The Unrecognized Head in the Freezer

“The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on…” the warm baritone of Jim Morrison cooed in the background as Terry blinked his eyes open to a new day. He felt like death, he probably shouldn’t have allowed what’s-his-face at the Boar’s Head serve him tequila last night. Tequila always messed him up bad. His head felt like someone tried to split it down the middle with a jackhammer, glued it back together, then slammed it with a hammer.

“Shit.” Rough hands messaged bloodshot eyes before running through stiff and matted locks. He attempted to open his eyes again, but everything was blurry… And red. At least his tequila self remembered to pull the blinds shut. The sunrise was tinting the room strangely, but at least the light was dim. He rolled up to sit on the edge of his beaten down mattress, which creaked and squeaked under his weight as he shifted. Sitting made his head feel worse. Maybe the weird crusty feeling in his ears was where his brain had chosen to leak out. At least that was what he felt like had happened.

Gruffly, Terry reached his bedside table and grabbed for his glasses. They weren’t there. “Okay, Tequila-Terry, where’d ya leave my glasses.” He sighed and rubbed at his eyes again. “Please, not on the floor.”

He gingerly stood, placing his feet carefully as to not step on and then break his last pair of visual aids. He stood and the world spun wildly. He stumbled forward, having to catch himself on the wall. He needed to get to the bathroom. His shoulder hit into the doorframe of his room as he exited into the hallway causing a mournful grunt to escape from his lips as he careened down the hallway. The opposing shoulder hit into the bathroom door as he slammed the poor excuse for a barrier open and fell to his knees to worship the porcelain god.

As his insides became his outsides, Terry could vaguely hear the continuation of Morrison’s lyrical genius still playing from his iHome in his bedroom. Tequila-Terry had probably put the song on repeat. This made sober-Terry worried, but at the moment he had no time to contemplate the meaning as the acidic burn of bile and alcohol assaulted his throat. He’d had a lot of tequila. Maybe he should stop visiting the Boar’s Head on Saturdays. Giles only ever served tequila to him on Saturdays. Fuckin’ Giles.

Forever later, when the dry heaving finally stopped, Terry managed to find that his glasses were neatly placed on the back of the toilet. Odd. But currently convenient. They were wet, which was disconcerting, but Terry was ready to see the world again. With shaking and graceless hands, he shoved the spectacles upon his face and blinked a few times to adjust to the glory of sight.

The string of curses that left his mouth once he could see would have normally been enough to make him blush, but the dried, crusty browning substances that coated the bathroom walls required such vulgarity. Tequila-Terry had been a bad boy. Sober-Terry was going to have to have a sit down with his drunk alter ego to discuss this shit right here. The amount of bleach he was going to need in order to clean this mess made his head spin with the phantom fumes he knew would permeate his small apartment for weeks to come.

“Oh god, the neighbors!” Terry groped for a steady handhold and hefted his hungover ass up as best he could. He flipped the light switch on in the hallway only to groan at the unfortunate drag marks that went down the center of the carpeting. He wasn’t sure where they started or ended, but whatever… whoever… they belonged to had visited not just the bathroom, and his bedroom, but had turned in the opposite direction towards the kitchen. There was a solid handprint or two along the wall. Male. Maybe his own. Maybe not.

He glanced in the bedroom on his way by. And... Now he knew why he saw so much red. He wondered if it was even morning at all. He followed the trail into the small kitchen that his apartment had. It was more like a narrow hallway that could barely fit a grown man in it, let alone all the gadgets he liked to use. Where the droplets that crisscrossed the bathroom were drying, the pools that had gathered on the kitchen floor were still wet. Congealed, but wet. This had obviously been his last stop before sleeping.

He had no idea how he was going to clean this up. Not only that, but he had yet to find who the mess belonged to in the first place. With the mess he’d left in the bedroom, his expectation would have been to wake up next to the poor sap, but now he could only assume Tequila-Terry had done some new form of cleanup.

Terry tiptoed around the puddling reddish goop and headed to the fridge. The first thing he needed to deal with the mess was some aspirin. He pulled down an old Lion King cup from the cabinet to his right. He won the cup as a child from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. He opened the fridge to grab the cold water pitcher and poured himself a glass. He set the mostly full cup down on the counter and replaced the pitcher in the fridge. He reached up to open the freezer and paused. There was dried blood on the door.

He slowly opened the freezing unit door and found himself staring into an unfamiliar face. The eyes had burst from the slow freezing process and the ears had turned black from freezer burn. Terry tilted his head to get a different angle while studying the face. Then it clicked. The brown fuzz of hair. The five-o-clock shadow. The look of passionate horror.

“Fuckin’ Tequila.”