“Gnaw”

Mason Firth watched the rural highway unravel in a slow curve through brittle grass and leafless oaks, the pavement cracking into patches where frost heave had bullied its way to the surface. His truck groaned with each dip, suspension aging as poorly as his knees, and he reached over to kill the half-eaten burrito sitting on the passenger seat with one final swipe of the greasy wrapper. It was a two-hour drive into Bone Ridge, an unincorporated cluster of farmland and forgotten roads where complaints like “aggressive possums” usually translated to raccoons fighting over pet kibble. Still, something about the woman’s voice on the phone had left a splinter under his skin. She hadn’t just sounded annoyed. She’d sounded frightened.

Clara Gentry met him at the edge of her driveway. The house stood a good hundred yards behind her, hunched and weathered beneath a swayback roof and a line of power cables that sagged between leaning poles. She wore a flannel coat over denim and kept her arms crossed tight against her chest, eyes narrowed with suspicion rather than age. She was in her sixties, maybe older, but something about her posture felt sharp—like someone who’d never relaxed in her life, and didn’t plan to start now.

“You’re the pest man?” she asked, not stepping aside.

“That’s right. Mason Firth. You called about possums?”

Her jaw shifted, tightening. “They’re not right. Not acting how they should. I’ve lived on this land since I was born, and I’ve seen my share of scavengers, but these ones—these ones tear. They chew through things like they’re angry.”

Mason raised an eyebrow. “Chewing what, exactly?”

“Wood. Pipes. My porch rail. They broke the crawlspace grate. One got into the chicken coop and tore up the wire fencing, didn’t even eat the birds—just killed ‘em. Left feathers and guts everywhere.”

That didn’t match any behavior he’d seen in his line of work. Opossums were opportunistic, yes, but not destructive. Not like that. He made a note of it but didn’t press her yet. Instead, he asked to see the damage.

The porch was worse than he expected. Deep gouges lined the wooden supports, and not the kind left by curious animals testing their teeth. These were wide, staggered marks, too deliberate, almost patterned—like something had been clawing or grinding into the boards with purpose. Nearby, the screen door hung half-unlatched, its bottom corner frayed and curling like it had been chewed and spat out.

Mason crouched beside the crawlspace grate and whistled low. The metal had been bent inward from the outside. Something had forced its way through the vent—not squeezed through a hole or exploited a gap—but pried its way in. Inside, the earth was disturbed and littered with bits of old insulation, newspaper, feathers, and what looked like matted fur or nesting materials.

“I’ve set traps. Cages, baited and placed properly. They ignore them,” Clara muttered behind him. “It’s like they know. And when I shoot at ‘em, they run, sure—but not scared. Just waiting.”

He nodded, noting her tension, but trying not to feed into it. “I’ll take a look around the property. Any places they seem to favor?”

She pointed toward the rear of the house. “They come from the trees. Past the treeline, behind the old shed.”

The woods beyond the house had the look of unmanaged land—wild thickets of brambles and leaf litter, half-buried stumps, and patches of fungus creeping up the sides of dead trees. Mason walked the perimeter slowly, looking for tracks, scat, or trails of fur. What he found instead, just beyond the edge of the yard, was a boot.

It sat tilted on its side in the grass, the leather worn and splitting, the laces rotted. But the thing that stopped him cold wasn’t the boot itself. It was the swollen, discolored foot still inside it. The toes were split, blackened, chewed raw at the tips. Ligaments and muscle peeked through where flesh had been stripped down to tendon. And squatting next to it, gnawing with slow, rhythmic bites, was a possum the size of a small dog.

Mason froze. The creature didn’t hiss, didn’t startle. It simply paused its chewing and turned to look at him. Its eyes were cloudy but aware. A thin line of dark fluid clung to its whiskers. Then, without any real urgency, it waddled off into the underbrush and vanished.

He stood over the foot for a long time, the nausea rising in waves beneath his ribs. The boot wasn’t new, but the meat was too fresh to be from an old burial. Something had died here recently. Or been left here.

He returned to the house and found Clara waiting at the back steps. She didn’t ask what he’d found, and he didn’t volunteer. Not yet.

“Is there anyone else living out here?” he asked.

“Not for miles.”

“Anyone go missing recently?”

She hesitated. “There’s always someone missing out here. Drunks, hunters who wander too far. Nobody checks real hard.”

He nodded again, filing that answer away. “Mind if I walk a little further into the woods?”

Clara’s eyes darkened. “Nothing good back there. Just old junk. The shed’s half collapsed. Nothing’s been stored in it for years.”

Even so, Mason went.

