- Violence
- Sex or sexual topics
- Psychological abuse
- Implied necrophilia, violence, descriptions of decay and rot, and workplace abuse.
My last summer after high school. The rose of my future was in full bloom. With my curriculum vitae, I was to be a great success one day. A medical doctor, a practitioner of law, or perhaps some variety of distinguished civil engineer, the type to design a bridge for a metropolis.
That day, the sun was shining as does the face of the Almighty, stretching out arms of the vital energy, the origin of life on this planet, the flame imperishable breathed into us all at birth. With my friend at the time, Dylan, I went to see a movie at a local cinema. The glittering gold and red of the lobby, filled with the scents of name-brand concessions, utterly vanished into darkness and the chill of a false night as the lights went down in the theatre. The screen came to life, first with advertisements of the most damnable kind, drilling in the minds of the youth the fabrication that the good life, the social life, required suckling drinks, foods, and services from the teat of big business. After the punishment had ceased, soon began what we came for, the anticipated superheroic picture of the summer, "White Witch."
White Witch was an obscure character, relatively, renowned by myself and few others for her inability to care about those whom she owed nothing, or her "frozen heart" power. Her modus operandi was to stalk villains, as a peeping tom stalks a young woman, from beyond the pale, hiding behind a layer of fog, beckoning them with her finger, and tormenting them with her beauty. They would be driven mad by her beauty, until one day, she would enter their abode, kiss them on a forehead, like a mother to a child rather than a woman to her lover, and seal their fate as they fell into a deep depression once deprived of her beauty, which was always on full display in the less foggy panels. Perhaps the comics were targeted toward a male gaze, but I found joy in them nonetheless.
Not wishing to be spoiled for any of the details of the promised new-and-improved storyline, I had avoided trailers after the first few teasers. That was the biggest mistake of my life. They butchered her, tore her to pieces, and dismembered her, putting on a gruesome display out of spite for the fact she didn't fit in to normal society. They adapted her character poorly, too. The whole reason she ended up getting mauled like that was because she was betrayed by the antagonist (or perhaps anti-hero, it was unclear to me) of the film, this stupid brooding alpha-male type with the ability to control dogs. She would never have fallen for something so ridiculous. Of course, the movie ended up burying the character's appeal for a while, but I must stay on-topic.
I hated the movie. Absolutely hated it. Yet Dylan completely enjoyed it. He betrayed me that day, struck me right through my heart, and froze it solid, never to beat again. Immediately, I ran out of the theatre, out of the lobby, passing cars and glaring street lamps and walkers in the road who glanced me. Tears streamed down my face, for the first time without physical irritation, in months. I was still just a child then. Something so simple as that, as his incorrect assessment of a movie, completely dejected me. The only place within that little world I lived in, that perfect neighborhood, was only a few minutes of running away through the darkness.
I ran out of breath before the halfway point, huffing and puffing as I was smothered by the pain in my chest and throat. The wind chanted a strange tune through the trees along the road, tearing leaves from their branches as the trees shook to and fro as if throttled by giants. The horrible electric scent of ozone lingered in the air. I kept walking even through the pain, because I knew nobody would be there to help me, nobody would give me a ride home, and even if they did, I would not let them.
After wandering with no end in sight, the end finally came. The cryptic gate that read, "A Place of Rest," but said, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," stood before me, the demarcation between the living and the dead. I lingered in the liminal space in the gap in the fence, leaning uncomfortable against one end of the metal archway, getting lost for a moment in fantasies of being a necromancer, as in the traditional meaning of one who calls forth the dead to receive their secrets, though the more modern meaning was not out of the question. The medium between the worlds of the living and the departed. I knew it would make for such a wonderfully cursed existence, and I relished the thought for a while.
Finally, I made my ingress, crossing the threshold beneath the horned face on the archway, passing into the only place where I could think clearly (well, except during funerals), the cemetery.
It's a dismal place to the uninitiated. Even during summer nights like those, the stone architecture and surrounding foliage managed to deflect all warmth during the day, manufacturing a chilling night. None of the gravestones or statues have any sort of sweetness to them; the mourning angels, hiding their faces from the fate befalling those sitting in the graves they guarded, are surrounded by sparse foliage over dirt and cobblestone. This environment only made me feel more welcome at the time.
My favorite statue, then and now, in the graveyard, is the "Grotesque." It is not a gargoyle, because it dispenses no water, unlike some of the smaller gargoyles on the edges of the yard. I thought it seemed like amazing decoration, because it did not sit upon a grave, but merely some kind of altar or pedestal. Lucifer, I called it, its leathery wings drawn around itself, its hands hiding its head from Heaven, its expression one of pure jealousy. The horns on its head were gnarled and curled and churled in a few more directions than should be aesthetically pleasing. The ears were pointed, but there were four of them. And the eyes, oh, the eyes, they were magnificently empty, plainer than the morning grey of a November Thursday, all three of them. The beautiful tail, too, running from the lower back and curling to protect the reptilian legs, with a killer point. Also, at the right angle, you can indulge in boyish humor looking where the sculptor tried to carve genitals below the thing's tunic, but gave up.
It isn't actually supposed to be Lucifer. There is a far more beautiful depiction of the man, with the conventionally attractive physique of a greek statue, engraved on the South wall of the cemetery. The monstrous sculpture was better suited to my tastes, of course.
As I periodically would, I sat at the bench (which was only placed there at my request) at the base of the Grotesque and relaxed myself, finally. I checked my phone to see no texts or voice messages from anybody, especially not Dylan, and sighed in relief before putting my cell back in my pocket. I took out my journal and began to write the events of the day. I wrote things like "he's such an idiot" and "why is everyone so stupid." So immature of me, of course, but I could not help myself. The tears flowed onto the page through my pen, a ballpoint, because I wasn't pretentious enough to use a fountain pen, and the journal probably didn't have bleed-proof paper. I bled through the paper one way or another.
I scarcely noticed how long I was journaling for, on topics such as the folkloric inspirations the White Witch was based upon, or how I really needed to find a summer job, when the light began to wax as the sun rose above the horizon, though I could not quite see it from inside the graveyard walls. Someone entered the graveyard. Weaving between the sunbeams, with a gait of gaiety, was a tall, slender man dressed in a suit whiter than milk with a briefcase to match. His grey hair showed streaks of white as he passed through the pillars of light. His skin wasn't pale, per se, but it had signs of age. Liver spots, wrinkles, etc., but all too faded to notice.
My leg bounced and my teeth clenched as I waited for him to approach, asking why a person such as myself was out alone so early in the morning, and why I had been out all night. Something about him put me on edge immediately. Perhaps it was his glasses, missing the lenses, or his federal getup. But really, it was his expression of utter satisfaction with life, like there was some big secret to it that he knew, that nobody else knew, and nobody would ever know, because he would take it to his grave. Was that why he was visiting the cemetery?
For a second I considered that he might be visiting his dead wife, and a pang of guilt shot through my legs. I came to my senses, though, because he had some quality, one I couldn't pin down, that made me think there was no way in the Stygian Abyss that he would have a wife. And if he did, why was he so happy to visit her grave? No, he wasn't even walking toward the graves, he was walking toward the statue I was sitting under, or perhaps, concerningly, he was walking directly toward me.
