FREEZER
The Complete Horror Series
J. Joseph Wright
Part I
GRAMMA’S FREEZER
Part II
MAMA’S FREEZER
Part III
MY FREEZER
Part IV
MY BOY’S FREEZER
Text copyright 2013 by J. Joseph Wright
Cover copyright 2013 by Krystle Wright
Author’s website: jjosephwright.com
Artist’s website: krystledesigns.wordpress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
I want the world to read FREEZER: The Complete Horror Series. If you’d like to share it with your friends, feel free. Just don’t make a material gain off of it, because that would constitute copyright infringement. Thank you, J.
Part I
GRAMMA’S FREEZER
1.
My name is Eddy Mitchell, and my gramma’s an ax murderer.
She’s not just an ax murderer, but also a cutting shears murderer, and a knitting needle murderer. She poisoned her entire bridge club, bashed in her neighbors’ brains with a meat tenderizer, and I’m not sure, but I think she killed a door-to-door salesman with her bare hands.
Actually, I should say she was a murderer, but I’m getting way ahead of myself. See, it all started the day I saw her in her basement, gnawing on some really unlucky man’s liver. I knew it was a man because I saw his severed head on the old workbench right next to Gramma’s electric carving knife, the one she used for Thanksgiving. She was hunched over the bloodied and butchered innards like a jackal on the putrid flesh of a dead animal, grumbling and growling and chewing. My heart seized up, and I swear I shit myself, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
I thought about how I’d gotten into that situation. I’d stumbled onto her after searching her entire house. She didn’t come to the front door when Mom knocked, so I burst in and ran room to room, upstairs and down, and finally ended up in the cellar, watching her, all four-foot nine and a hundred pounds, savagely munching on a guy’s internal organs like it was a hotdog with ketchup—a whole lotta ketchup.
“Mamma! Where are you!” Mom shouted from upstairs, and Gramma stopped chewing. She kept snarling, though, and I guess that scared me shitless, because I stepped back on instinct, right into a shelf of empty mason jars. Gramma spun around, her eyes on fire, her cheeks, lips, chin, even nose sopped in blood. Everything was sopped in blood. From head to toe, she was stupid with the stuff.
And the noises coming from her, it wasn’t my gramma. I mean, it looked like her, but it sure didn’t sound like her. She let out a throaty gurgle, almost a laugh, then bared her teeth, all sharp as razors. Then Mom yelled something directly downstairs and I got the hell outta there, fast, tearing into the kitchen and pushing her literally out the back door.
“Mom! Mom!” I was out of breath. “It’s Gramma! Something’s wrong with her!”
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Mamma! Is she all right?” she pushed past me but I held onto her. At fourteen, I’m bigger than her already, so she couldn’t get away.
“Wait!” I warned. “Don’t go down there!”
Mom looked like she was about to hit me. She never did that, but I could tell she was freaking out over Gramma, until the old lady sang up the stairs:
“Helllo-oo! Brenda? Is that you?” Gramma all the sudden sounded like the same, sweet Gramma I’d always known. Her voice carried from the cellar through the, like, hundred open vents in the ancient, three-story house.
“Yeah, mamma!” Mom raised her voice and struggled against my grasp. I wasn’t about to let her go yet. “Are you okay down there?”
“Oh, yes, yes!” she giggled. “You two help yourselves to some sun tea. I’ll be right up!”
“Dammit, Eddy!” Mom finally did hit me. She slapped my arm hard and I let her go. “You scared the hell out of me. I thought your grandmother had a heart attack or something.”
I wasn’t quite fooled by Gramma’s sudden transformation. “It’s worse,” I said, still fighting for control of my own bodily functions. “Mom! She’s got a dead body down there—a man…he’s-he’s-he’s dead, and she’s…eating him!”
Mom stared for a good three seconds, then broke out in hysterics like I was Zack Galifianakis or something. She shook her head and dropped her hand on my shoulder.
“Eddy, I think you inherited your dad’s morbid sense of humor.”
“But Mom! I’m serious!”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Mom stopped laughing—and smiling.
“You gotta listen to me!” I knew I was losing, but couldn’t give in. “There’s blood everywhere, and she’s cutting this guy up like he’s a slab of meat and—”
The cellar door slammed. Gramma stood in the hall, her hair unsullied and in a bun, her apron, face and hands free of blood. In fact, the only color red was the rosiness in her cheeks as she presented the same loving, welcoming smile I’d recognized all my life. It wasn’t right, though. I knew what I’d seen, and wanted to run, to drag my mom outta there. Could have, too. Gramma, though, scared the hell out of me, forcing me to stay put.
“Brenda! My baby!” she hobbled three steps and mom met her halfway, both wrapping each other in their arms. I cringed when it was my turn, expecting to smell the death on her. Instead it was the usual Gramma smells—a mixture of Bengay, cinnamon, and chamomile.