The woods grew denser as he moved farther from the house. The air carried a sour, almost metallic smell, like something rusted had soaked into the dirt. He passed the remnants of the shed, now just a heap of tin and warped lumber, and found the trail thinning into a kind of clearing. That was where he saw it.

A half-buried barrel jutted from the ground at a crooked angle, rim exposed above the dirt, mottled with corrosion. The lid had been sealed once, but the bolts were rusted and two of them had been pried free. Around the base, the soil had been disturbed, clawed or dug at by small hands—or paws. The stink was stronger here. Sweet rot, old blood, something chemical beneath it all, faint but undeniable.

He didn’t approach. Not yet. He circled the site, noting its proximity to the house and the trails that led to and from it. Possum tracks—definitely—but something else, too. Something that dragged.

A snapping twig behind him made him turn, and there stood Clara. She’d followed him without a word, and now she glared at the barrel like it might speak.

“You leave that alone,” she said, voice low and brittle.

“What is it?”

“Old garbage. Nothing worth stirring up.”

“Looks military.”

Her jaw worked. “Earl kept things. After he came back. Stored what he didn’t want seen.”

Mason let the silence stretch, the question unspoken. Clara answered it anyway.

“He’s gone now.”

That was all she said. She turned and walked back the way she’d come, boots crunching dry leaves underfoot. Mason stared at the barrel a moment longer, then marked its position with a ribbon of survey tape from his pocket, tied to a low branch. He didn’t dig. Not yet.

There was a right time for things.

And sometimes, the thing doing the gnawing wasn’t the possum at all.

Part II

The frost was still clinging to the grass when Mason pulled up to the Gentry property the next morning. The sunlight did little to soften the chill, and the wind had picked up, bringing with it the coppery smell he now associated with the land behind Clara’s house. He parked near the barn and stepped down slowly, the bandage on his palm itching from where a thorn had jabbed him the night before. He remembered tying off that strip of red tape and feeling the breath of the woods on the back of his neck as he walked away. It had not felt like wind.

His traps, ten in total, had been set across a rough perimeter between the crawlspace, the shed, and the treeline. Most were simple spring-cage types, baited with raw eggs and sardines. They had served him well for years, but when he began checking them now, a cold heaviness settled into his chest.

The first trap was untouched. The second had its door down, but the bait was gone. No tracks. No signs of struggle. It looked as though the possum had simply bypassed the mechanism and exited without a sound.

The third trap rattled when he approached. Inside, a possum huddled against the wire, but something about it was unmistakably wrong. Its body was bloated, the skin pulled tight across its sides as though filled with fluid. Patches of fur had fallen out in clumps, revealing pale skin mottled with lesions. When Mason knelt for a closer look, the creature turned its head sharply, and he saw that its left eye had no pupil—just a cloudy smear of white, pulsing faintly as though a second lid moved behind it.

He checked the fourth and fifth traps quickly. One was empty again. The other contained another captured possum, but this one was emaciated, trembling violently. Its mouth hung slack, revealing a complete absence of a lower jaw. The tongue lolled uselessly, twitching as if in response to his presence. There was no blood. No trauma. It simply lacked a jaw, as if it had never grown one to begin with.

He stepped back, suppressing the urge to gag. These weren’t just sick animals. They had been altered—and not by disease or environment. These were outcomes. Results of something introduced, something done to them. He snapped several photos and video clips, narrating quietly into his phone to document what he saw. If he needed to make a case to animal control or even the state wildlife department, he wanted evidence.

The sixth trap had been tripped but was empty. Mason knelt and studied the latch, which was still engaged. Something had tripped it from the outside. The bait was left untouched. Nearby, he found small paw prints, but they doubled back instead of approaching. He followed them a short way and realized they led directly to a branch where another trap had been set—the seventh. That one had not even been disturbed.

He stood there for a long moment, processing. The animals were learning.

At the gas station on the edge of town, Deputy Roy Hess was sipping from a Styrofoam cup and arguing with the clerk about the price of batteries when Mason stepped in. The conversation halted when their eyes met, and Mason nodded toward the booths in the back. Hess followed without question.

“What brings you back?” Hess asked, settling in across from him.

“I’ve got some questions,” Mason said. “About the Gentry place. Specifically Earl.”

Roy scratched his chin. “Old Earl? Hell, he’s been gone ten years or more.”

“Clara mentioned him. Said he stored some things after he got back from the service. That ring any bells?”

“Plenty of people served,” Roy said, carefully. “But Earl came back… different. Didn’t take to people. Said he was working on a patent, something to do with environmental control. Rumor was he brought things home from overseas. Chemicals. Drums of it. Clara told people it was just oil or fertilizer, but I always figured it was something more. He kept to himself after that.”

