Notes of an ambulance doctor

I work as an ambulance doctor. Among the various reasons I have to refer to the death certificate. Now I will tell you about three cases, three deaths, because of which for the rest of my days I will wake up in a cold sweat and stare into the darkness with horror, until my eyes hurt. Nothing united these three people during their lifetime: a pensioner. A representative of the old intelligentsia. A middle-aged man; probably without a certain kind of occupation, except professional alcoholism, and a student of a technical university. They were united by death under extremely similar circumstances.

The first was an elderly woman. She lived with her husband, who on the eve of her death went to the dacha for some business, where he decided to spend the night and return to the city in the morning. When he returned, he found his dead wife in the bathroom. She was lying on her back, with her head against the wall opposite the door (where the shower is), she did not fall, she met death lying down, the old lady died of acute cardiac pathology.

The main thing that struck me when I crossed the threshold of the bathroom was the expression on her face. Usually corpses don't have any special expression, here: a face with dead eyes looked at me, distorted by some kind of inhuman fear, the quintessence of horror. It was the most horrible grimace I've ever seen at that moment in my life. It is impossible to forget and impossible to confuse. It is difficult to describe, and, I think, no actor, whether his teacher is Stanislavsky three times and Alfred Hitchcock four times, will be able to portray it.

It was unpleasant to be there, and I tried to finish all the formalities as soon as possible. Then I did not pay attention to one important detail: when her husband returned, the bathroom door was not only unlocked, but also wide open.

The next incident occurred about a month later. A drunk who doesn't work anywhere, about forty years old. Lived alone, when such people die, they are usually found only when a cadaverous smell begins to emanate from their apartment. But then his drinking buddy saw in the morning that the door to the apartment was ajar. He looked inside, saw the corpse of a friend, and called us and the cops.

The body was lying in the corridor. On his face was the same indescribable expression of inhuman fear. The eyes look towards the slightly open front door. A cursory examination revealed no signs of violent death. Apparently, VCS is a sudden coronary death. The face of the deceased was like two drops of water similar to the face of that elderly lady. At first sight of him, a cold sweat broke out on me, and goosebumps crawled over my body. In my head, two cases merged into one picture. I imagined how this guy was already lying in bed (he was in pajama pants, but naked to the waist), heard some noise from the front door, left the room into the corridor, + and saw something that could kill a strong, rather callous man by its very appearance.

The call to the student was a couple of weeks after drinking. He, too, could soon be discovered, but the owner of his rented apartment came to check every month on a certain day. It turned out that in that month, this day followed the night when the student died. The body was lying in its bed, but the head was on the opposite side of the pillow and hung down. It was as if he was trying to jump away from something towards the window, by the way, he lived on the second floor, so it was quite possible to escape through the window. Why did I think he was trying to escape from something unknown? The same expression of animal horror, the eyes staring into the half-open closet door, all this was painfully familiar to me.

I do not know what happened to these people. I don't want to think and imagine WHAT could open the door of the room or the front door in the middle of the night and appear before their eyes. What kind of creature was it that could only kill with its appearance or gaze? I couldn't write on the call card that these people died of FEAR, but that's exactly what really happened. On a fateful night, they found themselves alone in their apartment alone with something unknown, face to face with SOMETHING so terrible that their hearts failed.

I also live alone. Now I drink a bottle of vodka every night. Otherwise I can't sleep; I'm waiting for HER to come out of the dark. Yes, I will probably die of pancreatic necrosis. Such an amount of alcohol will not go unnoticed, but I would prefer such a death than what I saw on these three calls.