I work at a medical examiner’s office in a large metropolitan area in the United States. You’ll have to excuse the vagueness, but I value my job and safety. My safety is also the reason why I’m recording my recounting of what happened in the first place. I’m not sure what to do next or who may be coming for me, and my hope is that having some evidence, even if its only my word at this point, may help me stay alive. Given what I know, it’s a very small hope.
Yesterday a body came into the lab. Badly burned, it had been found in a shallow grave out in the middle of nowhere woods. The only reason it was found at all was because the fire burning the body had spread to a nearby tree and then burned several acres before forestry got the call. It took two days to stop the fire spread, and it wasn’t until they were investigating the source that they found the twisted remains of a man, legs and arms broken and bound by barbwire that had melted into his flesh after he was set ablaze.
Identifying the corpse was going to be difficult. Any idea of facial recognition or fingerprints was out the window, and whatever blunt instrument had been used to break his limbs had also been used on his teeth. Still, his torso was partially intact, and after taking the initial round of external photos, I assisted the senior M.E. in conducting the autopsy.
Fire and heat change a body in a variety of ways, and because of all the variables—weather, clothing, ignition catalysts, body shape and mass—plus the inherent fickleness of fire, you never can be sure what you’re going to find during a burn autopsy. That being said, it still seemed odd that the internal organs were as intact as they were when we opened our John Doe up last night.
A person, terrible as it may sound, cooks just like any other animal or lump of meat. As the outside grows hotter, that temperature change pushes deeper and deeper into the center of the body, cooking the organs and muscle, the fat and bones, from the outside in. With some variance, you’ll see that pattern replicated on any part of the body, though different materials obviously change due to heat at different rates.
Yet even with the variances accounted for, this body had burned strange.
The bones, which are more resistant than soft-tissue, should still have had some damage at the extremities where there was less buffer between them and the fire—fingers and toes, for instance, or even at the wrists, ankles and neck. But no, there was no real sign of any damage to the bones other than where they had been intentionally broken.
And while the muscle and fatty tissue had melted within expected parameters, the internal organs were almost unblemished. As we began excavating and weighing them, I asked my boss if he noticed it too, and he said he did. He’s a reserved guy that doesn’t speculate on much, but I could tell he was as confused as I was.
I asked him if it was possible someone had set him on fire and then put him back out before it could do more damage to the bones and organs, but he began to shake his head slowly before I was even done speaking. Told me that if that was the case, we’d see signs of it in the burned tissue—irregular patterns where parts of the body was cooled off suddenly or melted residue from whatever was used to put the fire out. Besides, he said as he met my eyes, he’d heard the ranger that found the body said it was still burning when he found it.
I felt my mouth drop open a bit. How was that possible? If it was the source of the fire, it would have been set aflame days earlier. Fire had to have fuel, and the body would have been consumed well before then if it was burning the entire time. I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was, but before I could voice it, he began taking off his gloves.
He had a few calls to make before we went any further. Finish cataloguing the items we’d already removed, and then put the body in the freezer for the time being. He’d text me in an hour or two when he was ready to get started again.
All of this seemed strange—his demeanor, talking about calling someone to ask about the body, everything. But he was already leaving the examination room, and I still had to weigh the perfectly healthy-looking and unburned intestines we’d just removed.
It was as I was transferring them from the extraction bin to a sealed bag that I felt something hard and irregular inside. My first instinct was to just set it aside until we started back, but touching the bulge again, I reconsidered. It wasn’t a natural shape. Hard and rectangular, I felt along the length of intestine above and below it until I had a good sense of its dimensions and began to get an idea of what it might be.
A usb drive.
I glanced up at the clock. I had plenty of time to make a small incision and extract whatever it was. If it was important, that would certainly be better than leaving it in rotting guts to get damaged through another couple of hours of purification. Swallowing, I grabbed a scalpel.
Five minutes later I was holding a small, black usb drive in my hand. After its interrupted journey through the body, there was no chance of any fingerprints or other viable trace evidence, so I made the decision to clean it off. After that, it wasn’t long before I started debating whether to plug it into my laptop or not.
It was stupid. According to protocols, it should be bagged and sealed, deposited in the evidence lockbox, and examined forensically by someone in the computer forensics department. I knew that. But I felt this growing and irresistible urge to look at it anyway. At first I chalked it up to curiosity, but as the impulse took hold, I sensed it was something more. I was afraid, more afraid than could be explained by the strangeness of the body or finding the usb drive. And for whatever reason, I had the gut feeling that looking at what was on it was the key to understanding why.
