excerpt from the book

The first thing we noticed was the smell.

Animals had died in the garage before. Mice made a sour, stinging smell for a week unless their corpses were sought out and disposed of. Sometimes our cluttered garage made discovery impossible. The fallen animal would lie undiscovered and undisturbed till the stink burnt itself out.

Just last year I dragged the long box the Christmas tree was stored in out of the garage and into the living room. I found the dry corpse of a field mouse flattened out in the plastic pine branches. Its crumpled forelimbs were clasped together, as if in prayer to Father Christmas.

The thing that died in our garage this time was not a mouse. Its death smell was just as putrid, but different. As it got stronger, and stranger, it was apparent the dead thing hadn’t been an ordinary animal.

Some signs predated the smell. There had been a persistent trail of a black, hairy mold on the walls of the short hallway at the back of the house. This hallway led to the interior entrance to the garage. We washed the stuff off with detergent several times. It returned in a matter of hours, further down the hall, closer to the garage door.

There had been a change of mood in the house. The death of a normal animal would have no psychological effect. But as I’ve indicated, this was not a normal animal. There was a sour psychological reek in the house. It suggested, somehow, shame and spoiled expectation, neither thing something my wife, Brix, or I usually experienced.

And there had been small but persistent incidents of bad luck: cut fingers, stubbed toes, canceled appointments, missed connections. A healthy houseplant plant died overnight. Our phones acted up, and the internet connection was bad.

Those were early signs. Now the dead thing was decomposing, and it had started to stink.

Finding and disposing of it would be up to me. Brix and I were in agreement that the thing that had died in the garage was of supernatural origin. We knew how things worked in the place where we lived. The area was known, locally, for its proximity to the other side. The sprawling wood that surrounded our town was a hotbed of ancient energies, both dark and light. The thinness of the barrier between the normal world and the supernatural was what had brought Brix and I here. Brix was drawn by the closeness of angels and energies and spirit creatures. I used the uncanny energy from the forest in my writing.

Even the cleanest garage is bedlam, when you have to find something. Our garage is messier than most.

I started looking in the afternoon and by late evening I still hadn’t found it. The smell seemed to come from everywhere so I hadn’t a clue where to start. I’m old. I can’t move boxes the way I used to, so my investigation was slow. Brix and I are packrats. Each box was stuffed with belongings that had to be gone through thoroughly. After all, I had no idea of the size or the shape of what I was looking for. It could be anywhere.

Night fell. I was glad when Brix called for me to abandon the search and come inside. The bad smell and the creepiness of my mission had intensified as the sun went down.

It took two more days to locate the dead thing, in which time its influence permeated the house. A sinister anxiety fell over the house. If the anxiety was vague and hard to pinpoint, the smell was undeniable. The stink dulled our senses on the one hand, and made us twitchy and hypersensitive on the other.

It hadn’t gone unnoticed by the local wildlife. Outside the garage, the yard was busy with weird animal yowls and fretting.

Brix was concerned. What if the neighbors noticed? Our houses were not so far apart that they couldn’t notice something going on. And Jeanne from down the street was psychic.

It was unusual for things from the woods to come, physically, into town. Would the neighbors wonder why such a creature had been drawn to our garage? What if they thought we’d summoned the thing? We’d heard the rumor of how some drunken thrill-seekers from the city had done a ‘ritual’ in the woods and brought something bad out. We’d heard how the locals dealt with them. People in these parts use the power of the woods in various ways. But there was an unspoken agreement not to bring anything from out there into our neighborhoods.


The dead thing had to go. I went back to the garage and resumed the search. The smell seemed to have localized on the left side of the garage. I started moving things.

I was only a little frightened of whatever I’d find. The denizens of the dark side would not all be lions. There would be its rodents and slugs and one-celled organisms, too. These, I guessed, would far outnumber, and appear more frequently, than the more fearsome creatures. I feared nothing Lovecraftian as I cautiously picked through the boxes.

Still, I was apprehensive and slightly nauseous.

What led me to finally find the thing was a dark stain on the concrete floor that hadn’t been there yesterday. Something, some rancid liquid, that had only half-soaked into the floor. It came from the lowest in a stack of four cardboard boxes, the kind copy paper comes in. As I removed the boxes on top of it, the smell became stronger.

I already had gloves on, and a mask. I picked up a short metal curtain rod and prodded open the lid.