There are scents that carry historical nostalgia, but there are also scents that serve as a biological death sentence. When the sense of smell broadcasts a warning signal even before sight can shape the object, that is no natural bodily reaction—it is a primitive instinct transmitted through bloodlines over thousands of years, reminding human beings of the things that once devoured their own kind.
The path leading up to Great-Grandfather Kaelen’s cabin was a narrow, cobblestone slope covered in a soft layer of snow reaching up to the ankles.
Silas guided Mark to the bend at the foot of the limestone mountain and then absolutely refused to take a single step further. The bartender stood back in the murky fog, both hands clasped before his chest like a silent prayer, then quickly turned around to head back down the slope. His silhouette submerged into the gray air of Arak-Val Valley after merely a few breaths.
Mark was left alone.
Great-Grandfather Kaelen’s two-story wooden cabin materialized independently along the dark mountain edge. The building was constructed entirely of massive dark pine logs, stacked atop one another according to the ancient technique of the indigenous people, combined with a steep roof built in the Alpine Gothic architectural style. Uninhabited for ten years, the house looked like a giant animal skeleton abandoned amidst the white snow. Patches of withered black moss clung tightly to the rugged wooden walls, and atop the roof, a flock of black crows stood motionless like statues carved from slate stone.
Mark stepped onto the wooden porch steps that creaked beneath his boot soles.
He pulled out the antique brass key—the sole item he had found in his family’s iron box back in New York—and inserted it into the rusted keyhole. The scraping metal sound emitted a long, thin, and ice-cold screech.
Click.
The heavy wooden door slowly pushed open.
Right as the door crack barely exposed about two inches, a draft of stagnant air compressed continuously over the past ten years abruptly burst outward, rushing straight into Mark’s nasal passages.
It was a ruthless biological assault.
Mark froze in his tracks. His chest constricted violently.
The air inside the house was not the ordinary smell of dust or damp mold typical of abandoned structures. It was an intensely thick, fatty, and sickly sweet scent. This scent seemed to possess physical weight, so dense that it clung tightly to every wooden fiber, settling in the back of Mark’s throat with an oily, thoroughly unbearable sensation.
It resembled the heavy reek of beeswax melted in a sealed room, yet simultaneously carried the latent, bitter raw stench of animal fat congealed long-term in an oxygen-deprived environment.
Mark unconsciously raised his hand to cover his nose, pulling a handkerchief from his coat pocket to press tightly against his mouth.
What... is this smell?
As a doctor who had spent years in operating rooms and morgues studying cadaveric anatomy, Mark had come into contact with all manner of biological decomposition scents. But the fragrance blanketing this wooden cabin did not resemble any chemical or rotting cellular tissue he had ever studied in medical school. It evoked a visceral, instinctual revulsion—the kind of sensation that made every neural cell on his scalp tremble violently.
He switched on the heavy-duty flashlight he had brought from New York. The sharp beam of white light pierced through the humid, misty air, clearly illuminating the spacious living room.
The interior of the house remained intact just as it was on the day Great-Grandfather Kaelen passed away. A long oak dining table sat directly in the center; hanging on the walls were dried, rotted bear hides and countless hand-carved wooden masks of the Arak-Na people.
Mark ventured deeper inside. His boot soles left distinct imprints on the thick layer of dust covering the floor.
He realized that the dense, fatty scent did not originate from the living room air. It was swirling out from a gap beneath the floorboards—where a trapdoor made of rosewood sat modestly in the corner of the kitchen.
The trapdoor led down to an underground kitchen beneath the earth.
Mark lifted the rusted iron ring on the trapdoor. The rich, sickly sweet stench exploded instantly, ten times more concentrated than on the floor above. It struck Mark’s eyes, making his eyelids sting intensely.
He switched his flashlight to its highest brightness setting and set his foot onto the damp, moss-covered stone steps.
The underground kitchen was a vaulted space dug deep into the limestone mountain. The rugged stone walls dripped murky water droplets plop, plop onto the packed earth floor. The air down here was ice-cold, yet the cold was accompanied by a strange humidity that made Mark’s skin feel sticky, as if coated in a thin layer of oil.