Mason leaned in slightly. “You ever hear anything about someone going missing out there?”

Hess looked down into his cup, swirling the dregs. “Now that you mention it, yeah. About five years back, Clara called pest control. Not you—before your time. A guy from upstate. Came out with his own gear. Never got paid. His truck was found in a ditch two counties over. Engine running. Doors open. No sign of him.”

“Name?”

“Cameron Locke, I think. His wife put in a report, but the trail went cold. Folks said he probably ran off. But now… I don’t know.”

Mason nodded slowly. “He’s not the only one who might’ve been buried on that land.”

Roy narrowed his eyes. “You find something?”

“Not yet,” Mason replied, rising. “But I’m going back out there.”

The ground around the barrel had dried some overnight, though the soil remained soft from years of accumulated leaf mulch and poor drainage. Mason wore gloves this time, thick leather ones, and used a pry bar to chip away the compacted earth near the rim. It took him nearly forty minutes to clear enough space to get a full grip on the lid. The rusted bolts had corroded to the point of fragility, and with enough leverage, he managed to snap one of them entirely. The others squealed in protest but eventually gave way.

When the lid came loose, a foul, pressurized gasp escaped into the air, and Mason stumbled back, choking. The stench was unbearable—sweet and acrid, thick as sewage, with an underlying tang of metal and rot that seemed to cling to his tongue even when he turned his head away.

He approached again cautiously, lifting the lid only enough to peer inside.

The contents were not solid. A sludgy, gray-black slurry shifted beneath the surface, dotted with tufts of hair and the occasional glimpse of something pale and skeletal. Rib fragments, half-dissolved. A kneecap. Part of a spine. And nestled near the top, hovering just beneath the scum, was a jawbone with all its teeth intact.

Mason stared until he saw the engraving.

A wedding ring sat looped around the jaw’s canine tooth, so yellowed it might have been bone itself. The band had been warped by time, but the inscription inside was still legible.

E.G.

He backed away, bile rising in his throat. His hand fumbled for the camera, but the thought of photographing it felt obscene. This wasn’t waste. It wasn’t garbage. It was evidence. And not just of a death, but of intention.

The sound of rustling behind him pulled his attention away from the barrel.

The brush moved—first to his left, then again behind him. He turned, scanning the woods, heart pounding as he realized he was no longer alone.

From the shadows emerged five possums. No, six. Their movements were synchronized, not frantic or startled like wild animals disturbed. They came forward calmly, their bodies sagging with unnatural weight. One of them had a second tail, limp and dragging. Another had eyes so milky it should have been blind—but it was looking straight at him.

Mason reached for the pry bar, but the possums moved as one, lunging toward his legs with frightening speed. The first bit into his ankle. The second latched onto his forearm. Pain flared, sharp and white-hot, as teeth punctured through the glove and into flesh.

He fell backward, flailing, trying to shake them off, but they didn’t swarm. They didn’t tear. Each possum bit once, deeply, and then released. They scattered immediately afterward, retreating into the underbrush like a tide pulling back.

Mason lay in the leaves, blood running down his arm and neck, panting hard, stunned by the precision of the attack. His wounds were deep but not fatal. The bites were placed.

Not meant to kill.

They had marked him.

Part III

The bite wounds scabbed over quickly, but Mason knew something was wrong almost immediately. The pain was not sharp or localized. It was deep, radiating from marrow and nerve endings alike, and it brought with it a sensation that frightened him more than the blood had. It felt good.

In the truck on the way home, his mouth filled with saliva when he passed a roadkill deer. By the time he reached his apartment, he was grinding his back molars against one another so hard that his jaw ached. In the mirror, his gums looked swollen. Bright red pockets had formed around the bases of his teeth, and when he pressed one gently with the pad of his finger, a droplet of blood oozed between the roots. His fingernails, too, had changed. They were no longer smooth but ridged and thickening near the cuticles. When he scratched at his shirt, he left faint lines in the fabric.

He told himself it was stress. Infection. Reaction to the animal saliva. He made a doctor’s appointment but never followed through.

The dreams began the same night.

He saw dirt first—piles of it pressing down over his eyes as though he had been buried. Then came the sounds: chewing, rasping, whispering voices just beyond understanding. When he clawed upward toward the surface, he saw a hundred white eyes staring down at him from the mouth of a den.

The next morning, he awoke beneath his kitchen table. His arms were coated in grime, and the soles of his feet were caked with mud. His mouth tasted like pennies. He had no memory of leaving his bed, no sense of what he had done during the hours of lost time. He showered twice but couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still clinging to him.

