The House on Maple Crest ( Origins) (Music Video)

By PROJECT MONROE · Melodic Death Metal · From the album A FULL YEAR OF MURDER

Grandma’s name had been Evelyn Peterson, once.

She was seventy-eight when the doctor said the word pancreatic and gave her four months, maybe six if she was lucky. Evelyn wasn’t lucky. She wasted fast—yellow skin stretched over bird bones, hair falling out in greasy clumps that stuck to the pillow like wet spiderwebs. The pain was constant, a hot poker twisting behind her navel every time she breathed.

Her son—Daddy—watched the whole thing with the same calm curiosity he’d shown as a boy when he took apart neighborhood cats to see how the parts fit.

On the last night, Evelyn lay in the hospice bed they’d set up in the living room because stairs were impossible. Morphine made her float, but not far enough. Daddy sat beside her, stroking the thin skin on the back of her hand.

“Mom,” he said softly, “you trust me, right?”

She tried to nod. It came out as a twitch.

He leaned in until his lips brushing the parchment of her ear.

“I’m going to fix this.”

The overdose was gentle. Just a little extra in the drip. Enough to stop the heart without bruising the veins. The nurse found her the next morning, mouth open in a silent O, eyes filmed gray.

They didn’t call the funeral home right away.

Daddy told his wife to cancel the service. “Family only,” he said. “We’ll handle it ourselves.”

They wrapped Evelyn in the plastic sheet from under the mattress pad (the one meant for bed-wetting grandkids who never came) and carried her down to the chest freezer in the garage. She was surprisingly light, like a coat left on a hook too long. Her joints had already begun to stiffen, elbows and knees locking at odd angles so they had to break them with a rubber mallet to make her fit. The cracks sounded like green wood snapping in a fire.

They left the freezer plugged in all winter.

Spring came early that year. Daddy waited until the night the ground was soft and the neighbors were at a barbecue three streets over. He and Mommy dragged the freezer into the basement on a dolly, the plastic-wrapped body inside sloshing like a waterbed.

They laid her in the clawfoot tub they’d salvaged from a remodel. Unwrapped her. The skin had turned the color of old mushrooms, marbled with purple where blood had pooled and frozen. Her tongue protruded black and swollen, eyes sunken to raisins.

Daddy filled the tub with hot water and table salt—twenty pounds of it—until the brine was thick enough to float an egg. He added brown sugar, garlic, star anise, and a quart of corn syrup because he’d read somewhere it kept meat pink.

Then he slit his own forearm with a box cutter and let thirty ounces of fresh blood swirl into the bath like cream in coffee.

“Family recipe,” he whispered, kissing her cold forehead.

They left her to thaw and “cure” for nine days.

On the seventh day the smell started: sweet rot, iron, wet dog, and something else—like the inside of a pumpkin left too long on the porch.

On the ninth day the fingers twitched.

Daddy was there with a mirror to watch her eyes open. They weren’t Evelyn’s soft blue anymore. They were the flat yellow of an old dog’s cataract, but they moved. They saw him.

She tried to scream. The sound that came out was a wet clotted rattle because the lungs were still half-frozen in places and the tongue had swollen to twice its size.

Daddy cried then. Real tears.

He cradled her head—skin sliding off in his hands like wet tissue paper—and told her it was okay, Mommy was here, Lily wanted to meet her new grandma.

They broke her jaw with a hammer and chisels to open the mouth permanently (rigor had locked it shut). Wired it with coat hangers so it stayed that way. Drilled holes in the cheeks and threaded clear tubing straight into the stomach so she could be fed without chewing. The tubes ran to buckets hung on IV stands like grotesque udders.

The first feeding was the family’s golden retriever that had died the year before. They’d kept him too. Thawed, minced, mixed with antifreeze to keep it liquid.

Grandma drank it all. You could hear the suction through the tubes, a steady, greedy glug-glug-glug.

Within a week the skin began to loosen and slip entirely. They peeled it off in long strips and tanned it in the brine—made lampshades, book covers, a coin purse for Lily. Underneath, the muscle was surprisingly red and fresh-looking, almost raw steak. The cancer was gone; whatever Daddy’s blood had done, it had rewritten the rules.

She never spoke again, not really. Sometimes a hiss, sometimes a moan that sounded like a name. But she learned. She learned to rock in place when Lily sang. She learned to open the abdominal cavity on her own, splitting along the old surgical scar so the feeding tube could burrow deeper, straight into the intestines where digestion happened faster.

They had to trim her constantly. Toenails grew in black spirals thick as ram’s horns. Teeth loosened and fell out, replaced by jagged shards that kept pushing through the gums like a shark’s. Hair kept growing in patches—coarse, gray ropes they braided and used for rope when the old stuff rotted through.

And the hunger never stopped.

Even when the buckets were full to overflowing with blended neighbor, she strained against the chains bolted into the concrete, yellow eyes fixed on anything warm that moved.

Daddy said that was love.

Love, he said, is just hunger that learned to wait.

Every Christmas they gave her something special: a live gift, still moving, still begging. She always saved the eyes for last. Held them on her tongue like communion wafers until they dissolved.

Lily’s favorite part was brushing Grandma’s hair afterward. The bristles came away wet and red, but Grandma would lean into the strokes the way a cat leans into a hand, making that thick, wet purring deep in what was left of her chest.

Sometimes, late at night, Lily whispers secrets into the cavity where Grandma’s ear used to be.

Grandma gurgles back, and the buckets fill a little faster.

Family, after all, is forever.

Listen to The House on Maple Crest ( Origins)

About Melodic Death Metal

A Gothenburg-originated fusion of death metal extremity with soaring melodies and harmonized guitar leads, balancing brutality with accessibility and emotional depth. Bands include: In Flames, At the Gates, Dark Tranquility

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