“Yeah,” he giggled. “She was a real dog.”
“No, I mean about the guy. He really went missing?”
“Yeah,” Brent said. “A salesman, uh, he sold uh…water filters, I think.”
“My gramma murdered a water filter salesman,” I said to myself.
“Come on,” Brent nudged me. “You can’t be serious. Your gramma? Kill someone? Your tiny, eighty-year-old, has to have me come over to help her open a jar of pickles, she’s so feeble gramma? No way, dude. Not Gramma Davis. She’s the sweetest, most generous lady in the world. Do ya’ know how good her sweet potato pie is?” he rubbed his stomach. “Oh! Now you’ve done it! Made me talk about food and now I have the munchies!”
We snuck to the kitchen and stole all the Doritos, cupcakes and orange Fanta we could find and smuggled it back to Brent’s lair. After drowning my sorrows in junk food, I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew, it was just getting light out. Without waking Brent, I escaped back to my mom’s old bedroom and crashed, wanting desperately to believe my gramma hadn’t killed that water filter salesman.
3.
When I woke up, I was already drooling at the smell wandering up from the kitchen. I tore downstairs and found Gramma standing at the table in the dining room, her plump cheeks glowing.
“I made all your favorites,” she pulled a chair for me to sit. “You might’ve thought I’d forgotten what you like, but a gramma never forgets.”
She didn’t have to prod me much. French toast with real maple syrup and a sprinkling of powdered sugar, crisp bacon, scrambled eggs and toast. She even had biscuits and gravy with little bits of sausage. It was a breakfast suited for a king, and it almost made me forget about what I saw in the basement the day before. Almost.
Gramma went to the hall closet, put on her white chiffon jacket, and found her matching hat. “I’m going to the beauty salon, Edward. I’d ask you along, but I’m sure a teenage boy wouldn’t find a bunch of old hens very entertaining.”
“No, I guess not,” I said with my mouth full. Gramma noticed and shook her finger, then snatched her purse and said goodbye. Within three minutes, she was driving down Ash in her pea green 1968 Chevy Impala to a hair appointment.
I dove into breakfast. With each scrumptious mouthful, I was transported a little further back to my childhood memories of a woman who nurtured me, cooked for me, listened to me, and played with me. I remembered us playing Uno and Crazy Eights and Go Fish and just about every board game from Monopoly to Chutes and Ladders. I remembered all the Christmases and birthdays and just regular days when she was there with a smile and a hug—and usually a cookie, piece of pie, or a sandwich. This was my gramma, not a savage monster. The more I ate, the more my mind settled on that fact, and the more rational I became, or at least I wanted to be rational.
Then I heard a SLAM! from the basement, and rational flew out the window. At first I tried to ignore it. Another SLAM! forced me out of my chair, napkin still tucked under my collar, and tiptoeing toward the entrance to the subterranean chamber. Of course the door was locked, and I should have taken that as a hint to stay the hell away. I couldn’t help it. What if someone was down there, trapped, tied up, dismembered, and desperate for help?
The banging and thrashing got louder as my concern turned to panic. In the bathroom I got one of Gramma’s hair pins and, miraculously, found a way to pick the lock. Immediately I felt a sense of dread at the dim stairwell, framed in cobwebs, exposed beams and bare wiring resembling bones and veins. I flicked on the light—a single bulb at the bottom, the eye of Cyclops staring up at me.
As I reached the chipped and cracked concrete floor, I noticed right away the sound was coming from the freezer. It sat in the darkest corner, but somehow seemed to stand out, almost shine in its own glow. Next to it was the workbench where Gramma had done her dastardly deed. It all made my skin crawl, looking at the stuff on the table, thinking about what I’d seen. I didn’t want to believe it. It couldn’t have been true. Then the strange popping and slamming noises stopped, and suddenly my ears rang in the dark, dank silence. Instead of running, though, I got out my iPhone and started recording as much video as I could.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, really. Just wanted to satisfy my doubts, put to rest once in for all the idea my gramma was a homicidal maniac. I panned the tabletop, and, from a safe distance, zoomed in on little details on the freezer. It was a short top-loader, probably made in the seventies, dirty and dented, with some strange sticker of a hipster wolf giving the thumbs up. Really weird.
That wasn’t the weirdest part, though. When I scanned below the workbench, I saw a colorful blue box with big writing on it. I stooped to get a better shot, watching my iPhone’s screen and tensing up when I finally managed to read, Sparkling Stream Water Filters.
Water filters? Water filters! Didn’t Brent say the guy who disappeared was a water filter salesman? No way. No fucking way!
There had to be an explanation. I looked closer and saw a briefcase. I opened it. Inside, I found a ton of color brochures, paperwork, signed sales receipts. My blood boiled with terror, but my feet felt frozen to the floor. Then POP! CRACK! BAM! the freezer began to rock and sway and rumble, making my decision easy. The ice holding me in place cracked apart and I raced up those stairs faster than Usain Bolt.
4.
I ran straight to Brent’s house, and on the way found him with some other kids, most of whom I recognized from years past when I used to visit Bliss on a more regular basis.
