The Salt and the Silt

Gothic

The room smelled of wet lime and old copper. Silas lay on the trestle, his skin the color of a bruised plum. I did not look at his face; the eyes are always the worst part. I focused instead on the crust of rye bread and the pewter cup of ale resting on his sternum. The bread was stale. It had a grit to it, like river sand mixed into the flour. I took the first bite. It scraped against my palate, drawing a thin line of blood from my gum. The ale was flat, tasting of yeast and iron. I swallowed the liquid slowly, feeling it slide down a throat already tightened by the cold. Then the weight shifted. It did not start in the stomach. It started in the windpipe. A sudden, oily thickness slid upward, ignoring the path of the swallow. It felt like a wet knot of muscle, something blind and pulsing, burrowing into the soft tissue of my lungs. I gasped, and the thing inside me coiled. It did not want to be digested. It wanted to be spoken. I could feel the secret now. It was not a thought, but a physical pressure. It was a scream made of silt and saltwater. It pushed against my vocal cords, trying to force my jaw open. My own voice felt thin, a ghost in my own head. The dead man's secret was a heavy, suffocating thing. It tasted of brine and betrayal. I fought it. I clamped my teeth shut until they groaned. I swallowed again and again, forcing the filth deeper, pushing it down into the cellar of my gut where the other ghosts lived. I focused on the smell of the room (the rot, the damp stone, the cold skin) to keep myself anchored to the floor. The writhing slowed. The pressure receded into a dull, throbbing ache in the center of my chest. I stepped away from the body. I spat a mouthful of grey phlegm onto the floor. Silas was clean now, but I could still taste the salt.