26 Jul Creepy Crate

My girlfriend, Amber, shook several thick envelopes in my face as soon as I came through the front door.

“Do you see these? Huh? Huh?” she snarled with her teeth bared and nose scrunched.

“They look like junk mail to me,” I said.

“They are junk mail! And look at them! Look at how heavy they are! Think of how much precious forest went into this! Did you fill out some stupid form online or anything?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? No surveys, no freebies, nothing? Because this much wasted wood doesn’t just show up unsolicited! You’re responsible for the death and misuse and waste of this many natural resources, and you’re going to tell these companies to cease and desist! Your carelessness is the reason trees that didn’t have to die… well… died!”

“I’ll look them up and see what I can do, babe.”

And so this interaction went every single day after I came home from work. Actually it always started over the phone. She sends me something aggressive, I try to say something that will placate her, it has the opposite effect, and by the time I get home I have a thread of vitriolic texts longer than a CVS receipt.

The evening was lost to arguing and tension.

Again.

So, hi. I’m Dan. I’m a horror fan. So is my girlfriend. That’s probably the last thing we have in common besides our love of boinking. She’s a fan for different reasons than me. I love the adrenaline rush that comes from the feeling of toying with the forbidden and the unknown.

Amber? She loves horror just because it shows a lot of rich kids getting killed. She thinks that the privileged are some sort of cancer. Her idea is that as long as anyone rich and spoiled is alive, they’re consuming too much of the earth’s resources and giving back too little. So when the upper-class cheerleaders are hacked to pieces, they’re finally something useful: fertilizer.

So the only times we really get along are when we’re watching movies or sexing it up. The movies last longer than the sex.

I get to do what I want with my money for the most part. I saw this thing online called Creepy Crate. One of those mystery box getups you can subscribe to, except with Creepy Crate, it’s all spooky. Might scare off a few of your church friends.

Amber pretty much scared off all my friends so I didn’t care. It looked like a steal, getting $90.00 of ghoulish goodies for $39.00, so I ordered and waited. Just enough time passed for me to forget that I had placed the order.

On the day that I would be reminded, Amber came flying out of the front door as I was pulling into our driveway, this time shrieking at the top of her lungs. She took me to the doorstep where the source of her little aneurism sat plain as day. My Creepy Crate had arrived.

And it really was an actual crate. Like, a large wooden crate. The dimensions were ridiculous. It came up to my ribs. The more I thought about it, the more it looked like a military supply crate. But exactly why a bunch of assorted horror novelties would be shipped in this was beyond me.

“Explain this,” she said with the tone of someone pulling the pin from a grenade.

I opened my mouth…

“And don’t you dare try to tell me this was unsolicited. It has your name on it for sure. Not ‘resident.’ Not ‘Dear neighbor.’ You. Dan.”

I opened my mouth a second time…

“Is this that stupid Creepy Crate you ordered? More like a wasteful crate!” she exploded and ranted for several minutes about… environment… stuff.

I opened my mouth a third time…

“Yes, dear. It’s the Creepy Crate. You subscribe. They send you horror-related goodies bi-monthly, and you get the joy of unboxing them.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what’s really horrible! How many trees had to die just to make that crate? Oops, did I say trees? No, no, no… That’s a whole freaking rainforest! Look at how thick those planks are. Why don’t you just cut off Mother Nature’s head and mount it on a spear? You are going to call them and have this thing returned. No, wait. I’ll call them and have it returned. You’re too stupid for such a simple task. I’ll call them, and I’ll fix your screw-ups again, Dan!”

She walked away tearing at her hair.

You’d think by now that I’d be used to her fits, but she still shook me up.

She stomped back minutes later with her phone. “I’ve got FedEx on the phone and they want to know where this blasphemy came from. Read me the address, Dan. Read it to me! Now!”

I started combing the crate for a label of any kind but there wasn’t one. It had my name on it in Sharpie, but that was it. It was devoid of any shipping information at all.

My girlfriend’s face reached the next degree of You gotta be kidding me.

