They left me in the morgue

Trigger Warnings: Psychological decay, claustrophobia, body horror, grief, and disturbing imagery.

---They Left Me in the Morgue Overnight

---

I wasn’t supposed to wake up.

The paperwork had already been filed. Cause of death: cardiac arrest. Time of death: 11:13 p.m. on a Thursday that smelled like bleach and old piss. I remember the sound of flatlining. I remember a nurse’s face, slack with fatigue. I remember—barely—my mother’s sob. Then the black.

Then… the cold.

The moment I opened my eyes in that stainless-steel drawer, I knew something was wrong. The world was wrong. My body didn’t work the way it used to—every movement was a rusted hinge. My fingers were blue. My breath fogged the ceiling like a whisper that didn’t want to stay.

I screamed.

But screaming doesn’t matter when you’re zipped into a body bag, locked inside a freezer with the dead. No one hears you. They don’t check. Not once. Not until the shift changes.

And the thing is... the other drawers aren’t as empty as you’d hope.

---

At first, it was just the cold that got to me. The biting, numbing cold that crawled beneath the skin and made it feel like my bones were made of glass. I kicked. I thrashed. I bit at the zipper my teeth.

Eventually, the bag gave.

Then I was out—free inside a small white room of stainless steel, chemical smell, and silence so heavy it pressed on my chest harder than the heart attack ever did. The room smelled of antiseptic and secrets. Bodies lay like unopened letters waiting for answers.

One of them moved.

---

It was subtle. A twitch of a toe. A flex of a jaw. You’d miss it if you blinked. But I didn’t blink.

I was too afraid.

The body two drawers down was a girl. Pale, stitched, one eye sunken like a collapsed balloon. Her name tag read “JANINE – D.O.D. 06/11.” Her chest rose once—slowly, like a tide. Then stopped. Then again.

That’s when I noticed the others.

The old man missing half his scalp. The teenager with bruises around her neck. The infant wrapped in plastic. All of them… twitching. Slowly. In rhythm. Like they were syncing to some unholy beat.

---

I stumbled back, knocking over a tray of scalpels. One sliced my palm, but I didn’t feel it. My nerves weren’t working right. Blood oozed too slow. It wasn’t red anymore.

The lights flickered.

That’s when the whispers began.

Not voices. Not words. Just sounds, oozing from the cracks in the walls. Wet, slithering clicks like something with too many joints crawling across the ceiling tiles. Something... rehearsing the art of language, not quite getting it right.

Then Janine opened her eyes.

Dead eyes. Empty of color, but full of want.

“You weren’t supposed to wake up,” she said, voice like dust on glass.

---

I ran.

But the morgue has no windows. No doors that open from the inside. They lock it for a reason. The dead shouldn’t walk out. That’s the rule.

So I hid in the corner behind a stack of unused body bags, clutching a bone saw like it meant something. My hand shook. My mind cracked.

That’s when I saw my own file.

I don’t remember crawling toward it, but there I was. Top drawer. My name printed in perfect font. Elliot Gray – Male – 27 – No Kin Listed. There was a photo paperclipped to the folder.

It wasn’t me.

---

It looked like me. But it wasn’t me.

The face was wrong. Lips curled too wide. Eyes too far apart. Like something wearing me and not doing a very good job. The time of death said 11:13.

But I’d already been feeling something was off long before that. Before the heart attack. Before the numbness. I remember dreams I didn’t belong in. Conversations that ended too soon. People looking through me.

Had I been decaying longer than I realized?

Was this my afterlife? A freezer full of corpses that didn’t know they were dead?

Or worse… knew it too well?

---

Around midnight, the power failed. The cold vanished. The air got thick, wet with something that wasn’t air. The corpses sat up—every one of them—and turned toward me. Their eyes leaked something dark.

And in unison, they whispered:

“One must stay.”

---

They said it over and over, as if bound by law. One must stay. The rule of the morgue. You wake up here? Someone else has to take your drawer. Balance, they called it.

I begged. I cried. My skin flaked like dried glue.

They showed me the exit door.

Only one.

Only if I chose.

---

I opened every drawer. Looked each one in the eye. Mothers. Lovers. Addicts. Victims. One with a smile stitched into his face. I shook. I sobbed. My chest collapsed. I had to choose.

But then I saw him.

Still breathing.

Barely.

The morgue tech. Young. New. Probably on his smoke break when they wheeled me in. Slumped in the corner, neck twisted but not broken. Still warm.

He blinked once when I reached for him.

He wasn’t dead. Not yet.

---

I whispered, “I’m sorry.”

And laid him in my drawer.

---

When they found him the next morning, But no one could identify him. He wasn’t listed as staff. His badge was gone. His face unrecognizable. Another John Doe. They figured he’d been wheeled in with the rest of us they were baffled. How? when they met no conclusions, they simply decided to believe it was a clerical error. Mixed IDs. Simple mistake.

How could they not remember one of their own staff?

One man revived, one man dead. They zipped the drawer shut.

They never looked in the corners.

Never saw me pressed behind the furnace, veins like roots in the walls, my mouth sealed with formaldehyde.

I can’t move now.

---

I thought leaving the drawer meant freedom. But it was only the beginning of a darker prison.

I stepped out, but never truly escaped the morgue—or the curse that binds me here.

Now, I lurk in the shadows between cold steel and fading light, forever trapped in this endless cycle.

Watching. Waiting.

For the next soul to wake.

For the next sacrifice.

There is no real freedom—only temporary relief, passed on like a torch from one lost to another.

One must stay.

And I am the shadow that never leaves.

Author’s Note:

If you’ve ever had sleep paralysis, or dreamed of waking up somewhere you’re not supposed to be, you understand a piece of what this story means. “They Left Me in the Morgue Overnight” is about grief, guilt, and the terror of not knowing if you still belong in the world.

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