Freezer: The Complete Horror Series

by J. Joseph Wright

  Gramma’s frenetic giggling got closer and closer, right on my heels, driving my madness to escape. I encountered body after body—the four other ladies in Gramma’s bridge club, mouths frothing and gaping. Shannon, Brent’s girlfriend, swaying lifelessly. Then what I saw next made my skin tingle with frozen ice pellets. Hanging in front of me, so still and peaceful he looked asleep, was Brent. Dead. I must have been yelling already, because I couldn’t yell any more. I had no time to be sad or upset. I had to run to the nearest source of light. I found the door leading outside, and bolted up the four steps to the driveway, calling for help at the top of my lungs.

  I didn’t wait for help. I went to get it, and the first place I went was to the next-door neighbors. I didn’t knock or anything, just burst right in to the living room where, on the couch facing away from me, three people sat watching the cooking channel.

  “Help!” I screamed. “My gramma’s trying to kill me!”

  Nobody moved. The place sounded like a morgue. Smelled like one, too. Something told me not to go in any further, to just turn and get the hell out. I needed help, though, and these were the nearest people to me. I hurried around the couch.

  “Didn’t you hear me, I said my—”

  I stopped in my tracks and then nearly backed over the coffee table trying to get away from the abomination on that sofa. Three people. A woman and two men. Mutilated. Teeth showing through ripped flesh. Eyeballs dangling by a gooey discharge, skulls caved in and brains exposed.

  I heard gargling, frothing in the back of someone’s throat, and thought for a second someone was still alive. Then I realized it was me, struggling for breath. Then footsteps on the front porch made my natural flight instincts kick in. I ran down a long hallway, into the kitchen, then out the back. Finding myself in the neighbor’s driveway, I ran toward the road, and hit the skids when someone stepped in my way.

  “Cousin Eddy?” it was Tom Eubanks again. Tall and gangly, he cast a long shadow in the afternoon sun. “You sure you don’t wanna play a game of football? I promise not to smash you into the dirt—too hard,” he chuckled.

  “Tom! I said get outta here!” I pushed him away. He stepped backward and looked at me all confused.

  “Dude, you seriously are tripp—”

  A splash of blood hit my neck, my chin, my whole chest. Peppered in red, I stood there and only managed a meek whimper as Tom tensed up and stared at me with this blank look and a hunk of metal wedged in his head. It was deep, whatever it was, so deep that after Tom crumpled to the ground, Gramma had to step on his neck and wrench hard to get it back out. I watched it all happen, watched Gramma pound and pound and pound with the ax from her woodpile, carving Tom’s skull into a soppy pulp, blood mixing with earth, creating a dirty tomato soup.

  When she’d satisfied her bloodlust and reduced Tom to a six-foot ten pile of twitching meat, she gripped the ax handle so tight her arthritic knuckles whitened and she gave me a bloodied grin.

  “Goodness gracious,” she wiped her chin and teased her hair. “I’ve made a little mess, haven’t I? Now be a good boy, Edward, and come to your gramma!” she sprinted toward me with the agility of an Olympic athlete.

  “NO!” I ran three steps in reverse and then twisted around, dodging into the only place I could find in such a hasty retreat. I didn’t know where I was right away, just a small, gloomy space behind the neighbor’s house. Then gas fumes and a grassy smell told me I’d stumbled into a garden shed. My only hope was Gramma hadn’t seen me go in.

  No such luck.

  The shed door slowly creaked open, and Gramma peeked in her head. “Don’t be afraid of your gramma, Edward. I won’t bite...oh what am I saying? Yes I will!” her eyes found me, cowering in the corner, and she moved swiftly in her attack. Her round face aflame with homicidal intent, she brought the ax over her head and readied to come down on me full force. Nowhere to go, nothing else to do, I shielded my face with my forearms and pressed my back against the wall.

  That’s when I must have bumped into a rack of gardening implements—shovels, rakes, weed whackers, and one handy dandy tool that saved my life, a Garden Claw. The sharp, multipronged tiller fell off the shelf just as Gramma pounced, catching her in mid-swing and thrusting straight through her throat.