She threw her phone down and began a combination of scratching her eyes and pushing them into her skull, causing her glasses to fall to the grass at her feet. She nearly trampled them as she did a little neurotic disco dance.

“You… seriously mean to tell me… you ordered something this wasteful, this bad for the planet… and you didn’t make sure there would be a way of returning it just in case?”

My patience finally started to slip. “It’s a frickin’ surprise box! There’s no way of knowing what’s inside until you open it! How can you get something you didn’t want if you don’t even know what you’re getting?”

And I realized that I had made things much worse. You know, by responding.

She dropped her phone and came at me in renewed rage.

“I knew you were a decadent, wasteful asshole but this is ludicrous! I’m giving you a few days to find a way to recycle this box and whatever bullshit is inside of it or we are through! You hear me? Through!”

She was already gone before I could say Okay, that’s fine, I’ll take care of it. I was walking inside to see what she was going to want for dinner when she stormed past me with her bulging duffel bag. Yeah, that bag. The one that she has when she’s not coming back for a while.

I heard her little electric car whir away.

Then it was just me and the crate. I paced in circles around it, mostly to walk off my shock and stress.

I started staring at the crate instead of the grass. It did seem rather big. Did they send me a whole miniature fridge?

I halted. I had gotten a whiff of something strong. And damn awful. I looked around to see where it could have come from, but it was gone.

I cracked my knuckles and decided to see what was in my first Creepy Crate.

A-a-a-a-nd that box was not gonna open up. Whoo-whee, that sucker was on there. The more I looked at it, the more I was sure that the top of the crate was straight up nailed on. I grabbed a tire iron from my truck and used it to pry it open. The thing groaned and protested as my efforts revealed nails longer than my fingers. What the heck. Did they mail me a live bear?

Finally, the last nail squeaked its way out and I threw back the lid. I got a blast in the face of the smell from before. The crate was full of it.

“JEE-ZUS!” I staggered back.

I peered inside. It was the end of the day and shadows were pooling all around me in a hurry with the sinking sun.

It was strangely difficult to see inside the crate, so I figured screw it, I’ll just dump it out onto the lawn. A few small things clattered out and then flop, a big thing fell out. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. The one big object was a black bag. I touched it and shrank back. It was vinyl. Heavy, thick vinyl. Not that I’m an expert on the matter, but it looked like a body bag. With… something inside of it.

I shook off the feeling. I realized that I felt exposed, standing there on the front of our duplex with a huge crate and a body bag. I opted to drag said body bag to the back of the property. I bet that looked good on some of the neighbors’ cameras nestled in their doorbells. I then looked at the other items that had been tucked into the crate.

The first item was a sewing kit. The needle was unusually heavy and thick, as was the thread, which was almost a rope. It took me a few seconds to notice that the end of the needle was a hook. Was this surgical equipment? Okay, so I guess that’s kind of spooky. Recycling stuff from hospitals as horror novelties, okay. Smart marketing.

Furthering my suspicions that this was all stuff salvaged from a medical operation, the next item was a box of dressings for wounds and some medical tape to hold it in place. Not quite as chilling as the needle with the hook. But again, I didn’t pay an arm and a leg for this thing, so I figured I just got what I paid for.

There was a box of assorted condoms.

Then there was the business of opening the body bag. I was seriously paranoid. I looked around before I returned to the back of the house.

Okay, Danny Boy. The pipes, the pipes are calling… from glen to glen and down the mountainside… saying that there’s no body in this body bag. There’s no body in this body bag. There’s no body…”

I unzipped the long heavy zipper. There was a body in there.

The stench was renewed and it ate its way into my senses like acid. Now it could have just been any old dead body, but no, it could never be that simple. The face had been smashed in with something heavy and blunt, like a baseball bat. The arms were gone, either cleaved or chewed off. It was hard to tell, since the body was well along with the decay. The legs were intact, shriveled and dry skin like wax paper wrapped around jerky.

There was still some hair attached to the ruined head, long and matted. There were the tattered ruins of a pink shirt and shorts.