“Mamma, you’ll get a kick out of this,” Mom chuckled. “Eddy thinks you were cutting up human body parts down there. Said you were cuttin’ ‘em up and eatin’ ‘em,” she laughed harder.
“What in heaven’s name?” Gramma held me at arm’s length. Her voice said sweet and innocent, but her eyes told another tale. So did the slight curl on her upper lip. Mom didn’t see any of that, though. Gramma was crafty, and she made sure I saw her irritation plainly. “What’s gotten into this boy’s head?”
“Video games and cheap zombie movies, that’s what,” Mom gave me almost the same dirty look as Gramma. “And I’m thinking about banning them for life.”
“Don’t be so hard on the boy,” Gramma kept her bent, arthritic fingers clasped onto my biceps like two wiry vises. She stared bullets into me, then let me go as if nothing had happened.
“I can see how raspberry jam would look like blood to an active imagination.”
Mom clapped her hands like a giddy girl. “Raspberries? Already, Mamma?”
“Sure,” Gramma’s pleasant nature made me almost believe her. “I was just putting some in the freezer when you two got here.”
“Oh, good,” Mom said. “You got your freezer fixed.”
“No,” Gramma waddled to the porch attached to the kitchen and struggled to lift the big glass jar of golden sun tea brewing on the windowsill. “I got a new freezer.”
“A new one!” Mom got a little mad. “Why’d you buy a new one? You should’ve asked me, I was going to get you a new one for Christmas.”
“Couldn’t wait for Christmas. Besides,” Gramma’s eyes twinkled. “I got a really good deal.”
“A good deal? How good of a deal?”
“Hank Steele, from my church, picked it up at a police impound auction. Works like a dandy. Paid twenty bucks for it. I love it!”
Mom and Gramma talked for a while longer, but I stopped listening when I noticed the bloodstains under her fingernails. They could have been raspberry, but they weren’t. I knew they weren’t. My mom was wrong. I wasn’t having videogame violence-induced hallucinations. I wasn’t the vict
im of an overactive imagination brought on by too many years watching slasher movies. Gramma was a stone-cold killer—and a cannibal—and I wanted nothing to do with staying there for the rest of the summer as planned. So, when she went to leave, I was all over her.
“Mom, please take me back home,” I whispered, trying not to let Gramma hear. “I can’t stay here.”
“Eddy, knock it off. You brought this on yourself. You’re just lucky the judge let you off easy. Remember, we all agreed to this. It was either stay with your grandmother for the rest of summer, or two weeks at Saddle Mountain Military Camp. Do you want to go to military camp?”
“No, but…but Gramma. Something’s wrong with her. She was putting something in that freezer, but it wasn’t raspberries, I swear!”
“Eddy, I mean it. Stop trying to get out of this. Honestly, trying to make me believe my own mother’s some kind of a maniac. You’re this close, mister,” she held her thumb and forefinger a hair apart. “This close to military camp.”
“Why can’t you stay longer, Brenda?” Gramma snuck up and scared me. “It’s an awful long drive back to Portland.”
Mom looked tired but determined. “I know, Mamma, but I can’t stay. If I drive all night I’ll still make it to work tomorrow. I’ll take time off next month when I come back to get Eddy. Then I’ll stay a whole week. How’s that sound?”
“That sounds wonderful, dear,” I felt Gramma’s cold, twisted claw on my shoulder. It made me cringe. “That gives Edward and I time to get reacquainted. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you last, young man.”
Wondering if I would ever see her again, I forced a smile and a wave as Mom drove down Ash Street.
2.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Do you blame me? I mean, I’d just seen the most gruesome, most horrifying thing in my life, an act so brutally savage I almost can’t describe it. All at the hands of my Gramma, and I was trapped in her house. To make matters worse, I was in my mom’s old bedroom, which had been dutifully preserved from her childhood. Spooky porcelain dolls on the shelves, staring at me with their all-too-real eyes. The whole thing kept me up for hours, shifting and tossing.
At one point, and I don’t know when, I must have dozed off, because I remember waking in a stupor and getting the strangest feeling someone was in the room. I had to blink away the haze, but when I did, I saw her. Just for a moment she was there. Gramma. Watching me. I kicked to the headboard and held my knees tight to my chest, my pulse hammering inside my temples. Out of breath, I flicked on the ballerina lamp and scanned the room, but found only teddy bears and harlequin clowns and pink curtains against even pinker wall paper. The door was closed. Nothing had been disturbed. Gramma was gone.
Before I could settle my nerves, though, a strange noise got me out of bed and crawling to the vent on the floor. Gramma’s old farmhouse was built back in the early 1930s, and had a ventilation system that carried sound like two tin cans on the end of a string. All of the sudden I wished I hadn’t listened, because, from deep within the bowels of that house, I heard things, terrible things. Crushing and grinding and cutting. And I heard a voice, that same voice as before when Gramma was grumbling and growling to herself, tearing into that man’s liver with her teeth. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but by the tone I knew it wasn’t the Lord’s Prayer.
