Shades

Eden dropped the duffle in the floor of the living room. There was an odd, lingering lilac smell to the house, and another smell she couldn’t quite place. She surveyed the room and eyed the webbed corners and their eight-legged tenants with wary disdain. The old piano she and Grandma Ruby used to plink out butchered tunes on was gone, and in its place stood a bookshelf with creamy yellow paint.
“I’m going out to the garage for a bit,” Weston said. “You just make yourself right at home.”
Denny smiled at him and turned back to the self. There were three types of books before her; Bibles, cookbooks, and old dime novels Grandma Ruby collected. There were a few overstuffed photo albums and a miniature box hat Eden remembered her grandmother putting letters and news clippings in. There was one framed picture, one that Eden didn’t remember from her childhood, of Grandma Ruby in a blue Sunday dress, and a yellowed obituary page. The glass was dusty and there were cobwebs interspaced in the opulent swirls of the pewter frame.
There was an unusual amount of dust on everything, she noticed. It was like no one had lived in the house for months. Eden moved into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and was greeted with a sour smell that emanated from stacks of tin-foiled packets of unlabeled food. She wrinkled her nose and shut the door. She did a sweep of the kitchen for anything edible and found nothing. Not even a box of Swiss rolls, which she knew were Grandpa Weston’s favorite treat. Eden went to the sink, searching for signs of dirty dishes, or anything that would tell her that there was something unspoiled in the house, but the only thing there was some kind of brownish, rusty looking residue where something had not quite been washed down the drain. The sour smell was here, too. It was driving her insane; the smell was starting to trigger a panic response in her, and yet she couldn’t tell what it was!
She huffed and went back to the refrigerator, bending over to exam the foiled packets more clearly. Some of them were Tupperware containers filled with what might have been food at one point in time, but now looked like white and blue fuzzy mush. Some just looked like tinfoil dinners her dad would make when he took her camping. She picked one up. A reddish brown liquid leaked from the side onto her hand. Eden froze, blinked, and lifted her hand to smell of it.
Blood.
That was the smell. She began trembling, and ripped open the foil. It was just some kind of uncooked beef, but the rancid smell and the bloody juice that dribbled onto her hand triggered something frightening in her and she crumpled the packet shut and tossed it back in the fridge. She almost ripped the faucet out of the counter turning the water on to wash off her hands. When she found her skin to be acceptably clean, she continued to let the water run, seeing if the residue in the basin— which she suspected now might also be blood— would wash away. It didn’t. The smell of rotting meat and lilac started to blend together and made Denny feel sick. She felt like she should just toss out what was in the fridge, but the overwhelming odors drove her outside to the porch instead.
She could see Grandpa Weston from the porch, tinkering away in the garage. He would muse over the exposed truck’s engine and then return to the cab and try to crank the old pick-up. The engine would whir and turn over without success, and he would return to his tinkering. It was a pleasantly familiar sight. As soon as her head stopped spinning and her heart rate slowed she lighted off the porch and cut across the mums to watch him as he worked. He didn’t notice her until she leaned on the side of the truck.
“Settling in yet?”
“There were spiders in the living room. I’ve never been too keen of spiders,” she shrugged apologetically. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to fix this damned machine,” he grunted. “I’m afraid I’ve tinkered with her so much in my spare time she won’t run unless I mess with her after every trip.”
“Anything I can do to help?” Denny offered. Weston looked up at her, and down again in thought.
“Well, I suppose you can bring me the tool box. It’s on the workbench in the back,” he said.
Denny pushed off the truck and stepped over some old, warped planks in search of the red case, which she predicted would not be as red as she remembered it from her childhood.
“And bring the oil and a funnel, too,” Weston requested.
Denny found the oil first, and when she set it on the back of the truck to free both hands for the toolbox, she saw something that made her heart stop.
In the bed of the truck was a bundle of tarp, with that same brownish-red stain. While she didn’t smell anything (the air was too cold to smell clearly), she allowed her curiosity to get the better of her and when she lifted the corner of the tarp she thought she might have an attack.
There was a woman’s body, bruised and bloody, her tongue swollen and pushing between thick lips. Something red-black and chunky was leaking out of her nose and ears, and her eyelids were sunken in. Daring herself to lift more of the tarp, she saw the body of a child and the legs of what may have been an adolescent or another woman. Denny lowered the tarp quietly, and took Weston up the oil and funnel. Her mind was reeling.
It made sense. She ran the scenarios down in her head. The blood and the lilac. Shades smell like lilac. The Shades are using bodies to practice on, trying to refine their possession technique. They’re experimenting with ways to keep the body from decaying once a Shade took root. There were currently three, maybe four corpses in the back of the truck right now, and her grandfather— the Shade that had taken hold in his body— was hauling these victims around for the Shades.
“Denny?”
She snapped to attention at Weston’s voice, having been so deep in her thoughts, and looking again over his pale, sickly face. This wasn’t her grandfather. This was something that would kill her as soon as it got the chance. Her heart started to pound loudly in her ears to the point that she almost couldn’t hear herself talk as she handed him— it— the oil and funnel and said,
“I forgot to tell Uncle Phil something. I’ll be right back.”
He nodded and excused her. Eden tried to walk as calmly away from him as she could, not liking the thought of turning her back on him. It. If you panic, you die, she reminded herself.
The screen door slammed shut behind her and she almost collapsed by her duffle, throwing things in the floor as she searched for her phone. Hopefully Phil wasn’t too far away. Denny didn’t know if she could handle this on her own. It wasn’t a matter of having the ability to fight back, but this thing was inside of her grandfather’s body. She may be trained to kill, but Eden still had some humanity left in her. Her trembling hands found the phone and fumbled with the keypad.
“Shit,” she blurted. “Come on.”
She messed up the code twice, but didn’t get a third chance. Denny heard him behind her and before she could turn around something cold and hard cracked into the side of her skull.

Notes