They sent me the body of a girl. I didn’t even want to think of what had happened to her before she arrived here. My brain fired off in several panicked directions.

I settled on hiding the body before anyone could see me with it.

The landlord was good enough to let us have a garden in the back. I had just started to get some respectable tomatoes growing on their vines.

I was careful to make the hole right next to the tomatoes and just deep enough to make sure that the body would be covered. I didn’t have to worry about anything like the nose sticking out because, well, the nose was gone.

It was a pretty dark night, but I still felt exposed, silently accused by the darkness. Each shovelful of dirt sounded like fireworks. But before long the body was another mound of dirt in the garden. My brain’s hamster wheel slowed down just enough for me to think. Perhaps Creepy Crate was run by clinical psychopaths. Stranger things have happened. There’s a website where you can supposedly order human meat. It takes people in a very special spectrum to run a business of that caliber. Maybe some of them ran off and started Creepy Crate.

Or maybe this was an industrial accident at the factory.

I just didn’t know. And because I didn’t know, I knew it was time for something a little strong. I kept Jack Daniels in an unmarked spray bottle underneath the kitchen sink. It looks just like some generic all-purpose cleaner that had been reconstituted and forgotten about. I guess it is an all-purpose cleaner in psychological terms, so it’s not really a grand deception. I can sleep with that on my conscience.

Let’s just say I had enough to help me forget what anxiety and stress felt like. I went to bed feeling better.

I woke up to the sound of the television coming from downstairs. I felt just enough of a hangover to question if I had slept for the entirety of the girlfriend’s hiatus. I lay in bed gathering my patience and my nerves. I would need them.

I also needed some fresh air before facing Amber. I snuck outside the front door and took in the late morning sunshine. It was a good morning, and my hint of a hangover made the colors and the lights picked out by the bright rays more vivid. Heh. But through the murk of my simple pleasure, the thoughts of the body began to surface. If I ever got in touch with Creepy Crate, I’d either tell them that they did one hell of a job on the realism, or that they need to make sure all the members of their staff are accounted for.

Speaking of said dead body, I meandered my way to the back of the duplex, acting like I had no interest whatsoever in what was back there. I had to make sure that I had done a decent enough job of the burial. I’m sure that more than one disposal job that looked good at night led to an arrest in the clarity of morning.

I may or may not have pissed myself when I saw the garden. Because the spot where I had buried the body wasn’t just dug up. It looked like it had exploded from the inside out like someone had triggered a forgotten land mind and several feet of earth and a few tomato plants suffered for the carelessness.

Oh, it got worse. Like a massive slime trail left by some terrestrial snail or slug, there was mud leading from the hole to the back door. I stumbled to the back door with a throbbing brain. The mud trail continued through the kitchen. There was a large deposit of mud on the counter below a cabinet flung wide open. The trail terminated at the loveseat in front of the television where there sat, not my girlfriend, but the body. It was watching TV. It had a bag of Doritos next to it.

Someone dug up the body and posed it in front of the TV. That was all my thoroughly shaken brain could say to me.

The head was lolled back on the cushion, with no strength to hold itself up. Of course it wouldn’t hold itself up. It was dead. What was I thinking? I chuckled.

And the frickin’ thing turned its ruined face toward me.

Relax, relax, that was just gravity doing its thing.

As if it could read my thoughts, it stood up. I screamed until my lungs were collapsed and my diaphragm was fit to bubble out between my lips. And I did it again. And again. How nobody called the police, I’ll never know. I probably have very bad neighbors.

I used my ability to form whole sentences as soon as it returned.

“Get out! Get out of my house!”

The body stared at me with the face it didn’t have. Did it understand me? Did it think this was funny? Did it just not care?

It started walking toward me.

“Okay… Okay, now, that’s far enough.”

It kept coming.

“Stay back, stay back. For God’s sake, stay back.”

It didn’t listen. I backed up against the back door and I threw out my hands beside me, where I just happened to find the shovel I used in the garden last night. I seized it and used it to bludgeon my guest.