So I plugged it in, running virus software on it before opening the one folder that popped up. It was supposedly clean, and the folder’s name was normal enough. It just said “Song”.
Clicking on the folder, I saw there were seven .mp3 files inside, numbered 1 through 7 without any other description. Dialing my laptop’s speakers down to 15, I selected the first one and hit play.
A low, echoing thrum filled the examination room. It wasn’t coming from my laptop, or if it was, it wasn’t coming just from there. Waves of softly booming sound made the air tremble, like distant thunder, and when I looked around, I could see the instruments near the exam table jumping slightly in time with the pulsing noise. And not just randomly. They were all hopping and rolling in the same direction.
Away from the body.
Standing up, I started back toward the corpse on the table. Somehow, that sound was coming from the body. How was that possible? I had the image of someone stuffing a small subwoofer into the man’s chest, but that was absurd. And even if someone had, why would it activate when I hit play on my unconnected laptop?
I looked back at my computer just as the player switched to the second file.
The thrum was suddenly gone, replaced by the sharply sweet sound of a violin, or something that reminded me of a stringed instrument. The room was stiller now, almost frozen in the delicate, crystalline trance of the winding melody, something familiar and melancholy and terrible. I felt myself shudder as it began to coil inside my head like something dark and venomous.
Wincing, I forced myself closer to the body. This new music was coming from there as well, but how? It had to be a hidden speaker, didn’t it? I didn’t know how it was playing off my laptop, but that was the only logical answer. Bending down, I put my ear near the ruined charred torso. Yes, it was definitely coming from the body, but I couldn’t identify a particular location. It was almost as if the entire corpse was a tuning fork vibrating with whatever this awful song was.
I felt myself growing queasy. I needed to turn it off. I had to stop it before it got worse, I needed to…
That’s when I first heard the new noises from the body.
It was a wet, sucking sound at first, rhythmic in its own way, it seemed to keep time with the razored melody digging into my brain, buried underneath it or entwined with those strings. Standing up, I looked down at the body.
The organs we had removed…they were growing back.
Staggering backward, I ran for the door even as the music shifted again. Now it was a chorus of some kind, whispering, singsong voices uttering sibilant phrases I didn’t understand but that still made my skin crawl. Reaching the hallway, I looked back through the door at the body, sucking in a breath as its broken limbs began to reset.
Turning away, I ran down the hall toward our office. If he was still in there, I would get him. If not, I’d head outside and get in my car. Call the cops from there.
The hallway lurched as I turned the corner. The sound was still here. It was everywhere. And as it shifted from that singing whisper to a jangle of tinny bells, I felt my stomach begin to loosen as my limbs grew heavy. I had to make it to the office. I could lock the door, and even if my boss wasn’t there, I could call for help. I…
The senior M.E. was laying on the floor outside the door to the office, unconscious, his body shuddering in some kind of small seizure that echoed the ringing of the bells. Dropping to my knees, I felt my own limbs spasming as I crawled toward the door. If I could just get inside…If I could just make it inside….
And then everything went dark.
When I woke up, my phone said that about ten minutes had passed. Pushing myself up, I saw that I’d almost made it to the door and the unconscious man next to it. I checked his pulse and breathing, and both were fine. He was unconscious, but stable, and as I dialed 911, I realized that the music had stopped. Everything was quiet.
They said emergency services would be there in less than five minutes, and my first thought was to just stay with the senior M.E. until they arrived. But then what I’d seen in the exam room came back to me. I had to have imagined it, that body making itself whole…that wasn’t possible. The music had some kind of hallucinatory effect. Maybe it was some secret military shit, who knew. But dead bodies didn’t heal themselves, and I needed to get my shit straight before the cops got here and I started talking crazy.
So I forced myself to go back down to the exam room, my heart fighting to get loose as I pushed open the door. I just had to see that the body was still there, unplug the usb drive from my computer, and then I’d go back to the office.
The body was gone.
Sucking in a breath, I looked all around the room, but there was no sign of anything out-of-place. I shot a look out at the hallway behind me, but there was nothing there. Head pounding, I stepped inside, walking quickly across to my computer and reaching for the usb stick when I saw the player change.
Now Playing: E:\Song\7.mp3
And then I heard my own voice echoing through the room.
