As I sit here looking again at my Google search history from the past few days, from the physical security of a two-queen hotel room, I realize that this is not something that happens to most people.
So my mom died about three months ago, on the afternoon of New Years’ Day during a midday nap. My older sister had been watching her since Dad died two years ago at the age of seventy-four, and it’s been that steady decline you sometimes see with people who have been married forever and don’t know how to live with each other. Dad got sick and died in a matter of weeks, and I knew Mom was dying the day I sat in the backseat of my sister’s SUV on the way back from his memorial.
Not like medically dying. I mean that kind of poetically or metaphorically or metaphysically. She’d been with him when he took his last breath, she said, holding his hand and telling him how much she loved him. I didn’t know what it was like to be with someone in their last moments, but I could only imagine the damage it would do to someone’s head.
My sister upended her life, moving from the suburb on the opposite end of the city to live with my mom and make sure she was taken care of. I would’ve done it, but Mom never liked me as much as she liked Angela. She never said that, but considering my sister took the honorable route and got a job at an accounting firm while I was chasing open mic nights to practice my standup, it was pretty clear. It’s whatever.
Anyway. Mom died in January, like I said. Angela took care of everything, which was lucky because if it had been my job, I don’t know if I would’ve known what to do, and I might’ve just asked some research center to come get the body and do tests on it. Mom would’ve hated that, but she wasn’t going to be able to complain. Angela, the good kid, had Mom cremated.
About a month after the big memorial service Ang had invited all of Mom’s old friends and coworkers to, she texted me and asked if I would be interested in moving into Mom and Dad’s old house with them. Sure, I said, because they owned the house and it would save some money, and the stress of having three roommates (all human, not counting the four-odd mice that I’m pretty sure slept in bed with me) in a two bedroom apartment was wearing on me. Ang and I hadn’t spoken too much in the last few years, since she was busy with her life and I was busy with mine.
I tried to help where I could, but Angela had gotten so used to taking care of everything that she usually shooed me when I tried to help clean or cook, so I took some time to learn how to fix some things around the house with the plumbing or drywall or whatever so I could at least feel slightly contributory during the day before I would go into the city in the evenings to find somewhere to tell my stupid jokes. I took on projects here and there around the house, finding that maybe DIY was my calling, and I was taking the mirror down in Mom and Dad’s bathroom (where we’d never really been allowed to go) when I first discovered it.
In that bathroom, I pulled the mirror from the wall, finding it was barely hanging on by a single rusty nail anyway, and behind it there was a small square of drywall missing, maybe three inches by three inches. That in itself wasn’t strange, but the smell coming from it was definitely nothing to laugh about. It smelled like someone was roasting pennies over a campfire.
I gagged and left the room, texting Ang right away to tell her I thought something might be rotting in the wall between our parents’ bathroom and the laundry room next to it.
Uh, gross, she’d answered, and I braved the ick long enough to cover the hole with masking tape after the nail I tried to re-hang the mirror on broke right off. I went to the furthest reaches of the house to hide from the smell, and I thought it was just sticking inside my nose or head or something before Ang got home and was covering the bottom half of her face in disgust before she’d even come in the door.
“Good fucking God, Nina, did you look in the hole to see what was in there?” Angela demanded as soon as she got home. “The whole house smells like used tampons and burning hair.”
A better description than the one I’ve given you, but maybe you get the idea now. Gag.
We made a game plan, covering our faces with dish towels to stymie the smell and taking breaks to go stand out on the sidewalk when the smell got too strong. I investigated the laundry room, finding where the other side of the wall was, and I had to move a tall metal shelf where Mom had organized all their towels and cleaning supplies in neat rows to find the wall behind it.
There was the faint outline of what must have been a door at one point. It had long since been painted over, leaving only an indented seam where the door had once been. There was no handle, obviously, and if I had to guess, the hinges were on the other side.
We’d grown up in this house. How was there a fucking room we didn’t know about?
After showing Angela what I saw, she said she wanted to barf and we drove to the Holiday Inn Express to get a cheap room for the night, since she’d made the good point that we would never be able to sleep with that smell cloying throughout the house.
I searched a few things on Google:
Entire house smells like blood and burning?: A gross search that yielded a few pictures of animals that had violently died in some people’s vents. It was a possibility, but given that the smell started the moment that hole came uncovered, I put those thoughts on the backburner. There was something in the hole.
House records by address: The county we lived in had a handy search tool that told me Mom’s house was built in 1957, and that the blueprints for the house would maybe be on file in the County Clerk’s office.
County Clerk office email contact: I’m not gonna wait until tomorrow morning to fucking call.
I heard back from the County Clerk’s office at 10 a.m. the next morning, and the lady had helpfully attached a PDF of the blueprints to the house, and I examined them as Angela dried her hair from her shower, carefully braiding it in anticipation of the gross day we had ahead. She’d taken a sick day off work after she hadn’t slept well at the hotel, saying she didn’t feel right working all day when the house seemed so fucked up.
