They Don't Make Them Like They Used To

As soon as the first rays of conscious awareness began to creep back into Camilla’s mind, they were accompanied by the stark realization that something was terribly wrong. Her surroundings were completely unfamiliar, albeit unsettlingly unthreatening at a glance.
She appeared to be in a large, luxurious, and well-appointed penthouse straight out of the 1950s. She was slumped over on a stool in front of an island counter with a speckled scarlet Formica countertop, across from a young woman in a red and white vintage dress. Camilla's attention was immediately stolen by the woman's vibrant blue eyes, raven pigtails, and wickedly insidious grin.
“Coming around then, are we Ducky?” she asked as she took a sip from a martini glass.
“What… what happened?” Camilla asked, her rising panic quickly overpowering her confusion and grogginess as she checked to see if she was restrained or hurt before looking around for any possible threats.
“You passed out. Nothing to be embarrassed about; happens to me all the time,” the woman said with a gesture to her martini.
“No, who are you? What am I doing here?” Camilla demanded as she stood up from the stool.
“Ha! Black-out drunk by mid-afternoon? If you weren’t such a lightweight, you’d make a good drinking buddy,” the woman chortled. “To refresh your memory, my name is Mary. Mary Darling. My brother James brought you here because you wanted to write an article about our collection of retro appliances, remember? Apparently, the Zoomies have quite a bit of cultural nostalgia for the post-war era. Per my duties as hostess, I offered you a drink, and I guess you’re not used to cocktails as strong as I make them because it put you out like a light.”
Though her memory was hazy, Camilla knew that Mary was lying. She wasn’t drunk, and she wasn’t hungover. She knew it wasn’t alcohol that had knocked her unconscious. She had spoken with James about writing an article, but other than that, she had no recollection of where she was or how she had gotten there.
While it was obvious that the Darlings had abducted her, until she had a better idea of exactly what it was they were up to, she decided that it was best to play along.
“Oh. Right. The article. I remember now,” she said uneasily. “I’m sorry. Yeah, that drink must have hit me harder than I expected.”
“Nothing to apologize for, Ducky. I’m in no position to judge you,” she said as she finished off her martini. “Mmmm. Any night when James isn’t here to put me to bed, I usually wake up sprawled out at whatever random spot I dropped at. Whelp, now that one of us is sober, on with the tour!”
“Is it alright if I record our interview?” Camilla asked, quickly checking to see if she still had her phone on her. She was relieved to find that she did, but to her disappointment saw that she had no reception or WiFi. “Shoot, I’ve got no bars here.”
“Oh, I assure you there are plenty of bars in this house,” Mary laughed as she gestured at the nearby cocktail bar. “I do apologize for the lousy reception, though. If your little doodad there can work without it, feel free to record away.”
Camilla nodded and began recording video on her phone, keeping the camera focused on her presumed captor as much as possible.
“Hello everybody!” Mary said energetically as she smiled and waved at the camera. “My name is Mary Darling, and welcome to my kitchen. We’re going to start our tour today with my main refrigerator, easily the most essential appliance of any modern kitchen.”
With a twirl of her skirt, she waltzed over to a broad, six-foot-tall, beach-blue refrigerator with chrome trim. It had a convex door, branded with a cartoon atom and the name ‘Oppenheimer’s Opportunities’ in a retro, calligraphic font. The door was partially covered with the usual accoutrements; a notepad, a small chalkboard, some odd bills and receipts, along with a few photographs of James and Mary Darling. Most of the photographs also included a dark-eyed preteen girl who bore a disquieting resemblance to the twins.
But what stood out the most was that just above the lever handle, there was a small analogue device with several knobs and switches that didn’t look like it had originally been part of the appliance.
“This right here is the 1959 Oppenheimer’s Opportunities twenty-one cubic foot single-door Nuclear Winter refrigerator,” Mary said proudly. Camilla was tempted to point out that the concept of Nuclear Winter didn’t really come about until the 1980s, but couldn’t work up the courage to interrupt her hostess. “When my brother and I first moved into our little playroom here full time, we knew we were going to need housewares that were sturdier than anything on the open market. You can imagine how delighted we were when we found Oppenheimer’s! They make a wide range of electronic appliances powered by atomic batteries so that you can count on them even if the grid goes down. This beauty here has been running non-stop for sixty-five years now and it’s got no thought of retiring. It retailed for a whopping $249.99 back in the day, and it was worth every penny! The body itself is made out of a proprietary titanium aerospace alloy that’s virtually indestructible.”
