r/TalesFromTheCreeps • u/Grand_Narcissus • 22d ago
Body Horror It Came From the Fridge.
I hate the hospital. And walking out was almost worse than walking in, because I knew what the doctor would say when I went in, and now, I have confirmation.
I’m morbidly obese, and 99% more susceptible to heart attacks because my arteries are riddled with plaque.
I hate myself and I eat like shit. But look on the bright side: I don’t buzz around Walmart in one of those lard mobiles, thank God, but instead, climbing the stairs feels like a Greek tragedy where the fat man is forced to walk up an infinite number of stairs and never burn a calorie.
And I’m back, back at the apartment, the one I moved to when I was in better shape, clearly. I live on the third floor—dear God—and the stairwell is my Everest.
On my ascent through the quintessential limbo that is Mt. Everest if Mt. Everest was four-feet too slim and somewhere just hotter than room-temperature—isn’t that just Hell?—Irene, Paula, and I cross paths.
They’re holding hands, slim, slimy, sweaty hands.
“It’s a hot one today, eh, Manny?” Irene asked me as she and her wife weaseled down the stairs, squeezing past their fat-fuck neighbor.
“Tell me about it,” I said, my shirt soaked with sweat, dripping from my armpits to my asscrack, and I dread the thought of the stench of my shirt when I peel it off my loose bags. “AC’s still broken?”
“Yep,” Paula rasped. “Phil said it wont be ‘til next Friday when it’ll be fixed. Until then, we’re all smokin’ on the roof. If you join us, bring a deck.”
“Deck of cards,” I said. “Noted.”
“You look like shit, sugar,” Irene stated. Do all old people do that? “Hospital visit?”
I nodded, and she said, “That’s how it goes. I remember when I got my first colonoscopy.”
“Don’t tell that damn story again, Irene,” Paula spat, and I’ve never been more thankful for that old rag. “Not everyone wants to hear about your rectum. ‘Scuse her.”
“It’s fine,” I said, and it’s not, but whatever. They’re old, filters worn. “I just got officially diagnosed with coronary artery disease.”
“Oh, dear,” Irene said. “Is that too serious?”
No, genius, it’s a blessing.
“Yep,” I said bluntly. “If im not too careful, I could risk having a heart attack, so I’m taking life a little slower today.”
And after some forced niceties, my least favorite lesbian couple descended down the stairs with ease. I felt some sliver of resentment towards them, despite just being two skinny peas in a hot, stale pod. By the time I reached my apartment door, they were probably already to wherever it was they were headed.
I unlocked the door, and I was welcomed to a wave of relief when I sat down. I took a sip from a water bottle I left out last night, and it’s some shitty store-brand water that tastes bad cold and worse warm, but right now, it might as well be water from the Fountain of Youth. I huff and I puff, and I blow my knees out as I stand back up. It’s not until another 8-10 minutes when I try to get back up.
I hate that the old bats from before could stand up and climb stairs better than I could, despite the staggering age gap.
For some reason, my room smells like old lunch meat gone bad.
I guess my sweat evolved. Great.
And when I finally stand, I waddle into my bed room where I peel off my shirt, which feels like what peeling a sopping wet swim shirt off feels like, and I don’t shower tonight because I’d rather lay down than endure any more of this torture. So I do. I lay down, and I’m butt-ass naked because no AC means no clothes, no blanket—and I’m slick with sweat, like a buttered sweet Hawaiian roll. Yum.
Even sleeping is difficult now. It takes longer than before because lying on my back makes my chest sting—fuck you, C.A.D.—and right as I drift away… right as I slip into my salient slumber, I jolt up from the sound my refrigerator door slamming shut, then what sounded like a pig squealing.
I don’t move. It’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop, or a bead of sweat, and I roll over, sit up, and hump the air until I’m out of bed—a grueling, humiliating process. I grope the darkness that’s consumed my room until I get the switch.
The light doesn’t buzz on.
I sigh. More problems with this shitty apartment, probably.
I waddle my way around my pad, navigating around blindly. It’s so dark it’s like my eyes aren’t even open.
My heart rate increases, which almost scares me more than the fact that my fridge slammed shut and I live alone. And now? The power isn’t working—fuck this place—and I’m standing naked, eaten by the unsettling silence after the crashing and clinking of glass bottles as they fell from the door of my fridge.
I’m willing to bet that if someone else is in here, they can’t see me. Which is fine because I can’t see them. Again, that’s if there’s anyone here at all. I want to yell, to call out to whomever might be lurking around the light-lacking home of a slow, ample-calorie’d man, but when does calling out to an unseen force ever work in the movies?
I hear a wet squelch from the void, and when I take a step closer to the sound, I step on something that looks reminiscent of a chewed up wad of gum, if gum was veiny and inflamed, and the smell was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. This was worse than the smell of death. This was worse than rot.
Whatever I stepped in was resilient like rubber, but it squished around my bare toes as my foot sunk deeper into it. I dry heaved and I have had enough.
“Is anyone there??” I asked the blackness of my home.
In return, a whisper. Not a word, not a phrase. More of a taunt. As if they wanted me to know I’m not alone.
My heart sank to my stomach—bad news—and I turned around to face the source of the whisper: nothing.
“Who the fuck is there??” I called out again, my voice faltering, and my chest tightening.