I work at a medical examiner’s office in a large metropolitan area in the United States. You’ll have to excuse the vagueness, but I value my job and safety. My safety is also the reason why I’m recording my recounting of what happened in the first place. I’m not sure what to do next...
Snatching the usb drive from the laptop, I threw it into the sealed container we use for biohazard disposal. I was done, done with all of this. I was going to make sure that my boss was okay and then I was leaving. They could check the cameras in the hall to find out who had stolen the body or…however it had gotten out of there. I was going to play ignorant. Forget about the usb and the music, the healing corpse and hearing my voice say words I didn’t remember ever saying on a recording I’ve never made.
It all went smoothly enough. The EMTs arrived first and the senior M.E. woke up at the first sniff of smelling salts, looking confused but no worse for wear. It still took hours until we were able to leave, but the cops had seemed momentarily satisfied that someone had knocked us out and taken the burned body that had come in that evening. There were no cameras in the exam room, so they couldn’t know the rest unless I told them, particularly when my boss seemed to remember little after us first receiving the body.
It was well after midnight before I made it home, and after a long shower I climbed into bed with little hope of ever actually falling asleep. It would have helped if I’d turned off the lights, but I wasn’t quite able to.
I woke up to the sound of something sliding out from underneath my bed. Letting out a small scream, I saw myself, tufts of hair growing back in among other patches of black and red scalp. The eyes were bloodshot and sunken, but healed enough that they could focus on me clearly as this other me began to smile. A broken, bloody smile full of new teeth slowly pushing past the gums and the broken ruins that had been there before—pale white tombstones in red earth that’s gone sour.
Screaming louder, I try to back away, but its too fast and strong. It pulls itself up onto the bed and pushes me down, digging its grey fingernails into my cheeks as I struggle and squeal. It’s still naked, but there are only traces of the fire now, and down its center I can barely make out the pink ghost of my incision a few hours before. My mind is teetering now, balanced between self-preservation and buckling to the growing weight of madness as the air is forced from my lungs by his weight on me.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. It may look like me, but its far stronger, and in a matter of moments I’m bound to the bed with bedsheets and its placidly picking through my clothes before selecting something to wear. When it leaves the bedroom, I have hope it will just go away and leave me alone, but no. It’s in the other room. Talking. Using my voice, saying the words I heard on the seventh file and then going on, telling about last night and all that happened, even going into what is happening now while I struggle to get free. Using my thoughts, my words, though I’ve never spoke them aloud.
And then it stops for a moment and comes back into the bedroom, smiling a whole smile. Smirking down at me as I piss myself with fear and start crying, begging for it to let me go. Instead it just laughs and starts narrating again. Telling the recorder…my recorder I use during autopsies…what will happen next.
He will take me out to the woods, and there he will dig a shallow grave. The place is near an old cattle fence, and it only takes a few minutes for him to strip off a line of rusted barb wire to swaddle me in. A patch of my chest will stay free from sharp metal, because that’s where he’ll sit as he grabs my cheeks and tries to pry my mouth open. When I resist, he doesn’t miss a beat. He just picks up a rock and breaks in my teeth until it doesn’t matter if I fight. He can still fit the USB stick in, sliding it down my throat until I swallow.
Then he’ll wait awhile, just watching me cry and snot and shit myself as he hums along with the gentle music of some unseen star. Its night by the time I can smell the gasoline he’s siphoned from my truck. It’s cold on my skin as it splashes over me, making me struggle and scream when I thought I didn’t have any fight or noise left. I’ll beg again at the end, mind half gone, trying to explain to him that this can’t be happening. He is dead, which means he can’t be alive. And all this has already happened, which means it can’t happen again. And he’s me, but that can’t be. There can’t be two of us, can there?
When he pops the match in the night of the woods, his face is terrible and whole and familiar. If not for the past two days and the cruel look on his face, I’d think I was looking into a mirror. I recoil as he draws closer, and not just from the flame. He’s smiling, but there is a coldness there that is somehow worse than the blazing heat I know is about to come.
“You’re right you know.”
I feel a moment of uncertain hope. Maybe I’ve misunderstood something. But no. I know what is coming because he’s already told me. Line for line, thought for thought, word for word, its been recorded hours before as I listened. Despite myself, I can’t help but say the lines he told me I’d say.
“Right about what? That this can’t be real? Is this all a bad dream?”
He lets out a chuckle. The flame is to his fingertips now, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care. “No, no. The other part.” Leaning down next to my face, he set my cheek on fire as he whispers in my ear.
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