The Last Client

When I first took the night shift at the Harbor Crest Mortuary, the old-timers warned me about the basement. They said the building had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, and the basement had been the cold room for storing kegs and, later, bodies. The mortuary had been converted from a warehouse, and the basement was where we kept the backup generator and the overflow cold storage. It was also where I spent most of my nights, because Harbor Crest handled over 400 cases a year, and I was the only night embalmer.

The basement was a labyrinth of concrete corridors, lit by a single row of buzzing fluorescent tubes that flickered in a syncopated rhythm. The walls were thick, and the silence was so profound that my own footsteps echoed like gunshots. I got used to the dark, though. After a while, the darkness felt like a blanket, and I moved by memory, my hands finding their way through the familiar twists and turns without the need for light.

One night, during an unseasonably hot spell in early September, I had a particularly grueling run. Three bodies came in within six hours, and I spent the time between embalmings staring at the cracked linoleum floor, willing my eyes to stay open. It was around 3 AM when the last body arrived. I remember the hearse pulling in, the driver’s face pale and sweating, not from the heat but from something else. He handed me the paperwork without a word, then left quickly, almost running.

The body was that of an elderly woman, dressed in a faded floral dress, her hands folded over her chest as if in prayer. Her face was placid, but there was something wrong with her mouth. It was slightly open, as if she had died mid-sentence, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get it closed. I had a policy: never work on a body after three in the morning, because that’s when fatigue plays tricks on your mind. But I was alone, and the body was waiting, and I had a schedule to keep.

I wheeled her into the embalming room, the one with three tables, but I only ever used one. The room was small, windowless, and smelled of formaldehyde and something else, something faintly sweet, like overripe fruit. I lifted her onto the stainless steel table, and as I did, her hand brushed against my arm. It was cold, but that was normal. What wasn’t normal was that her fingers seemed to curl around my wrist for just a second, as if she were holding on. I pulled away, my heart skittering, telling myself it was a trick of gravity, a lazy muscle spasm.

I began the incision, the first cut along the carotid artery, when I noticed something odd. The skin was not yielding the way it should. It was tougher, almost leathery, as if it had been tanned. I paused, wiping my brow with the back of my glove, and looked at her face. Her eyes were open. I hadn’t opened them; they had been closed when she came in. Now they were open, staring at me with a milky, unseeing gaze. I blinked, and they were closed again. I knew I was tired, but this was not my imagination.

I tried to focus on the job, but my hands were trembling. I had never been afraid of the dead; they were just empty vessels. But this felt different. There was a presence in the room, a weight pressing down on me, like a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, but no one was there. The air grew colder, and the fluorescent light above me began to flicker more erratically, casting dancing shadows on the walls.

It was then that I heard it. A soft, gurgling sound, like bubbles rising through thick liquid. I spun around, but the room was empty. The sound came from the direction of the body. I leaned in closer, and the sound stopped. But then, I saw it. The woman’s chest rose, just slightly, as if she had taken a breath. I stepped back, my back hitting the instrument tray, sending tools clattering to the floor. I told myself it was residual gas escaping, a normal part of the process. But I didn’t believe it.

I forced myself to continue. I made the second incision on the inner thigh, searching for the femoral artery. But when I inserted the drainage tube, instead of the usual dark, viscous blood, a clear, odorless fluid began to drip out, drop by drop, like a leaky faucet. And with each drop, I felt a growing dread, as if I were draining something that was still alive.

Suddenly, the door to the embalming room slammed shut. I spun around, my heart pounding. The door was heavy, airtight, and it had a lock that I had to manually engage. It hadn’t touched it. I rushed to it, my hands shaking, and pulled the handle. It wouldn’t budge. I was trapped.

I turned back to the body, and now she was fully sitting up on the table, her head tilted at an unnatural angle, her eyes wide and black as voids. I tried to scream, but my voice was gone. She reached out a hand, and I saw that her fingernails had grown long, yellowed, curving like talons. She spoke, but her lips didn’t move. Her voice echoed in my skull, a dry, rasping whisper that said, ‘You have kept me waiting.’

I ran to the corner, pressed against the cold wall, as she slid off the table, her feet landing with a wet slap on the floor. She walked toward me, each step intentional, the fluid from her incisions leaving a trail like a snail’s slime. My mind raced, trying to find a rational explanation, but there was none. This was not a corpse; it was something else, something that had been waiting for a body, and I had given it one.

She stopped in front of me, her face inches from mine, and I could smell the sweetness, now overpowering, like overripe fruit left to rot. She opened her mouth, and I saw that her tongue was gone, replaced by a black, writhing mass of maggots. But they weren’t ordinary maggots; they had tiny, glowing red eyes. ‘You will help me,’ she said, and her voice was now inside my head, like a cold finger stroking my brain. ‘You will help me find the others.’

I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor, the lights steady, the room empty. The table was clean, the instruments sterile, and the body was gone. The only evidence that anything had happened was the pool of clear fluid on the floor, soaking into the concrete. I scrambled to the door, unlocked it, and rushed up the stairs, not stopping until I was outside, gasping for breath in the early morning air.

I quit the mortuary that day, but it didn’t matter. Since then, I have moved across the country, changed my name, but every night, at 3 AM, I see her face, and I hear that voice. She is not done with me. She is patient. She knows I will answer her call, because I am still a mortician, and there are always bodies to prepare. And sometimes, I think I feel her eyes on me, when I’m alone in a room, and I know she is waiting for me to return, to finish what I started. But I will never go back. I will never work at night again. Because I know that the last client is always the one you can never escape.