  She gurgled and gasped, dropping the ax and clutching at the Garden Claw’s blue handle, ejecting her tongue and swallowing it again and again. Her cloudy pupils rolled my direction, and as she reached for me I pressed against the wall so hard I became part of the shed. Then Gramma took her last wheezy, stunted breath, and fell limp and silent.

  9.

  I crawled out of the shed and stumbled up the driveway. There I saw Tom Eubanks’ lifeless corpse on the sidewalk all askew and awkward. I decided I didn’t want to go anywhere near it, and hopped the hedge to Gramma’s property.

  “Help!” a faint, hoarse voice came from the basement. No doubt in my mind who it was, I tore the rickety old door open and went down inside. Brent was alive, and I heard him clearer and clearer the closer I got to him as he dangled, upside-down, from the low ceiling beams.

  With a stepstool, I managed to lift him off the hook and he fell to the semi-earthen floor with an “Oof!”

  “Sorry,” I told him. He didn’t care about himself. Right away, he stood and rushed to one of the other many hanging bodies and brushed aside her long hair.

  “Shannon!” he cried, then yelled at me, “Help me!”

  We both got her down carefully. He sat with her head in his lap. She looked so peaceful. No blood. No visible signs of trauma at all.

  “Oh, Shannon!” he rocked back and forth. “Shannon, no!”

  He stopped rocking and looked up at me. We both flinched when she filled her lungs with air and opened her eyes.

  “Shannon!” Brent was elated. “You’re alive!”

  She rubbed her neck. “What the hell happened? My head’s killing me.”

  “My gramma happened,” I sighed and stared at the old freezer in the corner. Its motor kicked on, whirring away gently like nothing had happened. “But she’s dead now. The curse should be over.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Brent announced. I cocked my head at him. “Remember what Webster said? Whoever owns that freezer is a…a servant to hell and becomes a relentless killer.”

  “Yeah. That was Gramma. But she’s dead,” I said like he didn’t get it. It was me who didn’t get it.

  “Exactly,” he continued to school me. “She’s dead. And what happens when people die? Who gets their stuff?”

  I held my breath. “Their next of kin.”

  Brent squinted. “So that means, the person who owns the freezer now is…”

  “My mom!” I shouted, and as soon as I finished shouting it, a vehicle pulled in the driveway really fast. We all gave each other wide eyes as a door slammed hard with the engine still running. “Shit!” I ran to a window and saw Mom’s minivan. “It’s her!”

  “What’s she doing here!” Brent jumped to his feet and ran to the door. He pulled it closed and slid the old-fashioned wooden lock into place just as something hard and heavy slammed against it. He dropped to all fours and crawled a few feet before rolling on his back to watch the second blow, shaking the basement door’s hinges and causing a puff of dust to fall from the ceiling.

  “Eddy!” we all gasped at Mom’s low-pitched grumble, a tone so evil it was virtually indescribable. “Eddy this is your mother! Let me in! Let me in this instant!”

  In the murky, dark corner, the freezer shifted hard, scraping the concrete. Then it moved again, and again, quaking and rattling relentlessly. I sat on the floor in utter disbelief and watched the door. This time the ax blade broke through.

  “Eddy! I mean it!” I saw Mom’s fiery glare through the splintered hole. “LET ME IN!”

  My name is Eddy Mitchell, and my mom’s an ax murderer…

  Part II

  MAMA’S FREEZER

  1.

  My name is Eddy Mitchell, and my
mom’s an ax murderer.

  How do I know? She tried to kill me, like, a bunch of times, that’s how. She also killed about a hundred people right in front of me, but, once again, I’m getting way ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning, the day my mom got caught up in all this mess. As you may or may not know, my gramma owned a freezer that once belonged to a serial killer. Turned out that freezer had some kind of evil power, because as soon as she bought it, she turned from a sweet old innocent lady to the most vicious monster I’ve ever seen. But now Gramma’s dead, and everything she owned belongs to my mom, including that freezer. So the curse was transferred—to Mom.

