The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  With shaky hands she retrieved the pull-out bed from below her own, thankfully it was on coasters that ran surprisingly freely on the thick carpet. The bed was already made up and just needed a pillow which she took from the walk-in closet. With a steadying breath she collected Hand-Me-Down-Henry up, he moaned softly in his sleep and murmured something about the wind and the trees, then with very little finesse, she dumped him down onto the pull-out. Sweat was now dampening her forehead and she wondered if she might have had a bad drumstick at Lucinda’s. On the low-slung bed by her side, Henry squirmed on the coolness of the fresh sheets, then scrunched his tiny body into a foetal position and fell back into a deep and settled sleep.

  Now stood by the bed, Ellie noticed the darkness filling her window and it vexed her at just how fast night had fallen. Before time had stopped for her, the grounds outside had been washed with the steady falling light of dusk. Now, however, out there was a pitch blackness so perfect it was akin to that of a deep abyssal cavern, like the blackness she’d seen inside the tunic hood of the faceless monk-like thing. She felt inexplicably drawn to it and with a shaky hand, she placed a palm flat against the glass, the night pressed a dark hand back against the pane, cooling it to her touch. With a shudder, she drew away and closed the heavy drapes, as if the fabric would help keep that unnatural darkness out, a darkness that seemed alive with a wanting to break through and fill the room.

  Ellie climbed into bed and fixed her brother’s tablet to the charging lead that had been intended for her phone. His battery was flatter than a dropped pancake and she surmised that he’d left it playing a Peppa Pig marathon whilst they were out. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done such a thing and come the morning he’d be impossible if it wasn’t available for him to watch. She felt chilled despite the warmth of the night, the cold sweat had now crept down her back and her Ramones shirt clung uncomfortably to her. She didn’t have the energy to change, instead she climbed below the light sheets, laid her spinning head on the soft pillow, and for the first time since she’d played with dolls and set up imaginary tea parties where her soft toys would sit in attendance, she left the light on while she slept.

  Chapter 15

  In the dream, Ellie was not herself. She could sense it, feel it with every fibre of her being. She did not know who she was at that point, just that the eyes through which now she saw were not her own. Ellie, although terrified by her earlier encounter in the field realised that the fear she’d felt then was what a papercut would be to losing a vital limb when held in comparison to the fear that came through this girl, who although she now seemed to share a body with, was a total stranger to her. The girl’s heart raced and thundered behind her ribs, the pounding heart felt as real as if it were her own, and as if her very soul had somehow been transplanted into a new body.

  In the past when she’d dreamt, Ellie had always been herself, no matter how fanciful or nightmarish the particular dream was, it was the one thing that every dream had in common, the one constant. She never even knew it was possible to dream as someone else. Sure, in a dream you might be a big music or film star, might be able to fly like Superman, or find yourself naked ski-jumping at the Winter Olympics, but you were always you no matter what persona or situation your mind put you in. But this felt different, it didn’t feel like a normal dream, it had a palpability to it, a realness and a feeling that no matter how hard she tried she’d be unable to steer it the way she wanted, as she sometimes managed to do in dreams that were her own. Feeling panicked Ellie willed herself to wake, yearning for consciousness, but consciousness evaded her. This dream or whatever it was had her prisoner and she was along for the ride.

  The girl whom Ellie was now passenger to was in a dense forest, her feet bare and sore, something light and squirming burdening her arms. With eyes that were not her own, she looked down at the burden. The red face of an infant festooned with strawberry blonde hair looked back. The child was no more than a few weeks old; its face showed a distressed grizzle but there was no sound coming from its lips, the child was somehow muted to her ears. She felt the wind teasing its way through the forest, it played with hair much longer and redder than her own, and with the hem of the dirtied white garment she wore. She could not decide if it were a robe, a nightie or a dress. It began in straps at the shoulders and ran all the way to just above her ankles, where delicate lace met the material, lace now splattered with greys and muddy browns. As the wind blew again a sound – no, a voice came from all around.

