Tether: From the Fright Vault - A Short Horror Story

Another short horror story to introduce my upcoming Patreon.

The sweet release of death was denied him on that cold morgue floor.

In the evening of your life, the time for eternal rest has come.

Your spouse passed years ago. It’s your kids and their kids that are gathered around your bedside holding flowers, silently weeping. You look around at their blurry faces and realize you’ve forgotten their names.

Closing your eyes, you know this is the end. 

You welcome the sweet release that comes with death. 

You crave freedom from pain. 

Of emotional turmoil. 

And grief that comes with loss.

Death sweeps over you like an enveloping shroud. 

The darkness embraces you like a warm cocoon. 

For once since the beginning of your existence, you feel comfortable and oh, so safe. 

With a flash of light, the darkness shrinks away and your eyes fly open. 

That’s not entirely correct. 

Your eyes don’t so much open as you can now inexplicably see.

You find yourself lying on your back in a room made of metal.

Sitting up, you realize with horror that you’ve been taken to the morgue.

The cold air chills your skin.

You stand and look around at the metal tables. 

Gurneys.

Each one is topped with a pale blue sheet in the unmistakable shape of a body.

Twelve bodies in two neat rows.

What strikes you as odd is that all the gurneys are occupied. 

This fact goes against your initial thought that you were brought to the morgue mistakenly, with someone thinking you were dead. 

You assumed you must have fallen off a table. 

But which table would you have fallen off from?

All the drawers lining the wall remain closed. 

You couldn’t have fallen out of one of them.

The air turns colder. 

The hospital gown you wear itches. 

The back of the gown you so stubbornly insisted on tying yourself in your feeble state still hangs open. 

You feel the icy chill on your backside.

You take the necessary steps toward the door. 

You plan to alert someone as to what happened. 

You’ll tell the truth. That you were accidentally taken to the morgue, but that you’re still alive. 

There’s been a mistake, that’s all. 

You take two steps, then another before an invisible barrier stops you short. 

At first you don’t believe it, so you try again.

The barrier is not necessarily solid. It’s not even liquid,. It’s more of an elastic force that only allows for a slight amount of give before the notion is clear: 

You’re not going anywhere.

You try a different direction, and get the same result.

Every time you slip between a different metal table, rounding a stock-still dead body, the barrier prevents you from going anywhere.

Soon, it becomes clear. The force field keeping you in this god-forsaken morgue is centered around one particular dead body.

You yell out a shriek when the door to the morgue opens with a jarring metallic click. 

A man in blue scrubs walks into the room holding an electronic tablet. 

A stylus dangles from between his lips as he hums a tune that is oddly familiar. 

Then it comes to you. 

“Another one bites the dust.”

How crass. 

This employee of the hospital does not seem to notice you standing there.

In fact, you find it quite rude how he walks up to where you’re standing, leans down, and swipes away the sheet directly at your waist.

Another shrill scream escapes past your lips. 

Your knees give out and you sink to the floor in a heap of bony limbs. 

It happens in the flash of a moment, but on the way down, you notice the man lying on the gurney is you.

Picking yourself back up is a struggle as the morgue worker pokes and prods at this body you grew yourself for many long decades. 

That body was you.

You cared for that body. Ate the right foods. Exercised when you could.

But now you’re separate. You’re apart. No longer whole. No longer a real person.

What are you? A ghost?

You yell at the orderly to see if he can hear you. 

You shout, “I’m not dead!”

But you also know you’re not alive. 

You no longer feel hunger, for instance. Not like before. 

Your sense of thirst is gone, too. In fact, you couldn’t care less if you never had a drink of water again.

Or sex.

But there is one undying feeling in you that can’t be ignored.

This pull is so strong it suddenly overcomes you with sheer panic.

Escape.

You need to be free from this place.

To flee from your body.

You take a running start, but the barrier stops you cold.

Determination becomes exhaustion and now your teeth are chattering from the frigid air.

You wish you could start a fire on the pristine tile floor when, like a sunrise in the darkened corner of your mind, realization dawns.

Your mind travels back to a paper you wrote in college, about all the cultures that used pyres to memorialize their dead, and send them off on that last farewell into the afterlife. 

Vikings, Hindus, Greeks, even the Romans all used to configure flammable funeral platforms made of elaborate log configurations. 

These shrines to their loved ones would be set alight, with the remains burning until there was nothing left. 

This, you argued in your paper, may be the only way to release a soul from the body.

In your heart of hearts, you know now your thesis was correct.

As the air becomes more frigid, your mind travels forward. 

You see yourself tethered to your body through the embalming process. 

You’re awake and aware throughout the viewing. 

And the funeral.

Even the burial.

Only when your very last bone has dissolved into the earth will your soul truly depart to a higher plane.

With modern burial methods that preserve remains that otherwise would have disintegrated at a much faster rate, you realize you could be stuck on earth in your current state for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

You sink to your knees and scream until your lungs give out as your mind travels to all the ghosts that must face the same haunting reality.

Even in death, you are cursed to suffer emotional turmoil.

And the grief that comes with loss.

You can’t see them, but you know all the other bodies in the morgue have souls tethered to their remains. 

Your imagination expands to the millions of bones that comprise the walls of the underground catacombs in France. 

The skeletons interred at museums that may never disintegrate given our current preservation methods.

And all the ghosts tethered to bones resting in beautifully decorated coffins in the millions of cemeteries all over the world.

You thought death would bring release, but all it brought was more unrelenting pain. 

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