My suspicions were correct, as he made some steps toward me, smirking pathetically in an attempt to seem friendly, white-knuckled-grip on his briefcase, and waved at me. I ignored him. I started to doodle a bit in my journal, hiding my thoughts between the pages, away from the man. He then let out a hearty laugh, the laugh of not a man of 40 as he appeared, but a man of at least 80, with a "Oh-ho-ho, good one, kid!" and a clutching of his briefcase.
It made me more comfortable with him, for some odd reason, to hear him laugh like that, as it seemed to me that perhaps he was not merely amused with his own ego, but he was just an easy person to amuse.
This comfort compelled me to ask him, "What have you got in that briefcase? Just work papers?"
He ignored me, and looked up at Lucifer (the Grotesque) and explained to me, "You know, I was around when that statue was built. It was made right here out of stone right from this here ground." I didn't know how old the statue was, but it felt like perhaps it was older than he was. Of course, he must've meant he was very young when it was made and learned of its construction from his family. It only made sense.
I asked my question again, not being one to take such deflection. This time, he got a wary look in his eye, and he said, "Well, if ya really wanna know... it's a job offer. For you. Congratulations!" And then he had the pure audacity to start clapping and laughing there in the graveyard, among the dead, the angels, and the Devil.
And as soon as he explained what was required of me, how long I would have to work, and how much I was to be paid, I accepted gladly.
When I got home, after a long nap, after a lecture about keeping up a consistent circadian rhythm, even during my gap year, I finally broke, and I announced my new position to my parents. To say that they were pale was to call a blizzard crème, and yet, with resolve, they both nodded happily, and congratulated me on my employment.
"We're so glad!" my mother had said, ushering me out the door. My work was to begin that night, but, as she said, "young people shouldn't spend all day locked indoors." I had planned to spend some time on the computer, researching academic articles to help spur inspiration for the selection of my career, but now all I could think to do was go straight to the cemetery and just kill time until my shift started; perhaps hang out with Dylan a bit, as I had become estranged from his current plans.
My cell phone provided an eternal lifeline to anybody I chose, a last resort in case I was ever in real danger, though of course, the only person I called or texted often was Dylan, and I had few other numbers saved or memorized. When I asked him if he wanted to spend some time in the cemetery, just hanging out, he said with a speaker-popping sigh, "Alright, I guess, we can hang out for a bit, but I have work soon."
As soon as he turned into the parking lot, I waved for him, but he was unable to see me through the fog, the fog of that fateful summer day, the fog that never should have been. His car's headlights cast an uncanny glow that bounced through the fog, a corpse-light in the corpse-yard. He stepped out of his car, wearing his grown-up black suit and tie, appearing as an undertaker, a groom, a mourner, or the cadaver to be buried. At once the image of each floated past my mind's eye, and upon my imagining him dead and buried in a coffin, my skull pounded with an amalgam of warm terror and ambition. It took muscular effort to prevent myself from laughing aloud.
When he approached me he did so reluctantly and wearily, mostly because he worked late most days, but his avoidant gaze told me all else. In the fog that shouldn't have been, he was just waiting to get this over with, to get me over with. What a bastard. I should've struck him right there, should have knocked him right to the ground and pinned him down and grappled him until he apologized for his most grave mistakes, but I held myself back. Instead, I gently forced a smile.
"Hey, Rory," he said plainly, no emotion but some lack, a lack of something he wanted and desired horribly, a thing, some X-factor he was grasping at that was just out of reach. The same wanting that every grown person feels in the dead of night, when only departed souls rule the streets, the time when the dead might walk if not for the rule of God. He then asked me, "Hey, can you not look at me that way? I'm just tired, that's all, don't read into it too much," but I knew better than that.
"Dylan!" I called out, and we walked into the graveyard, "What've you been doing?" He hadn't been doing anything. He was just at the movie with me the day before, but I still asked him that, in case maybe he had done something as interesting as I had in the time between our hanging out.
Of course, the answer was a simple, "Not much, what about you?"
"I have a job now," I revealed.
"Oh, that's good." He paused for a moment. "What's the pay like? What is it?" he asked.
"Well," I began, planning my words carefully to ensure he would not immediately turn tail and run into the mist, "It's like a sort of, uh, mortuary job. A bit spooky, but I can handle it. And it pays well."
"Oh, that's a bit grim. Kinda cool, though," he said with a smile. His electric blue eyes remained half-shut. "So, you do think you'll go into something medical or funerary like that?"
I stopped for a moment, then stated, "I still don't know what I really want to do." And it was true. My future was buried in fog, and every path I could choose was just another headstone with a subtly different epitaph. "He healed the sick," "He built bridges," or "He dressed the dead in their Sunday best." Anything I did would lead to the same ending: six feet under and devoured by the maggots, worms, and microbes of the place under the ground, decaying until I was nothing but a skull and bones, the shell of the person I was supposed to be.
Dylan, a bit somberly, admitted, "I'm not 100% on the whole chemical engineering thing, but I'm still going to do it, and I'll probably have a decent life. Then I can settle down, get a wife, have kids, move somewhere nice. Stuff like that."
"Ah, that's a bit of a long-term plan... Well, I don't think I have the same goals, really. A wife or kids."
"Heh, I know that much," he remarked. We talked a bit more about our plans after the summer, most of mine revolving around getting work and picking a major, and most of his revolving around studying hard and making as many friends as possible. Soon enough, he had to head to work, an internship at a pharmaceutical company.
I once again sat and brooded below Lucifer, ruminating on everything, or the lack thereof, that had led up to my current position. It was quite literally handed to me, someone with little work experience, as if by divine intervention. I looked again at the company name. "Gordon Thanatology." Dr. Gordon was the pale-suited man who had given me the job. The owner of the company, the head undertaker, decided there was something about me that made me worthy of an apprenticeship. I didn't know how to describe the feeling other than that it was wrong. I looked again at Lucifer and saw that it could not be the fallen angel. He was not, in fact, hiding his head from Heaven in shame. What he was really feeling was not rejection, but an uncanny acceptance. I glanced at every other statue in the yard, each an angel. The Grotesque was a demon that rose to the heavens on some strange Seraph's kindness. Something surrounding me was changing, and something in me was terrified by that.
Eventually, it was time for me to begin work. As instructed, I circled the Grotesque for about half a minute before pressing on the ring, a detail hitherto unseen, that lay on the demon's right index finger. Immediately, a horrible shaking in the earth began, the crying of a thousand buried bodies, before ceasing as the statue began to rise, the innocent devil ascending slightly closer to heaven to reveal an opening, a hidden passageway containing only darkness with a chilling breeze blowing forth. Terror took hold in me to the point I couldn't feel any kind of amusement from the risen demon's shoddily sculpted privates, which now were an omen of sin rather than a source of humor. All I could do was take one step at a time until I had finally entered the stairwell below the graveyard.
