Why do the stained glass windows show scenes that change with the moon? What makes the candles burn with colors not of this world? How do the shadows form symbols older than the church? Why do the bells ring in patterns that match the stars? What causes the holy water to ripple without touch?
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Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.
― John Bunyan
The bells of St. Paul’s Church tolled thirteen times at midnight, though the clock face showed only twelve. Sexton Ambrose Thorne counted each resonant peal as he locked the north door, his arthritic fingers struggling with the ancient key. Forty-three years he’d served these hallowed grounds, and never once had the bells rung of their own accord.
The church stood as it had for centuries, stone walls blackened by time and the creeping lichen that seemed to form patterns too deliberate to be natural. Stained glass saints gazed down with expressions that, in certain light, appeared more like warning than blessing. Ambrose had long ago stopped looking them in the eyes.
It began with whispers during evening prayer. Parishioners claimed to hear responses to their devotions---voices that weren’t the priest’s, emanating from the empty choir loft. Then came the discovery of ceremonial candles arranged in geometric patterns each morning, their wax warm despite being unlit when Ambrose had locked up the night before.
The parish records spoke nothing of it, but local legend whispered that St. Paul’s wasn’t the first structure to occupy this land. Something older had stood here, something the early settlers had tried to sanctify by building over. The stone font near the altar bore symbols beneath its Christian carvings---revealed only when Reverend Callaghan had it moved to replace the rotting floorboards beneath.
Ambrose found himself drawn to the altar each night before leaving. Tonight was no different. The silver crucifix gleamed in the moonlight streaming through the rose window, but as he approached, something moved in his peripheral vision. The shadow of the cross stretched impossibly across the floor, elongating toward the east wall where no light should cast it.
“Hello?” His voice died in the vast space. The shadow continued to stretch until it touched the wall, then began to climb upward. Ambrose felt his heart constrict as the darkness formed a door where no door had ever existed---and worse, it was opening.
What emerged wasn’t darkness, but light---terrible, ancient light that no human eye was meant to witness. And standing bathed in its glow was a figure Ambrose recognized immediately despite having never seen her before: Yithna Morvell, the woman whose name was scratched into the underside of every pew, whose existence had been expunged from all church records in 1887.
She smiled at Ambrose with too many teeth in too wide a mouth, and spoke words that tasted like copper on his tongue though he heard them only in his mind: “The foundations remember what the walls try to forget.”
