10_6_contest entry

Sensitive content note: Death referenced and some mildly icky imagery.

Different species don’t smell the same when they’re dead. A long dead chicken that your dog found and rolled around in before jumping on you and your last clean shirt has a sticky, oily scent. A recently dead horse that you need to somehow load up into the back of a pickup to get rid of has a tinge of rotten grass to it, similar to a damp pile of grass clippings going rancid, at least at first. It’s like if you took a bunch of cheese slices from a charcuterie board; each one smells like cheese, but they all smell different from one another. It’s distinct enough that you can train a cadaver dog to search for just human remains, and ignore all the local roadkill. It sounds unbelievable when you first hear it, but in retrospect even the worst tracking dog can tell the difference. Even I could tell with just a regular human nose.

A mix of stinking feet, body odor, old woman, and rotting stinking death left no doubt on what lay in the darkness behind that cracked door. There was a quality of the uncanny valley to it, something unmistakably human but also so horribly wrong. Even though I had never encountered that smell before, some preprogrammed part of the brain, some deep seated alarm system inherited from countless generations of those who survived long enough to reproduce, screamed in my head that I had made an awful mistake by coming here.

“Something wrong?” the man I’d considered a friend until just now leading me down the dimly lit hall asked when I froze in place. He’d seemed like an average guy in every way up until this moment, regular build, basic haircut, normal hygiene. No red flags to signal that he was the kind of guy who’d have literal skeletons in the closet. 

“J-just trying to remember if I locked up my car,” I stammered, glancing back at the front door. He had locked it behind us, citing a sketchy neighborhood with lots of recent break-ins.

“Well, it’s too late to go back for it now. Hopefully no one takes your tire jack.” He replied with finality, turning back and continuing on.

There was no way he lived here and didn’t know what was in that room. If you live with a smell long enough, you’ll get nose-blind to it, so maybe he didn’t realize that I had noticed. Or maybe he knew and was just toying with me before I ended up discarded in that same room myself.

I played back the events of the evening in my head as I followed him, watching for windows or doors that could lead outside as covertly as I could, the stale, stuffy air making the place feel as closed off as a tomb. I don’t make it a habit of coming home with guys from the bar, but there was a perfect storm of circumstances that made it seem like a good idea at the time. Too perfect, looking back on it. I didn’t know him that well, but we’d bumped into each other and chatted enough times to feel like we were buddies. He didn’t ever strike me as a homicidal maniac while we were chatting about cars, jobs, or girls.

This just hadn’t been my day. It’d been a bad day at work, my phone was dead, and I’d had an argument with my girl over something that seemed so pointless now. I’d gone to the bar to unwind and blow off some steam. Maybe my venting to my supposed bar buddy marked me as an easy target on this particular night. More bad news waited for me after the final call. Out in the parking lot, one of my car tires was completely flat, with a roofing nail sticking out the treads. I waved my bar friend down as he was pulling out of the parking lot and asked if I could borrow his phone to call for a ride, but his phone was broken. The night was cold and wet, and neither of us was in a state to change the tire. He offered to let me crash on his couch for the night, and said that we could come back and deal with the tire in the daylight. It was so obviously a trap looking back on it. He probably popped the tire himself when he stepped out for a smoke. But my dumb ass didn’t suspect a thing until after the door locked behind me like the jaws of a carnivorous plant.

“T-this is a nice place you’ve got here,” I lied, casting about for any kind of information. “Do you live here by yourself?”

“It’s my aunt’s place,” he replied, smirking to himself as we stepped into the brighter lit kitchen “But she’s not here anymore. Now I can do whatever I want and not have to hear any complaining.”

 The kitchen had a back door and plenty of windows, but I knew he’d be on top of me before I made it outside if I made a run for it in such a small room. I considered fighting him, but decided to save that as a last desperate resort, since I doubted I’d win against a murderous lunatic. If I could just get some distance or a barrier between us, I had at least a small chance. Even this far from the room with the body, the air had a faint foulness, keeping me well aware of how much danger I was in.

 “I’m going to slap together a sandwich before I crash. You want one?” He asked, transparently an excuse to keep me from bolting as he reached for the knife block on the counter.

“Sure, b-but before that, where’s the bathroom at? I had way too much earlier.” I tried to keep my voice as calm and level as I could, like I was trying to back away from a vicious dog without triggering an attack. 

“It’s at the far end of the hall, you can’t miss it.” He said, clearly trying to sound casual as his hand glid over the knife handles, settling on a big one at the top of the block. He had the same air of helpful hospitality as a spider creeping closer to a fly caught in its web.

I didn’t fully turn away from him until I reached the bathroom door. The mirror inside reflected the hallway behind me, and in it I could see him step into the kitchen doorway, holding a knife far too large and sharp for spreading mayonnaise. It isn’t quite accurate to say that his eyes had turned black. They were just completely devoid of anything, like whatever internal mask he’d been wearing to seem like a normal person was completely dropped. I slammed the door and fumbled with the lock, my fingers suddenly clumsy. It was just a cheap interior door, and it wouldn’t buy me more than a few seconds if he went at it. I tried the bathroom window, and it wouldn’t budge. Locked, stuck with humidity, nailed from the outside; I didn’t have time to figure it out. I grabbed a heavy scented candle sitting on the toilet tank and smashed the glass out. I lowered myself out with some cuts, but no twisted ankles, and took off like a hare. I ran until I was exhausted, and then then ran some more, keeping to cover in a random pattern until I was sure he wasn’t pursuing me.

The police did find the body of the elderly lady who owned the home the next day, but no trace of my supposed bar friend other than the mess he had left behind, including a few more bodies of those unfortunate enough to trust him. She had lived alone and had no nephews. The name he had been using with me was fake, and his car was stolen. When I escaped he had just pulled up stakes and moved on, blending back into the crowd with his practiced camouflage, free to hunt again another day.