He returned to the Gentry farm that afternoon, not out of duty but out of need. The land called to him now—not in words, but in scent. The rot was stronger than ever, and when he stepped onto the property, a wave of hunger rolled through his stomach so powerfully it left him trembling.

He found himself drifting toward the chicken coop, where blood had soaked into the soil days earlier. Flies buzzed lazily over dried entrails, and bits of gristle still clung to the wire mesh. Without thinking, he reached through the fence and took a scrap between his fingers. It crumbled there, but before he dropped it, he raised it to his nose and inhaled.

The scent was sublime.

He recoiled instantly, ashamed of the moment but unable to deny the urge it had stirred. Behind him, something moved.

A possum emerged from beneath the porch steps, head cocked. It was the same one from earlier, the one with the cloudy eye and bulbous jaw. It waddled toward him without fear, stopped a few feet away, and sniffed the air. He stood still, hands hanging at his sides. When it reached him, it pressed its nose to his boot, then nuzzled up his pant leg. Slowly, it climbed onto the toe of his boot and stretched toward his fingers.

Mason extended his hand. The possum sniffed, then began to lick.

Its tongue was rough and warm, and it licked at the dried blood around the bite on his wrist with a tenderness that felt almost reverent.

That night, Mason returned to the barrel. He had not meant to. His truck simply turned onto the dirt road, and his hands did not fight the wheel.

The soil was softer than before, as though the woods themselves had loosened in anticipation of his arrival. He brought a spade this time, along with a flashlight and a fresh set of gloves. He dug deeper along the back side of the barrel, hoping to determine its depth. He reached nearly three feet before striking something solid, something thinner than metal. He cleared away more earth and found a plastic-wrapped bundle: a waterproof notebook, muddied but intact, held together with decaying twine.

He unwrapped it carefully, sitting on a rock nearby while he flipped through the pages. The first few were notes—basic trap patterns, population counts, feeding schedules. But the handwriting grew erratic, the ink darker, the margins tighter, as the entries progressed.

One page stood out:

“I swear I heard it again tonight. Sounded like my voice, whispering from the woods. I thought I saw eyes, too many, too close together. The traps are being moved. Not broken. Moved. Something knows what I’m doing.”

Another entry followed three pages later, nearly illegible:

“They were waiting at the truck. Five of them. Watched me load the cages. One mimicked the rattle, repeated it back at me. Mocking. I think it’s him. I think Earl is in them now. Or part of him is.”

The final entry was smeared, as though the notebook had been dropped mid-sentence:

“I woke up with blood in my—”

The rest dissolved into ink trails and a thumbprint.

Mason sat in the silence for a long time, the notebook resting on his lap. The trees felt closer now, not just surrounding him, but enclosing him. The air did not move. The rot-smell, once nauseating, had become something else—familiar, almost soothing.

He felt it then, not as a voice, not as a thought, but as a certainty. This was not a disease. This was not rabies, or contamination. The bites were not attacks.

They were invitations.

He pressed his hand to the soil, digging his fingers into the loose earth. He brought it to his face and breathed deeply. The hunger surged again, not just for meat, but for dirt, for insects, for marrow.

When he stood and looked down at the barrel, he understood at last. The thing inside was not merely a chemical vat. It was a gestation chamber. What Earl had created had not died. It had multiplied. It had found hosts, then mouths, then minds.

And now, it had found Mason.

He was not being devoured.

He was being claimed.

Part IV

It was no longer possible for Mason to pretend that he had control. The changes had taken hold of him completely, not in fits or spells, but with a steady, creeping certainty that left no part of his body untouched. He had stopped trying to hide the wounds on his arms and neck. The skin around the bite marks had darkened and cracked, not with infection, but with growth. A fine layer of grayish hair had begun to emerge along his forearms and lower back. When he crouched to scratch at the itch behind his shoulder, he found that the motion of his joints had changed—his shoulders now rotated in ways that allowed him to curl inward, to compress himself unnaturally, like a thing that lived in tunnels.

His molars had shifted. The spaces between his teeth widened each day, and his front incisors had begun to protrude. He could no longer chew soft food without the sense that he was wasting time. Meat was all he could think about now—raw, stringy, sinewed cuts that still held the warmth of life. He had begun to drag roadkill into the woods behind the house. Each time he returned to the pile, he found it already picked clean. But they had left pieces for him. They always left something.

