The rough-planked wooden walls loomed up into darkness, splattered here and there with colorful blobs. The irregular space they enclosed was thick and airless, heavily tainted with smoke from the single candle that smoldered atop a floor-stand, and supplied the only real source of light. Other smells trickled in from the edges of things, a mixture of horrible and enticing, and there was silence, even more thick and choking than the air.
  The female figure stood amid this, the tall athletic curves of her limbs and torso wrapped in tightly-stitched swaths of rough brown burlap, splattered here and there with colorful blobs. A hood had been pulled down impossibly tight around her head, somehow sliding around her nose, down under her mask and disordered mop of curly brown hair. A pair of large button eyes stared sightlessly, tilted to one side, white with green thread, and a slash of matching green stitches ran across the fabric which covered her lips, sealing them firmly shut