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

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

The house on Maple Crest had a basement no one talked about.

Not because it was a secret (everyone in the neighborhood knew the Petersons had a basement), but because the people who went down there stopped talking afterward. Permanently.

It started with the smell. Sweet and wrong, like meat left in a warm car. Mrs. Gutierrez from next door complained first. Then her cat disappeared. Then Mrs. Gutierrez did too. The police came, knocked, left when no one answered. The Petersons were always “out of town.”

Inside, eight-year-old Lily Peterson sat at the kitchen table coloring a unicorn purple while her father dragged what used to be Mrs. Gutierrez down the stairs by her hair. The woman’s face had been peeled off in one piece and pinned to the basement wall like a butterfly. Her scalp flapped with every step, exposing the wet red skull underneath.

Daddy hummed while he worked.

In the basement, Mommy was already busy. She had Mr. Gutierrez strapped to the old weight bench with bungee cords. He was still alive, barely, eyes rolling white as Mommy used a melon baller to scoop out chunks of his thigh muscle. She fed them to the thing in the corner.

The thing didn’t have a name anymore. It used to be Grandma.

Grandma had died three winters ago. Cancer, they said. But Daddy said cancer was just God’s way of tenderizing meat. They’d kept her body in the chest freezer until spring thaw, then thawed her out in the bathtub like a Thanksgiving turkey. When she woke up (wet, blue, and hungry), Daddy had smiled the way other fathers smile at first steps.

Now Grandma sat in a kiddie pool full of brine and human gravy, skin sloughing off in gray sheets. Her jaw had been broken and rewired open so it couldn’t close. Tubes ran from her stomach to five-gallon buckets where the family dumped everything they couldn’t eat raw: fingernails, teeth, gallbladders, the rubbery parts of ears. Grandma digested it all. Slowly. Noisily.

Lily came downstairs sometimes to watch. She liked the sounds.

Today was special. Today they had a whole family: the Wilsons from church. Mom, Dad, and their two little boys (ages four and six). They were still screaming when Daddy nailed their hands to the workbench with roofing spikes. The mother’s voice cracked first. Daddy fixed that by pouring bleach down her throat until her vocal cords dissolved into pink froth.

The father begged. Offered money. Offered anything.

Daddy just laughed and took the reciprocating saw to the man’s knees, cutting sideways so the caps came off like bottle caps. The screams turned wet. Daddy made the older Wilson boy hold the severed kneecaps while he cauterized the stumps with a blowtorch. The plastic smell mixed with pork.

Mommy was gentler with the little ones. She always was.

She laid the four-year-old on Grandma’s lap like a baby for storytime. Grandma’s arms (bones showing through rotted meat) wrapped around the child automatically. The boy looked up, confused, as Grandma’s stomach split open with a wet ripping sound. A pink, muscular tube (not quite a tongue) unrolled from inside her abdominal cavity and began licking the boy’s face with the patience of a cat cleaning a kitten.

It didn’t stop at the face.

It kept licking. Skin first. Then muscle. Then the soft jelly of the eyes. The child’s screams turned to gurgling bubbles as the tube found his mouth and pushed inside, pulsing, drinking. When it pulled back out, the boy’s face was gone (just a raw, red skull with teeth too big for it now). Grandma’s belly bulged happily.

Lily clapped.

Upstairs, the doorbell rang. The mailman, probably. Daddy wiped his hands on a dish towel made from Mrs. Gutierrez’s skin and went up to answer it.

He came back down carrying the mailman by the ankles. The man’s head bounced on every step, leaving a red comma.

“Special delivery,” Daddy said, and everyone laughed except the Wilsons. They couldn’t anymore.

Later, when the basement was quiet except for the wet sounds of feeding, Lily sat on the bottom step and whispered to the dark.

“I love our family,” she said.

From the kiddie pool, Grandma the thing that used to be Grandma gurgled something that might have been agreement.

Outside, the FOR SALE sign in the yard spun lazily in the wind. It had been there for years. No one ever bought the house on Maple Crest.

They just… disappeared into it.

One by one.

Listen to The House on Maple Crest ( The Feeding)

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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