The blueprints were pretty shitty quality, honestly, but the faint lines were plenty for me to identify the bathroom where I’d found the hole. There was what appeared to be a linen closet there between the bathroom and the laundry room where I’d found the outline of the door, and when I told Angela as much, she asked questions I couldn’t answer: how long had that closet been sealed off? Did Mom and Dad even know it was there? How long would a room that smelly take to clean?
As we loaded up in the car, having checked out of the hotel, I searched up a few more things.
How to open a secret door in your house: The results were mostly YouTube videos on how to install a secret door. I didn’t know the architect from Clue had a YouTube account.
How to open a door that’s been sealed shut: Mostly results from video games, but after some scrolling I saw some people suggest that a sharp putty knife and a reciprocating saw might do the trick.
Hardware store near me: The nearest one was about five minutes by car from the Holiday Inn.
Ang let me go into the store by myself and I walked out $110 poorer with an electric saw and a sharp, sharp knife.
We got to the house and I went straight for the laundry room, instructing Angela to go to Mom’s bathroom and look through the hole and tell me if she saw light when I stabbed the seam between the door and the wall. She looked uneasy going to the bathroom, but I hadn’t expected her to scream.
“Nina, get the fuck out of there!” she shrieked from the front door, and I didn’t question my older sister’s instructions, booking it the fuck out of there after her.
“What? What happened?” I asked, closing the front door behind me. I could hear my heart in my ears, but Angela was turning an interesting shade of green.
“The tape was gone,” she said quietly, turning around to empty our McDonald’s breakfast in the garden and then some. I wanted to puke, too, but one of us had to keep it together. The masking tape being gone on its own was annoying, but not vomit-worthy, and I almost said as much, but she kept talking. “The tape over the hole was gone, and I hadn’t gotten the light on yet, but I saw an eye looking at me, Nina.”
There’s a very particular fear in seeing someone very brave and collected completely losing their shit, and more than what she’d said, I was terrified because Angela clearly didn’t want anything to do with any of this. “You’re sure?”
Angela walked out to the sidewalk, sitting on the curb and putting her head in her hands. “There was a fucking eye. It was looking at me. The second I screamed it closed or moved away, I don’t know. What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck.”
I feel like this makes me a bad sister, but I patted her on the back and said, “I’m going to go look again. It was probably a trick of the light, and since you were scared your brain probably saw something that wasn’t there.”
I’m so dumb. I’ve seen movies.
Angela told me not to go, but when I insisted we couldn’t walk away forever, she slowly nodded, and said she would wait at the door while I went back in. The smell was stronger than ever now, and as I went into the bathroom, the sickly trepidation that made me want to vomit then and there was almost enough to turn me around.
The door to the bathroom was still open, and I guessed that Angela hadn’t taken much care to mitigate the smell by keeping the door closed like I had. I reached into the bathroom before I went in, turning on the light to keep any tricks of the light and imaginary eyeballs at bay.
The masking tape was on the floor of the bathroom, like it had been torn off in one chunk, and the hole remained dark. No eyes looked back at me, and when I shined my phone light into it, I didn’t see much since the hole was so small. It was just me and the burning blood smell.
“There’s nothing here,” I reassured Angela as I left the bathroom. “The tape probably just didn’t hold. I’m going to go back into the laundry room and try to get the door open again.”
She didn’t move, nodding with her face still devoid of color. If she wanted to stop me, she didn’t have enough air in her lungs to talk, so I walked around to the laundry room and picked up the shit I’d dropped when she screamed and got back to work on the door.
All in all, it took me about half an hour to carve through the thick coat of paint keeping the door sealed, and I talked to Angela the whole time, trying to stay casual despite the fact that I could feel my guts trying to get out through my esophagus. Whatever dead animal had gotten into that closet, the smell was going to hit me like a fucking Mack truck and I knew I had to be ready.
The paint around the door came free, and to my disappointment and relief, it didn’t just swing open and reveal its sordid secrets. I fucked with the spot where a knob would’ve been for a bit, poking and prodding it with a the putty knife. I hadn’t been speaking to Angela for a moment so I could concentrate, and I managed to make enough of a gap in the door mechanism that I could get in there with my fingers and pull on the mechanism.
I was so caught up in my celebration that I had figured out how the door could open that when it came loose and opened a crack, I hadn’t thought to hesitate and brace myself.
The smell hit me like a tidal wave, and when I saw the mess inside I took a step back, choking and gagging. The bottom of the closet was littered with a substance I can only describe as something similar to wet jerky, red and wrinkled and shiny.
Curled in a corner in the back, retreating from the light of the laundry room, was a filthy and malnourished body, with wide bloodshot eyes trained on me. The skin around its mouth had been eaten away, forming a feral grin.
“Angela!” I screamed, and as she came running, I stopped her so she wouldn’t see what was inside. “Call 911,” I ordered, blocking the doorway. She turned away and I heard her speaking to an operator by the time she got to the front door.
I took out my phone, trying not to retch, as my shaking hands tried to tap out one more Google search:
How long can a man in his seventies be kept alive in a closet?