To demonstrate her refrigerator’s quasi-mythical indestructibility, Mary pulled out a butcher’s knife that she had been carrying in the sash of her dress and began slashing at the bottom half of the door with a violent ferocity that sent Camilla stumbling backwards out of fear for her safety.
“Enough! Enough! I believe you!” she shouted.
“You see! I didn’t even scratch the paint!” Mary bragged as she holstered her knife. “Nothing like a modern appliance; this thing was built to last! But it wasn’t just durability that sold us on this model. It’s functional too!”
She swung open the door, revealing six chrome shelves that were mostly laden with heavy packages of meat wrapped in butcher’s paper. The packages were all neatly dated and labelled in a feminine flowing script that Camilla suspected belonged to Mary. Though the cut of each meat was clearly marked, Camilla’s eyes jumped from package to package as she tried to find one that said what kind of meat it was.
But all she could find were human names.
“The height of each shelf is fully adjustable with the push of a button. Each one slides out for easy access, or detaches completely for cleaning,” Mary continued her presentation, pulling the shelves out to create a tiered staircase. “That’s an especially useful feature for my little Sara Darling. Even though she’s more of a daddy’s girl, she still likes to help me in the kitchen, so it’s important that everything’s accessible for her. And since everyone’s so concerned about accessibility these days, I suppose it would also be helpful for a cripple or a midget. As you can see, I’ve customized the interior to my family’s specific needs. We don’t have any need for a vegetable crisper when we’ve got plenty of organ meat. All the vitamins you could ever want in those, and no nasty ethylene gas or phytotoxins to worry about! Of course, keeping this much meat fresh is obviously the top priority, and it would be an absolute shame to risk freezer burn on grade-A cuts like these. That’s why in addition to an airtight seal and atmospheric control, the Oppenheimer 1959 Nuclear Winter uses radiation to keep its contents one hundred percent germ-free!”
“I’m sorry. Did you say radiation?” Camilla asked nervously. “Why would you use radiation in a refrigerator?”
“It was the Atomic Age. We put radiation in everything!” Mary explained with a manic grin. “It’s just like how you put AI in everything these days. What could go wrong, right? Oh, there’s nothing to worry about, Ducky. The radiation is only on when the door is closed. The titanium alloy is completely radiation-proof, plus the paint is lead-based! The interior of the fridge is exposed to beta and gamma rays from the atomic battery, penetrating any packaging or containers and completely sterilizing the food inside! It may be mild, but since it’s near-continuous germs can’t get a foothold, so our meat stays abattoir-fresh for months!”
Mary pushed all the shelves back inside the refrigerator and gave them a gentle shove to the left. They spun around as if on a carousel, despite there being no room inside the fridge for that to be possible. Mary stopped them when they reached a segment filled with ceramic baking dishes and tinfoil-covered platters.
“Now I’m the first to admit that I’m not always sober enough to cook, which doesn’t always stop me! But for the times it does, I keep lots of meatloaf, casseroles, and roasts on hand so that I have plenty of leftovers to serve my family. Luckily for me, even my good china bakeware is no match for the ionizing radiation of the –”
“Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait,” Camilla interrupted. “What did you just do?”
“Hmmm?” Mary hummed in mock confusion.
“You spun the inside of the fridge around like a Lazy Susan,” Camilla clarified. “How did you do that?”
“Oh, that! Yes, that’s one of the modifications my brother James made,” Mary explained. “As wonderful as Oppenheimer’s appliances are, James could always make them better! He was able to expand the interior space out into the hyperdimensional volume of our playroom, so I never have to worry about running out of space for all my savoury creations.”
“That’s… impossible,” Camilla said as she shook her said in disbelief. “Everything else you’ve said until now has been ridiculous, but that’s impossible.”
“Come in and take a look for yourself if you don’t believe me,” Mary suggested as she spun the shelves in the fridge around with a theatrical flourish.
Camilla adjusted her glasses as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing, tentatively approaching the fridge. As she tried to work out how the illusion worked, Mary stopped spinning the shelves when she arrived at a completely empty compartment.
“You want to know what really made me buy this fridge, though?” she asked. “I asked the salesman how many bodies he thought I could fit in it, and without any hesitation he said ‘at least ten if you pack them in tight enough’.”
With superhuman strength and speed, Camilla felt Mary shove her into the fridge from behind, slamming the door shut.
“Hey! Hey! What the hell?” Camilla shouted as she pounded at the door from the inside.
