Short Stories of Dread and Wonder

Post Mortem

It was during the second year of my apprenticeship under the famed doctor Lewis Hallman that the singularity  that is my tale occurred.

The doctor called me into his office, and the look on his face bespoke something queer. Intrigued, I sat down across from Dr. Hallman as he sat behind his desk, his hands tapping the desktop nervously. As it came to be, the doctor simply wanted me to look into a patient that had died during the night. Yesterday the man had shown all the signs of a speedy recovery and was thought to be returning home the next day. This morning the nurses found the man to be dead. The cause of death was unknown, though I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that there was something the doctor had not communicated to me.

While preparing myself for the necropsy, I had perceived what was evidently a botched diagnosis of death, for after I entered the patient’s room a sudden and spastic motion seized the body. Then it laid inert once again upon the bed in the center of the room, and the room was restored to an unsettling silence

After recovering from the scare I tentatively pulled back the white linen to reveal a young man. A twisted grimace contorted his face and his eyes were firmly closed. Just as I began to doubt my sanity the man abruptly sat up in his bed, his eye’s still invisibly fastened shut.

I stood in wonder for a moment, and struggled with the thought of reacting. I opened my mouth in effort to speak, but I was immediately interrupted by his outburst.

“I’ve been to the other side, and all is nothing but emptiness.” His tone was fantastic, though fearful.

For the sake of settling the situation I humored his mania. “You’re saying there is no life after death?”, I interjected.

“If only there wasn’t!”

Quizzically I spoke, “What then, is there?

“Utter isolation. Separation from all that is. From others, from thought, and most abhorrently, separation from self! What a woeful divorce of conscience and thought!”

Having been thoroughly shaken I no longer desired to continue this correspondence and moved forward to comfort the distraught soul before me. “Why, you have only been asleep and dreaming! Lay back down and…”

The determined expression upon his face chilled me to my core and I was silenced.

Without the slightest uncertainty the man before me retorted, “You know as well that I speak the truth as you know that old man to be sitting  beside you.”

It was with the most unsettling alarm that I looked down to the chair at my side. I was very pleased to find the chair vacant.

With slight relief I turned back toward the man, “Surely you are diseased! There is no other person in the room but you and me.”

“You do not see him? Clad in rags and staring from behind those blank eyes?”, he spoke with eyes still closed. “Hush! Listen now, as he speaks.”

Silence consumed the room, aggravating my patience. At this I called for a nurse, for I could no longer stand this absurdity.

“No stop!”, he cried to the vacant seat. “All is being stripped away and my torture I am to bear again!”

The door swung open slowly and a nurse entered. I looked back to the man and his lifeless face was still twisted into an expression of agony. The man was dead.

I left the room wordlessly. In a daze of befuddlement I walked back to the doctor’s office to relate the strange happenings. I shook my head in disbelief, catching sight of something curious out of the corner of my eye as I did so. The patient’s elevator was closing, and one man stood alone inside. Just before the elevator doors slid shut, I looked into the blank, lifeless, eyes of a man wearing tattered old clothes, and an aged, bone chilling smile.