  SLAM! SLAM! SLAM!

  “Eddy, you’re being a very, very bad boy…now let me in this instant!”

  I huddled in a dark corner of Gramma’s basement. The place reeked of death, blood and vomit. Dead bodies dangled from open beams above, dripping and swaying and reminding me of Gramma’s sadistic acts. But that wasn’t what made me, my friend Brent, and his girlfriend Shannon shiver with fear. It was Mom.

  BANG! SLAM! BASH!

  Mom ranted and raved like I’d never heard her rant and rave. The old wooden door, the only thing holding her back, was being torn to splinters by the rusty, dull ax from Gramma’s wood pile. I decided to make a break for it. Brent already had the same idea.

  “Come on,” he whispered hoarsely. “Let’s get outta here.”

  I sprang to my feet and we all sprinted upstairs just as the cellar door broke in two. I didn’t wait around to see the damage. It was a run for our lives, and we had no time to be spectators. I was sure we could make it. Gramma’s house was pretty big, and we could dash out the front porch and make it to the safety of a neighbor’s house before Mom even knew we were gone. So you can understand my confusion when, just as Shannon opened the door leading from the basement to the kitchen, she stopped, forcing both me and Brent to crash into each other, and screamed bloody murder.

  In the strange light, all I saw was a silhouette, but that was all I needed. I’d never seen my mom look so imposing. She seemed larger than life, and, with that ax in her hands, she didn’t look real. Like a movie. Or a video game villain. Not my mom.

  Without a word she backed us down, slowly, to the bottom of the stairs. Once again in Gramma’s basement, the scene of countless grisly killings. Now, I was convinced, there were going to be three more.

  Mom stepped to the dirt floor and set her devilishly gleaming eyes on each one of us. She looked around the room, surveying the dusty dankness, settling on the dead bodies. That made her smile. Then her eyes drifted and she spotted the freezer as it started to shake and shimmy like an unbalanced tire. Whump! Whump! Whump! That made her laugh.

  “Looks like it’s time to feed the freezer,” she said, and raised the ax over her shoulder, aiming it directly at Shannon’s shaking head. We were trapped. Cornered. Nowhere to run, and we could forget about hiding. It seemed Mom had some kind of supernatural psychic abilities, and would’ve been able to squash our escape in seconds. I knew it, and it seemed Brent and Shannon knew it. Both of them were speechless, and stared with unbelieving eyes. Before Mom could bring the sharp, heavy weapon down and split open Shannon’s skull, something—an instinctual and familial feel—had me pushing my friends aside and confronting Mom face to face.

  “Mom, no!” I put up my hands, readying for the terrible blow. But how can anyone really be ready for such a thing. I tried, though, to prepare myself mentally for the sudden and calamitous end to my fourteen year existence. But it didn’t happen. Mom paused for just one moment, and for that moment I saw a flash of my own mother. She was in there, somewhere, and no matter how much of a grip that evil freezer had, I knew I could reach her.

  “Mama,” I cried, and her expression contorted, eyelids twitching, chin quivering. I used to call her Mama when I was a little baby, and that got to her a little. But just a little, because in no time at all, the sinister sneer crawled back onto her lips, and her glare looked like a yellow fire as she spoke.

  “If you think just because you’re my son that means you’re getting out of this, then think again!” she snatched my ear, hard, and dragged me toward the freezer, which by that time had begun to gyrate out of control. Mom then took hold of Brent’s earrings and pulled. He let out a whoop of pain and crawled on his hands and knees. Shannon glared at Mom, but gave in and ambled reluctantly next to Brent.

  Mom forced us all to kneel before her like some kind of sacrificial lambs. I guess we were. Sacrifices to the dark presence inside that freezer. I had no idea what it was. A demon? I really didn’t believe in those types of things, though I was beginning to. Quickly.

  “That’s a good boy, Eddy,” she offered a demented smile. “All of you. You’re good little children…Now,” she lifted the ax high. “Be still!”

