Things you don't want to hear on a night shift: Scratching In The Funeral Home

Week 22 of a full year of tiny horror fiction

Photo by Sharon Lawson on Unsplash

Intro

Bon soir! Greetings from Strasbourg, where I’ve been working this week during a heatwave. I’m typing this at half-past ten at night and the temperature is somewhere in the mid-20 Celsius-ish range (77F). During the day it’s been around 33C (91F).

It’s toasty, and been like this since I arrived.

This is around 15C hotter than average for this time of year. Climate change: it’s a doozy.

I’ve learnt several things during my time here:

1. Many houses in Strasbourg look like they belong to vampires.

2. I can’t remember much French.

3. French people outside of Paris seem to be much nicer than French people in Paris.

4. When I try to speak French, my brain gives me two or three words then goes to Dutch, then goes to English, then shuts down. “Merci, tot ziens, thank you …”

5. Seriously: vampires might live in Strasbourg. So many houses are Gothic AF and they’ve all got shutters on the windows.

Anyway, we’ve reached week 22 of a full year of year of tiny horror fiction. I send out short stories in a different genre of spookiness every week, from vampires to ghosts to aliens to cursed land and more. There’s no running story, so feel free to dive in wherever you want.

Also, all of these stories are 100% human written by me AND I occasionally use an em-dash because it’s a handy piece of grammar. Both things are true! Not every writer using an em-dash is getting AI to do their work.

If you want to support a human writer doing human writing-y things, subscribe!

Let’s dig into this week’s story…

Scratching In The Funeral Home

Some security guards look like panthers: sleek muscles and prowling gaits. Bert is more like a capybara, with a blocky, balding head, and rotund body. He knows he’s an unimposing figure, even with a club-sized torch and can of pepper spray attached to the chunky belt on his waist. Not that any of the clients mind: they’re all dead.

Bert works the night shift in Cawdale & Daughters’ Funeral Parlour. The most suspicious characters he’s had to deal have been horny teens dressed in black, sneaking into the back gardens for a bit of private time. For the most part. Bert patrols, does crosswords, patrols, has a snack, patrols a bit more, then heads home for a nice bath beside an open window, listening to the dawn chorus before falling asleep (usually leaving the bath before sleeping, but not always), and feeling confident another good night of work is complete.

Except tonight is different. There’s a tiny scratching sound coming from somewhere, and Bert can’t locate the source.

He searches outside, but the sound isn’t coming from there, so he checks all the doors and windows. He finds everything sealed and snug, all as it should be. Bert puffs out a deep breath, rubs his belly, scratches his head, smacks the back of his neck, kneads an earlobe.

The scratching sound is louder.

Maybe a mourner somehow got stuck in the building? Or hid there after a ceremony for some reason? Bert searches all the floors, getting hot and out of breath after marching around. The sound of the scratching is giving him a headache. No matter where he goes, he can’t find the source.

And then, of course, there’s the last option: in the basement, there is the morgue.

Bert doesn’t like going into the morgue. He’s not a believer in ghosts and ghoulies, but he’s no fan of hanging around dead bodies either. Nonetheless, with all other options exhausted and the scratching only getting louder, Bert has no choice.

He stands in front of the heavy oak-panelled double door. He strokes his chin, scratches an armpit (which is damp from all the searching, so he wipes his hand on his trousers), knuckles his eyes. He runs his thumbs along behind his ears, under the lobes, along his jawline, meeting at his pursed lips. The door awaits him. The scratching is coming from nearby.

Pushing into the room, the scent of formaldehyde fills his nostrils, making him light headed. On a wall, there are six metal doors, concealing six steel beds, potentially holding six bodies, and potentially, impossibly, one of them is clawing inside the door.

One by one, Bert opens the doors. The first contains a motionless body, covered neck-down in a white cloth, skin as pale as a teeth. Definitely not alive. The second and third are empty. The next fourth holds another definitely-not-moving body. The fifth is vacant.

The sound of scratching gets louder and louder.

There is only one door left.

Bert pulls the steel handle, it clunks open and reveals…

An empty space.

Curls of cool mist fall from the hole.

The scratching is deafening.

Bert stares into the void. He ruffles his scant hairs, blows out his cheeks, furrows his brow, adjusts his belt, tugs an earlobe.

POP! The scratching sound transforms.

His fingers, still holding his earlobe, are wet.