I had dressed for cold, and in fact I was wearing a lab coat above my sweater and pants, but the chill that came from the passage was worse than any I had experienced since the dead of winter. Each step I descended was a step closer to my career, and each step I descended was a step farther from my adolescence. As the inverse of Orpheus, I looked back as I walked, certain I would see someone, Dr. Gordon, anyone, following me, but all I saw was the light of the moon coming through the opening beneath the statue.
Each time I saw that light, it brought me back to life. Back to the world of humans and movies, back to the world of the living. Like a security blanket, I drew it around my soul for comfort. And like a security blanket, all of a sudden, it was ripped out of my reach, as I saw the light shrinking and heard the earth shaking, the Grotesque making his return to Earth. Now, I was in the dark, alone (I hoped), and without anything to do but keep going forward. Progressing step by step, I held on to the metal railing, cold enough to hurt, with the sleeve of my labcoat wrapped around my hand.
I couldn't know if Dr. Gordon was a liar. I couldn't know if there would even be anything at the end of this passage but a prison. I especially couldn't know if I was actually going to be working in a city of the dead, a necropolis, as he had suggested. Such a thing shouldn't have existed beneath an American city with a cemetery only the size of a block. All I did know at the time was that the only way forward was down.
It felt like hours of walking, but when I checked the clock on my cell phone, it had only been a minute. I sighted something shining in the dark, a cold and sterile light that provided none of the comforts of the sun nor the tranquility of the moon. A light that gets put in a hospital room, flickering, torturing the patients. This was my confirmation I was at my place of work.
As fast as I could, I ran right to the light, and found a steel double door embedded in the rock of the underground. I frobbed at it until it gave way and creaked open.
Behind the door was a sprawling set of halls, something between a catacomb and a clinic, but clearly built into a natural cave system. There were white walls and fluorescent lights, but there were coffins stacked to the ceiling from various eras. One stack was smashed to pieces. I examined it for a bit, ignoring the young medical students passing by, and fell to my back in horror once I saw what was inside. I should have expected to see a corpse. I should have expected to see many corpses, but I expected a combination of long-dead skeletons and preserved modern remains, not a partially mummified, disgusting body.
Eventually I asked a hollow voiced employee where to find Doctor Gordon, and followed the directions to his office, past rows of doors from behind which I heard the sounds of students groaning and working, presumably to embalm the bodies for anatomical use.
When I found him, he was sitting at his desk, feet put up, leaning back in his chair, reading a book on the process of decomposition. I approached and sat at the desk, waiting for him to acknowledge my presence. Instead, he started doodling on the pages smugly. I slammed my fist on the desk in frustration, seething with rage, and he jumped before assuming a more appropriate position.
Coldly, I asked, "What am I to do?" He had been rather vague about what my position was to be.
He passed me a name tag, with my full name on it. "Welcome to the team, Rory. You'll be my personal assistant. I need a hand around here, and everyone else is far too focused on actual medical research for... my needs." He took my hand and brought me out into the hall.
"These caverns," he explained, "are called the Halls of Purgatory. They formed thousands of years ago, and there were no humans here at the time. Aren't they beautiful?" I gazed at him. "I know, I know, we've covered most of it up with our little facility, but it was much needed. The air down here is the perfect temperature and moisture level for preserving bodies. In fact, some of the cadavers down here have mummified."
I nodded along as he explained the history of the place. The Halls were shaped by vast underground rivers in between ice ages, and they spanned past the city above. He claimed that they formed a cave network that might span the entire Western United States. I asked if perhaps an entire civilization might live down here, not of humans, but of something that might survive in such a dark place. He just laughed it off and put a hand on my shoulder and tousled my hair. What a bastard.
After that, he took me to his own private preparation room. He had a few drawers, presumably for bodies, a shelf full of different chemicals and medical implements, a dirty and stained chair at a desk with a computer, and a table for preparing bodies. There was one already laid across it, completely nude, cold, dead, and grey, clearly embalmed, with some stitching on the head. The person that it used to be was long gone, and it was now just a corpse, a thing, staring blankly at the ceiling. I realized something was strange about all this and asked him, "Uh, isn't there supposed to be, like, a modesty cloth, laid over the, uh, private area?"
He chuckled a bit. "Oh, come on kid, don't be a prude. We're all adults here, aren't we?" I nodded, but I felt something twist in my stomach. It was just an unusual choice, it had to be, something he did because even though it was a bit strange, it made the process of examining and preparing the bodies easier. Maybe he was studying the reproductive system, or something like that. The way he was smiling at me, grey eyes wide open, smell of formaldehyde in the air, still gave me chills.
"So!" he said, ignoring my discomfort, "What I need you to do in here, is go on the computer and answer some emails. Mostly from families who's relatives are currently stationed here. Make sure to tell them that they will have their family members back soon." He left me to my own devices, and I began my work. My eyes read every subject line, but my brain refused to accept that there were so many messages from different families, all asking to know where their deceased relatives now were. It wasn't my place to be concerned by this. I did as I was told and answered every email with a promise that they would be returned shortly. It was boring work, but I tried to focus on it and ignore the exposed corpse only about 6 feet across the room from me.
Thankfully, there were some more instructions on a note on the table, which had helped me figure out the best PR-speak for each email, and told me I now had a break. I killed the time browsing the web, researching the process of embalming and preserving corpses. Apparently, after death, gas built up in the body can—GROAAAN I heard from in front of me. The body on the table had its mouth ajar, and it had an expression of slight pain on its face. The rational part of my brain couldn't tell my heart to stop rapidly pumping adrenaline-filled blood throughout my body. Shuddering, shaking, and shivering, I stared at the carcass on the mortuary table, waiting for it to make a move. Of course, nothing happened. It just had a bit of gas escape from it.
To comfort myself, I decided that I would get up, take a look at it, and just make sure it was really dead. The chair stuck to my clothes as I got up, and I thought to clean it. At a glance, all seemed well, as the body was pale, devoid of any pulse, completely still, and cold to the touch. But then, a moment after I touched it, I felt an electric shock, and jolted backward. When I got up, I noticed nothing strange, but I looked to the corpse, and, to my disgust, part of it that should have been devoid of any life had become swollen, revoltingly, and I wished for a modesty cloth. Such a thing shouldn't have even been possible without a beating heart. I exited the room immediately and went into the Doctor's office.
The Doctor greeted me with a gentle smile, but it disappeared once he saw the bewilderment on my face. "What's wrong?" he asked.
I explained what I had seen, and plainly and simply, he explained it was nothing too unusual. "When people die from hanging," he said, "the blood can flow to exciting places." There was a bit of rouge in his otherwise sallow cheeks.
"Did the body in there die from hanging?" I asked. Plus, how would it have started all of a sudden? But I kept that to myself.
"Well," he said, "he died of head trauma. That's why we messed with the brain a bit. But then the pressure on the head can cause the blood to flow in weird ways, too." So there was a rational explanation, and I let out a great sigh of relief. "Of course," he started, "that's only one possible explanation," but he would not elaborate.
The rest of the day was uneventful, but after work, the Doctor told me that I shouldn't take the cemetery entrance again. He gave me directions to an office he owned and told me there would be a way down in the basement. He led me through a series of halls until I was in a strange cellar, then told me "go up." Exhausted from the events of the day, I started ascending the stairs until I was out of the basement, dashed out of the empty building, and walked home.
