The Concrete Womb

The day started with rain—a fine, needle-like drizzle that clung to everything and made the world feel wrapped in damp gauze. I was waiting on a crankshaft for my ’92 Ford Ranger, a rust-bucket I’d been nursing back to life for months. It was supposed to arrive from a salvage yard in Paducah, Kentucky, and I’d been pacing my cramped apartment above the old bowling alley in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, checking my phone every ten minutes.

My buddy, Marcus, called around noon. ‘Hey, you got nothing to do, right? I found a ’93 Celica GT-Four for sale out in Marion, Illinois. It’s a project, but the guy says it’s all there. You’re the only one I know who can tell if it’s a scam.’ I hesitated. The drive was further than I thought, but the promise of a rare turbo AWD Celica was too tempting. I agreed, and we left in Marcus’s rattling ’94 Civic, his cousin Diego riding shotgun.

The roads were slick, and the GPS kept rerouting us through county roads that turned into gravel and then into mud. We got lost twice, once ending up in a dead-end farm lane with a silo that looked like a concrete missile. By the time we found the place, the sky had bruised into a deep purple, and the rain had turned to a steady drumbeat on the windshield.

The house was a low, sprawling ranch with peeling paint and a carport that sagged under a tarp. The owner, a wiry man in his sixties named Mr. Kellerman, waved us in from the porch. ‘She’s in the backyard,’ he said, pointing to a chain-link fence where a hulking silhouette sat under a canvas cover. ‘Battery’s dead, but I got a charger.’ His smile was thin, and he kept glancing at the cloudy sky.

We walked through the wet grass to the car. The cover came off with a soggy groan, revealing a dark green Celica with a hood that had been sanded down to bare metal. Marcus and I went over the engine bay—a 3S-GTE, turbocharged, intercooler missing but the block looked solid. ‘I’ll take it,’ I said, too quickly. As I leaned in to check the oil dipstick, I noticed something odd: the rear seat was damp, and there was a faint, sweet smell, like rotting fruit mixed with motor oil.

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Mr. Kellerman said from behind us. ‘Previous owner had a dog that liked to crawl in there.’ But the dog smell would’ve been mustier. This was something else. I shrugged it off, and we agreed on a price. He helped me jump the battery, and after a few cranks, the engine sputtered to life, belching a cloud of blue smoke. The headlights flickered, then steadied. ‘Runs nice,’ he said, but his eyes were on the tarp now lying crumpled on the ground.

We drove back in Marcus’s Civic, me following in the Celica to test it out. The heater was stuck on high, and the radio only picked up a country station playing haunting steel-guitar melodies. I passed a crossroads and noticed a dead deer on the shoulder, its eyes still open, staring. I shivered. The odometer had 180,000 miles, but the engine felt strong. Still, I kept glancing in the rearview, expecting to see a shape in the back seat, because that sweet smell was getting stronger.

I parked the Celica in my garage, a shared space with the bowling alley, behind a peeling door. I told myself I’d deal with the smell in the morning. That night, I dreamed of concrete—a woman’s face emerging from a wet slab, lips sealed, eyes wide. I woke up with a start, heart pounding.

The next morning, I went to the garage with a flashlight and a bottle of bleach. The smell was overpowering, like something had died in the upholstery. I pulled up the rear seat cushion and found a zipper. I unzipped it and saw a large, heavy plastic bag, duct-taped shut. My heart froze. I knew what it was before I opened it.

I called the police. They found the body of a woman—she’d been buried in the concrete foundation of the garage itself, but the rats had gotten to her first, and the smell had seeped up through the seams. The cops asked about the previous owner of the Celica. It had belonged to a man who lived in this very garage, a couple of decades ago. He’d been suspected of killing his wife and burying her under the slab, but they’d never proven it. The car had been sold to Mr. Kellerman, who had left it in his yard for years.

I stopped using the garage. I couldn’t sell the car—it was evidence. But I kept thinking about that smell, and about the woman who’d been trapped under concrete, her hands reaching up through the rebar. I’d never seen her, but I knew her face from my dream. Sometimes, late at night, I hear a faint tapping from the garage, rhythm of fingers on a wall. And the concrete floor in the corner—it’s always just a little damp, even in summer. I found a photo of her once, in an old newspaper clipping at the library. She had my eyes.