her smile was never out of love. It was of a darker, inhuman predator, savouring what it had already consumed. His face was statuesque, trapped in a moment of nauseating realisation.

“She can’t separate us now - I am Emelia, can’t you see? We are bound forever. In flesh. In blood.” her vulnerable voice pleaded with him to see her perspective; to see why she had done this. Her words coiled around him like a noose, preventing him from denying her. 

And in the cracked mirror, the furniture was rotten: decayed, like their souls. They stood. Twisted. Monstrous. Her beauty serene, his body fading, their forms mangled and broken.

“Do you see now? What we’ve become?” she murmured erratically, her cheeks splitting completely as her smile widened further, blood spurting like pus into the soup, melting into it. Flesh was hanging on by mere fibres. He looked at their reflections again: two bodies, bound by law, and hunger, and decay. 

“Don’t you see? You are mine now. Forever. The cycle is complete,” she whispered, the remains of her facial flesh dripping like wax onto the floor, exposing masses of muscle and creamy white bone. In the cracked mirror they remained two spirits, forever bound in sin. The soup’s steam rose, thick and cloying. Foul green fumes regurgitated from the soup, choking the air like a final breath.

And the growing darkness at last swallowed them to black.