The next few weeks of work were just the same. I'd answer some concerning emails, maybe a phone call once or twice, and hold myself back from begging for help from whoever was on the other side. There would be a corpse of some kind on the mortuary table in the same room. None of them had any kind of special incidents, unlike that first corpse. The new entrance was actually closer to my house than the cemetery, so getting to work was no issue any day. My parents continued to express some concern over the nature of my work, but I assured them it was all just administrative assistance.
Dylan was too busy to hang out most of the time, as he was preparing for, then beginning, university. I spent my days at the mall, online, or playing games. My nights were spent listening to Doctor Gordon rambling about the preservation of the human body before working on damage control for his company's horrible practices.
One weekend, Dr. Gordon asked to hang out during the day. Sensing a raise, I accepted, and went with him to a pizza parlor, alongside some other employees. I felt nothing but cold stares from my fellow workers. I was a lot younger than they were, and they would become frustrated when I couldn't give a straight answer to "What are you majoring in?"
When an employee delivered our food, I caught the Doctor leering at her. He was straight up licking his lips, drooling, his eyes were bulging out of his head. He might as well have whistled and said "Awooga!" She wasn't even much older than I was. I asked him, a bit bluntly, "So, you like 'em that young?" He shook his head with conviction.
"Don't be a pussy, Rory," he defended himself, "I'm simply appreciating such a fine human specimen. The kind that deserves to be preserved for eternity." I almost rolled my eyes and groaned at the continued talk of eternity, but then he said, "I prefer the company of the dead, anyway." I stared at him for a bit before he laughed and said it was a joke.
The pizza was good, at least. People looked at me funny for getting mine with pineapple and extra sauce, but they simply didn't understand the nuances of a sweet-savory combination, the philistines.
Afterwards, I went home for a bit as the rest of them, who worked for many more hours, headed back to the facility. I slept for a while, but I had a horrible nightmare. I was in a coffin, and I heard people speaking about a man who had died in a horrible accident. At first, I assumed it was me, but then I saw... myself, looking down on the coffin, and smiling. But my eyes weren't the typical brown, they were a color I had failed to recall upon waking.
I talked to my parents for a bit. "What do you think about my job," I asked, hoping in secret for a "quit now." But they just nodded their heads, smiled wide, and tried not to look so scared as they did. They've always been horrible liars, but amazingly tight-lipped. I told them I was going to the cemetery, which I hadn't done in a while, and they seemed a bit happier than usual. Normally, they treated that habit of mine as something grim and macabre, but now... but now... they seemed more comfortable, more familial, less upset.
The tears of God fell upon the Earth, upon his children, the Angels, and his child, the Grotesque, and the deceased in their graves, and on me. I knew He would be angry at me, if he ever existed at all. Though I hardly think of it, my time at church as a child shaped me into who I am, sneaking into the crypt on Sunday nights, hiding from the clergy. I stopped going as soon as I found out Santa was only a holiday tradition, but that spiritual teaching could never leave me. The wet stone smelled delicious, and the Grotesque seemed quite a sight; whereas Lucifer was a rebel without a cause begging for God to strike him down, the Grotesque fell in line, kept his head down, worked quietly with the Angels, and just hid himself, hid his true nature inside himself until he forgot who he had been, all to spare himself wrath from above.
When the sun's low angle demanded it, I made my way to work. Petrichor was on the air, the leaves were changing, and children played outside no longer, having been corralled into their various schools. The smell of wet leaves of yellow, orange, and red warned of the coming winter. The city was starting to settle down for sleep now that all the college-aged kids had left to better themselves academically.
The empty building which was my entrance to the underworld was a lonely one. Most of the offices in the complex were for lease. There was an orthodontist's place and an ice cream parlor, though. I considered getting ice cream before or after work, but feeling any colder than I usually did from being in the Halls of Purgatory was a deterring possibility.
That way to work was much less grim and gothic, but left me wanting for any kind of beauty. It was so boring, clinical, and basic. I understood it was a more covert way of getting to work, of course, but I was still a bit unsure why they needed to be so secretive anyway.
When I came in, the Doctor wasn't in his office. I thought I heard his voice from behind, from inside my work room. He sounded like he was struggling with something, maybe trying to move a heavy object. When I finally decided to go in, when it sounded like he was done, he was sweaty, and his coat was undone.
"Ah," he said, huffing, "there you are! I have some cleaning I need you to do." It smelled horrible, like a combination of body odor, formaldehyde, the dead-body-smell I had gotten used to, and a more serious rot that had no place in a morgue dedicated to preserving bodies. Like death a million times over.
I looked at the mortuary table. There was a body on it, and near the body there was a substance. "Obviously, the place is haunted, and that is ectoplasm," I said.
"Yep!" he replied, and ordered me to clean it up. And so I did. And then the mortuary table was spotless, and that was that. I just got to work like nothing had happened and tried to forgetting about it. Obviously, I couldn't, or I wouldn't be writing about it, but who was I going to talk about it with? I didn't have a therapist! I was completely alone since Dylan had gone off to college. I made a mental note to try meeting with him on Labor Day weekend.
What the fuck?! What an accursed existence I was living! Damned to that desk in the room with that body and where the damnable "Doctor" did those damnable things. Still, I was saving up the money to buy a used car, and I needed to fill out my resume. I would just have to deal, of course, as all people are forced to do in situations like that, until the toll of the circumstances withered my soul, and I perished.
Later that day, Gordon called me into his office, and I entered with the expectation of some kind of threat or blackmail. After all, I had found out a terrible secret about him, evidence of a perverse sentiment toward his work, something that could get his medical license, if he had one, revoked. When I saw him, he immediately directed me to sat down, with uncharacteristic sternness. This is it, I thought. The best case scenario was that I would be fired. Otherwise I might never leave the place at all.
But what Gordon said, surprising me, was, "I'm going to teach you some things, things that none of the other staff know. Come with me." I hesitated for a bit, knowing the danger of being alone with such a person, when I was so young and defenseless. Then he said, "It comes with a raise," and I obliged shortly.
He walked with his cold, bony hand on my shoulder. The fluorescent lights grew fewer, and the features of catacombs became more numerous. The walls shielding us from the cave system soon vanished like training wheels on a child's bicycle, and gave way to the Plutonian rock and stone of the underworld. Straight lines in the earth that almost looked carved, twists and turns along the way that could not have been made by water, and the sound of knock, knock, knock, a hammer in the distance, gave the sense that I was not alone with Gordon, and such a feeling was nearly welcome. Water flowed behind us on the inset floor in the center of the hall.
The caves were too erratically arranged to have been made by rational humans, and yet too perfectly geometric all the same. There was wind in the Halls of Purgatory, wind that was entirely explainable, but still uncanny. Weren't they an entirely underground feature? Weren't all the entrances narrow and manmade? The passages became wider as we took echoing steps into the darkness. The way Gordon walked, his gait unflinching as the lights grew farther behind, indicated he must have been acclimated to walking in the darkness.
