My J-Horror Couch

The stain was black and brown and had spread out in a wavy oval. The stench was well past unbearable. It was so vile, in fact, I half expected an evil long-haired ghost woman to rise up from it at any second, seeking supernatural vengeance from beyond the grave. And it was on my hide-a-bed.
Last Thursday I arrived home at three in the morning, following our Night of the Creeps screening. After a day at work, a night of making sure the event went smoothly and then driving people across town, I was exhausted. I also had a house guest so I needed to pull out the bed in my couch. That’s when I found it: a large, dark stain on the mattress, which had soaked into multiple sections of the bed where it was folded over. The smell was something akin to when your Halloween pumpkin gets moldy and starts rotting, except imagine you had a dozen pumpkins, and you left them to decompose for a long time… in your room.
Earlier in the week I’d caught faint whiffs of rot but figured the garbage was past due to go out; yet, even after it was binned, the smell would return. That hideous stain, though, was as if something from Beyond was fouling not just the fabric of my couch, but the very fabric of existence. It resembled those nasty stains in J-horror film such as The Grudge, Ringu and Kairo (pictured above); I wondered if someday Samara would rise out of the cushions to wrap her evil locks around my remote control and spirit it off to the underworld.
Then I saw the bag, and remembered back to more than a month ago…
I’d hurt my back playing street hockey and was on a prescription of muscle relaxers, Tylenol-3 and rest. The doc advised icing the strain, as well, so I was lying on the couch, doped to my retinas, with a bag of mixed vegetables beneath me. Somewhere between my drugged-out state and usual bad memory, I’d fallen asleep, let the bag slip between the cushions and had forgotten all about it. More than a month earlier.
In that time a J-horror-style mold ring had spread throughout layers of mattress and onto the floor beneath the furniture. It was a helluva discovery at that time in the morning. Although the thought of just burning the entire building to the ground and disappearing into the night crossed my mind, I resigned myself to the bleary-eyed, nausea-inducing task of stainbusting. I started scrubbing with warm, soapy water, which erased the stain somewhat but reactivated the semi-dormant stink. Windows were opened, and the next day several coats of various cleaners were applied. Needless to say, my guest chose the futon in the other room – this furniture was cursed.
The whole ordeal definitely ranks amongst the dumbest things I’ve done, and I advise strongly against indoor composting, particularly inside your furniture. Unless, of course, you want to have a J-horror couch but don’t have an old well to set it on top of.