CHAPTER ONE - WHERE THE EARTH NEVER SLEEPS
Long before the hospital had even opened its doors, the mortuary had stood alone, a fortress of cold stone, hidden from the sunlight by thick walls and centuries of secrecy. Its windows, narrow and unyielding, seemed to stare out at the world like blind eyes, observing everything and giving nothing away.
Legends grew around it. Whispers in the corridors said that anyone who dared to enter after ten at night would never return the same. Some students came back pale and trembling, eyes wide with terror that had no name. Others simply vanished, swallowed by the darkness inside.
The mortuary’s story began during the British era, long before the hospital existed. A doctor, brilliant but cruel, had made it his private laboratory. He was a physicist and a surgeon, obsessed with experiments that defied ethics, morality, and life itself. He would cut bodies alive, swap limbs, imprison his subjects in cages half their size, and record every breath, every scream, every heartbeat.
He was fascinated by fear—how it bent the mind, broke the body. And when his subjects inevitably died, he buried them within the mortuary’s walls, hidden from the eyes of the world. Those who worked with him vanished too, either killed in his experiments or silenced to keep the truth hidden.
When the first bodies were buried, the building itself seemed to shiver. Shadows stretched longer, floors groaned beneath weightless footsteps, and whispers drifted through the corridors long after the doctor had left. By the time the authorities arrived, the place was a house of horrors.
Yet the official story told to the public was different: a “madwoman” had killed the doctor and his assistants, and then herself. The truth—buried with the bodies inside the mortuary—was far darker. Only the mortuary remembered.
Even today, over two centuries later, the building seemed alive. Students spoke of lights flickering inside its windows, doors closing and opening on their own, and the faint sound of chains dragging across the stone floor. Security never patrolled it after ten. Teachers avoided it. And every night, those who dared to glance out of their hostel windows swore they could see figures moving inside—people from centuries past, wandering endlessly, waiting for intruders.
No one remembered their names. No one knew their stories. But the mortuary never forgot.
And every night, the earth seemed to watch, silent but awake, as if the building itself waited for the next visitor brave—or foolish—enough to enter.
By morning, the legend had grown. And somewhere in the shadows, the spirits of the past whispered, just loud enough to remind the living that some doors, once opened, could never be closed.