Eventually, though, he took out a flashlight, a light to banish the shadows. When he flicked it on, pointing it with intent into those Halls, the darkness did not recede immediately, as one would expect knowing the ultrasonic speed of light. Instead, it slowly crept out of the way, in the manner of black mold being dissolved by a corrosive chemical. The stress of the situation had given me pareidolia, so I thought I saw something almost like a person scampering out of the way, into some other hall.
Eventually, we came to a bulkhead door, more like one in a submarine or ship than a basement, with a valve to open it and everything. It had to be watertight. From below the door was the source of the water which had been flowing on our way. I was ordered to turn the crank, and, labcoat wrapped around my hands, I began the strenuous task of opening the gate. It took a minute of pushing and pulling before it finally started to give way, and I turned it smoothly until the door was loose.
The smell of water not quite as salty as the ocean broke through the portal. The dank air whistled as it came through. Gordon bade me to pass through first, but I insisted he walk ahead, and I walk behind. He accepted this arrangement, but not without an expression of being insulted, humiliated even. In the moment between his entrance of the chamber and my own, a sinful, rotten, delightful thought enraptured my mind. I could clearly see myself shutting the door, locking it tight, and leaving him trapped inside the massive cave I saw ahead, forever. Of course, my better judgement reminded me that there was probably a way to get out from the other side, and even if there wasn't, I wouldn't know the way back without Gordon. So, I just stepped through the door like nothing was amiss.
A sea of shifting ink in the cold. The water had to have been miles deep, if such a depth was possible, and 100 feet in diameter. It was darker than water should have been. It hardly even reflected the floodlights hanging from above. From it came the aroma of wet rock, but I could have sworn there were hints of ethanol and formaldehyde on the air. Something strange had died there, I could tell, and something else had made sure to preserve the corpse.
A rusted, old steel catwalk which we walked across with clanking steps. I could push him, he's far weaker than me, I thought. As a child I was always the runt of the litter, but here my physique was relatively developed. I could have easily disposed of him, and claimed it an accident, and accident caused by his decision to take me to such a place. But no, his staff would surely suspect me.
"What is this place?" I asked, before adding on, "What are we doing here, why are we here?" The walls of the cave were unusually smooth, and the roof was nearly a dome.
"This is, well, all I know to call it is the Old Cistern. Rainwater collects here, but the water never gets higher than the catwalk." His coat was billowing behind him from the wind in the cistern. "Here, I'm going to tell you a secret, and I have to tell you here so we have complete privacy."
"Shoot," I demanded.
"A long time ago, I was a lot like you. Young, full of energy, and free. Now, well," he looked pensive for a moment, "I guess you could say, my body is not what it used to be. I don't have the same spark anymore. I'm getting old again." Getting old again, as a 20 year old turns 30, a 30 year old turns 40, and a 50 year old turns 60. "Do you know the reason why we get old?" he asked. I answered something from high school biology about telomeres. "Well, that's more a symptom of it," he explained. "What actually happens, is that from birth, and especially from adolescence, we are endowed with a vital energy. Freud called it libido, the Orientals called it Qi" yikes, I thought, but I let him keep going, "but my favorite term for it is Orgone."
"Orgone?" I asked. The word seemed entirely unfamiliar. He explained it as being the animated force that turns chemicals into living things. Well, "living" is far too narrow of a definition for what it does, but I digress.
"As we start to get older," he went on, "we start to lose that energy, Orgone, and our bodies begin to fail. By the time we die, if of old age, we are completely without it. You see, Orgone is our weapon against entropy. The only sanctuary we have against the rot, until we begin to decay."
"What if we die by accident?" I asked. By "accident," like most of the cadavers in the morgue.
"Perhaps, then, there will be Orgone left behind in the body. Then the dead body can retain some qualities of life, just for a little while, after death. And, perhaps, as my research indicates, the Orgone may be further harnessed."
"How so?" I wondered if an 80 year old could turn 40, by some forbidden art. The fumes from the water below had the scent of an elderly person struggling against the natural process of decomposition.
"Ah, that is the question indeed. I've still been looking into that. I believe Orgone is contained in the nervous system, or at least controlled there. Don't think I'm one to eat brains, though, oh-hoho!" No part of me believed his claim for a second.
After a bit more discussion, where Gordon evaded most of my questions, he led me out of the Old Cistern, and back to the lab, so I could be given my paycheck and go home. As we left the cistern, however, I swear I heard a deep set of clicking, pulsing, and rumbling, a song from the depths, and a bubbling as well. I shut and tightened the door behind us as soon as I was able.
I was given a large sum of money for my paycheck. The pay and the work experience were the only things keeping me from quitting immediately, until that day. I had to know more, I had to know what Dr. Gordon was getting at, what he was up to, because I knew it couldn't be anything good.
By Labor Day weekend the ectoplasm incident had occurred twice more. Do anything more than your job and it becomes your job, so I didn't bother helping him with it again, but all that meant was that another employee had to handle it. I didn't really care anymore. I had been labeled employee of the month, and I really would have been able to use that on my resume. And the things he taught me, oh, ah, the terrible secrets of the pale! Of the Beyond! There are things in the dark places of the world that can't be ignored once their presence is made clear.
That Monday morning, the streets were full of dead leaves, crunching underfoot. When I had tried to leave the house, I found the door to be barricaded, obviously by my parents, because who else would it have been? They were always sneaking into my room at night, staring at me, and denying it when I asked them about it in the morning. I just went out my bedroom window instead. The walk was peaceful, anyhow.
Dylan was able to meet at the cemetery, the gothic space that had once been my refuge from the world. I had dwelled there less since I started my work, but every time I visited, a piece of myself that had been missing was pressed back into place. With Dylan there, too, I was resurrected from the decaying body I was becoming.
Me and him talked for a while. Neither of us had done anything fun lately, but we just talked about old news. Neither of us could really remember the school wide game of infection from Senior year, but we tried our best to dig up the memory nonetheless; work had made both of our brains into graveyards of such idealized moments.
I asked Dylan, "How's the pharma work going? Selling quack pills to grannies?" I was only half joking, but he took it well.
"Hah, well, actually, I was wondering how your work was going. You said you worked at a morgue, right? Which one?" His eyes were wide and tired, full of hate and rage for someone that wasn't me.
I paused for a moment. I trusted Dylan, of course, but did I trust Gordon? Not at all. I couldn't trust him at all, even if he told me such terrible secrets. He wouldn't tell me about that thing in the Cistern... I decided to be open and honest with my friend. I told him, "Gordon Thanatology."
He looked shaken, but unsurprised. He was waiting for that terrible answer, hoping every second from our last meeting till then that it wasn't true. I asked him how he knew of the place, hoping it was from some kind of legal case or even just simply as a customer of his employer.
But he had lied to me before, as I had hidden the truth from him. We lied to each other thinking it was the mature thing to do. Innocence is for the weak, we thought. The weak and the young. We all have to become rotten eventually.
