It was relatively chilly. At one end of the street stood a blue Cadillac – its engine humming in the cold quiet of the night. It had rained that evening, and the streets were still wet, reflecting the million shades of yellow and gold that two flickering street lights were generating. The place seemed a little too brightly-lit. The road was lined on both sides by a set of grimly looking buildings – all part of the city hospital campus. This was one area of the campus no one ever liked visiting. In fact, not many visited this place at all.
One of the buildings, more dark, dingy and neglected than the rest – with grey paint peeling off its cracked walls, was a huge hall – Hall No. 7 of the City Morgue. The City Morgue was just another wing of the City Hospital. The hospital campus was too old and too inefficient for providing service to a now burgeoning patient population. A nexus of hospital staff and administrative big-shots had come up with an underground plan – to eliminate terminal cases immediately to make place for the non-terminal ones. They called it ‘prioritizing’.
Hall No. 7, on the inside, was made of nothing but metal – now rotting and rusting, just like the many insignificant human bodies it contained in its dilapidated, stacked rectangular chambers. All of them were unclaimed bodies – the disposal of which was of low priority to the hospital. If you stood inside for long, you’d occasionally hear a loud pop and thwack – the sound of a decaying body bursting into a shower of dried blood and organs after it inflated itself like a balloon – it was just another stage of the decomposition process.
Outside, a mysterious figure now appeared in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac. His face was shrouded in darkness, and a single stream of street light filtering through the wind-shield cast a luminous glow on blue eyes. He was waiting for something. He wasn’t sure what it was, but his gut told him that something was about to happen. It took him a minute to realise that he wasn’t even sure of what he was doing there. In the car, in the middle of the night. Why and how did he end up here? He tried straining his mind, but nothing but a collection of extremely blurred images – obscure recollections of his weakened memory came to his mind. It didn’t make any sense. A surge of fear shot up his spine, and his pupils dilated. The fear would have gripped him further had he not noticed what was happening on the street outside. Four men were emerging from the creaky door of Hall No.7, carrying a stretcher with a body on it. They were struggling hard, for the body was not still – it was thrashing about periodically. He was probably going to be put in a white van that had somehow showed up on the other end of the street. Every five seconds or so, it would go rigid as if a jolt of electricity was shooting through its spine. He was going through anaphylactic shocks. The man in the car peered forward to take a closer look from his hiding spot. His face now came in the light – he was fair skinned – wrinkled with a few scars here and there, and had brownish-grey hair. He was squinting with concentration – for some reason, it was of utmost importance to him to figure out who that person in the stretcher was. The man had light brown hair – or perhaps that is what it looked like under the yellow street light – and was white. Any other features of his face were not discernible from the distance. The very next moment, a sudden surge of fear shot through the hiding driver’s spine, and his vision started to get clouded. He felt a strong, painful electrical jolt hit his body. He was losing control, and his hands and legs were thrashing about, beyond his control. Just a moment before he fainted into oblivion, he realised he was experiencing what the person on the stretcher was – anaphylactic shocks.
He woke up with a start. His state of consciousness did not last long. For the few moments that he was awake, he grasped that he was trapped in a rather small capsule. It was completely dark and he could hear the wood around him creak. He remembered the doctors discussing his terminal status before he had passed out the last time. There was something about ‘disposing him anyway / despite the anaphylaxis’, ‘discreetly’ at night that was perhaps mentioned too – just what his last hallucination had been about. Even before he could go further on his path of solving this puzzle, another wave of anaphylactic shocks knocked him into that dark realm that transcended reality and the fictional.
Mr. Philip woke up after what appeared to be a few hours. He was covered in a pool of his own sweat, and strangely enough, a sprinkle of mud. He was still in the car, still unaware of what he was doing and what was happening, but somehow, a little surer of what he had to do now. The van had long gone, but he knew he had to follow it. He hauled himself up, shrugged off the mud, and pushed the accelerator frantically. The car sped forward into darkness.
