Snowman's Revenge

Story Sent in by Priya:

After my first date dinner with Frank, he took me on a walk through our college's biology lab, where he was a work study student/lab assistant. He showed me various preserved specimens, both recent and not-so-recent.

"Want to see the pickled human heads?" he asked me.

I said, "There's no way you have pickled heads."

He nodded. "We do. People who've donated their bodies to science. We keep them locked up in refrigeration."

Of course I wanted to see, so I followed him to a different room, where there was a large metal door at one end. He typed a code on a keypad, opened the metal door up, and a blast of cold air shot out of the walk-in refrigerator. Dim blue light shone out from within.

"Go on in," he said.

I replied, "You first."

He said, "I'm just trying to be polite. It's not like I'm going to lock you in there."

I smiled. "Then you can be polite by going in, first."

He said, "No. This isn't a federal case. Just go inside."

"You first."

He sighed. My smile disappeared. He said, "Do you want to see the heads or don't you?"

I replied, "I do. I'll follow you in."

"This isn't a big deal. You go in, first. I'm not going to say it again."

"After you."

He shoved past me, walked in, and slammed the door shut behind him. I called, "Can you get out from inside? I don't know the code!"

No response. I yelled, "Can you hear me? Frank?"

He didn't answer. I knocked on the door. He didn't knock back. I left the lab, found a security guard, explained the situation, and the guard, who didn't know the keypad combination, called up one of the professors at home.

As the guards weren't allowed, apparently, to know the codes to such things, the professor would have had to come in and open the door. However, the professor told the guard over the phone that the door was always unlocked from within, just in case of such an event.

The guard and I walked back to the lab. The lights were out. They had been on when I had left it. It seemed as though Frank had exited the fridge and left. I apologized to the guard and left the bio labs. As far as I could tell, the date was over.

I made it back to my dorm, and hadn't planned on contacting Frank at all. I briefly discussed the date with my roommate, watched some TV, and went to bed.

At around 3am, loud banging at the door woke us up. The first thing I thought was, "It's the police. They found Frank frozen to death."

Instead, when we made it to the door, there was no one there. However, there was a pile of ice cubes and shaved ice, about waist-height, and it was wearing the same shirt and pants that Frank was wearing on the date.

We lived on the 10th floor of our dorm, so I have no idea how Frank had carted all of that ice upstairs (or past the downstairs guard, for that matter). A note stuck out of the ice, written in a silver marker: "You killed me. Murderer."

It freaked my roommate and I out at the time. The melting ice would have seeped into our room from under the door, so we took as much of it as we could and put it into a shower stall in the bathroom, where it would melt down the drain.

As for Frank's clothes, the next day, I brought them to the bio lab and stuffed them inside of his mailbox. I never saw or heard from him again.