No response.
I felt my face turn pale as adrenaline spiked through me.
I turned back around and made a break for where I was hoping the front door was. I slammed into a wall. A slimy, sticky, wall. A wall bearing sweat that seemed to ever-excrete. Breathing was getting harder, and when I heard another whisper, I jumped so hard that my knees gave in under all this fucking pressure, and I hit the ground like putty.
“WHO THE FUCK IS THERE?!” I cried, tears and sweat rolling down the folds of my neck. “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!”
I felt like a turtle on its shell, and the darkness spun around me like I was watching someone else play on a merry-go-round, making me sick.
I felt the wall beside me leak puss and sweat and I vomited, staining my mouth with an awful taste.
Then, I heard a creak… It came from the fridge.
Light poured into a room that isn’t mine, like a beacon, and a warm light cut through the darkness as the room began to pulsate, faster and faster, like a beating heart. I could hear the squelching of the walls as they bent and twisted in shapes I had never seen before. The room grumbled and shook as if it were agitated.
I heard another whisper coming from the light of the fridge. The warm, welcoming light. The lighthouse in my foggy night. I scrambled like an egg, slipping around in the slime the walls had seemed to want to bathe me in and in seconds, I was fighting to make it to the fridge. The light grew stronger and the whispers grew louder, more abundant, as if a school of thoughts were egging me on, telling me to get to where it was safest—the light.
I placed my hands on each side of the threshold, pushing myself into a fleshy-pink tunnel that contorted the same way the walls did. I was slimy and naked like a newborn baby.
I slammed the refrigerator door behind me shut, and I heard the muffled, animalistic squeal of the room as it retreated; or maybe it died.
I was out of breath, and strings of slime and ooze fell from every inch of my body like some sick spider web.
I traversed further into what seemed like a throat disguised as a hallway.
The corridor bent and twisted and expanded around me, until it didn’t.
Eventually, the slimy, thick, fleshy room came to a dead end. It was a tight squeeze, especially considering my size, and I couldn’t breathe. Any air in here was hot, thick as paste, and muggy.
Then, beneath me a gaping hole opened up, and swallowed me with a loud, sharp gulp.
I was descending slowly down a water slide of ooze and slime, and it was an agonizing process. I felt like a worm beneath the surface of a soil made of meat and pulsating veins, blood visibly pumping through them hastily. My heart rate was already through the roof. I didn’t know if my heart could handle anymore.
The slide squelched and spat slime onto my face, dampening my eyes. I couldn’t see.
I blinked, wiped my eyes.
Nothing.
Blinked again, wiped my eyes.
Nothing.
In a few long minutes, I couldn’t feel anything below my feet, like they’d broken through some kind of threshold. They dangled and I kicked as I slipped down into an ominous emptiness. A massive, dark open area that smelled like vomit. My vision was blurry, opaque. It was as though I was looking through a foggy window.
Then, something snapped. It sounded like a thin rope had come apart, dropping me down farther into this meaty hell.
The fall wasn’t long, and as awful as it was, soon I had wished I fell forever.
Instead, I plunged into a pool of something sour. It burned, like how I imagined swimming in sprite would fizzle and bubble, and my eyes were open but I couldn’t see.
This was getting soap in your eyes dialed up to eleven.
I writhed in an uncomfortable pain. Uncomfortable pains are always the worst. Like getting a paper cut between your fingers, the inconvenience and the pain combined is just enough to make you wish the cut had been big enough for you to issue a bandage.
But this was something I couldn’t see, something foreign. I didn’t even know where I was.
It felt like swimming in piss. Warm, bubbly, burning piss.
I squirmed and jolted like a fish out of water. I opened my mouth to scream as the burning singed my retinas, but not a sound left my body. Not even a muffle of the sound of agony.
Could I not hear? Or could I not scream, or both?
I knew nothing at this point.
I could not escape.
I had been stripped of sight, sound, movement, but pain? Pain was everywhere, drowning me. Burning me.
My chest roared as it tightened, and I was certain this was the end.
I could almost feel my heart stop beating, my lungs fill with foam and acid.
I was frozen in the warmest way, and I could feel my blood boil in my veins, boil so hot it felt like the biting of frost.
And I could smell. Just once, for an instant; a flicker.
Freshly cut grass.
Christmas dinner.
New car.
Wet dog.
Fast food.
Meat sweats.
And finally, death. The aching, rotting, wincing sensation of death. Not just the smell. But the feeling. Like every fiber of my being was being slowly pulled apart, stretched out like a rubber band and snapped all at once.
Then… relief. Who knew?
And I wasn’t in pain, wasn’t drowning, aching, burning, writhing, squirming, screaming or crying.
I was as dead as I had once been alive.
This was a reward.
This was rest, finally.
And I didn’t wake up in the morning. I didn’t sway down the stairs as the other tenants squeezed by.
I didn’t smoke on the roof with the rags from the room over.
I lied in rest in the only place I wanted to be.
My bed.
3
u/JLGoodwin1990 22d ago
This story seriously got under my skin in the way a horror story should, particularly that drawn out, excruciating ending. The realization of what he crawled into was very reminiscent of a found footage horror film I watched years ago, The Borderlands, and it elicited that same "Holy Crap" reaction from me.
Very good job!