He rubs them together and examines them. The liquid is gritty. His fingers are red, and there are black dots in there. It’s blood—his blood—and something else.

More surprised than afraid, he examines the black dots, rubbing them between his fingers.

The dots have crippled, broken legs.

The scratching escalates to an unending thrum, like an apocalyptic bass drum.

Blood trickles down his neck from his ears, tickling his collarbone and slipping under his shirt.

He swipes at it with his hand.

It’s only a little blood.

It’s mostly not blood.

It’s mostly spiders.

The scratching-drumming-thunder fills his head entirely as the new-born spiders pour out from his ear canal.

The end

Ick!

Alongside the story, every week I add some background about the inspiration and writing choices in the story…

Writing Notes

Inspiration

The heatwave in Europe is partly to blame for this story: it’s prickly and itchy, even late into the night. Something bit my leg two days ago and the heat makes the itching much worse. Urgh.

So, I started with a rough idea about itching at night. Not very promising, but it’s a beginning.

Itching and a bite led to ‘scratching’. Where would you definitely not want to hear scratching noises? I’m sure there are plenty of options (in a one-person submarine? On a space station?) but I think all the spooky houses in Strasbourg put me in mind of funeral homes.

It would be too easy to have the scratching coming from an (un)dead body. As much as zombies are creepy, it’s a bit too obvious.

Instead, I thought the funeral home and mortuary room could be a red herring, i.e. a misdirection.

The scratching is coming from inside the body!

Misdirection

Did it work? Did you think the scratching would be a dead person, at least for a while? Let me know in the comments please!

I suspect you probably caught on before the full reveal, but hopefully your mind went in the classic horror direction: a body rising from the mortuary slab, white sheet slipping away to reveal bloodless, blue veined skin and milky eyes, arms stretching out… braaaaaains!

I also didn’t want the ‘spiders in the ears’ to come out of nowhere, so I had poor Bert be a fidgety guy with all kinds of mannerisms, including touching his ears.

Bert puffs out a deep breath, rubs his belly, scratches his head, smacks the back of his neck, kneads his earlobes.

The scratching sound is louder.

Did you notice the sound escalating each time he touched his ears? My idea here was that his was moving the spiders around a bit each time he did it…

He runs his thumbs along behind his ears, under the lobes, along his jawline, meeting at his pursed lips. The door awaits him. The scratching is coming from nearby.

You probably didn’t notice this connection at first, and maybe not at all, but I hope it planted an image in your head enough times that the reveal at the end felt natural.

First or third person

I like writing first-person horror for these short stories, but sometimes a story needs a little bit more observational distance. In this case, Bert’s escalating frustration with the scratching, then his confusion at the discovery of the blood, would probably have interfered with natural storytelling: his emotional state and perceptions would have got in the way of clarity, I think.

I absolutely can imagine a first-person version of this story could work but, to be honest, it’s damn hot here, the hotel I’m booked into is cheap and has no air conditioning (or tea-making facilities! I’m jolly well British, dammit!) and my brain is melting.

To be honest, if I wake up after the heat wave and discover this story is just ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ over and over, then I wouldn’t be too shocked.

Finding the horror

We’ve got a few horrors in this week’s story, most of them implied and toyed with, so suspense plays a big role in the story: what’s causing the scratching? Will it be the obvious?

• Night shift work - definitely spooky

• Isolation - a key ingredient of horror

• Unknown noises - the unknown is scarier than the known

• Mystery - will the sounds come from an obvious horror trope or something else?

• Funeral homes - not scary per se, but not exactly a top nightspot either

• The undead - breaking the rules of nature is always creepy

• A twist! - there’s something else going on, doubling down on the unknown

• Body violation - something has got inside the skin

• Insect swarms - okay, arachnid swarms. No one likes swarms of anything, and they happen in the real world, which can be scarier than the supernatural

• Blood - yep, simple blood is a scary thing. It’s supposed to be inside the body and not leaking

• Stuff in your ears - no one likes stuff going into their ears, right? (Or am I the only person traumatised by The Wrath of Khan?)

Combine these, and hopefully you’ve got a good itchy horror.

C’est finis!

The heatwave is due to pass in a couple of days, so hopefully I’ll have a fully functioning brain again next week.

In the meantime, it would be a huge help to me if you could share this wherever you think others might enjoy it:

I hope you’re thriving wherever you are. It’s a wild world out there, so there’s all the more reason to…

Go be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx