The Undertaker’s Debt

Milo Voss had spent four decades refining the art of the final arrangement. His funeral parlor, ‘The Last Goodbye’, sat on the outskirts of a town that had long since forgotten how to mourn properly. His motto, etched on a brass plaque above the embalming room door, read: ‘Dead is dead, and you can only improve on it.’ It was a joke, of course, but one that had kept him sane through the endless parade of tragic ends.

But last year, the joke turned sour. The black mist—the term he used for the overwhelming despair that sometimes crept into his bones—had taken a new, vicious form. It wasn’t just the weight of others’ grief anymore; it was his own body turning traitor. At fifty-three, his joints ached with betrayal, his heart fluttered like a trapped bird, and his mind, once sharp as a scalpel, began to cloud.

One ordinary Tuesday, while the morning sun struggled through the grimy windows of his apartment above the parlor, Milo stepped into the shower. The water was scalding, as he always liked it, the steam filling the small cubicle. He reached for the shampoo bottle on the ledge, and as he turned, a bolt of lightning—white-hot and blinding—seared through his left side. His arm went numb, his leg buckled, and he crashed to the tiled floor, his head narrowly missing the faucet.

He lay there, paralyzed, the water beating down on him like a relentless drum. The pain was a living thing, chewing through his chest and down his arm. He couldn’t cry out; his voice was a strangled whisper. Time stretched, each second an eternity. He thought of the embalming table downstairs, the cold steel, the tools of his trade. For the first time, he understood the faces he had worked on, the final panic frozen in their expression.

With a herculean effort, he dragged himself out of the shower, using his right arm and his chin, inching across the wet linoleum. The hallway stretched before him like a gauntlet. He bumped into a side table, and a framed photograph toppled—a picture of himself and his late partner, Elena, grinning at a fishing trip decades ago. The glass cracked, slicing his cheek, but he felt nothing.

The study was his goal; the phone was on the desk. He pulled himself forward, his left side a dead weight. He left a smear of water, and a thin trail of blood from his cut. When he finally reached the desk, he grabbed the receiver and dialed 911. But the line hummed with a strange static. No one answered. He tried again. And again. Each time, the same hollow buzz.

Desperate, he dialed his daughter, Lena, who lived three hours away. The line clicked, and a recording played: ‘The number you have reached is not in service.’ His own voice echoed back at him, a robotic parody. Panic clawed at his chest. The world seemed to narrow to the pounding of his heart and the absurdity of his situation. The most adept embalmer in the region, and he couldn’t summon help.

He remembered Elena’s last words, whispered to him as she lay dying of cancer six years ago. ‘You think you can fix everything, Milo. But some things can’t be improved.’ He had laughed then, assured her he’d make her ‘presentable’ for the open casket. He had kept his word. But now, his own body was a coffin, and he was trapped inside.

As the minutes crawled by, the fog in his mind thickened. He stared at the wall of his study, covered with awards and certificates from the funeral industry. ‘Master Embalmer of the Year,’ ‘Innovative Repatriation Techniques.’ They were meaningless now. His gaze fell on a small, forgotten shelf where he kept odd trinkets collected over the years—a glass eye, a ceramic heart, a silver locket that contained a lock of hair from a child he’d buried decades ago. They were mementos of lives cut short, of the stories he had pieced together from shattered families.

His phone buzzed. It was a text from Lena: ‘Call me when you get this. Love you.’ He tried to type a reply, but his fingers wouldn’t cooperate. He dropped the phone. It clattered to the floor, and the screen went dark.

In the silence, he heard a faint noise from the parlor below—a muffled thump, followed by a dragging sound. He knew the building was empty; he was the only one there. But the sounds grew louder, rhythmic, like something heavy being moved across the embalming room floor. A chill ran down his spine, and not from his condition. He remembered the final body he had worked on before the attack—a middle-aged man, a recluse, who had been dead for a week before anyone found him. The body had come in with a note pinned to his chest: ‘I knew you’d take care of me, Milo. You always do.’ There had been something off about that body, a faint smell of decay that lingered even after the embalming, a strange lopsided grin that he couldn’t correct no matter how many times he reset the jaw.

The sounds below grew more insistent. A door creaked open. Footsteps on the stairs—slow, deliberate, each step a pronouncement. Milo’s breath caught. He tried to push himself up, to drag himself to the door, but his body refused. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs. The study door, slightly ajar, began to swing open.

A figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the dim hallway light. It was the man from the embalming table, the recluse, but his face was now a mask of fury, his skin a waxy pallor, his eyes glazed with a dead man’s stare. In his hand, he held a scalpel, gleaming under the fluorescent lights. ‘You improved me,’ the figure hissed, his voice like dry leaves. ‘Now let me return the favor.’

Milo wanted to scream, but his throat was frozen. The figure advanced, raising the scalpel. And in that moment, Milo understood the ultimate irony: He had spent a lifetime perfecting the dead, but he could not perfect himself. Death was not a state to be improved upon; it was an end. And his end had come, not as a peaceful rest, but as a final, brutal judgment.

The scalpel descended. The lights flickered. And then, there was only the sound of water, still running in the shower, and the fading echo of a name not yet spoken.

When the police finally broke in two days later, they found Milo sprawled on the study floor, a look of utter terror frozen on his face. The coroner noted that he had died of a massive heart attack, alone and afraid. The embalming room was spotless, the body of the recluse gone. But on the leather chair, they found a note, written in shaky, grief-stricken handwriting:

‘I have seen the other side, and it is not improvement. It is debt. And I have paid in full.’