It is a truth universally acknowledged that the longer one lives in a town, the more it begins to resemble an anthill. A man comes into a place with nothing but his clothes and his guns and maybe a few coins for his efforts and he leaves having somehow accumulated all sorts of junk no sane soul would ever want or need, much less keep around. And so they stay; accumulating things, until their homes can't fit anymore—until every nook and cranny is filled to bursting with stuff that has little to do with living and everything to do with survival. The only way out is death—and sometimes not even then.
I've seen them. I have a friend who's a hoarder; her house is a maze of junk just like anyone else's but there are also bodies. Bodies everywhere. She claims she doesn't remember what happened to each of them because she was drinking when it occurred, but I know better than to believe her.
The thing about a dead body is you don't really look at it. You just step over it or move it aside or throw it away as best you can and get on with your business. But sometimes it's harder than it looks to make the body go away... sometimes it takes something bigger than yourself.
And sometimes those somethings come from inside the house, where the junk resides, where it hides and multiplies like rats in a dark cellar. Sometimes they come out through the open door and into the night, looking for trouble.
This is how I ended up in this mess in the first place.