It sounded too much like the crunch of a celery stalk. There was a small splatter as the head suffered another degree of damage and it then hung from the vertebrae of the neck by a single strand of connective tissue like a morbid tetherball.

Never before in my life and never after, had I heard such an inhuman, stomach-churning, sanity-curdling scream. It was raw-and-red sadness, fear, dismay, anger, distress and every shade in-between, and it came from the body as it went from shambling to scrambling. It fell on its stomach and the legs began pumping like a frog fighting for its life. My courage dried up immediately under the punishment of the shrill sound waves and I backed up against the closed back door. The thing’s legs moved with the speed of pistons, driving it in all directions like a possessed and dismembered toy.

I mustered just enough mental fortitude to stand up and open the back door, hoping that it might scoot itself out. It must have sensed what I was up to, because the damn thing decided to scuffle underneath the loveseat and continue to scream.

It dawned on me that at that volume and intensity, it was only a matter of time before someone called the police to investigate my house and find out what sort of experience was causing someone to make such awful sounds.

My terror started to transmute into anger and annoyance. I skulked up to the loveseat. A clump of hair announced that the thing was lying still. So I decided to drag it out by its hair.

The hair tore off with a clump of decayed scalp attached to it. This resulted in the unthinkable: the screaming got worse. To the point that a few glasses nearby were rattling.

I stepped outside, where the screaming was just as awful, if not as loud. Trouble was imminent if anyone heard this.

I examined the contents I had dumped out from the crate. Once again my eyes came around to the hooked needle and the heavy thread. I took them inside where the sounds were practically river rapids that threatened to knock me over. I laid the morbid items on the coffee table in front of the loveseat. I could feel my skull rattling from the screaming. I then sought out the spray bottle of Jack Daniels and soon I was feeling much better about the task ahead of me.

Lifting the loveseat, there the body lay totally still, the head dangling by a slight strand of connective tissue and a fresh bald patch on the head.

I tried to speak consolingly.

“There, there. I’m sorry.”

It was like flipping a switch. The screaming stopped.

“I’m sorry that I hurt you. Please let me make it up to you.”

The body didn’t respond. Perhaps that was all I could hope for. I dug out our bright yellow latex gloves that were meant for cleaning. I loaded the needle with a thread and then I got to work.

I was able to put the patch of scalp back in place. I was also able to do a reasonable job of reattaching the head to the neck. I had to hold back the urge to retch. She had not been dead very long, and yet, long enough for her body to have become a one-lady-stage-act of rot. More than once, maggots wriggled onto my arms as I was working and I was repulsed each time. I imagined that this might have registered some emotions like embarrassment and shame in my patient. But again, the face was blank and so I detected nothing. I cut the thread and tied it and stepped back.

“There, good as new.”

She lay there in the same position like a rag doll, sans screaming. And then the body got up and walked outside the open back door. I was rendered temporarily motionless. Which was long enough to delay me from shutting the door and she walked right back in. she had something lodged between her intact toes on her right foot. She walked past me and ambled right up the stairs.

I prayed to God that she was heading for the bathroom. God must not have been taking messages at the time because she went right into our bedroom. I scrambled up the stairs and went through the door. There she lay on our bed. Our beautiful queen size bed. Her ichor staining the beige comforter. She lay on one side, one leg stretched out and one leg bent at the knee.

“What the hell do you want now?” I shouted.

With the bent leg, the body placed its foot behind one knee and grasped something with its toes. It threw it at me and the object landed at my feet.

It was a packaged condom.

I can’t really describe the tsunami of emotions that slammed into me.

Any apprehensions I had about hurting the thing’s feelings (assuming it had any) were scorched away in a flash fire of outrage. I said lots of things. Most of which weren’t very nice to say to anyone dead or alive. I finished. The body was in the same position it had been when I started, and it stayed that way for a long moment. It then lifted the same foot, slowly reached behind the other knee, grasped something with its toes and flung it at me.