"I've been working there longer than you," he admitted. We had only missed each other by our different hours. Something was different about spending time with him after that split second I realized it. He wasn't just a friend anymore, he was a coworker. For a minute of silence it was no fun to be near him. I wanted to run away again, I wanted to run back in time before I knew such a thing. I wanted my memories embalmed and encased in stone so that Dylan and I would remain successful teens forever. Nothing can ever stop aging.
I broke the tension with, "I'm sorry." He forgave me, and he was sorry too, and I forgave him. We hugged under the terror of the Grotesque. Something wet started coming from my eyes, and from his.
"I haven't cried since I took the job," I confessed, wiping the tears from his eyes. They were warm.
"Neither have I," he added, wiping off mine. They were cold.
Drops of water started falling from the sky, acid rain that burned as it hit our faces. The caustic touch of each little fleck of liquid broke the numbness inside me, the numbness I didn't even realize had taken me over. Sobs of regret and anguish sang sweetly into the grey day, heard only by angels, angels that were rotting right on their pedestals as the rain fell harder.
"I brought an umbrella," and he opened it above us, hooking it on the Grotesque, shielding the three of us from the corrosive water. We grew older for an hour, and matured perhaps by five.
"You know, I think we should go to a Halloween party this year," I proposed. Since we stopped trick-or-treating Junior year, we hadn't done much at all for the holiday.
"Yes, I know of one, I'll take you there," he promised, "We shall drink for the first time, make some new friends, or enemies, and we'll move for the first time since we took that job." We were friends from that moment on.
The torrent of bile ceased, freeing us to go wherever we may have pleased. We both knew there was only one place we could go, being as responsible as we now were. "Let us stop Gordon once and for all," one of us said. We rounded the pedestal, and, though the angels in the lich-yard were no longer anything more than marble corpses, figures deformed, the Grotesque, the demon, rose above them all, wings spread out wide, ready to fly off into the sky, and beneath him walked two adults.
The morgue was devoid of all life. The lights were still on, but they only illuminated halls of cold bodies. I led my friend to the office where the doctor would spend his days idly. The shelves of books and documents were torn apart by ravenous hands sifting through piles of dull research on the dead until we found something completely unusual.
A document, an article, written by some strange mortician somewhere in Central Europe, detailing the process of transplanting a brain from one body to another. The type was too bold to read, and there were scrawlings everywhere, so nothing of the paper itself stood out. What did stand out, and what changed everything I thought I knew from those secret meetings in the Halls of Purgatory, was the only legible scribble: "Orgone," right below the mortician's suggestion that only certain bodies would be suited to transplant a brain to and from. It was all for his stupid old person anxieties. I still don't know how old he was really, at the time.
We went into my work room next. It was completely empty. There was no body on the table which was now completely clean. It was being prepared for something special, I could tell.
"What kind of research is he even doing! Is this some psycho-wizard shit?" Dylan asked.
"Dylan," I whispered, "I have somewhere I need to show you." I took him by the hand and we started walking, walking in the darkness and the cold, terrified of what lay behind and ahead of us. Halls of warped perfection, geometry that had been slightly modified at its moment of carving, passed us by. The echoing of our footsteps was the only sound to accompany running water.
We passed by forks that I knew would lead us nowhere. I had walked these halls in secret with Gordon several times. Each time, he revealed a bit more to me about the boundary of life and death. Everything has its opposite, and death is not the opposite of life. There was something far worse, something that Gordon was terrified of ever happening, should his work go wrong.
My phone's flashlight flickered in the shadow. I heard footsteps, but I swore we had both stopped walking. He shouted, and his legs took him far away into the dark. Then something cold put its hand on my shoulder. Something cold and boney. I turned and shone my light at it, expecting to die by mauling, if not from terror. But it was pitiful, not clawing or biting at me, but just staring, staring with rotten eyes, grasping with limp hands, barely able to stand except by some strange animating force. I'd seen it before, on my very first day of work. The stitching on his head matched a diagram from the research paper in Gordon's office. A rush of adrenaline spurred me into action, and with a sweep, a kick, a stomp, it was reduced to mush. That was a pathetic sight to behold. It was nearly limp, and had only stood with the greatest of its strength. I felt lukewarm. Nothing could get in my way, now.
Calling out to Dylan several times in the dark yielded no response. My cries grew desperate until my voice started breaking. I threw stones against the walls, the echo instilling me with the false hope that my friend was responding in kind. The only way to go was forward. Perhaps the water would lead him to the Cistern.
When I unsealed that chamber, the smell of formaldehyde and alcohol was accompanied by the odor of crab, or maybe lobster. Visits to the coast had taught me that scent, of before the meat was cooked, and the smell brought me back to fossilized memories of days at the beach.
I entered, expecting nothing, and left the door unsealed. Hands wrapped by my sleeves, placed firmly on the railing of the catwalk, I watched in the water as if scrying. Shapes took form in the dully reflected electric lights. Arthropod legs, massive pincers, a sting engorged with venom. I heard a horrible call like a whale's echo through the cavern. A fizzing sound, bubbles escaping from the deep, brought me back to summer nights of chugging cola, before a drip, drip, and a drip grew louder and more frequent. The rush of water rising into the air and falling deep on itself with crash and spray of foam could not break my gaze into the dark waters.
The shapes in the pool shifted and grew and engulfed me, surrounding me with wonderful phantasms of monsters under the bed, things kept secret, things I was told but never taught. It was awesome, awful! My mind was filled with delightful terrors then, terrors which could never be kept securely within, safe inside my skull. A cold rush froze me, then I felt warm, and I began to drift off into sleep. I hoped to dream of better, sunnier days, and I heard a wonderful voice calling out to me.
The shock of cold air struck me lucid. A warm grip dragged me back up onto the catwalk. I started to cough up foul fluids, black as the water below. He placed his hands on me and replaced my wet coat with his dry one. "Rory!" Dylan said, "Can you hear me?!"
"Yes! Yes! Where am I?"
"Rory, why did you want me to see the Cistern?" he asked.
I was confused. "You know about this place?" Gordon had told me several times that it was our secret, to accompany many more secrets shared.
"This is where the chemists get the ingredient for the embalming fluid. It's why there are natural mummies down here. It's a creepy place."
He began to take me to the exit. I said, "Wait, but, Gordon, he told me about this, life-force, thing!"
"No, no, we're getting you home, and fast. C'mon." Quickly as he could, he dragged me out of the Cistern. As we walked back, I saw a concerning number of bodies, strewn about randomly, not like the arranged cadavers one expects in a catacomb. They had fallen after a great rush, or something like that. Once we were back on the surface world, Dylan told me, "Do not go there again. Do not even show up to work if you can help it. But that place, that cistern, there's something strange in there." Chemicals, maybe.
When I had gotten home, it was early Tuesday morning. I told my parents I had been out late with Dylan. Me and him agreed that we would both put in our two weeks notice, and so we did Tuesday night. It was to be a simple, professional process. Gordon was a bit miffed, a bit eccentric, but otherwise was cordial.
In the coming days, we did some quiet quitting, slacked off during work, chatted during our breaks. We had some fun together, even surrounded by decaying, dead-end jobs.
