They’d been living in the new house for a month before they smelled it. It was terrible, wet and rotting. When George caught onto it, he’d gone around the house, sniffing, crawling on his hands and knees in the kitchen at one point, sure he’d find a dead rat behind the fridge. But there wasn’t a dead rat, just the permeating smell of death.

“It’s an animal, it’s died in the house…oh my God, what if it had babies in the walls?”

His wife was always the negative Nelly, but George had heard weird noises at night, and at night was when the sneaky animals came out. She may not be wrong, he thought.

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.