Topic: An Unexpected Guest..

Author: Chris Dunn

With the spray can clutched in my right hand and a mask over my face, I make a quick count to three to steel myself before the horror that is to come and throw open the door. What follows is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever been a party to…

See, it all started a few weeks back when Karl arrived for the game. “There’s a strange smell on your porch,” he said as he entered. This is not a typical greeting in our culture, so I took it as Karl being his normal, weird self and ignored the comment for the most part. In the back of my head, I assumed he was suggesting, back-handedly, that the cat litter boxes needed to be emptied. I made a mental note to check on that and tried not to take offense.

Then two days later while leaning out to get the mail, I noticed the smell too. It was certainly stronger outside, but the stench I found out there explained what had been teasing my nose all day up in my office. It wasn’t a smell I would call “strange”. I’d definitely label it carrion.

“Oh shit!” My mind raced back to week’s further still when I was sitting alone watching TV in the early evening hours of a thunderstorm. The rain was falling steadily, punctuated by brief flashes and booms, and I was just hoping the power would stayed on when I detected a sound that couldn’t be coming from the television. I muted the TV, and sure enough, the sound persisted. It was a faint, plaintive meow emanating from my front door. Miranda, my cat, was seated on her chair next to me seeming wholly oblivious to the intruder, so I rose slowly and cracked the door, figuring to find a sodden feline from the neighborhood riding the storm out huddled on my porch, but strangely, raven-like there was only darkness and rain beyond the door. The meowing stopped as well, so I pet my cat as I returned to my seat assuming my approach had scared away the interloper. I lost myself in whatever, cop-drama-sci-fi-explodey show I was watching to while away the evening, until the sound came again. This time I rose quickly, but when the door opened the meowing persisted, coming from under my very feet.  “Oh, shit…” Now I know what’s going on. There’s a crack in foundation of my porch and the tiniest crawlspace that runs all along the front of the house. Every now and then, possums like to crawl in there, scratch away and make their bizarre possum noises, but this was clearly a cat, and from the sound of it, a cat in some distress.

I returned to my living room pondering how I could help the animal without stressing it further. What was I to do, go out with an umbrella to stand in my neighbor’s driveway with a handful of cat food and try to coax beast to come out into the rain. “Hi, there… I’m a stranger and there’s a ton of water out here, but are you hungry?” That wasn’t going to work. My best hope was that the cat was just wet and scared and would leave of its own accord - perhaps at storm’s end. When the continued meowing got to be too much, I decided to retire early, and promptly forgot about the whole affair.

But the stench brought it all back. The cat hadn’t left of its own accord, and it hadn’t been merely seeking shelter from the rain. Likely injured by one of the commuters who use our back streets to avoid the gridlock of the nearby main thoroughfare, the poor wretch had found itself a nice, dark hole in which to die. Right under my front door! Yes, I felt a momentary pang of pain for the beast and a twinge of guilt that perhaps I should’ve done more, but those feeling were quickly pushed out by the power of the lingering stank of its rotting corpse. Now what was I to do?

If the likelihood of extracting the injured animal from the depths of my porch recess during a thunderstorm, was slim. I had to put the chance of removing its dead body from roughly 15 feet down a 4 inch wide crack in my porch, at none. I resigned myself to wait it out. Two days in, my resolve gave way and I called everyone I could think of, animal control, building contractors, my brother Marty, anyone with an ounce of handiness. They all sounded hopeful and helpful until I laid out the particulars.

“Wait, so it’s how far in? And how big is the whole?”

“Yes, yes. That’s what I figured. How long do you think… Two months!”

Yes, two months of stench. “You get used to it,” I told people. It was true. It’s amazing what you can come to ignore. Each night my gamers would arrive with looks of revulsion on their faces, but shortly after sitting down to play they stopped smelling it. There was nothing to be done outside of complaining. I researched alternatives, powders and sprays to nullify the stink but the issue was always, how to get them to the body. I envisioned a long pole with a flash light and a pouch, a pouch with some sort of catch-release, but honestly, I’m not a mythbuster. I just watch them on TV.

Weeks went by with the smell lessening a little each day, and it was all but gone when the true horror began. First it was one fly. Then two. Then five! Big, fat, enormous, slow-moving flies that seemed dazed and confused. It was easy to coral them into corners and the downstairs bathroom and swat them by the dozens. They barely tried to evade the swatters. I’d open windows to offer them escape to the wild as an alternative, but too many decided to they wanted to move in. I went to the hardware store and bought all the equipment: fly spray, swatters, fly paper rollers, citronella and a weird plastic contraption which claimed to kill for up to 3 months. I went to work making a couple passes each day. I figured it couldn’t last much longer. The smell had stopped, I could swat a few more flies and it would all be over.

Until the morning I came downstairs to find that the smell had returned. This struck me as odd, but what really bothered me wasn’t the smell I detected, but the sound. There was a buzz, a significant buzz coming from under my living room. I knew immediately what it had to be, but my mind refused to accept it. Even as I climbed down the basement stairs through a new thick cloud of flies, I hoped against all evidence and reason that what was coming could not be reality. Creaking open the door to room which once contained the ancient coal furnace, I shuddered in revulsion as my eyes beheld the entire ceiling of the small room covered in a carpet of thousands of buzzing insects. I beat a hasty retreat and fought desperately for a plan of action. Lighting a fire and walking away was high on the list! But no, it was my house, my responsibility. These are the kinds of things they don’t mention in realtor ads. “Own your own home! But remember, anything that goes wrong there is now YOUR responsibility. And when we say anything…”

Another trip to the hardware store, and I procured a couple more cans of industrial strength bug killer and some respiratory masks, and this takes us to where we started. The spray was powerfully effective on the newly spawned flies and their dead and dying bodies rained down on my by the hundreds. I remained for as long as I could stand the pelting, then fled to the safety of the upstairs shaking my hair clean of corpses over the sink. I cherished the gulps of poison-free air while simultaneously trying to banish what I’d just experienced and also searching for the courage to face the realization that I would need to do it several more times before they were all gone.

I did it. Today, that’s what the kids would call “adulting”, but really it was just a simple question of what else could be done. The basement floor was so thick with dead flies that I removed them with a shop-vac. This was years ago, but the scars remain, and every so often I’ll move a piece of dust-covered furniture in the basement and find a small pile of dead flies, a continuing reminder of that rainy night and my unexpected guest.