Hey, sorry in advance since english isn’t my first language. This happened a few days ago and I don’t really know where else to share it.
It was around 7:30 PM and I got a message from a friend asking me to help him out with his garbage. I didn’t really understand it at first but thought maybe there was too much trash and he needed my truck(?) He lives a few miles away from the city and needs to take his trash out by car to a common dumping area since the garbage truck won’t go up to his house. He does this daily on his way to work.
I arrived there about 40 minutes later and he was on his porch area smoking a cigarette with a blank expression on his face. We hugged since it was some time since we last saw each other, you know how life tends to get in the way. I lit up a cigarette as well and he started explaining why he wanted my help. He put the trash out the night before and was explicit that there was nothing out of the ordinary with it, he lives alone so there wasn’t much trash, and it was new since he drove the old trash out to that garbage area in the morning. A few hours later, he was watching TV and got startled by some noises coming from the back of the house, where he puts his trash. He didn’t want any wild animals going through it so he got up to scare it away. After a few steps he heard something akin to a cat meowing, so he figured it was one of his neighbor’s cats, they don’t live that close to each other but you can see his house from my friend’s porch. I’ve never seen him, but I’ve occasionally seen cats around my friend’s house, and he always said they were from that neighbor. Anyways, my friend really likes cats, so he started “talking” to the cat while walking to the kitchen, where the door to the back is. When he was arriving at the back door he bumped into a beer bottle that was on the counter and it crashed on the floor. He heard the cat screaming and when he opened the door he saw a dark shape dashing for the tree line. “welp, he isn’t coming back after that scare” he said to himself as he was taking a look at the garbage. It looked normal and there weren’t any apparent holes in the bags, so he went back inside, cleaned the glass from the floor, and threw it in the kitchen garbage. The next day he woke up and decided to empty his kitchen trash before taking it all to the dump area. As he opened his back door, the foulest stench hit his nose and he immediately started to gag. He threw the kitchen trash bag next to the others and closed the door. He immediately went to the bathroom to throw up and decided to deal with it when he was back from work. We’ve been having quite a lot of rain for the past few days, so he thought it would help with the smell. Hours later he arrives home, already forgotten about the smell. As he opened the kitchen door, he was hit again with it, and it all came back to him. The smell hadn’t gone away, it had gotten worse, and was now inside his kitchen. He threw up on the floor, didn’t have time to go to the bathroom this time. He decided to go around the house to see what the hell was wrong with his trash, and from afar, he almost puked for the third time, all the bags had holes in them, and there were maggots all around. He ran back to the front of the house, and thought a bit about it, how was it possible for the fresh garbage to be in that state after just one day? Doesn’t really matter, he just needed it fixed, so he sent me the message and didn’t leave his porch.
This friend was startled really easily, he always jumped when watching horror movies, so I thought that maybe he was exaggerating a bit about the smell and the maggots, maybe it was rice from a bag that spilled onto the others when the cat was going through them the night before. We finished our cigarettes and after a deep breath, he opened his front door and we got inside. The living room had no smell at all, making me confident that it wasn’t that bad. “Actually, don’t want to go around the house? I think the kitchen is unbearable right now”. “Don’t worry, man, let’s see if there’s anything wrong with the kitchen first, and then we can go around if need be”. Boy, how was I wrong. He opened the kitchen door after a few seconds holding the door handle and gestured for me to go inside, as he got out of the way holding the door open. 1, 2, 3, and on the fourth step I froze, I could feel my nose, my mouth, my throat, everything burn with the most horrible smell I’ve ever felt. It remembered me of one time when I was a child, and I and a few friends were riding our bikes through my uncle’s property, but this time we went further than we ever had before. We came across a small house next to the woods and decided to knock, because I was sure that at this point we were no longer on my uncle’s land, and we wanted to get permission to ride around there. As we rounded the house to get to the door, there was none, the place was abandoned and filled with animal carcasses. There was rotting flesh, bones, and flies everywhere. The air was heavy and humid and the smell unbearable. We got to our bikes and booked it back. Even that smell, rotten animals, blood, and death itself, couldn’t come close to what I was feeling at that moment. I held my breath and ran back to the leaving room, shutting the door behind me. My friend looked at me with that “I told you so” look, and we started thinking about how to make it easier. The plan was to spray air freshener on some masks and wear smaller bags as gloves. After we prepared ourselves, we went out to go around the house. It was dark, so we couldn’t see that much, we also couldn’t turn that light on since the switch was in the kitchen, and no way in hell any of us would go in there again before getting rid of that smell.