  “Mom! Wait!” I threw one last plea her way. She inhaled sharply and stared daggers at me, but hesitated just long enough for me to try reasoning with her. “Don’t kill us. Not yet. We can help you,” I pointed at the abundant corpses hanging from the ceiling. Gramma’s handiwork. “Look at all those. You’d be at this for hours. And by then it might be too late. Someone’s bound to call the cops.”

  A small crack in Mom’s otherwise stony façade. I was making sense, and she knew it, no matter how possessed she was.

  “The three of us, we’re young and strong. We can get this all fed to the freezer in no time.”

  “Y-y-yeah,” stammered Brent. “We can help you.”

  “Four pairs of hands can do a lot more work than one, right?” I added. Brent nodded. Shannon remained still and quiet. Mom was quiet, too. I could see the gears turning in her satanically-controlled mind. One last plea put her over the top. “The freezer wants to be fed, right? Then let’s feed it.”

  At that, Mom’s demeanor changed. Her harsh, angular features unstiffened, and she even sounded sweeter when she talked. “What a good idea,” she tussled my hair. “I’ve got such a smart boy.”

  2.

  So I’d managed to save our skins, but, after all the ‘help’ we’d promised to give my mom, I’m not sure if death wouldn’t have been a better alternative. We had a half dozen bodies to gather and dismember and shove, piece by bloody piece, into that old Frigidaire. It seemed happy. Every time we opened the top, it moaned with giddy anticipation. And every time another hunk of human meat was dropped inside, it popped and snapped and grinded, letting out little squeals of pleasure. It even burped a few times. Mom seemed happy, too. She got her hands dirty just as much as we did, and hummed the whole time. I’ll never forget the tune. Mary Had a Little Lamb. Like I said, lambs to the slaughter.

  The work was hard. Those bodies weighed a ton. Dead weight is tough to lug around, especially since Mom made us round up each and every corpse, which turned out to be a lot. All four members of Gramma’s bridge club. Officer Jackson. Gladys the hairdresser. Even some of that water filter salesman was lying around. Those weren’t the worst ones, not by a long shot. When Mom made us go out and get all the people Gramma had killed in the immediate vicinity, the job went from bad to awful. We had to drag over the neighbors from next door. We even retrieved Gramma from the tool shed. Mom didn’t bat an eyelash when she saw her own mother’s mutilated corpse. She just nodded and kept working, slicing and cutting and slopping the juicy chunks into the freezer with glee like she was fixing Christmas dinner.

  When we’d gotten down to only one body left to process, I did a last minute check on the premises. To my dismay, I discovered we’d forgotten all about Tom Eubanks, the boy Gramma had hacked up on the sidewalk. He was a pretty big guy, and I had a hard time lifting him. And when I crouched to try again, my heart jumped at the sound of footsteps behind me.

  “Need some help?” it was Mr. Glickman, Gramma’s neighbor from across the street. I froze with my back to him. Brent and Shannon emerged from the basement and stopped at the sight of him. They were stained all over in red, and when Glickman saw that, he gasped. “What-what
-what’s going on around here!”

  “Mr. Glickman,” I stood and faced him. He became even more distraught at my bloody appearance. “Run!” I pleaded. “Get outta here…save yourself! Quick!”

  His eyes traveled to the ground and he gasped again at Tom’s caved-in melon, oozing all over the place.

  “You-you-you,” he backed off. “You killed him…I’m-I’m calling the—” he stopped when he spotted Mom. She strode out the cellar door with a determined purpose, straight for Glickman, the ax behind her back. No wavering. No hesitating. She just walked right up and SPLAT! drove the ax right in his chest. Deep. Glickman’s entire body shook rapidly, starting with a tiny quiver, then growing quickly into full convulsions. His arms, rigid at the elbows, waved in front of him like he was trying to extricate the ax, but he had no control. I looked away when he collapsed. Didn’t want to see any more blood. Ever. But it was just the beginning of the grisly chores we’d signed ourselves up for. I could see it in Brent’s face when Mom ordered us to add Glickman to the pile.