I’m a medical student. I don’t want to get into too much detail, because I’m sure if my dean read this, I’d be deemed unfit to practice medicine. Frankly, maybe I am… but It’s been my dream to be a doctor since I was a kid. I was in a really bad accident with my parents when I was 5, and I suffered burns to large parts of my body. Since I was so young at the time, and due to some incredible doctors, I was able to make a full recovery. You wouldn’t even know I’d been burned unless you looked carefully at my legs. Children’s bodies experience so much tissue growth as they grow, they can restore tons of damaged tissue in the process. Isn’t science incredible?
My parents didn’t survive the accident, so I was raised by my grandpa. Growing up, I was always in the doctor’s office. Dermatologists, pediatricians, even reconstructive surgeons. They were my heroes, and I wanted to be just like them. My grandpa has a picture of me using a toy stethoscope on the cat that he loved showing people. When I found out how much work you have to put in to be a doctor, I got serious. I always got the top grades, led the extracurriculars and shadowed in my off time. It paid off when it came time to apply for med school.
I go to a prestigious historic university in New England. During your first year of medical school, you take anatomy, complete with cadaver dissection. Yeah, you cut up a dead human body. It sounds crazy but there’s no better way to understand the body. Every school does it a little differently, but in my school you’re assigned a cadaver that they refer to as “your first patient.” They have a set of odd traditions spanning back to when the school was founded in the 1700s.. When someone donates their body to the school, they write a letter to the student who will be dissecting them. The letter usually tells the story of the body and the major events it’s been through, as well as what they hope their body will help teach us. I tried my best to treat my cadaver with respect, so I would always begin and end a dissection by thanking my cadaver. I knew a few students who would say a quick prayer, but that stuff isn’t for me. Hard to believe in a God when your whole family burns alive, huh? But enough about that.
The entire anatomy building has an oppressive morbid aura. Carved above the doorway of the old stone archway is the phrase “mortui vivos docent” which means “the dead teach the living.” It’s always freezing cold inside, even during the short New England summers. People joke about the building being haunted for obvious reasons. It even looks a bit like a mausoleum. To make it even more unsettling, it is the most confusing building to navigate I’ve ever been in. I don’t know what the person designing it was thinking. Short, narrow hallways run into each other at odd angles. Finding a particular professor’s lab is nearly impossible unless someone takes you there first.
I’ll call my professor Dr. Lukas to keep this anonymous. Dr. Lukas is an old man with a bushy beard and an unplaceable European accent. He never says much, but he reminded me a lot of my grandpa. Whenever I’d make a mistake, rather than harshly critique like some professors he’d always say “excellent attempt,” which was really encouraging. I really enjoyed anatomy lab, but all too soon it was over and I was on to my second year of medical school.
During the fall of my sophomore year, my grandpa passed away. It sounds odd to say it was unexpected since he was in his 80s but he always seemed invincible. Full of energy and vigor right up until the end. God, I miss him. After that, my grades took a nosedive. I couldn’t concentrate, hell, I couldn’t even bring myself to eat. I had to take a leave of absence. Usually when someone takes a leave of absence they return home, but I had nowhere to go. I just stayed in my shitty little campus apartment, watching days turn to weeks. I needed to do something to keep me from going insane. I don’t know why, but I went to talk to Dr. Lukas. I asked if there was any work around the anatomy lab that needed done. In as few words as possible he told me the lab needed a caretaker, and the job was mine until I rejoined classes the next year. I must have been beaming when I walked out of the cadaver lab, and it struck me that in that moment, I was the only happy person I’d ever seen in this building.
As the caretaker, I had various jobs, all of them morbid. I had to water the cadavers every day. I swear, I’m not joking. You have to make sure their skin stays moisturized with an embalming solution or it gets crusty and gross. Besides laying out instruments and topping off various solutions, I had another responsibility that I was entirely unprepared for: cadaver processing.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why they thought it was a good idea to give this job to someone acutely grieving a loss, but honestly, I think this was the kind of job that would be hard no matter what. When the bodies are brought from the morgue, they already have some minor embalming done. I hooked them up to a pump of formaldehyde and various other chemicals that I circulated through their vessels. You have to let them sit a few days to make sure it all soaks in, and sometimes I had to process 7 or 8 at a time, so I definitely kept busy. After a cadaver was dissected, they were cremated so their ashes could be returned to their families. Not a lot of students know this, but we actually cremate the bodies in the lab, down in the basement. Somewhere in the absolute labyrinth of corridors is a fully functional crematorium. The first time you push a body into the giant oven, heated to a roaring 1800 degrees, and close the doors, it just feels…wrong. But that’s just the first time. I did probably 10 a week, so I was thoroughly desensitized. That is, until it happened.
I found myself working late on Friday night. I was down in the crematorium with two cadavers in body bags on gurneys which was how we stored them when they weren’t being dissected. I unzipped the first one to reveal, a petite elderly woman, and put her into one of the two furnaces. I wheeled the second body over to the unoccupied furnace, and, a bit on autopilot, I unzipped the body bag. I looked down and immediately jumped back, knocking over a bucket of embalming solution and falling on my ass. “Fuck!” I grumbled, as I scrambled to my feet to avoid getting soaked by the growing puddle. Even as I struggled to get up, I couldn’t look away from his eyes.
The body was unlike anything I had seen in nearly a year of work. For one, he was massive. Usually it’s elderly people who donate their bodies to science, but this man looked to have been in his 30s. He must have been something like 6 ft 5 and 300 pounds, all muscle. His entire body was covered in intricate tattoos, but the thing that had knocked me over was his eyes. They were pitch black.
