The Bone Orchard

I had a friend, Dale, who worked at a crematorium and moonlighted as a stand-up comic. ‘Laughing in the face of death,’ he’d say, ‘keeps the other gig from eating me alive.’ Dale had this idea to throw a Halloween party at the crematorium, ‘The Ash & Ember,’ he called it. He said it would be a real blast, pun intended. I wasn’t so sure.

My old buddy, Ray, agreed to tag along. We drove out to the edge of town where the crematorium sat on a lonely stretch of road, surrounded by a field of dried-up sunflowers that swayed in the breeze like skeletal fingers. The building itself was a squat concrete block, with a modern addition that had these huge, frosted glass panels that glowed from within. As we pulled into the gravel parking lot, we saw no cars, no balloons, no sign of a party. Just a single flickering light above a side door.

We sat in the car, the engine idling, debating whether to leave. The silence was heavy, broken only by the rustle of the sunflowers and the distant hoot of an owl. Then, without warning, the side door creaked open. A tall, lanky figure emerged, hunched over, wearing a white lab coat and thick safety goggles. The coat was splattered with dark, rusty stains. The man just stood there, staring at us, his face half-hidden in shadow. Ray rolled down the window and asked, ‘You know where Dale is?’ The man slowly raised a long, bony arm and pointed toward a small, dilapidated cottage nestled behind the crematorium, almost swallowed by the overgrown weeds. Without a word, he turned and shuffled back inside, the door slamming shut with an echoing thud.

We exchanged a nervous glance. ‘This is too creepy, man,’ Ray muttered. But we’d come all this way, and Dale was expecting us. So we drove the short distance to the cottage. It looked abandoned, with crooked shutters and a porch that sagged. A single dim light burned in the window, casting a sickly yellow glow. We climbed the steps, and I knocked. The door swung open on its own, revealing a narrow hallway lined with old photographs of people in Victorian mourning attire.

‘Dale?’ Ray called out. No answer. We stepped inside, and the door creaked shut behind us, the latch clicking with a finality that made my skin crawl. The air was thick with the smell of dust and something else, something sweet and cloying, like decaying flowers. A grandfather clock at the end of the hall began to chime, but it was off, striking eleven times when it was only nine. The sound vibrated through the floorboards.

We moved deeper into the cottage, past a dusty parlor filled with antique furniture and a grand piano with yellowed keys. In the corner, a portrait of a stern-faced woman seemed to watch us, its eyes following our every move. Ray pointed to a door at the back, slightly ajar, with a soft light spilling out. We pushed it open and found ourselves in a greenhouse, but the plants were all dead and twisted, like gnarled hands reaching toward the glass ceiling that showed a starless sky. In the center, there was a table covered in a black cloth, and on it, a single object: an old, leather-bound journal.

I opened it, and the pages were filled with spidery handwriting, recounting the history of the crematorium and the cottage. It talked about a period in the early 1900s when there was a series of unexplained disappearances in the area, and the original owner of the cottage, a mortician named Dr. Silas Grimm, was suspected but never charged. The journal described his obsession with ‘preserving the essence’ of the dead, and his secret experiments in the very greenhouse we were standing in, trying to capture the souls of the departed in glass jars. My hand trembled as I turned the page and found a list of names, with dates, and next to each name, a description of the ‘soul essence’ extracted. The final entry read, ‘Tonight, I will have my own soul preserved, for I have discovered a way to transfer consciousness into a new vessel.’

Just then, the glass panels of the greenhouse began to rattle, and a cold wind swept through, extinguishing the lantern. In the sudden darkness, I heard Ray scream, a sound that was cut short. I fumbled for my phone, its flashlight beam revealing Ray standing motionless, a look of horror on his face, and behind him, the tall figure from the crematorium, now without his goggles, revealing empty, black sockets. The man opened his mouth, and a voice that sounded like rustling dead leaves spoke, ‘I’ve been waiting for a vessel that could contain all their souls. You two will do nicely.’

The last thing I saw was the tall man reaching out with long, cold fingers, and then the world dissolved into a chorus of whispers, a thousand voices crying out in despair, all trapped within my own mind, as I felt my body being pushed aside, my consciousness fragmenting like shattered glass.

They found us the next morning, sitting on the porch of the cottage, side by side, our eyes wide and vacant, staring at nothing. The crematorium was closed down, and the cottage was boarded up. Years later, a group of kids exploring the ruins reported seeing two figures in the greenhouse, always in the same position, as if frozen in a silent scream. And sometimes, if you listen close to the wind blowing through the dead sunflowers, you can still hear a faint chant, a desperate plea from the trapped souls of Ray and me, begging for release.

The end.