Emilie stood at the threshold of the dining room, her lungs refusing to fill.

She kept her eyes on the floor, tethered firmly to the tips of her shoes, not leaving their reassuring fawn leather.

Should the room smell? Logic dictated it should, if memory served right. But memory was a tricky thing. Hers was a silk scarf falling through her fingers, a waterfall never grasped but dripping away as insubstantial as a dream on waking.

Focus. Breathe.

Her lungs refused. Still, smell eluded her. Perhaps she ought to be grateful for that. This was her dining room. She knew it to be an ordinary room; a room one passed through every day, several times a day in fact. Nothing untoward happened in a dining room.

She stepped forward; one foot, the second. Her boot tips met the edge of the carpet. The pattern was one she had chosen herself from the furnishers, a fine example of Arabian workmanship, with light blue with yellow swirling throughout as if it were gold mined from the pale face of the moon itself.

An incongruent dash of red marred the perfection of the treasured rug.

She averted her eyes, but not before a wave of honest scent threatened to drag her gaze upward. To what? A sliver of memory, a sight which once seen may not be denied.

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Until it was seen, she might continue innocent of what had happened.

An attempt to dash from the room had her close with the wall. She stopped short of hitting it, fearful less of hurting herself than of what it might mean if she struck the wall and it failed to hurt her.

Shying away from it, she traced the skirting board around the room, a clean white line in the gloom. In time she reached the first window, with the curtains still drawn closed from when she was last in this room.

She raised a hand to pull the curtain open, when a splash of dark colour on its silver-grey folds stopped her.

The sight of the gore on the curtain's hem brought the smell of the room crashing down on her like a breaking wave. The table was spread once with a hearty meal of various goodly, wholesome scents - rosemary on robust, roasted potatoes; sprigs of mint laid across the lamb; garlic peas in onion gravy; so many scents and tastes crafted for his palate, to serve him - but all scents now were one discordance of decay, a hand slammed down on the keys of an olfactory piano.

Beyond all that, a deeper rot laid over all.

She laid a hand on her stomach and waited to be ill.

When minutes passed and nothing arrived, she shuffled from the room and back to the corridor, where the cold light, filtered through the mist outside, still reached its long fingers in through the open door.

What remained of sensation had little sense to it. Smell, sight, hearing - what of touch? Why pain or revulsion or this unspoken yearning, when other things were gone completely? How much would vanish of her into the beckoning fog, and how much would remain, and why?

There was something she had come here for.

It was not in the dining room.

What was it?

Her failure to remember it was a tragedy far more affecting to her than the one present in the adjoining room. She fell to her knees and wept until her gut ached, and yet there were no tears.

Emilie wept all the harder for that.