She tried to push or kick it open, but it wouldn’t budge. The seal was as airtight as Mary had said, and there was no way to open it from the inside. The instant the door had shut, the overhead lightbulb had gone out, replaced by the faint and eerie radioactive glow from the atomic battery below.
“Oh no. Oh no,” Camilla muttered, squatting down and trying to force its shutter back into place. Pipes that had already lived longer than some people began to creak as an old motor sluggishly pumped Freon up and down their length. A vent that ran along the top of the back wall of the fridge began to exude a pale yet heavy misty that slowly began to sink to the bottom of the compartment.
“Can you hear in me there, Ducky?” Mary’s voice asked over a crackling intercom.
“Let me out!” Camilla demanded as she furiously pounded against the door. “Let me out!”
“Don’t worry about the radiation. It’s too mild to be a short-term hazard,” Mary told her. “I don’t kill my victims with radiation anyway. It’s too drawn out… and it ruins the meat. No, I just want to see if I can kill you with the modifications my brother made before you run out of oxygen.”
Camilla felt the interior of the fridge start to spin as she watched the door slip out of sight.
“There we go. Not that I didn’t trust the door to hold, but I have some sauces and preserves in there that I’d really rather you didn’t smash,” Mary announced.
“You’re fucking psychotic!” Camilla screamed as she threw her weight against the side, trying to tip the fridge over. “Why didn’t you just put me in here when I was unconscious?”
“And how would I have shown you my beautiful Atomic Age refrigerator if I’d done that?” Mary asked in reply. “Sorry, Ducky, but you ran afoul of me when I was in the mood to play with my food. No quick death at the end of a knife for you. I mentioned that I can adjust the shelves with a push of a button, right?”
A sturdy chrome shelf came sliding out from behind Camilla, catching her off guard and shoving her against the wall.
“Fucking hell!” she cursed as she struggled to push against it.
After a few seconds, it retracted itself at Mary’s command. Camilla spun around, bracing herself to catch it when it came at her again. Instead, one of the lower shelves came flying at her, bashing in her shins.
“Christ!” she sobbed, collapsing onto her injured shins the moment the shelf withdrew. She clenched her teeth in rage at the sound of Mary’s sadistic cackling.
“Oh my god! Before we got started, I was seriously asking myself if the novelty of killing someone with a fridge would be worth it, and it absolutely is!” she declared as she fired off the middle shelf again, this time hitting the kneeling Camilla in the forehead. “I hope it doesn’t void the warranty though. Oppenheimer’s guaranteed that so long as the atomic battery lasted, they’d always be able to repair it.”
“The… battery,” the nearly concussed Camilla muttered as her eyes drifted down at the glowing green square in the center of the floor.
With the use of a hitherto useless Swiss army knife on her keychain, she slipped the blade in along the battery’s edge and frantically began trying to pry it out.
“Oh, you little… no respect for other people’s property, I swear,” Mary muttered.
With the press of a button, the shutter for the battery nearly closed all the way, but the knife’s blade kept it from closing completely. Taking great care not to let it slip, Camilla continued to pry away at the battery in the sliver of radioactive light that was left to her. A lower shelf came flying forward again, but this time she succeeded in ducking it.
Grunting, she tried to pull back the shutter to give herself more light, but the mechanism holding it in place was incredibly strong. She had succeeded in pulling it back only a fraction of an inch when its brightness suddenly flared.
The blinding pain caused her to drop the knife and jerk upwards in retreat. As she rose, a shelf slammed into her throat and pinned her up against the wall at full speed. Choking and gasping, she desperately tried to force the shelf back as it slowly but surely crushed her windpipe. She pulled and pushed and rattled it, tried to shake it loose or kick it free with her feet, but nothing worked. As she squandered the last of her oxygen fighting against a shelf and her vision began to fade, she realized with a grim irony that Mary had been right.
Oppenheimer’s really had built that fridge to last.
***
“Hello, Mommy Darling!” Sara chirped as she happily skipped into the main living area and towards the fridge to get herself an afternoon snack. Mary politely acknowledged her presence, but was too caught up in her soap opera to engage her in conversation.
As soon as Sara had the door open, she began spinning the inside to get to the desert compartment. She jumped back just in time to avoid being crushed by Camilla’s asphyxiated corpse. It hit the floor with a dull thud, bloated and blue, an expression of horror and agony etched into its face as it stared up at the ceiling with unseeing eyes.
Sara stared at it for a few seconds before overcoming her initial shock and turning towards her mother.
“Mommy Darling, this body is still good. Can I use it for my trolley set? Pretty please?”
Category:Items/Objects
Category:The Vesper's Bell