Prologue.
It didn't hurt. I always assumed it would hurt, but rather than pain I just felt empty, just a void where my soul once was. It wasn't really a matter of my not feeling it, for I'm sure that each second was pure agony, I had just lost the ability to care. I had no reason to move, to breathe, to live. This would be my tomb. I was stuck, left to rot like the putrid corpse of the woman that lies just outside the confines of this room. There is no one left to mourn, no eulogy to be read, just solitary and silent hell until one day, with any luck, it will all just end.
My fingers are stiff and rigid, my knees and ankles frozen in place, but it hardly mattered. I felt the film that was building up over my eyes, like diamond scratching glass, each grainy flicker of my eyelids tearing at the delicate orbits beneath. I could probably stop blinking if I tried, it shouldn't matter after all, what was left to see anyhow? I tried to see how long I could force the lids to remain open, closed was too easy, closed was just asleep. What little was left of my human impulse would take over before long and again I'd feel the scratching, digging, boring into my head, the delicate drops of blood rolling down my cheeks, but again, it wasn't pain, at least not in any recognizable sense, merely sensation.
Blood! Sweet salvation! My lust was insatiable, desperation a palpable cord stretched to its breaking point. I could hear it outside the window, pumping through the tiny bodies of birds, taunting me just above on the rooftop, mice and squirrels running haphazardly beneath the floorboards. Had I the strength and my wits about me perhaps I could have broken through the planks to allow the vermin access. Why didn't I think of that before? A quick and easy death for them, unlike that which was afforded me, but right now in my semi-conscious state, just thinking was exhausting.
How long had I been stuck here? Days? Weeks? Had months gone by, perhaps years? How long does it take to mummify? How long before the brain shuts down and one simply ceases to be? Perhaps never; maybe this was death after all, awareness of mind without control of body. A living corpse left to fester for all eternity within one's own mind. The thought was unpleasant though not entirely outside of the scope of reason. Who could really say how long it would last and what I would feel? There wasn't exactly a playbook of rules from which to divine an answer. I was, after all, Unique.