A Dark Place

 In the darkened space, the end of a cigarette flared merrily red, and like a belated echo, two red eyes flickered just past them. The long inhale swept through the background drip and drip and drip of whatever pipe was leaking in the darkness. The breath held. One second. Two. A third. 

An exhale with a sigh. 

"Ya know, I don't need to smoke these." A semi-hollow rasp, worn from too much screaming, smoking, time, erosion, decay, who knows. Maybe just too much. 

"Prob'ly psychosomatic.  Somethin' to do with my hands. Or maybe I just like how it burns."

Those red eyes squinted at the cherry ember at the end of the cigarette. A flutter of ash fell from the tip and disappeared from sight. 

"I do like them, though. Like the aesthetic, I s'pose." He chuckled, despite the sound of grating skin it was filled with a surprising bubble of mirth. "Woke up in an era when smokin' was sexy as hell, ya know? And hey, since it don't hurt me, I figure what the hell. I make it look good, don't I?"

He put the cigarette to his thin black lips and leaned in. The glow from the tip barely made out the sharpened angles of his face, the pallor of his skin, the hairline fractures around his right eye, like broken bits of porcelain had started to crumble loose. There was more red there, beneath his eyes, along a fracture at the bridge of his nose. Slow, gleaming streams of blood lingering at the surface and refusing to overrun their boundaries.

"Do you know who I am?" His breath smelled like smoke and whiskey and blood. "What, you don't know Jack?"

The bound man simply glared.

"Doesn't matter." Jack reached a hand out to grip the back of the wooden chair, inches from the other man's face. The other man's gagged face. This other man didn't struggle, though his body was rigid with tension, as if he could will the bonds keeping him tied to the chair to fray and break. 

"I don't have to eat either." His voice softened, this close to the bound man. Sandpaper drifting lazily over stone. "You wanna get technical about it, I can't eat. Not what you'd eat anyway. Not pizza, not tacos, not mahi mahi, nothin'. Taste buds are shot, I don't get anythin' but cardboard when I try. Sometimes if I'm real lucky it just turns to ash in my mouth. Whadda ya think about that?"

The bound man mumbled something in his throat, more like a growl then a response. 

"There are some things I can consume though." Jack inhaled the smoke, the cherry dangerously close to the bound man's cheek. "Fermented things have flavor. Things in a state of decay work a'right sometimes. But what really gets me goin' is something with a pulse."

Jack exhaled, right in the bound man's face. As tears sprung into the other man's eyes, Jack took the cigarette from between his lips and flicked it into the gloom. It skipped and sputtered in the darkness until only the tiniest pinprick of ember could be seen, so far away.

Now what illuminated the space between them were Jack's eyes. 

"See, most of the time it ain't a problem. I'm plenty strong, I got my shit locked down, but hey, when it gets bad..." Jack leaned in and took a deep breath. The bound man's pulse flickered at his throat. Jack whispered, that blackened smile twisting thinly upwards, a single drop of thick blood finally slipping from a crack beneath his eye to roll down to his jaw, like a promise:

"...I go right for the fuckin' jugular."