“Well if it isn’t Cousin Eddy,” Tom Eubanks sniggered through buckteeth. The tallest kid in town, he’d grown into a near seven-foot Frankenstein since the last time I’d been there. “Haven’t seen you ‘round these parts in a coupla’ years. Where yuh been?”
I didn’t have time for the kid. “Brent! I gotta talk to you. My gramma, I…I really think she killed that water filter salesman!”
“Whoa!” Tom laughed so hard he frothed at the mouth. “Freak show!”
“Go long, Tom!” Brent threw the football he was carrying and Tom lumbered down the street, fumbling and bumbling it in front of him. The other kids followed, all but a girl, short, dark brown hair and even more tats and piercings than Brent. She snatched Brent’s hand when she noticed me noticing her.
“Look at this,” I gave him my phone and let the video clip roll. He and the girl watched as I narrated. “See, there, that’s the guy’s water filter stuff…and there’s his sales brochures, and there’s his briefcase or something with all kinds of paperwork, invoices and stuff…that’s all his.”
“This doesn’t prove anything, dude,” Brent kept watching. His girlfriend lost interest and checked out the other kids as they ran toward an open field behind the Baptist Church. “Maybe your gramma bought one of the water filters. Hell, my mom bought one. We’ve got a box like that under our sink. Does that mean my mom’s a murderer, too?”
“What the hell?” the girl all of the sudden became interested again. “What’re you talking about?”
“Eddy thinks—oh, yeah, by the way, Shannon, this is Eddy. Eddy, Shannon,” we smiled and shook hands as Brent continued. “So Eddy, here, thinks his gramma went all medieval on that salesman guy’s ass. You know, the one who disappeared.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding,” Shannon squinted playfully. “What kinda drugs have you been taking?”
“Why won’t anyone believe me?” I was frustrated beyond belief.
“Because your gramma’s about the size of an Ewok, that’s why,” Brent’s attention snapped to my iPhone. I’d kept the video file running, and he looked surprised. “Whoa,” he whispered as if he didn’t want anyone but me and Shannon to hear.
“What?” we both said at the same time.
“That freezer,” Brent talked like he was in a trance. “I’ve seen that freezer before.”
“Gramma says she just got it. At a police auction or something.”
Brent pressed pause on a shot of the
strange wolf decal. “That sticker. I know that sticker,” he scrunched his eyes. “But from where?”
“C’mon guys!” Tom shouted and the football sailed at me so fast I had to duck to get out of the way. Tom couldn’t catch worth a shit, but he had a rocket for an arm.
Brent quickly forgot about the freezer decal and we played football in the sweaty, sweltering ninety-degree afternoon. We only had ten kids, technically enough for a basketball game, which would have been my preference. Those Idaho kids were all bulk and no brains, and they only wanted to chase me and smash me into the hay. After a few times eating dirt, I decided I’d had enough, and sat down on the sidelines next to Shannon. I didn’t even get to catch my breath before she was on her cellphone and I was listening, rudely, to her whole conversation.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Vivienne, what’s up? Come in now? Why, where’s Gladys? Missing? When?”
I perked up at the word, ‘missing,’ and really keyed on the rest of her phone call. She’d been called in to cover for a woman who seemed to have vanished—from the beauty salon! She was a hairdresser, and she’d gone missing, just like that salesman. By that time, you’d better bet my interest was a little more than piqued. I mean, my gramma said she was going to see her hairdresser, and then a hairdresser disappears? No way was it a coincidence.
I had to go to the salon with Shannon. Turned out, she was seventeen, and already a fully-trained, licensed hair stylist. Right away, she started giving an impatient lady some auburn highlights. I went into full Sherlock Holmes mode, asking all kinds of questions about Gladys, and what had happened to her.
“Beats the heck outta me,” Vivienne, the owner of Ye Olde Hair Parlor, sounded more annoyed than concerned. “She’d just finished with a customer and said she was going for a smoke break. That’s the last we seen of her. Left her car and everything.”
One of the other hairdressers spoke up as she gave a woman a shampoo. “I bet she finally worked up the nerve to leave that no good husband of hers. Cheatin’ bastard.”
“But why would she leave her car?” I pointed out, almost as shocked at their lack of concern as I was that such a small town had two missing persons in a week.
“That is a little strange,” Vivienne said.
“Maybe she had a secret boyfriend. Maybe he picked her up and they ran off to start a new life together,” the imaginative hairdresser grasped for straws. It was clear she didn’t want to face the reality that they had a problem in Bliss. It didn’t take long for a group of us kids to form a volunteer search party, going house to house, asking if anyone had seen Gladys. Nobody had. The only lead we had was my gramma. She was Gladys’s last hair appointment. But everybody ruled Gramma out immediately. Not me.
5.
That evening, Gramma treated all the search volunteers to homemade chicken and roast potatoes, then sent everyone home with a handful of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. She even fed the cop who’d shown up to investigate, a county deputy everybody called Jackson. In fact, she gave him a slice of apple pie as he walked out the door. He smiled and thanked her for her hospitality. They chatted for a while on the porch and I waited to get Jackson alone, but Gramma walked him all the way to his car. After that, I just went to bed. It was an exhausting day. Little did I know how exhausting the night would be.
