 I know this is going to sound crazy, but I need someone to read this. I need someone to believe. If no one does, so many more people are going to be hurt. Do you hear me? If you're reading over your shoulder, please know I'm doing my best. Please don't hurt anyone else. I work in home clean up. It's not like those TV shows where the stars show up and try to save someone's home from garbage and clutter. By the time my people get to a house, the nightmare tenant has long been evicted, and the owner just wants their property cleaned so they could rent it to another family. My work is a lot of hazmat suits and shovels. Insects crawl over half-eaten cans of unrecognizable sludge. Rats scurry from under any pile of rags you pick up. And with any step a floorboard may give, and you can find yourself knee-deep in a mass grave of rats below the carpeting. I'm used to all that. I've done this job for over a decade. What may make you empty your stomach and you do not know if to puke or cry? Well, I call that Tuesday morning. I really thought I'd seen everything. From the beginning, we were told this was going to be a tough job. The previous owner claimed they weren't a hoarder, even his police tried to enter their premises. The cops were called because the neighbors could smell the stench from their own homes. As they described it, when the front door was forced open, a brown river of rainwater mixed with the insides of the house spilled onto their feet. The front door was entirely blocked by piled, rotting stuffed animals, and the smell made them have to call the fire department and treat the site like a chemical spill. In full safety gear and armed with axes, the rescue workers breached the property from the back door. They were expecting to find a body, but instead, through corridors of garbage, found an old man sitting on a stool, the only empty space in the house, armed with an old rusty knife. The man immediately became aggressive towards the police, screaming at them not to touch anything and that he wasn't a hoarder. As it was described down the grapevine from the police to me, it was only after the third taser discharge that they were able to bring him down and take him into custody. The property was going to be a total loss. Houses don't get to the point where their walls bulge and just get cleaned out into places humans can live. We still had a job though. First we had to get the place clean enough to let the insurance adjuster and city inspector condemn the property. Second, the city was concerned that this house would pollute the water tables and the horde had to be brought under some kind of control before demolition. Now, most of the time the things in a place like this are rotting garbage, no matter how much the owners yell about their priceless collection of beanie babies. Sometimes though, there's a box or two of vinyls that a thrift store will give you 50 bucks for. By law, by the time my team shows up, all property has been forfeit to the landlord. The unspoken rule is, if you see it first and it fits in your car, you can take it. Perks of the job, I guess. I don't usually take much, not unless I know I can sell it. I even have an eye for it. And when I saw a book with a gorgeous leather cover and the size of a library dictionary, I knew I was going to order imported beers at the bar tonight, yelp free. At least I thought I knew. After a day of shoveling little else of interest, I drove back home, took my ceremonial hour-long shower, and then finally got the book out of the trunk. I was worried it was going to have the smell of the house, but holding it in my hands, I smelled refined leather, like a bike jacket that has seen 100,000 miles and would see 100,000 more. With no name on the outside, I set the book down on my work table and slowly opened the cover. It looked more like a notebook than a printed reference. Solid black lines with neat writing on page after page, the letters in a tight script with a thin pointed handwriting that didn't look like the work of a ballpoint pen. It was an inventory of some sort, I could tell that right away. Thousands of pages of inventory. The items were random and in no particular order. Their location was described in a cryptic system of directions, counts, and steps. I couldn't take my eyes off its pristine pages and just kept reading and reading. The evening slipped into night and somewhere in the witching hour, I knew what I was reading. It was the inventory of the house. Every rag, toy, wire, coin, can, bucket, tool, board game, everything was documented. Thousands upon thousands of objects, a guide to something that my team had destroyed during the earlier eight hours this morning. It was dark when I stood back up. My eyes must have been red and blurry with the endless reading. I shut the book and was fully standing before I knew why I stopped reading. The lights in the basement were no longer on. I wondered if my wife thought I was asleep in bed and flipped the switch heading upstairs. I made a step for the door and tripped on something. I fell to the ground, metal stabbing me in my legs and arms and I felt around. My tools were on the floor for some reason and I'd fallen on one with a screwdriver making enough of a gash in my leg that my jeans were getting wet with blood. I forced my eyes to adapt to the dark. They were all around in piles, tools and other things. Did I own that many? There were also little green lights in the dark that seemed to scurry. Did I have rats? Was the basement like this when I went downstairs? Was I this obsessed with that worthless book not to notice? I limped upstairs and cleaned out the wound. My wife still wasn't home. I must have misremembered her shifts. The house was a mess and I didn't know why I'd lost power in the basement. My leg hurt too much to make another trip down there tonight. When we got back to the property at 6am the next day, the old tenant was waiting for us. I don't know if he got out or escaped the jail or hospital he was in. The Horde. Don't go in there. I thought you said you weren't a hoarder. I said I didn't have patience this morning. My leg still hurt and my wife still wasn't home. Maybe she stayed out late because she felt guilty. She must have bought out her entire Amazon wish list. The front porch had so many boxes that I didn't even bother trying to take them into the house. Where would we put them? The kitchen and dining room tables were full. There were clothes everywhere. We were going to have a big talk when she got home. Stop. The old man said. I turned around. I was going to give the old man a piece of my mind. But then I saw the barrel of a gun pointed at me. If you go in there I will shoot. One of the bigger but less clever guys took him down with a tackle. He had the gun out of his hands in a moment. It wasn't loaded boss. I could see he still had the safety on. We called the cops and they picked him up still screaming about the hoard. This did not register as it should have. This was not even the first time an old tenant came at the cleanup crew with a gun. Today we were going to get to the basement. One of our main goals was to make sure nothing down there was going to be a hazard for demolition. We shoveled and shoveled until we found the catch. Opening it, I was almost ready to find it full to the ceiling. That would have been days more work before we could reach the boiler. Instead, it looked like the old man must have covered the hatch when he started his collection of trash. He must have never thought of how much could be kept down there. I went down first, cursing my leg. I was hoping I could see the appliances there in good condition, let the team work on the cleanup and go to emergency care for my leg. The moment my foot touched the ground, the hatch above crashed down. The basement with its earthy floor fell into total darkness besides my flashlight. Green spots danced around in the darkness. I yelled to the guys upstairs and shined my flashlight around. There was a chair on it, tied to it, was a woman. It took me too long to recognize. She was almost naked in rags of her former clothes and her body was covered in what looked like rat bites. She was gagged, unable to make a sound, and her eyes were wide. I screamed and tried to make a step towards her. Something was everywhere in the darkness. I couldn't place my feet and I fell. Something growled and ran over my body. I chased them off and again found my wife with the flashlight. They were everywhere. I got a good look at one crawling up her leg. It was green, maybe a foot long, with a tail, scaly, and with a snout like in alligators. It looked right at me and said, you took what was not yours and now we take what is. And then it lunged for my wife's throat and bit right through, spraying blood. The rest of them swarmed from all over. They covered her body in a sea of green and when they were gone, not even bones were left now. They all spoke as one, let's talk. We made a deal down there in that basement. We made a deal for the lives of my workers, for the lives of my children in college. I would get them whatever they wanted. I would spend the rest of my life working to buy, gather, and protect their belongings. I would never be alone another day, forever under the watch of their green eyes. They would keep their wealth in my house and if I let one thing leave their domain, they would take the life of me and my loved ones. As I sit here in this bloated mockery of what I once knew as my family home, I see and smell it gathering and writhing with its own life. I think of the old man and how no one understood or believed him. He wanted us to beware the horde.