My House of Horrors

Brother Wei picked up the two large water buckets and walked down the corridor. Li Jie stood where he was. He held the flashlight in his hand and forced himself to resist the urge to flash it into the morgue. He knew, in the darkness, the cadavers were all looking at him. “I’d better close the door.”

Li Jiu closed the morgue and looked around. Brother Wei had already left, and it was quite scary standing there alone.

He turned back to look, and it felt like there were monsters just hiding in the edge of the light. He wanted to go and check, but he did not have the courage. After much deliberation, he felt it was safer to stay with Brother Wei. “This place is too creepy. Being together at least means that we have someone to look after each other.”

Holding the flashlight, Li Jiu turned back every three steps that he made, deadly afraid that he might find someone following him. “Hopefully, I’m just being overly sensitive.”

After Li Jiu walked away, a scary-looking hammer peeked around the corner. Chen Ge poked his head out to look at the pair that wandered away. His eyes were filled with confusion. Did the man discover me?

He walked out from the corner and stood at the door. The pictures given by Zhang Li didn’t show this morgue. Could this be the mysterious Morgue No. 8 that shouldn’t exist?

Chen Ge pushed open the steel door and looked in. Other than the glass tubes with dead bodies, there was nothing out of the ordinary. The dead look peaceful, so they should be voluntary donors. There is no trace of bad energy in here. This is not what I expected from Morgue No. 8.

Due to his experience, Chen Ge took a look around, and his confusion grew. The situation at the underground morgue seemed more complicated than he had anticipated. Just now, I think I heard the two talking about handprints and something crawling out.

Chen Ge was about to enter the room when the white cat jumped down from his shoulder and ran down the corridor.

There were other people in the corridor, and Chen Ge did not want to expose himself yet. Thus, he quickly retreated out of the morgue to chase after the cat. After consuming the society’s blood, the cat’s body seemed to have grown larger, and its reactions became faster. In a blink of an eye, it was already several meters away.

What is attracting it? Chen Ge was very familiar with the white cat. Whenever they were out on a mission, the white cat would stick close to him. The cat used to be very feral, but that had been lost after a period of complacency. Most of the time now, it would be very cowardly. Therefore, unless truly necessary, it would not leave Chen Ge willingly. To stop the white cat from going missing, Chen Ge also picked up his speed, and they reached the end of the corridor.

The place seemed to have been sealed up at one time, but something had later happened that caused the brick wall to crumble. There was all sorts of trash in the road, and there was a sign that read—Lack of maintenance over the years. Danger of falling objects. No entry!

There was trace of that sticky substance on the bricks next to the sign. Brother Wei and Li Jiu had gone this way. The outer perimeter with the seven morgues was the last expansion. Beyond this will be the middle section of the morgue.

Western Jiujiang Medical University had been built decades ago; it was Jiujiang’s earliest medical university. The underground morgue had perfectly preserved the medical scene at the time.

Back then, they had still used cadaver pools to store dead bodies. The pools would be filled with formalin, and the bodies that the university gathered through various channels would be soaked there. When the students needed to experiment, the teachers would lead them to the underground morgue to fish the cadavers from the pools.

The road to the central hub should be somewhere in the middle section. Chen Ge put away his phone. The map provided by Zhang Li was mostly about the outer perimeter. There was little on the middle section and nothing on the central hub. Hopping over the sign, Chen Ge walked into the middle section, holding the wall.

The air in the corridor turned murky. There was a weird smell in the air. Chen Ge sniffed the air, but he could not tell where the smell came from. It felt like the smell was coming from all sides. It had soaked into the bricks of the ceiling and the walls.

“The middle section is the forbidden zone of the university. Normally, even the security team and the people from the school don’t dare come here, so what are the two outsiders doing here?” Chen Ge really did not get it. The two seemed to like ‘adventure’ more than he did. Chen Ge slowed down and covered his nostrils and mouth with his hand. He stared at the white cat, making sure that the cat did not leave his sight.

After running several meters, the white cat leaned low to the ground and entered the hunting state like it had spotted a rat. This was the first time that Chen Ge had seen the white cat in such a serious state. He moved slowly with his body bent low.

After a while, the stench in the air thickened. The white cat continued to prowl. The corridor became older and more dilapidated. The white paint peeled of the wall to reveal the gray bricks.

After a few more meters, Chen Ge heard the voices of Li Jiu and Brother Wei coming from one of the rooms. The thing that had attracted the white cat came from that room as well. Afraid that the cat might do something hasty, Chen Ge picked it up and placed it in his backpack. He walked to the door and peered in.

The room was larger than Chen Ge anticipated. There was a large rectangular pool. Brother Wei stood in the middle of it while Li Jiu stood by the edge. Every time, they collect such a large amount before they call us to come deal with it. Do they really think we’re not humans?

Li Jiu coughed twice. He had seen many bodies before, but whenever he saw these things, he could not stop his gag reflex.

The repulsive smell oozed from the pool, and Li Jiu’s eyes were watering from it.

“I told you to wait outside, so who can you blame but yourself?” Brother Wei poured the content of the buckets inside the pool. “Just be satisfied, based on our contract with the school, we should be bringing these things back to our crematorium to burn them, but with this convenient dumping spot, we’ve already saved a lot of trouble.”

“You have a point.” Li Jiu’s face was white. Looking at the things that had been dumped into the pool, he still felt like vomiting, “Just how did the medical students manage to do this? These are all picked from the human bodies. Just thinking about it makes me shudder.”

The two continued their conversation, and Chen Ge heard everything. He finally knew the two’s identity and their purpose for being there. Li Jiu and Brother Wei were workers at some crematorium. The university asked them to deal with the leftovers after autopsy classes.

Normally, each cadaver had their label. After cremation, the remains would be returned to the families or buried in a public cemetery. They could not do anything about that, but there were rarely whole cadavers in an autopsy room. There were many things that were left behind after autopsies.

These things were very hard to deal with, and they took a great deal of time. Li Jiu and Brother Wei wanted to save themselves some trouble, so they prepared to dump these things at the underground morgue.

They seemed to have done something like this before, and they had not been exposed.