Short Story: the Chapel
My attempt at some Gothic horror, the end might seem abrupt cos i changed my mind about it halfway...mainly a descriptive exercise.
The Chapel
The world paused for a moment, the dry hissing susurration of the mistral chasing through the rye dying away like shadows before the candle flame. The merest creak of old wood, the sound of masonry shifting and grumbling. The windowless old chapel crouched on the top of a low ridge, splintered and bent in outline, the single track leading to it wide enough for one man only, and with reason. No gargoyles adorned it, nor friezes to chastise and educate the faithful. The porch was ramshackle and offered no protection, and no graves or relics nor even a picket fence gave any impression that the chapel was part of the land or the community. The nearest village was miles away, beyond the briar tangle of the woods, and everyone knew that the land about the chapel was no good anyway, rocky and barren. All superstitions have a basis in fact.
It began to rain.
The sky was dark now, clouds indistinguishable and confused, spitting constantly at the earth until myriad showers merged into one curtain of pelting water that spattered and trickled from eaves and coursed through gutters and briefly threw up tiny craters in the dry mud around the chapel. Lightning would have been appropriate, thought Brother Faustus. Thunder and lightning, to underscore his work, to emphasise and counterpoint and punctuate. A leak in the roof somewhere sent a cascade of chilling rainwater coursing down a beam and onto a pew, as always causing a grim smile to form on the monk’s scarred features. As if anyone would sit in this chapel. On these pews.
Faustus finished his preparations. The Book sat on the lectern before him, its pages yellow and crackling, covered with scrawled writing , as if the writer had tried to trace the flight of swallows or the flash of a shoal of fishes, interspersed with symbols and fragments of Latin and Greek, Arabic and older, more archaic tongues. Faustus had placed the candles, ordinary wax mixed with rodent blood, streaked and gnarled, but merely from a sense of ritual than because he actually needed the things. He could read the relevant passages by heart, from memory, from memories. Of things he wished he had not seen and done…
The candlelight also, incidentally, illuminated the most important part of the ritual. Scatterings of chalk markings ran across the dusty wooden floor from the brass circle inlaid before the lectern to the pew in the fourth row. If one looked at the pews (if one wanted to take a second look after venturing beneath the lintel, carved with relatively standard human faces in torment), one might conclude that the woodcarvers had perhaps died during their work, or payment had been stopped, or possibly they or the patrons had been so disturbed by the results that they had ordered work to cease immediately.
Some pews, like the one to which the markings ran (as if on tiny feet or hands, or snakelike, slithering) had blank finials above the backrest, mere five sided columns sanded smooth and varnished to a gleaming darkness unlike the rest of the chapel’s woodwork. Some did not. About an inch or two from the headrest, wood bubbled and boiled, frozen with sores and trickles like pus from an infected wound. Veins and tendons emerged from the sickening corruption, growing and thickening into necks…above this, rested the forms of heads, perverted features writhing with hate and agony and vileness. Fangs and beaks and jaws abounded, bones sharp or skin hanging, yet every one of these loathsome caricatures had a single defining, common feature. Eyes…saucers, pits of blackness, glittering with malign and fearful lust. While all other features were static and given animation only by the fitful candlelight, Faustus knew that if he should blow out the candles, all he would see would be a myriad of pinpricks, light reflected where there was none to reflect, the walls of their lust and hate and fury gathering about him, cloaking him, crushing his soul…and were it not for the rain, he would be able to hear, as he so often had before, the murmuring of voices in his head and the scratching at the surface of his skin, insistent, like a cat at a locked door. The insistent breeze of the seasonal wind of this part of France, the mistral, was nothing by comparison, a mere feathery caress on his physical self.
The rain stopped, suddenly. The air hung, heavy and sodden, as the wind died and the murmurs began, at first faint and indistinguishable from the gentle trickle of water down the sides of the ancient structure. Faustus stepped behind the lectern. Where blank floor had been, now sat a small box, carved with a single symbol, twisting in on itself in wild patterns, thorny and shifting, bringing to mind a trap a cage, a construction of wire and barbs. The murmuring ceased. Nothing moved. A sense of buzzing pressure, air straining to get out of the building, pulled at the monk’s robe and thinning hair as he stood motionless, staring at his hands as they clasped the lectern, at the scars and scratches he would carry to the grave, earned in service to a greater power.
He began to recite. The words rang in the stillness, heavy and dull, on and on. The pages began to turn, slowly, and all the while Faustus’ hands gripped the lectern, sweat beginning to spring beneath them. Air sighed, swirled, the subtlest shifting of wood around the gloom of the chapel. Faustus’ voice droned on, rising, falling, but never ceasing, echoes growing and feeding with surprising power for such a small building. Imperceptibly a grim and shivering light began to spring into the shadows, emanating from the pews themselves, highlighting new and hideous features upon the carvings, skulls leering, maggots crawling, all the panoply of death and decay dripping forth from timber features.
Faustus stopped. The air quivered now, a whining hum filling the void. Light coalesced into the circle above the box, questing along the markings upon the floor. Faustus wanted to shut his eyes, to shriek, to scramble and fall and stagger out, away, into the dampness of natural night to hide beneath a hedgerow and forget for all time…instead he waited.
Faint tendrils of light crawled, drifted, aimless but with a terrible sense of purpose, stopping at one marking after another. Faustus fought the terrible urge to leap down and scatter them with his hands, swat them like vermin. His hands shook, white and strained where they still clutched the lectern.
The tendril stopped at the final marking, then…streamed. Thinning out, leaping with heart-stopping speed, lunging into the solid wood. Then it was gone. The building shook, water and dust and splinters crackling and pattering onto the floor.
Frenzied heaving as the earth fought to rid itself of the black infection above it, a wordless howl rising above the tumult. Faustus straightened his back, and shouted a single desperate syllable in a voice unrecognisable from his own.
Silence, stretching, tingling. Then, as one, in a terrible, impossible choreography of movement and liquid fluidity, every demonic head on every misshapen pew…twisted. Staring at the box.
It opened.
Faustus smiled in relief. The moment of acceptance was always a difficult one.
Feeding time, he thought.
Three miles away, in the village of Colonnes, the futile search for Monsieur Labardes’ six year old daughter Sybile continued by torchlight, rain hissing as it struck flaring tinder, lighting the desperate eyes of peasant folk as they slogged through the mud and brambles. They never thought of the old chapel and, being superstitious folk, would not have gone near it in the dark. After all, they knew that it was best not to tempt fate. All superstitions have a basis in fact.
The next morning, the number of blank finials had decreased by one…
Ahaaaaaar
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Re: Short Story: the Chapel
Originally Posted by Ludens
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