Short story by Nora Drenalina
Nobody in Kampung Senduduk has ever spoken about the ruins of the old community clinic behind the hill. Not since the night of the monsoon blackout, when the janitor vanished.
The janitor had disappeared without any trace. No screams. No struggle. Just a flashlight found spinning in a puddle of bile. Since then, the jungle had begun to take it back.
Vines overgrew the walls, and the smell of disinfectant was replaced by fungus and iron. Everyone said to stay away.
But Razif was new in town.
He’d been stationed at the community clinic to complete his rural service. A month in, he began to notice something odd.
Patients came in with stomach cramps, nausea, and bloating. Nothing unusual at first. But their complaints grew stranger: a sense of something moving inside, something sentient.
One woman swore she heard voices. The voices sounded like soft, burbling whispers that echoed from her gut.
“It says it’s hungry,” she told the young doctor, pale and trembling. “It wants… old things.”
He laughed it off. Food poisoning, maybe. A shared parasite from tainted water. But then more came in.
Each one came in with a severely bloated abdomen and wide, glassy eyes, swearing something lived in their intestines. They started vomiting odd items: rusted nails, old teeth, pieces of leather.
Razif checked their histories. One thing connected them: They’d all recently visited the old hospital ruins.
He looked it up. There had been a video long forgotten titled “Hantu Perut Klinik Lama”.
It was from a live stream made by a group of teens from inside the old gastro ward. Most of the footage was shaky and silly.
But near the end, the video showed that something had splashed loudly off-screen, followed by sounds of heaving and sobbing.
The clip went dark for a second, and then returned to show a jar, labeled “COLONY 1971”.
That was the last upload from that account.
Curiosity finally overcame him. Razif set out with a flashlight and a medkit one morning, just as the mist began to rise from the hills.
He walked through the main corridor, past the front counter and the broken cabinets. He found the gastro ward.
The air was thick with a smell like rotting meat and fermented milk.
He found dozens of jars on a shelf in the back. They were labeled with handwritten notes on yellowed masking tape: Appendix. Duodenum. Jejunum. Colon.
Another jar was labeled “Semicolon,” though the word had been scratched out and corrected with a hasty “Sigmoid colon.”
Some jars were empty. Others… not quite.
A churning noise rose from the drain beneath his feet.
He backed away. But it was too late.
Something rose up. Not fast. Not violent. Just a long, uncoiling segment of intestine, pale and veined, slick with decades-old fluid.
It slithered from the floor drain like a hungry eel, dragging behind it a stained stethoscope and a hospital ID card fused to its wet folds.
It moved toward him. Razif tried to run, but slipped.
The intestine wrapped around his ankle.
He screamed.
Nobody found Razif the next morning. Only his white coat, soaked and half-swallowed by the floor drain.
His house is locked now. But neighbors say strange smells come from the bathroom window at night. It smells like rust and stomach acid.
Sometimes, on windless nights, if you stand very still by the drainpipes, you might hear a whisper:
“Still digesting.”
This spine-chilling tale of sentient intestines and haunted gastro wards was penned by the Nora Drenalina early one morning while she was battling a very real, very uncomfortable case of gas.
What started as a mundane bout of indigestion and rebellious digestive tracts proved to be a terrifying inspiration for her.
We highly recommend reading this story with a soothing cup of ginger tea, and perhaps staying far, far away from any abandoned hospital drains.
We believe that fiction is a powerful way to build empathy and help us better understand the natural world.
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