Two Incidents: The Blind Old Woman with a Smell of Decay and the House with a Corpse in a Coffin

An anon questionnaire from a neighboring thread reminded me of an incident from my life. I had a buddy, he took a side gig in his youth, delivering and peddling some brochures door to door. I don't even remember what product he was advertising. And I often went along with him, there was nothing better to do anyway. One evening we were making the rounds of a khrushchyovka housing block, winter, already getting dark. We go up to a floor, ring the bell. An ancient door opens, at first we thought it opened by itself, we just hadn't noticed how small the old woman standing in the doorway was. Her appearance alone was something: height up to my waist probably, gray-haired, a predatory little face but not very wrinkled, eyes with cataracts like porcelain, apparently completely blind. I'd still shit myself today from a look like that. She's standing in pitch darkness, in the apartment it's like there's no apartment at all, just solid blackness. While my buddy is peddling his bullshit to her, the old woman is spacing out, doesn't even understand what they want from her. And then I feel a savage waft of carrion coming from her den, the stench was such that I actually staggered. It clearly wasn't a mouse, only a week-old human corpse can stink like that. When the old woman saw that I'd caught the smell she just spread into a fucking predatory Müller-style grin. Despite the fact that she was about a hundred and fifty years old, all her teeth were still in place. As far as I know, ancient gargoyles like that don't get teeth that look like real ones. Unable to stand the stench, we basically told the old woman to go to sleep and got the fuck out of there.

Another strange incident too. Me and my buddy (a different one), drunk as shit, went to some girls he barely knew in some random settlement and as usual got lost there completely. Private houses, late night, phones with maps didn't exist back then, we're getting tossed from side to side. My buddy like a modern-day Susanin leads me from house to house, like, this one's definitely it, the fence looks similar, and so on. Eventually we climbed onto someone's porch, the whole house has lights on. Just as we were about to knock, I, like anyone in my place, peeked purely out of curiosity through the slightly open window inside, and there's a fucking scene. People in formal suits are shuffling around in the hallway, clearly not Russian, talking about something. I somehow immediately understood we'd ended up in the wrong place. Leaning upright against the wall is a coffin with a dead fucking man inside. I mean the deceased is standing upright, some old guy. While I was poking my friend in the shoulder, like, holy shit, look at this, someone's hand from inside the house slammed the window shut with a bang and then there were sounds of the door being unlocked. We ran losing our shit for quite a while.