The Wrong Family(78)

The smell was thicker on the main level; it was a sizable animal, he decided. He grabbed a handful of thick, industrial garbage bags from under the sink. He wished he had a mask to put over his mouth and nose—wherever that smell was coming from, it was only going to get worse as he got closer. There was a mask shortage, go figure, some virus people were shitting their pants about. George found a bandanna from his wife’s accessory drawer and wrapped it around his nose and mouth, and then he went downstairs to the foyer, wearing the gloves he used for yard work.

The entrance to the crawl space was in the front closet, the left one, if you were facing the front door. He’d had to pull the plans out to find the entrance to the thing, but he knew old houses like this one had them. He yanked open the closet door, eyeing the floor carefully. It was carpeted. New-looking, from what he could see. He might even have to pull the whole thing up. He dropped to his knees, looking for a seam, and found it: a trapdoor lay beneath a rectangle of carpet. George held his makeshift mask tighter across his face. Yep, that’s where it was coming from. The door was an original fucking piece of wood, if ever he’d seen one. It was easier pulling it up than he expected, and as soon as he did, a gust of god-awful drifted up and George gagged. Too far to turn back now, he thought.

He lowered his flashlight into the hole, hoping to God something wasn’t going to jump out of the darkness and eat his face. Rat babies, he thought. No—bigger—possum babies, maybe. But as the beam from his flashlight spun around the darkness in quick, manic jerks, he saw no obvious movement. The bottom wasn’t far off, so he lowered himself down, landing in a crouch. Here he could see that some parts of the dirt floor were uneven, making the space a roller coaster of high and low spaces. Like caves. He chose a direction at random and got to searching.

This place was creeping him the fuck out. He’d only crawled a little ways when he saw what he thought was garbage piled in a mass, in a far corner. It reeked. How the hell...? George thought. He was starting to have a very, very bad feeling. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck. In one corner, cans, bags, wrappers, and plastic gallon bottles were stacked against a wall in a neat row. Garbage enough to fill more than a dumpster. That’s when, in a panic, he began searching the ground, pausing occasionally to vomit his lunch, and then continuing on. The smell was getting stronger away from the rubbish pile, and his hand hit something wet and sticky; he kept going, though, his knees surely bleeding at this point from the little stones rolling under his palms.

The real estate agent who had sold them this house, a real hard-ass originally from New York, had said something about the former owners. George didn’t care for women’s gossip, but his wife had latched on, asking a dozen follow-up questions. They were new to the area. Was it possible it wasn’t safe? How many families were there on the street? She’d driven the hard-ass from New York to exhaustion with her questions, but at least it gave George a break. Amber had been her name; she’d said the previous owners had moved to Portland after a family tragedy, but there was something else he was trying to remember, something important that had stood out at the time.

He yelped when something cut his knee, stabbing sharply into the soft flesh on top of his kneecap. Glass. He pulled it out, tossing it aside. He was going too far; he should definitely fucking turn back. Turn back. The father had died, along with a woman, that’s what had happened. Killed by his brother-in-law, who then disappeared. George had seen the stories on the news, but the juicy details of people’s lives were his wife’s specialty. He’d not thought anything of that until—fuck—he could see something now. Sweatpants...hair... George panted, head hanging toward the dirt. He’d sweat through his shirt, and he could smell his own ripe smell on top of the stench. A thin line of spit hung from his mouth, swinging toward the dirt. Where had his wife’s bandanna gone? He lifted his eyes again, more slowly this time, reluctant to look but unable not to.

There were two feet, small, like a child’s. George had to know; he hadn’t suffered all this way just to go back now. He crawled around the body so he could get a look at the face. The ground rose around the corpse in a cradle; George had to crawl upward and hold his flashlight between his teeth, pushing forward on his belly. It had a beanie on its head, pulled down low, but in the shaking light of his flashlight George saw strands of long gray hair stuck to a mottled gray face. Not a child, the opposite. In the yellow glow of the flashlight she looked almost peaceful. Where had that thought come from...? Someone dead in a crawl space—his crawl space—and they did not die peacefully. His mouth dropped open, and the flashlight rolled into the cradle with the body. George could not see to get back without it. He reached in toward the light, being careful not to touch anything—to touch it. But as he pulled the flashlight away, something came with it, roused in the dirt.

He picked it up, horrified to be doing so and yet unable to stop himself. It was small, like a piece of chalk. George held it up to his face, panting, sweat running into his ass crack. A bone. He was sure it was the hip bone of something very small. Fuuuck! He dropped it, shaking his hand. It’s human, he thought, and very quickly unthought it. It was not human; it couldn’t be. It was too small. The shock was still present as George began his long crawl back to the trapdoor. What was he going to tell his wife? This house had been his idea of a new start for them, even with its grisly history, but the minute she found out about this—and what was “this”? George thought. He’d almost reached the front of the trapdoor again, and he shone his light back and forth as he went, scared something was going to jump out at him. And then the beam of his flashlight illuminated something else and he jumped, hitting his head on a beam and then falling backward onto his ass. But he still had his flashlight. He swept it over the darkness, panting softly. You’ve already seen one dead body, idiot, he thought. But George did not want to see another dead body, even though he was pretty sure now that there were two back there. He wanted to be sick again.