The nest had taken shape over the course of three days. Beneath Clara’s porch, in the cool hollow of the crawlspace, Mason pulled apart insulation and rolled it into soft mats. He dragged in torn sheets, his own clothing, shreds of burlap sacks he found in the shed. The bones came later—chicken first, then something larger, with longer femurs and a human-like jaw. They had been left for him in a shallow pit near the woods. He accepted the offering.

The possums slept near him at night. They circled his nest but never intruded. Sometimes, one would venture close and nuzzle the side of his face. One crawled onto his chest and fell asleep there, breathing in sync with the rise and fall of his lungs. Their scent was thick and sweet with rot, but Mason no longer found it offensive. It was the smell of his own body now—earthy, animal, blessed.

He no longer spoke aloud, not because he could not, but because language had lost its appeal. He understood through movement, through temperature, through the direction of a scent on the wind. The human part of him—the part that had needed words, tools, explanations—was slipping away like the last dry leaves before snowfall.

One evening, as dusk stained the treetops with rust-colored light, Clara opened the back door and stepped outside. Mason was crouched beneath the porch at the time, resting. He had not expected her to come so close. He had thought she had accepted what he had become.

She did not speak right away. Instead, she walked to the edge of the porch and stared down at the nest, her eyes glistening. In her hands, she held a red plastic canister. The slosh of gasoline was unmistakable.

“I should’ve buried it all when I had the chance,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I should’ve burned it to the roots.”

Mason tilted his head, blinking slowly.

“I thought I could keep it contained. Thought if I just didn’t feed it, it’d die off. But it don’t die. It multiplies. It changes the ones that get close. That feed. That get bit.”

She moved to the edge of the porch and crouched, unscrewing the cap of the gas can. The scent was sharp, intrusive. The possums stirred behind Mason, but he held up a hand—not in warning, but in calm.

“I can still end this,” Clara said, voice shaking. “You’re still you. Somewhere in there. But I won’t let you become what he became. I won’t let you—”

She didn’t finish. Mason had already turned and crawled back through the dirt, slipping past the outer line of possums and into the deeper undergrowth. The smell of gasoline followed him, but he moved quickly, weaving between roots and fallen branches until the sound of Clara’s sobbing was lost beneath the songs of frogs and the distant calls of crows.

He did not see the fire, but he smelled the smoke. It rolled in behind him in soft, gray sheets, like the final breath of something too old to scream.

When he returned days later, the house still stood, though the underside of the porch was blackened and split. The floorboards above his nest had collapsed inward. Clara was gone.

Inside the house, everything had been overturned. Cabinets were empty. The pantry had been ransacked. Mason moved through the rooms on all fours, sniffing the floors and rubbing his side against the corners of the walls. He found a single strand of Clara’s hair caught in the bedframe. The refrigerator door was open, its shelves stripped clean. The dining table had been dragged across the floor and upended.

Bones littered the corners of the kitchen. Some were clearly from raccoons or possums. Others were longer.

He did not look for Clara’s body. He knew she would not be found.

Weeks passed. Rain soaked the ground, and the barrel behind the property sank deeper into the earth. The possums no longer needed to dig. The food came to them now. Small animals first. Then pets. Then something larger.

When Deputy Hess returned to the Gentry property, the sky was overcast, and the wind carried the smell of mildew and damp wood. The house stood crooked against the horizon, its windows broken and its roof curling upward like a peeling scab. The front door creaked open at the slightest push.

“Clara?” Hess called out. “Mason? You in there?”

Silence answered him.

The interior was worse than he had imagined. The walls were coated in smears of something that had once been red. The floor was covered in feces and scattered debris. Hess kept one hand near his holster as he moved from room to room, noting the claw marks, the shredded fabric, the bones tucked into corners like hoarded treasures.

He stepped onto the back porch and looked toward the woods.

The traps were gone. Not just missing, but utterly destroyed—smashed and twisted and buried. The trail that led to the barrel was wider now, tamped down by dozens of small feet. He followed it slowly, each step a new warning.

The barrel had been overturned. Its contents were gone. The hole where it had rested was deeper than it had any right to be.

He heard movement in the trees.

At first, he assumed it was deer. Then he saw the eyes—low to the ground, too many, glowing faintly in the half-light. A dozen possums crept from the shadows. One moved ahead of the others, larger than the rest. Its back legs bent strangely, and its forelimbs ended in fingers, not paws. Its face was patchy with fur, and its mouth curled into something that nearly resembled a smile.

Hess took a step back.

“Mason?” he whispered.

The creature blinked once, slowly, and cocked its head. It took another step forward, then opened its mouth to reveal teeth that had once been human.

And then the teeth came, all at once.