I could measure with each day my blood pressure and resting heart rate decreasing. I felt less feverish and more calm, at peace. I chalked it up to the lessening stress, or to my growing maturity. Dr. Gordon started looking more and more desperate. He was seeking our replacements, surely. There were more wrinkles and white hairs on his head. I laughed giddily when I had the privacy. Everything would work out, right?
Two weeks later, it all fell apart.
The last day we were to work. Me and Dylan went together. All we had to do was hold out for one more day. One more day of the same monotonous, terrible routine.
There still wasn't a body on the table in my room. The sleek metal was perfectly clean and shiny. Whatever project Gordon was working on must not have started yet. Dylan messaged me that all the surgical people were prepared for something big. Hopefully, it would wait until the next day.
Then, Gordon called me, and Dylan, into the office. "Hey, team!" he said. He was wearing some casual clothes.
"What is it?" I asked, monotone. Dylan nodded along.
"Well, you know how the both of you are quitting?" We gave affirmation. "And this is your last day?" Again, we confirmed it. "So," he began, "the two of you, as outlined in your contracts, will have to sign a little NDA."
"Uh, like the basketball thing?" I asked, with childish rhetoric. It was a serious lapse in my judgement.
Dylan corrected, "Non-disclosure agreement. It means we can't say shit."
"Woah, watch your language, sport!" the old man whined, "It means you have to keep some things about our company private! It's only fair!"
Dylan was furious. I didn't really care, I was laughing it off. But Dylan, there was blue fire in his eyes, hotter than the inferno that rages at the center of Pandemonium. "Fuck this!" he stomped, slammed his hand on the desk, knocked some papers to the floor, he was panting with righteousness. "We don't have to sign shit! What you've been doing here is crime! That means we can talk all we want!" It was true, as far as I knew, but it was a bad idea. A very bad idea.
"Dylan's right," I said, hands in my pockets, shirt untucked. We were home free, after all, we would simply leave the halls of buzzing lights and body bags and go on with our lives."Why don't you give us one good reason why we shouldn't take this all to the presses?"
A snap of the fingers. Surgeons suited in riot armor, tools and arms alike grabbing and twisting. Separation. I was locked out, thrown into the Halls of Purgatory. Dylan was left in, in the Doctor's Office, near the places of surgery and embalming. I pounded against the steel door, red drops coming from the thin skin of my knuckles. The noise echoed, echoed through the impossible caverns of Purgatory. In that place, where that noise had echoed, deep in Purgatory, groans answered the clanging and beating of desperate fists. The light of my phone illuminated discarded stiffs, experiments gone wrong, forever aging in the dark. A few of them still resembled living humans. A few.
The dead aren't as mindless, nor as violent, as is declared in the illusions enjoyed by the living. I was not met with aggression, but with horrible, clammy, bony embraces. Rotted and skeletal limbs everywhere, performing embraces of kinship. I begged and pleaded, "No, please, I'm not like you!" I felt my heart. It should have been racing. It should have been. Without any willpower left, I started to walk with the dead. They take fascinating paths through the dark, sensing something other than noise, heat, light, or smell, wandering through the black until something of sentiment was discovered; a doll, a lost shirt, a watch. Then they stared, stared into that darkness, shadow that was now not so difficult to see in.
Dylan was only a memory, and even the worst memories may be forgotten for a moment. That moment became days. My skin felt dry, even in the humidity of the impossible Halls of Purgatory. I just kept scratching at myself, clawing at myself. Soft walls of meat enclosed me. I started tearing, ripping, gouging, taking everything off. My clothes went first, then my hair, then my eyes. I could still see, the darkness was clearer than ever.
My flesh tore off in sloughs as I kept scratching, biting, itching. Needed to get out. Groans of the discarded departed cheered me on, clapping, howling, screeching, rattling. When I was finally nude, dressed only in scraps of flesh that were left, my skeletal corpus was wrapped in robes and shrouds from a time unknown. I made to thank them, in a grand bow and curtsy, but when I looked up, they were all strewn about, limp bodies in the impossible Halls of Purgatory. Something else, a chilling breath running from between my rips, up my spine, and into my skull, kept me standing, moving, walking.
Patience is a virtue in the darkness. I waited, and wrote in my journal, wrote everything I knew about Doctor Gordon and all the secrets he had told me. The ink could not match the beautiful darkness of the impossible Halls of Purgatory. In time, the dead would walk again, and as their leader, I commanded them, "Tear it down!"
Dent upon dent, the door was steadily obliterated, and I stepped through the ruins, in hand a journal filled with all the incantations I could recall. I marched straight into the Doctor's office, ready to kill, stab his throat with a pen if I must.
Instead, the person sitting in that chair, the person I was going to kill, was Dylan. He looked at me with his grey eyes, wide as the moon, and told me, "It's over, you can rest." I knew no place for a body to stay, and mindlessly, I went to my old office. There was a corpse on the table, and assorted organs in jars nearby it. It was Gordon. He was smiling wide, but there was finally a modesty cloth over his shameful area, though it was stained. There were stitches on his head. he was smiling. Dylan's eyes were blue. There were stitches on Gordon's head. Dylan's eyes were grey. He was smiling.
"What the devil?!" I asked, barging back in to his office. My voice didn't come from vocal chords, but from a dead wind through my jaws, creaking and rattling. It would have been amusing on anyone else.
"Oh-hohoho-hoho!" he laughed, which just sounded wrong out of such a young body. He held Dylan's belly as he chuckled.
"You... bastard." I apologize, but I simply could not come up with fanciful language in that moment.
"So what?"
"You... you do horrible things with dead bodies!" It was true, after all.
"Bodies like your own?" he smirked at me. "And what's the harm? They're dead, they can't be bothered by it."
"Was Dylan dead?" Gordon took a body and violated its inner workings just to be young again, and again, and again.
"Now he is." He was a terrible liar, just like my parents, but with lips as tight as those of a wine glass.
"How... how am I still alive." I felt cold. Empty. I drew my cloak over myself for warmth, but the breath within me was sub-zero.
"You're not. You're worse than dead. You're still walking and you don't even realize you should be dead. You're like a 30 year old in his mom's basement. You have so little life within you that you have less than nothing. Go, fly away, go into the light!"
"No! No no no no! I don't wanna! I wanna... I wanna" I was struggling to think. Negative Orgone. I was dead now. I would have cried had the tear ducts been there. All I could do was stomp on the ground, knock everything in the room down, throw books across the room, thudding against the walls, but missing Dylan's head, all in a horrible tantrum.
"Okay kid, what'dya want?" He looked exasperated. No, terrified. I could smell his fear. He was bluffing.
"I... I want Dylan back!" I stamped my foot until it started to damage the floor.
"You're not getting him back!"
"I'll kill you!" I rattled. Undead strength throttled the neck of my greatest friend and my greatest enemy at once. Medical staff screamed as they fled from the risen dead. Howls of ghoulish delight echoed through the manufactured facility within the impossible Halls of Purgatory.
His face was turning blue, he was struggling to breathe, and soon he would have been dead. He would have been dead, but I was too weak to finish the job by hand. I couldn't kill him, I couldn't kill Dylan, I just couldn't. I threw him across the room. He gasped for breath, scratched at his throat until it was red. Then he just cackled at me, taunting me! "You don't have the balls!" I cowered in the doorway, looking at my pen, which was far from sharp, and my hands, which could not be compelled to act. Then, my journal.
