The truth is I was afraid to go any farther—no word from the house’s occupant for many days, and now these circling creatures, taken everywhere as omens of death because they forage by smell, scouting the thermal drafts that carry them for any whiff of ethyl mercaptan, the first in the series of compounds propagated by carnal putrefaction and one recognizable to many of us, I’ve since learned, as the agent added to natural gas in order to make it stink.