We approached the garbage area and I help up my flashlight to get a better look. I was immediately struck with horror. That couldn’t be normal, no way. I’ve seen garbage before, I’ve seen dumps before, but nothing came close to that. There were maggots all over the bags, their movement making the tiny reflections flicker. It was like looking at the night sky, pitch black from the bags combined with glistering white dots. I could see my friend press his mask to his face, hoping that the lavender smell could prevent him from throwing up. Our eyes squinted, it was involuntary, we could feel a little burn sensation and the tears coming. I put the flashlight between my neck and shoulder and held a new big garbage bag open while my friend tried to lift one of the rot-infested bags to put it inside the new one. He was trying to hold in places where there were no maggots or holes, but there were no empty areas to hold onto, as he tried to lift it, brown liquid started oozing from the holes. You could see several white dots falling into the dark pool that had formed under the bags, it was like sprinkling sugar into a black coffee. He managed to get a good grip on the bag, and I held my bag open for us to secure the trash, but as he was slowly lowering his bag, it started coming apart. To our luck, most of it fell into the new bag. We couldn’t handle any more of the smell at that point, so we decided to take a break and ran back to the porch. Keep in mind that this ordeal couldn’t have lasted more than 30 seconds. We took out our masks and started smoking our cigarettes, trying to get that awful odor out of our respiratory systems. “Fuck it” I said, my friend looked at me with terror in his eyes, I think he thought that I was going to leave him to deal with it alone. I took another hit off the cigarette and looked at him, “Here’s what we are going to do”, he listened intently, “I’m gonna park my truck back there, we are gonna throw the bags on the back as fast as possible, just trying to now destroy them and spill everything. After that we will drive to that dumping zone and take everything out”, his eyes glowed with hope, and that’s what we did, that part was still horrible and we almost threw up a lot, but this is getting too long and I still have things to tell.
After driving to the dumping zone and back, my friend took a hose and we cleaned the back of my truck, we also tried to wash away the area where he kept his trash, it was concrete, so it all came out after some cleaning products and a lot of water. After that, we sat in his back area and started smoking again, I’ve never seen him more relieved, and to be fair, I was really relieved as well. There was still some odor in the air, but nothing close to whatever the hell that was before. We were discussing how bizarre it was, and with the light on this time, I was looking around the area and could see what looked like a path on his back lawn, it was surrounded by dying grass. I asked him what that was. He didn’t know, so we went to have a closer look. It was a pathway of dead grass from his trash area to the woods. I held the flashlight up to it and could see what looked like paw prints on the wet soil, it looked like it was from a cat, but bigger, not much, but enough to make it weird. The weirdest part, however, was that every print was mirrored. Imagine if put your foot on the dirt, then turn 180 degrees on your heels and press your foot down again. I’ve never seen anything like that. My friend said it was probably from his neighbor’s cat, and that he came and went through that same path so the prints were overlayed on each other. I think that’s highly unlikely since all prints we saw were like that, how would he step over all of his past prints? And how do we explain the trash being in the state that it was after only one day, with nothing out of the ordinary inside it? Or the weird rotten path formed from this house to the woods? Do you think that cat thing had something to do with the rotten garbage or was it attracted to it?
I know this isn’t all that scary and is more on the nasty side, but thinking about it all gives me the creeps. I can’t seem to get that smell out of my nose and mouth, I’ve tried it all. My friend for some reason doesn’t want to talk about this with our other friends, and I also don’t understand that. Am I supposed to forget about the weird cat and rotten garbage? How? I can still smell it, I don’t think I’ll forget it that soon.