I was never supposed to talk to Mrs McGlynnis next door because she kept garden snakes in a bin and never washed her hands - at least that's what my parents told me. As a bored child often does, I ignored what they said and used the ivy to climb over into her garden to see if anything they'd said about her was true.
Before I could get a single finger on the metal cover I'd been caught by an old woman who looked a lot cleaner than my parents had led me to believe. In fact at first she was nothing like they'd said she'd be. I'd spend whatever time I could in her garden, whenever the weather was agreeable and my parents weren't paying attention.
Most of my fondest childhood memories are of her garden which only makes it worse that she named me as the sole benefactor in her will all these years later. Not once had I set foot in her house until I found her half collapsed by her open back door. She was stone-cold dead, blood congealing in a pool around a large cut on her head where she must have hit it on her way down.
Every time I've had to go into her house it's just been one bad thing after another and not just from the sheer amount of garbage she'd accumulated over the years but for all the animal corpses that had steadily been unearthed as volunteers from the neighbourhood helped me clear out Mrs McGlynnis' home.
We found thirty-eight cats, nineteen dogs and far too many kittens and puppies to begin counting or even differentiating - when they're that small and deformed they all look alike. After all those poor creatures we thought we'd seen the worst and last of it.
Then we found her nursery.
Before I could get a single finger on the metal cover I'd been caught by an old woman who looked a lot cleaner than my parents had led me to believe. In fact at first she was nothing like they'd said she'd be. I'd spend whatever time I could in her garden, whenever the weather was agreeable and my parents weren't paying attention.
Most of my fondest childhood memories are of her garden which only makes it worse that she named me as the sole benefactor in her will all these years later. Not once had I set foot in her house until I found her half collapsed by her open back door. She was stone-cold dead, blood congealing in a pool around a large cut on her head where she must have hit it on her way down.
Every time I've had to go into her house it's just been one bad thing after another and not just from the sheer amount of garbage she'd accumulated over the years but for all the animal corpses that had steadily been unearthed as volunteers from the neighbourhood helped me clear out Mrs McGlynnis' home.
We found thirty-eight cats, nineteen dogs and far too many kittens and puppies to begin counting or even differentiating - when they're that small and deformed they all look alike. After all those poor creatures we thought we'd seen the worst and last of it.
Then we found her nursery.
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