And then, Mark’s flashlight beam swept across the innermost corner of the underground kitchen.
He stood frozen stiff.
Stacked neatly atop one another from the floor all the way to the stone ceiling were dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of ancient, dark-brown ceramic jars.
The ceramic jars possessed bulging bodies and narrow necks, handcrafted from the red clay of the Arak-Val region. Every single jar was bound tightly with a layer of coarse burlap, and atop that burlap was a thick block of yellow-brown beeswax, stamped with a seal bearing the outline of a mountain and three water drops—identical to the pattern on Mark’s heirloom ring.
A ten-year layer of dust covered the ceramic jars in a gray film, but that rich, sickly sweet scent was unmistakably leaking out from the very cracks of this beeswax seal.
Mark stepped closer to the pile of ceramic jars.
His heart hammered in his chest. Depersonalization reared its head once more—he saw his own hand trembling as it brought the flashlight closer to a ceramic jar sitting in the middle of the stack.
Why would a recluse like Great-Grandfather Kaelen store hundreds of ceramic jars in an underground kitchen? Why was his father—Thomas—so obsessed with rubbing alcohol and so filled with hatred toward animal fat? And why had Old Nicanor, the blind old man, screamed that “the fog this year smells richer with fatty meat”?
The questions swirled wildly in Mark’s head like a tornado.
To resolve all these delusions, he needed physical evidence.
Mark set his flashlight onto a stone ledge and drew a sharp, metallic utility knife from his trousers pocket. He approached the largest ceramic jar sitting directly in the center.
The cold metal knife blade touched the hard, dried beeswax layer covering the mouth of the jar.
Crack.
A faint snapping sound echoed. The yellow-brown beeswax block yielded its first fractured fragment. Mark pressed the knife blade firmly, scraping away the entire beeswax seal that had existed for ten years.
He used the tip of the knife to lightly pry the ceramic lid off the neck of the jar.
Pfft.
A draft of compressed, humid air rose, carrying the scent that saturated the underground kitchen.
Mark shone the flashlight straight into the interior of the jar.
Under the cold white light, the coarse burlap layer inside had decayed. And beneath that cloth... lay a pale yellow liquid, thick, viscous, and completely congealed due to the winter cold.
It was fat.
A jar filled with pure congealed fat, without a single speck of dust, smooth as a mirror surface of butter.
Mark brought his eyes closer to observe the structure of the congealed fat layer. As someone with a deep understanding of biological anatomy, he knew very well the structural differences between vegetable fat, pork fat, beef fat... and primate fat.
The fat in this ceramic jar was excessively clear in color, possessed an extremely high sticky density, and under the flashlight beam, it reflected a bizarre pale pink hue rising from the bottom of the jar.
A wave of ice-cold air shot from Mark’s spine straight to the crown of his head.
Before the academic machinery in his mind could formulate any medical conclusion, a thoroughly primitive biological reaction exploded inside his body.
A surge of violent nausea rose from his stomach directly up to his throat.
It was no ordinary psychological revulsion. It was a biological toxin response—Mark’s body automatically recognized the thick, congealed liquid inside the ceramic jar as a lethal threat to his life. His throat constricted, his salivary glands secreted continuously, and his entire abdominal wall convulsed violently.
Clattering!
The metal utility knife in Mark’s hand fell freely, striking hard against the stone floor with a harsh clash.
Mark dropped to one knee onto the damp earth, one hand pressing tightly over his mouth, the other bracing forcefully against the stone wall to keep himself from passing out from the violent wave of vomiting surging forth.
In that moment of collapsing amidst the underground kitchen filled with the sickly sweet scent of congealed fat, Mark’s eyes unexpectedly caught sight of a detail at the bottom of the ceramic jar that had just been pried open.
Lying deep beneath the thick, pale-yellow layer of fat... was a hard, ivory-white object.
A human finger bone.