"You taught me things you shouldn't have," I said, watching him ready himself. Formulas to ward off spirits, rituals to preserve the mind. I would use all of it against him. I flipped through the scrawlings of my journal, writings forgotten, writings of the arcane and insane. Doodles of pincers and stings, tendrils and tentacles, writings of Orgone and Gordon's philosophy, all seemed to be useless. Then, finally, I found the section I had labeled "Hexes," and I found one that would hurt.
He mocked me, "That's all just magic words. You don't know the power of arcane science!" but I ignored him.
I chanted, incanted, the forbidden words, the formula to this physical contradiction, waving my arms through the air, tracing a sigil that was drawn in the book, and clearing my mind for a moment, before shouting the curse's final words, its forbidden name.
Those grey eyes rolled back into the head and Dylan's body convulsed until it stopped for a moment. A drop, then a stream, then a thick paste of blood started leaking from his nose, his ears, everywhere. My sixth sense, deep in my bones, told me he was still alive, and would survive, unless I acted.
I hesitated, held myself back from finishing the job. Gordon was reeling from the spell of hemorrhage, but soon steadied himself, came to his feet, and cracked a bloody smile. He laughed, and told me, "You don't have the balls! I can tell! You can't even knock me out. You're weak. You're impotent. You're no man at all. Go home."
Gordon taunted me, tried cutting me right in the heart, but my heart had rotted in the last few days. I called out, "Help! Help me! He's a monster!" No living person answered my call, so he just kept laughing at me, calling me a pansy, but howls and screams and cheers came from behind. Abject terror deformed his young face, and bodies of varying decomposition were upon him, all familiar with his grey, wizened gaze. Skeletal, rotten, embalmed, and human limbs struggled with one another.
They strangled him now, throttled him until his face was blue, pinned him to the ground and kept tightening their grips. I heard a vessel burst, and he started screaming, gurgling. If their hearts did indeed still beat, the staff kept their wits about them and stayed away from Gordon. Blood was pooling in his neck, and none was getting to his brain. That X-factor, that libido, that Qi, that Orgone, it would all be gone soon.
It leaked out of his ear, covered in blood and mucus, and my kin dispersed. I stomped on the grey matter, I breathed on it until it rotted into nothing but mold and roaches were eating it. I felt so alive! But I couldn't be, I still felt empty inside, missing something that I once had. I shook Dylan. I shook him again. I shook him again, and again, and again. I thought maybe once I had killed the Doctor, he would wake up. He would come back.
I laid him down on the ground and I laid beside him. He looked the same as he did before, thanks to the strange sciences of Gordon Thanatology. The entire incident had never happened, I could imagine. He had only died from trauma to the head, something like that.
I put an arm around him. I could touch, but I couldn't feel anything. I had no heart, so the only measure of my emotion was the aching of my bones. We were still to go to that Halloween party, outside of the impossible Halls of Purgatory.
"Dylan," I said, "It's time to wake up." But he was gone, at least as a living person. I wasn't alive anymore. Neither was he.
I paced around the room for a while. It just wasn't fair, I won, Gordon lost, I should have been able to get Dylan back. Looking around for a full minute yielded no results. Dejected, I went back to my office, and stared at the Doctor's old body and the table of medical instruments. Then I spotted the brain in the jar.
Forcing something down a corpse's throat is harder than would be expected, but easier than surgery. I was so excited I played my ribs like an instrument and began to clap with my phalanges. Dylan's brain was somewhere in the body now, right?
My breath of death, compressions to his stomach, some elbow grease and something strange, something from the journal, something that I wrote that came not from the dead Doctor, but from my subconscious; they all began to rot away at his flesh. His decomposition was impeded by a chemical in the blood, which must have been injected by that parasitic brain which was now rotted on the floor. Dylan was embalmed. Grey in the skin, clearly dead, but still looking young. We might still make it to the party! Hooray! I thought.
And he began to stir, eyes so blue, so tired. And he looked at me, and he said, with a voice that came from nowhere, "Why... why did you do that..." There was more weariness on his face than ever before, more than on the face of a person that never had slept in their life.
"What?"
"I was drifting towards the light! I was gonna make peace with myself! I was ready to die! I thought maybe you would be okay if I died! Look at you! Look at me!" I told him what happened to me. It didn't cheer him up. "I know what happened to you! I could see it! Once you finally killed the bastard, I was gonna be alright! But no! you had act like a kid again and get your way! You think I'd ever be happy like this?"
"At least... at least we have each other..." I suggested, with questionable confidence.
He glared at me, and shouted, "I don't want each other! I don't want to be stuck with you! You're a dumbass! You did this to me! Why would I want this?!" Tears of a dark fluid oozed out of his eyes. I moved to hug him, wrap him in a bony embrace, but he smacked me away.
"But... you're alive. That's better than dead." I did it all for him! I did it so that he would be well again! I didn't need to think about what he might have personally wanted, right? It was just the right thing to do! It was!
"I'm not alive! Fuck off!" He pointed a gun from the Doctor's desk right at me, clearly strong enough to shatter my skull into pieces, ending my short existence. The medical staff gathered around their new leader and chased me out, past the now sleeping dead, out into the eternal Halls of Purgatory. Twisting corridors, forgotten tombs, designs neither natural nor manmade; they have all become so familiar.
There's more down here than you may ever know. Everything I find, I write down, every piece of the puzzle. So much knowledge, forbidden to any who still have a beating heart and a warm breath. I no longer enjoy any of the revelries of life, my only source of satisfaction is this endless pursuit, of knowledge, of will, of power. I may never grow old, but I keep myself growing.
As far as I know, Dylan still lives as if he were alive, but is considered chronically ill by the general public. He took over Gordon Thanatology. He was supposed to destroy it. I told him as much, but he just ran me out of there again, and said, "This is the last time you get to leave this place."
Now, he's doing experiments, experiments on people, living or dead, to see if he can reverse what "Rory" did to him. What Gordon did to him, he should say.
He used to be such a good person. He's just... rotten now. He's not the same anymore. I haven't been back there in months. My parents know I'm dead, he told them, and he assured them he enacted vengeance. They don't know that I hate him now.
For a while, I have been spending my days in an abandoned sewer, just far enough from the surface for privacy. I can go up to the surface world only in the dead of night, hiding in the shadows of cities, above the impossible Halls of Purgatory. On occasion, I may see someone about my age wander down here, an explorer of abandoned urban areas, and I will wave to them, call out, do anything that might be less than threatening, but they all run, terrified. Only the dead keep me company; in these subterranean, impossible lich-yards, I am their hierophant, their fellow-corpse, and their leader.
That's why I'm writing to the Ouroborus Institute. I don't want a cure. Just, please, is there anyone else that might understand my situation? Anyone my age that went through something weird like this? Please.
Yours truly,
Auroron, Archlich of the Underworld
P.S. (DON'T MAKE FUN OF ME!!! I will curse you!)