Right then and there I should’ve made a break for it. I should’ve ran to the police station and never looked back. I mean, I was a virgin. I didn’t want to die a virgin. Something, though—stupidity, insanity—made me go and investigate.
By the time I’d gotten down to the first floor, there was no mistaking the grisly noises were coming from the basement. But the door was locked, and I really didn’t feel like knocking, so I tiptoed outside, down the back steps, and, in the dark, got to my hands and knees along the foundation, searching for a view inside. Every window I came across was covered in dust and cobwebs and grime, to the point where all I saw was a dim light and an even dimmer silhouette. I heard her, though, chopping and fileting and packing, all while grunting and mumbling like a zombie.
For some ill-advised reason, I wanted to get a better look, to once and for all satisfy my morbid, sick fascination. So I kept crawling, from window to window, until I finally found one that was unlocked. I didn’t want to open it too much, just a crack so I could sneak a glimpse. I had to be careful and not tug too hard. The windowpane was stiff, though, and it barely budged with even the strongest pull. It let out a loud, hollow screech and had my heart pumping at light speed. I swore Gramma heard it. She stopped making noises. I crawled backward in the night, slinking away from the house.
“Hey, punk! What’re you doing!”
Two hands, firm and rough, grabbed my shoulders and hoisted me off the ground. I swear to God I went into cardiac arrest. My life was over, right there and then. In the dark I was blind. Then my vision adjusted and I beheld the ugliest, meanest looking dude in Idaho. Had to be. Completely bald with metal studs and rings, glowing in the moonlight, sticking into his cheeks, lips, nose and, I swear, eyelids. He had tattoos of wild animals on his neck, forearms, and probably on his ass. He looked like a cast member from a bad biker show. Only this kid was no biker. It was Brent Hadley, my old buddy.
“Ha-ha!” he released his grip, then patted my back. “Scared the shit outta ya’, didn’t I?”
“Shh!” I pushed him further from Gramma’s house. “Man, be quiet!”
“Is that any way to treat your long lost cousin?” he snickered.
I looked at him closer. He had more piercings in his ears than I’d first estimated, and a three-inch long silver barbell, too. “You still telling people we’re cousins?”
“Why not?” he shrugged. “What difference does it make? We haven’t seen you in, what, three years? What’re ya’…too good for us here in lil’ ole Bliss?”
“No it’s not like that, I just—”
“Oh, who gives a shit!” he pulled me in for a bro-hug. “It’s great to see ya’, man!” he pushed me away to get a glance at me. “And ya’ haven’t changed a bit!”
“Looks like you have,” I whispered, hoping he’d take the hint and be a little quieter. I still couldn’t hear any noises coming from the house, and that made me even more nervous.
“Yeah,” he twisted the metal bar in his nose. “My girlfriend, she loves body mutilation. You can say I’m a modern day Van Gough! Ha-ha!”
“Man, SHHH!” I pushed him into the English laurel and forced him to hunker down.
“What’s the matter, Eddy?” Brent got serious for a fleeting second. “Man, I know whatcha need,” he reached into his pocket, the buckles on his leather jacket jangling and jingling. With a twirl of his wrist, he produced a fat blunt and waved it first under my nose, then under his own. “Ahh! The sticky icky! Come on!”
Two doors over, we snuck into Brent’s house, where he lived with his mom, dad and younger sister. After creeping up to his attic bachelor pad, with the door locked and Flo Rida busting out of the speakers, we commenced smoking the joint. After two puffs, I spilled my guts. I mean, I just let it all out. Everything. I told him about how I’d caught Gramma by surprise, and how she was cutting that guy apart and taking a bite out of him, savoring the taste like a connoisseur of fine human flesh. I told him about the noises coming from the basement and how I thought she was down there right now, packing the guy in her freezer for safekeeping. I talked until my tongue was sandpaper, and had to drink some of his stale soda he had sitting around from God knows when. And when I was done, after the joint had been smoked to a charred roach, he finally lost it, laughing so hard I thought he’d wake the whole house.
“Wow! You guys there in Oregon have some pretty good weed, don’t you?” he laughed harder, then had to breathe heavy a few times to catch his wind. “What kinda shit have ya’ been smokin’, anyway?”
“I’m not high,” I paused. “I mean, I wasn’t high. Not at that moment, at least. I swear, dude. I saw her cutting up a dead
guy.”
Bent’s laughing faded to a chuckle, then he scratched his bald head. “Hmm,” he muttered.
“Hmm, what?”
“No,” he twirled the stud on his lower lip. “No way. Not your gramma.”
“What?”
“Well, funny thing, but there was a guy who went missing the other day. A salesman from Pocatello. His car was found down the street, but there was no sign of him anywhere. His wife came to town looking for him yesterday. Let me tell you, by the looks of her, my bet is the guy wanted to disappear, if you know what I mean. Woof! Woof!”
I had to raise my voice over his chortles. “Are you serious?”
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 1