It was another condom, but much smaller.

She got up off the bed and shambled out the bedroom door, down the stairs. I couldn’t believe it. A dead body that couldn’t handle rejection. I cautiously peered out the door in time to see it plop down on the loveseat. It grasped the remote with its foot and turned up the volume. I’m sure I watched it for at least fifteen minutes. It stayed still. I took that as my cue.

I cleaned up the back yard. I took care of the mud streak that led inside as best I could. The yard looked rough but the kitchen cleaned up just fine. I swept, scrubbed, and mopped until my bones ached. There didn’t seem to be much point in cleaning the loveseat. I mean, there was a dead body on it. Its rotting fluids oozed into the fabric and I had a feeling they wouldn’t clean up well.

It was only a matter of time before Amber would be home. I put my hands in my pockets and shuffled up to the loveseat.

“Hey, uh…” I began.

She didn’t acknowledge me. She was either too distracted by the television or she was giving me the cold shoulder. And she was dead, so that shoulder was awfully cold.

“My girlfriend will be home soon and I don’t mean to be an ass or anything, but she will be extremely jealous to see that I’ve been alone with another woman.”

Not so much as a twitch.

“And she won’t like what’s happening to the loveseat, either.”

I gestured to the spreading dark stains from under the body’s slender legs.

She merely continued to stare at the television with her eyeless gaze and clicked the remote once in a while. Yep. I was getting The Treatment. Sheesh.

Since she wasn’t going to bite my head off or anything, I took a moment to really examine my visitor. I could make out a tattoo on the ankle of the foot using the remote. It was pretty clear in spite of some wrinkles and warps. It was a cartoon pig with wings that were fluffy like clouds and a bolt of lightning striking behind it.

It was a notorious tattoo in our town. No, it wasn’t the branding of a bunch of gangbangers. Not quite. It was the tattoo worn by the biggest clique of one-percenter college goons on the North end of town. They were just as soon to rub their money in your face as they were to vandalize your mailbox. In other words, if you had that tattoo, you had enough money to buy your way out of any tar pit of trouble.

“Wow, you must have had it really big,” I said to her, gesturing to her ink. She remained still.

“Your family must really miss you. And your friends. I’m sure you had a lot of those. Maybe you miss having all that money.”

Nothing.

“Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you feel relieved.”

She lowered her head so that her chin was resting on her protruding collarbone. She smelled worse than an open sewer, earthy and heavy and sweet with rot, but I felt compelled to sit next to her. She leaned on me as soon as I did. I felt liquids seeping through my shirt. Bitter vomit welled in my throat.

That’s when I noticed the news segment on the TV.

“Authorities are still trying to find the body of nineteen-year-old Karissa ‘Creepy’ Craig. She went missing during an altercation at a campus block party in the North end of Mason Falls, a neighborhood of perennial hijinks during the summer months.”

The TV showed the uniform, repetitive skyline of the North end with its blatantly upper-to-middle class homes and businesses.

But then it showed the girl. It showed her face. It showed her birthmarks. It showed her tattoos. One of them was the local elitist tattoo on the ankle. I slid away from the rotting body and some squishing punctuated our separation. Her posture suggested she was startled. I looked her up and down, lingering on the tattoo on her ankle.

“Karissa… Karissa Craig?” I croaked.

She nodded.

“I guess I’ve found you… or maybe you found me,” I said, unable to suppress a smile.

The front door slammed. Amber was home. She was taut with even more aggressive energy than she was before she left. One hand crushed a brown paper bag that hid something. The other hand formed a fist so tight that the fingers should have fused together.

I looked at her and tried to formulate words that would help explain the scene before her. I barely made sense of any of it myself.

“Danny, sweetie? I’m going to kill you,” she said softly.

The paper bag slid off of a huge meat cleaver in her hand. I kinda forgot about Karissa for a few seconds.

“Oh, my. How come?” I said with a deer-in-the-headlights stare.

She shook her head.

