I Follow the Rules at the Funeral Home

On my first day at work, HR handed me an employee handbook. On page 13, a handwritten note was tucked inside: “The previous six night-shift security guards have all left. Reason for leaving: not submitted by the employee.” I flipped to the back cover and found a line in tiny print: “Final authority over the interpretation of this handbook belongs to them.” I work the night shift as a security guard at a funeral home. My job is simple: keep watch over the morgue, monitor the security screens, and make sure the temperature charts for the refrigerated cabinets show no irregularities. The rules are simple, too: After 2 a.m., don't look at the security screens for more than three seconds. If the lights in the morgue switch on by themselves, don't go in to turn them off. If you've already gone inside, the previous rule no longer applies. Never take the same corridor twice on your patrol route. The second time, you must take a different route. When the last body is placed in storage, don't say his name aloud. Memorize the ten rules, and you'll survive. But the seventh guard, namely me, broke the seventh rule on my very first day. Then I discovered something. Not one of the first six guards had ever “left.” They had simply vanished from the work schedule. There were no resignation records, no handover signatures, and their things were still at their stations, but nobody thought anything of it. I was the only person in the entire funeral home who remembered they had existed. I opened the last page of the employee handbook. Someone had written a line in pencil there, in my own handwriting: “Don't look for them. If you keep searching, you'll be the next person everyone forgets.” But I have to look. The person who went missing in the funeral home three years ago was my mother.