I found myself standing on the opposite side of the small room from the body. Every hair on my body was standing up, but I had a job to do. “You’re being ridiculous. He probably just has some kind of ocular hematoma, which has congealed into a dark subscleral mass,” I reasoned, doing absolutely nothing to calm my nerves. I walked closer to the body, my knees weak. I quickly pulled his eyelids shut, and took a deep breath. It was then that I started to notice even more unsettling things about the body.
The tattoos covering his body were terrifying. I recognized a few occult symbols like 3 upside-down crosses on his forehead, but most of it was foreign to me. Writing in a language I’d never seen before curled around his arms, ending with a pentagram on the back of each hand. “What the fuck were you into?” I whispered, not wanting to know the answer. Before I could finish my thought, it hit me. He hadn’t been dissected at all. His entire body was intact; not a single incision. What was he doing in the crematorium? All our cadavers come with a toe tag with an ID number and 3 checkboxes. One means ready to be processed, two means ready to dissect, and 3 means ready to cremate. I looked at his toe and the string was there, but the tag was missing.
I looked at the door. I didn’t know what was going on but I wanted to get out of there. I felt my heart beating out of my chest. My ears rang and I choked on my own anxious breaths. “You’re a scientist! You’ve been working for this your entire life! What are you afraid of? You don’t even believe in demons!” I shook my head and tried to clear my mind. I wanted to put him in the furnace and be done with it, but I had to find the toe tag first. Sometimes they fall off of the string, but they always end up in the body bag somewhere. I quickly scanned the table to no avail. I thought maybe it had slipped under the body, which happens occasionally. I took a deep breath, and grabbed one of the cadaver’s giant arms. I braced myself to pull him onto his side, when I felt his icy fingers wrap around my wrist. I screamed, jumping away, and his arm limply fell to his side.
Fuck me, was I going insane? “That did not just happen. That did not just happen.” I whimpered to myself, backing towards the door. I refused to take my eyes off the body, feeling along the wall behind me trying to find the door knob. As my shaking hands fumbled along the wall, I accidentally hit the light switch, suffocating the entire room with darkness. The only thing illuminating the room was the glow of the furnace on the other side of the room. Tears running down my face, I frantically clawed at the wall, begging the lights to turn back on. I finally found the switch, slammed it down, and whipped around, expecting the cadaver to be right behind me. It wasn’t behind me. In fact, it wasn’t in the room at all. It was gone.
I honestly didn’t care if I was going crazy at that point. I threw open the door and ran down the hall. Sobbing, I whipped around the corner and ran down another hall. And another. And another. In my utter panic, it took me longer than it should have to realize that I should have made it to the stairs already. The building wasn’t this large. Where the fuck was I? I turned another corner and slammed into a brick wall with a sickening crack. I broke my nose, and nearly knocked myself out. Stunned, I staggered back, and the room seemed to spin around me. I turned to run back the way I came, unsteadily preparing to run in the opposite direction, praying I’d see the stairs around the next corner. I shook my head to clear the concussive fog, the blood streaming down my face splattering on the walls around me, when I saw it. The room at the end of the hall was the crematorium. I looked around frantically, unable to believe what I was seeing. On one end of the hall was the wall with blood and tissue smeared from where my nose had impacted. The bare, doorless brick walls on either side stretched towards the maw of the crematorium, funneling me into hell. I must have stood there for five minutes, crying, bleeding, gasping and choking, refusing to believe the reality of my situation: I had nowhere else to go. I still don’t know why I decided to go back into the crematorium. I was so terrified you’d think I’d have starved to death in my little corner before I set foot in that cursed space, but I felt compelled. I staggered towards the door, almost against my own will, but my knees were so weak they gave out. I crawled on my hands and knees to the doorframe, using it to pull myself up.
The crematorium was exactly how I left it. One oven on, two empty tables, a spilled bucket of embalming fluid on the floor. No monster, no demons. I turned around to see if the dead end behind me was still there, but before I could check, the crack of bursting bulbs made me jump again as the lights went out, plunging me again into darkness. The lone light came from the furnace. The flicker of the flame cast shadows that danced across the room. I stood, transfixed by the fire, watching it curl and leap about. It was so warm and bright. Like a fireplace on a snowy day, or the break of dawn on a moonless night, it radiated comfort and light. I shuffled towards it as the begging voice of self preservation fell silent. As I drew closer, I thought I heard something, but it was almost imperceptibly quiet. It came from the fire, but it also came from within me. It grew louder, then louder still, and then it was all around me, penetrating my very being. The screaming voices called out to me by name, calling forth memories I didn’t know I possessed.
“Mom? Dad?” I whispered, reaching out for the flame. “Are you there?” The dancing flames started to take human form, forms I had only seen in pictures for over 20 years.
“It’s ok, I’m coming.” I found myself saying, as I reached for the furnace door.
“I’m coming.” I turned the handle, and the flames leapt out, ready to embrace me, but I didn’t even feel the heat.
“I’m here now. We’re together.” I raised my foot to the door of the furnace, bracing myself on the frame. The sound of searing flesh fell on deaf ears as I prepared to step in. I was so ready to feel whole again. I smiled as the skin on my lips cracked from the heat. Without warning, the face of the demon cadaver burst out from the flames. Eyes black as night, teeth like knives, it came at me, through me, and all went black.
I woke up in the hospital. They told me I had slipped on the embalming fluid and hit my head. My hand had fallen against the furnace and gotten burned. It was wrapped in nostalgic bandages. They said I was having a panic attack when I tried to explain, and pumped me full of valium. They try not to involuntarily institutionalize medical students, since it’ll affect our licensing as doctors. I’ve been in bed for 2 weeks. I can’t bring myself to go outside. I barely leave my room. I feel my mind slipping. I smell smoke at night. I hear the crackling of flames all the time. Last night I turned on the burners of my gas stove, staring into the flames, and it felt like home.