“You’re just another parasite worming this planet to death, Danny. You waste and you waste and you waste. All you’re good for is enriching the soil so that it can be full of life again.”

“I found Karissa Craig!” I blurted out. Pointing to the body next to me. A shudder visibly ran through Amber and her eyes flashed. Her mouth formed words that I couldn’t hear, this time it wasn’t because I was a man.

“Say what?”

“I said how did you know where I buried her?”

Then it was my turn to shudder.

“You mean you’re the one that killed her?”

“She was drunk. The whole lot of them. An entire neighborhood of drunks, and they all drove Hummers! Hummers that their worthless parents bought for them! Gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting Hummers! They were all a waste of resources! Just like you!”

Amber clenched her teeth and grabbed her own hair and began yanking it.

“Do I have to bury her again? It’s just like you to undo something I worked so hard at! And then I’ll have to bury you with her. Is that the kind of night it’s going to be?”

I was going to answer. I really was. But that’s when Amber charged me at full speed. I got a deep nick in my shoulder from her cleaver. She kept right on sailing and hit the wall next to the loveseat.

That’s when Karissa stood up. That’s when Amber realized that Karissa wasn’t one-hundred-percent dead. Amber cut her across her abdomen where entrails slurped out. Said entrails began writhing like serpents and whipped around Amber’s legs. Her feet were pulled out from under her and one very large segment of intestine began feeling along Amber’s neck and head and then… it started swallowing her.

Amber twisted to look at me. Her nose was completely turned up and her glasses were mashed around the perfect circles of her terrified eyes. Her mouth was wide open in a scream but the intestinal wall formed an airtight membrane over the opening. Have you ever seen someone suffocated with a plastic bag? Me neither, but I think that came close to what I was seeing.

The intestine clamping down on Amber’s head began contracting rhythmically like a snake and the rest of her was sucked in and crushed. I heard muffled pops and crackles and screams as joints and vertebrae were compressed. Before I knew it, Amber was completely drawn into Karissa’s body. Devoured. Her sagging flesh wriggled slightly with her prey’s final struggles. And then that was all. My last thought before passing out was what a weird boner I had.

It was late evening when I woke up. The faint peach light of dusk was coming through the blinds. Part of me wondered if it had all been a dream. Nope. There was Amber’s cleaver. The loveseat still had dead stuff staining it. I grabbed my head with two trembling hands and went for the front door. I needed to step outside.

There was another package sitting on my doorstep.

It was marked “Creepy Crate”.

I grinned an unhinged little grin and took the box inside.

Amber would have loved the biodegradable packaging that was just the right size for the contents. Cardboard. Nothing that would be around for hundreds of years like plastic and not an extra square inch more than necessary.

Oh, wow, there was a book. And it wasn’t a piece of hack pulp either. It was a story by none other than Guillermo del Toro.

There was a Dracula’s Head air freshener. As much death as there had been in the apartment that day, that little doodad wouldn’t go to waste. I know I looked like death myself, so the monster mask that I pulled out of the box would more than help me keep from drawing undue attention to myself.

There was a horror-themed postcard. I decided I would send it to Amber’s parents when the time was right.

Notebooks, pens, eBook access… that little box had a ton of stuff crammed into it. I suddenly felt the worst exhaustion of my life. Probably the comedown from being in mortal danger and watching a dead body eat my girlfriend alive after she tried to hack me to pieces. Just a guess.

I staggered my way upstairs. It would be interesting having the bed all to myself again. I flicked on the light and there was Karissa in the bed. Same flirty position as before. Again, she grasped a packaged condom with her shriveled toes and threw it at me.

I stared at it.

I stared at her.

I held up a finger.

Un momento.

There was a Ma and Pa hardware store just up the road. They had one video camera in the whole store trained on the cash register and whoever was being rung up.

That camera recorded me purchasing a plastic face shield, an apron, some long gloves and wading boots. The kid with the backwards cap behind the register looked me up and down.

“Dude, you look like you’re getting ready to like, totally smash up a dead body!”

“You could say that,” I said with a shrug.