At a little after midnight, I woke to a commotion outside, a rustling I thought at first was in my room. After my senses returned, I realized the sounds were coming from the driveway below my bedroom window. I peeked out, through the Minnie Mouse drapes, and saw Gramma, standing at the rear of her Impala. She had it parked close to the house, angled slightly so she could slide something out of the trunk. Whatever it was, it looked big, even bigger than Gramma. I didn’t think she had a chance in hell of getting that huge bundle, wrapped in some kind of plastic, out of her car. She did it, though, dragging it and letting one end drop to the ground with a Thud! Part of the plastic covering came off, and I saw what was underneath—a face! A woman’s face. Even in the dark, I saw the bouffant hair, the heavy rouged cheeks. And her eyes. I saw a pair of scissors jabbed into her eyes, one blade in each socket, almost all the way to the finger holes.
I don’t know what I did next. I must have screamed, because Gramma stopped dragging the corpse toward the open basement door and looked up. I hid below the window frame before her cold, dead stare traveled all the way to the second floor.
It was at that moment that I’d decided enough was enough. I’d had it, and wanted to go back home, pronto. I dug my phone out of my pocket and texted my mom, in all caps, yelling at her to come and get me. She didn’t answer right away, so I called her. She wasn’t happy I’d called so late, and she was even less thrilled about driving all the way to Idaho again.
“Mom, listen to me,” I begged. “You have to come, now! Gramma’s murdering people!”
“Eddy, are you and your friends drinking? Huh? Are you smoking pot again? You know, I just might come and check on you if you don’t shape up, young man.”
“Good!” I shouted, not caring if Gramma heard. “Hurry!”
“Watch it,” Mom snapped. “You might just get what you ask for. Now, it’s late. Go to bed.”
She hung up. I stared at my phone for a second, confused, afraid, alone. Then the screen lit up with an incoming text message, sending a wave of anxiety through my veins. I was startled by the abrupt alert, but felt at least a little comfort when I read Brent’s text:
Got sumthin UR gonna wanna C. Get ovr hr—STAT!
6.
“Check this out,” Brent tossed a paperback, all frayed and dog-eared. It bounced off my face and fell to the floor and Shannon giggled. I barely saw her in the dark, laying on Brent’s bed, smoking a cigarette.
“American Psycho Killers, Volume Four?” I read the cover, then picked it up and leafed through to the pictures in the middle. Always did that whenever I saw one of those true crime books. Morbid fascination and all. “So what?”
“Page 217,” Shannon sighed out a stream of smoke.
I turned to page 217 and started reading about some guy named Wayne Webster, who apparently killed a bunch of people in the mid-nineties. “What’s so special about this guy?” I was confused.
“Wayne Webster was Idaho’s most notorious serial killer,” Brent grabbed the book from me and turned a couple pages further. “He trolled bars and Indian casinos for drunks, took them home and diced them up and put them in his freezer. He ate them, too. Parts of them, at least.”
“He was like Jeffrey Dahmer on steroids,” Shannon’s face was serious. “Killed, like, twenty-five people in the span of two months.”
“That’s pretty demented,” I said. “But what’s this got to do with my gramma?”
“Look,” Brent pointed to a picture in the book. Grainy and black and white, it showed an unmistakable image of an old freezer with that odd wolf decal.
“That’s my gramma’s freezer!”
“Creepy, huh?” Shannon finally smiled, only not a happy smile.
“It gets creepier,” Brent cleared his throat and opened his laptop. With a click he had a YouTube video playing, a shot of some guy by himself, sitting at a table.
“This is Webster’s last interview just before they executed him,” Brent said.
“Lethal injection,” Shannon breathed out another cloud of smoke, this time smiling happily.
Brent turned up the volume and a narrator’s voice began.
“Wayne Webster professed his innocence up until the day of his execution, claiming he wasn’t responsible for his heinous crimes. He insisted vehemently he was told to kill by a possessed home appliance, his freezer.”
The narrator stopped and then the video shifted to Webster.
“It wasn’t me,” he pounded his fists. “It was that freezer. I swear, the thing’s cursed. It’s cursed by hell itself, and damns whoever owns it into feeding it human flesh. It must be destroyed,” he turned to the camera with desperate eyes. “Do you hear me? It must be destroy
ed or else the next person who owns it will turn out like me!”
The last shot froze on Webster’s anguished and contorted face as the narrator continued.
“Of course everyone knew Wayne Webster was making up the bizarre story to force the state to spare his life. It didn’t work.”
When Brent stopped the video, I went numb. Finally, I managed to squeak, “Oh my God.”
“Your gramma owns a haunted freezer!” Shannon burst into laughter. Brent followed close behind.
“It’s not funny, assholes!” my voice cracked.
“Oh, come on,” Shannon was still laughing, but she sounded pissed. “You’re not seriously saying that sweet old lady is possessed by a haunted freezer, are you?”
“I don’t know what it is,” I said. “I just know what I saw. First it was my gramma gnawing on some guy’s liver, and tonight, just before I came over here, I saw her dragging that hairdresser lady into the basement.”
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 2