The first thing we noticed was the smell.
Animals had died in the garage before. Mice made a sour, stinging odor 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.
It was at the bottom of the box. It had chewed its way in and wriggled itself between two beige power strips and a gaudily decorated sewing tin. It was the size of a yam, and similar in shape, though it seemed to have deflated a bit since expiring. It had front legs like a spider. It was in a pose somewhat similar to the dead mouse from the Christmas tree box. Its sides had stiffened tentacles. Its head was brutish, and covered with pale blisters. The fluid that had seeped out of the body had soaked the bottom of the box.
The insistent fungus from the hallway had found the corpse before me. There were swarms of tiny black hairs all over its body.
I put the lid back on the box. Then I flapped open a heavy duty garage bag, and pushed the whole box into it with the curtain rod.
I signaled to Brix that I had been successful as I entered the house. She was on the phone with her sister in Germany. Her sister needed a hip replacement but the insurance company didn’t want to pay for it.
“What are we going to do with it?” Brix asked when her call was over. She didn’t ask me what the thing had looked like, and I didn’t want to tell her.
Of course, we’d discussed how to dispose of it before while I was still looking for the thing, but the question had gone unresolved. We knew we couldn’t simply put in the trash. If it were discovered, we’d be under suspicion. Burning it had been mentioned.
“Doing something dramatic as burning it might bind us to it somehow,” Brix said. There was an air of ritual to that solution, and it worried me too, considering the sort of creature we were dealing with. “I could drive it back into the woods,” I said. But Brix was worried about me being alone with the thing, outside the town, in ‘their’ territory.
We were tired. We decided to put it in the farthest corner of the yard and sleep on the question of how to dispose of it.
We went to bed. We discussed her sister’s difficulties with the insurance people. I put my partial denture in its cup and Brix took her pills. Together, Brix and I had formed flickering constellations of illnesses and discomforts in our sixteen years of marriage. But there hadn’t been anything too serious till Brix got breast cancer in 2019. Brix believed the energy from the forest had helped her survive it.
I woke up around 3:30 am. There was a commotion in the backyard. Hissing and yipping, and a high-pitched fretting like the sounds coyotes make. Brix was still sleeping. I got up, and went to the living room window. I could see the corner of the yard where I’d stashed the box.
A pack of rodent-like animals were ravaging the dead creature bathed inside a blue phosphorescent mist. They had the hunched back and ground-focused posture of predators. They had no eyes, but they had teeth, surely, for they had ripped the plastic garbage bag to shreds, and the cardboard box was in tatters. The snouts of the spectral animals stabbed with heartless precision at the dead thing. I heard their low yowls and the rending of the dead creature’s flesh, and, beneath that, a predatory psychic crunching, like they were devouring more than flesh and blood.
When it was over the blue mist faded and the pack skittered backwards into the night.
The problem of disposal had been solved, at least.
I pulled the curtains back over the window and sat down at the kitchen table. I thought of the strange sight I’d witnessed through the window. The merciless growling of the spectral rats, their phosphorescent wriggling. I wondered about what other types of creatures must infest those brooding woods, and hoped the ones in the yard had returned to it. I drank coffee, with no plans to return to bed. I’d be up for a while.
To calm myself, I thought of Brix, and the elemental power of the forest that had (maybe) cured her cancer.
There was no doubt the place we lived was special. But the price one paid for that was the proximity of monsters.