About[]
"A Debt to the Dead" is the fourth tale in the sixteenth episode of the first season of the Nolseep Podcast. In it, a man partners in a science project with a strange man. Written by Douglas Bramlett, it has a runtime of 10:00 and was performed by David Cummings. It is the 64th tale overall on the podcast.
Summary[]
A medical student takes a biology class where in every lab they must dissect a cadaver. A quiet, strange student named Cliff is assigned as his partner. Though Cliff is terrible at the classwork, he always excels in lab.
One of the first corpses they dissect is a woman with a bullet hole in her head. Cliff says this woman's boyfriend broke up with her. Shortly afterwards, she fell and hit her head. Sick with a combination of the headache from the injury and the heartache of the breakup, she shot herself. The student dismisses all these claims. He gets a C while Cliff gets an A.
During the next lab, Cliff inspects the body carefully, caressing it and listening for a dead heartbeat. He says this man dropped some cigarette ashes on his lap and swerved his car, getting in fatal accident. The student writes down everything Cliff says in lab from there on out, always getting high marks.
A few months later, the pair are called into the professor's office and asked if they are cheating by talking to workers at the local morgue. The student interrogates Cliff, who won't reveal how he knows these things but says it is his duty to get the dead's stories out, as they can't tell them themselves. As the semester winds down, Cliff begins failing all his classes except lab and telling of things that happened to the corpses when they were alive he couldn't possibly know.
Their last cadaver is of a man with a broken neck. There are strange lacerations all over his body and his penis is discolored. Cliff examines the corpse and begins crying, explaining that the man was a child molester that hung himself so the police couldn't catch him, but regrets doing so because he wanted to be famous. His victims' voices apparently lie within him.
The student tells Cliff to silence the voice of the man and not tell anyone what he can see so the victims can be laid to rest. Cliff refuses and says it's his debt to the dead to tell what he knows. The student angrily crushes his skull with a metal tray and arranges the scene to make it look like he slipped and hit his head on the examining table.