The Cadillac was now shooting past streets Philip did not remember not seeing before. It was a rather strange feeling – a very strong Deja Vu. He did not have time to ponder over what he was feeling, for the very next moment, he had to force his car to a screeching halt. A construction of stone – rectangular but rounded on the edges at top stood right in the middle of the street. It was…what appeared to be an oversized tombstone. He stood there, right in the middle of the road, staring at the tombstone through his car. The tombstone read “Dr. Joseph D. Drake (1914-2001). To live in the hearts of those we love is to never die.” For one moment, he tried to maintain control over this force of instruction that was driving his actions. The intensity of his confusion was now peaking – regarding the events of the night – his presence in a car on an unknown street… no recollection of the past whatsoever…the strange impulses that were directing him to something or someplace…the men and the man on the stretcher…and now this – a tombstone in the middle of the road. With his mind grappling to process the absurdity of information that it was receiving, Philip absent-mindedly began reversing the car…only to hit into a stone structure – another tombstone. Things were becoming a shade more non-believable every passing second. Beads of sweat now trickled down Philip’s fear-filled face. He swung the steering wheel to the right and pulled his car out from between the two tombstones. He kicked the accelerator hard, shooting through the narrow streets of downtown. And this time, he did not have to look at the street ahead to find another tombstone…he looked around, and tombstones appeared everywhere. They were there on the footpath…and on the buildings, like horizontal projections jutting out from the walls. They looked as if they had been there for ages, untouched. Most of them were stone, while some were made of marble, glinting brightly under the moonlight. A sudden shudder is al it took, and suddenly, the dimensions around Philip began to warp – the road behind him was ‘pulling up’, turning the path ahead into a dangerously vertical slope. The buildings, as if simply melted, to fit the sudden change in dimensions. The windows went from rectangular to more fluid, circular proportions, and the tombstones began melting like wax; the stone and marble melting down the contorted building walls like a fast-melting glacier. The space around him was closing in. His very own car was now bending and twisting – the rooftop now pressing on his head and the back seats. The doors dented inwards, and the wind-shield shattered the very next moment. The steering wheel drooped like a dead flower and was pushing into Philip’s chest. Philip was no longer in control of his reality, and the car was tumbling down a constantly shape-shifting path. His insides were churning just as fluidly as his outside environment was, and his mind had gone absolutely and completely blank, as if someone had liquefied it and was now swirling the liquid around like a cocktail. This was something beyond fear, something beyond the spectrum of normal human feelings and experiences. His eye caught a visual of the road ahead – it ended in a large patch of barren land that was laced with an even greater concentration of tombstones. In the middle, was a clearing, with a massive tombstone, perhaps the size of three storied building demarcating it. The area in front of it was dug up into a hollow. It was freshly dug, as if someone was planning to bury somebody there but had left hurriedly. Philip’s car approached the tombstone, knocking off all other stone epitaphs that came its way. In what definitely seemed to be his last and final moments, Philip, for a split second saw what this overly-huge tombstone said: “Mr. Philip Dresdon. (1977-2009) The song has ended, but the memory lingers on forever.” Next to it, was a smaller tombstone that read “Dr. Joseph D. Drake (1914-2001). To live in the hearts of those we love is to never die.” His car dropped into the dug up hollow, and the epitaph fell right over, sealing the depression and its trapped inhabitant forever. The already damaged car’s structure completely gave away immediately under the immense pressure of stone, crushing Philip into a flattening, bloody squeeze. The insurmountable pain lasted for a split second. His body ruptured, and his blood and fleshy pulp began mixing and dissolving into a mixture of mud, metal and stone.
With a back-bone-breaking jolt, Philip woke up into the realm of consciousness, escaping what was perhaps the terminal end of his horrific hallucination. He was lying in a wooden coffin, six feet underground. The weight of earth above his coffin had caused the roof of the capsule to give away. Splintering wood was now piercing his pale, naked body. The numbness of body started wearing away and agonizing pain was consuming his body. Wooden splinters were piercing every inch of his body, and blood had slowly started to ooze out from this multitude of punctures. Philip yelled and shrieked, but no sound would escape his death chamber six feet underground. And even in all this pain, he had one last epiphany that explained it all. He had seen himself being exported from Hall No.7 in the previous hallucination. The mud in the car…he was being buried in reality…in a cemetery, which explained the tombstones in the hallucination…it all made sense now. He had been receptive to everything on his last journey in the real world…he wasn’t dead, he was simply perceiving everything from his anaphylaxis-ridden senses and was using that to build a reality of his own…his hallucinations. The wood splintered further, and a piece of sharp, strong wooden fibre penetrated both his eyes – driving into the pupil and tearing apart the optic fibre. The last and most painful screams of this man would never be heard by any living being, except perhaps the million worms and micro-organisms that would later scourge his body to its bony remains.