  “Lindeee,” the wind whispered woefully. “Come back to us Lindee-lou.”

  Ellie span looking left to right, then again turning in place trying to figure out where the voice was coming from.

  “Lindeeee.”

  The voice was nowhere and everywhere at the same time, filling her head mentally as well as aurally. She looked up to the trees, whose lipless-leaves seemed to call the name, they stirred as they spoke.

  “Lindeeeee.”

  Above, the sky was as black as sackcloth. No stars shone their ancient light from solar systems light years away, no moon looked down from its lofty orbit, yet the forest somehow held a sickening grey light. Not dusk and not the light of early dawn, it was a light like nothing she’d ever seen, and in that blackness above she had the sense of things in flight, large things with massive leathery wings that when flapped caused the very wind that carried that ethereal voice.

  Without forewarning Ellie's stomach lurched as if she'd suffered a sudden fall, and she felt the change. She was still in the woods, the trees topped by that cavernous darkness, but the body felt different, she didn’t know how she knew, she could just feel it was so. The way she knew the body she’d been in just now was not her own. She imagined that this was how Samuel Beckett, the fictional scientist in the retro TV show Quantum Leap must have felt when he switched bodies, leaping around fixing injustices and righting wrongs.

  Her arms now held another child, the face of this one different. On its head a mop of dark hair and its eyes, although wet with tears, shone brightly with an almost haunting grey.

  “Sara,” the voice now called, it sounding once again as if it was everywhere but nowhere, carried on the breeze that played with her hair, hair that Ellie realised was now blonde.

  “Why ruuunnn, Sara? Come back to usss and become.”

  A change again, another leap, another girl, another child swaddled in her arms, another sky of eternal darkness, a vastness so great that the human mind could not conceive it, just as it could not truly conceive the infinite nature of the universe. Ellie felt that if she jumped high enough the blackness would take her from the Earth and into it, and then once in that chasm of nothingness she'd fall and fall for all eternity and be gone from the world forever, left to the mercy of the unseen horrors that dwelt there. Things not of the world she knew.

  “Lucyyy,” the breeze sighed.

  “Come back to usss, Lucccy, this is your destiny, the destiny of your child, come back to usss and become.”

  The changes kept happening, one after the other, each coming faster than the other until the name whispered by that hateful voice of leaves hadn't had time to utter its first syllable before she was someone else. With the changes she had another feeling - time, it was as if with each change she was going further back, reeling from the present and into the depths of the past. For in the brief moments she’d settle, before the tumbling sensation gripped her insides she saw the forest change around her, the darkened trees looking younger and smaller. She felt as if soon the entire forest would soon be no more than the saplings of a newly planted wood in a time where the village of Trellen and The Old Chapel had been as new to the world as the multitude of infants had been who’d she’d cradled in her arms. So many girls, so many babies, and with that thought came a terrible dawning realisation of what it was she was being shown.

  Change.

  The woods were gone, now she lay restrained on the cold stone, the sound of an infant child squawked uncontrollably next t
o her. Ellie felt as if she were back in the first girl now, Lindie, whoever Lindie was. She tried to turn her head to find the distressed child, but a strap held her forehead in place with such force she could feel the pressure on the back of her head, pressure on her skull so strong that at any moment it might just crack like an egg and spill her brains out. With her head fixed painfully this way, her eyes were unable to do anything but stare at the high arching roof above.

  Through this new nightmare, Ellie now knew without a doubt what this was, and why The Old Chapel was not the idyllic getaway it should have been, why evil lurked there still and stalked children at night. Why that crucifix could never stay on the wall. This had been a chapel, just not the kind where God dwelt, if indeed there was such a thing as God. For surely if there were, he would never allow such an abomination of a place to exist upon an Earth that he'd created.

  A heart that was not her own, yet she felt as if it were, hammered in her chest and the thoughts of the mind that was not her own, and yet somehow across the bounds of time she shared in dream begged over and over, praying to a God that Ellie knew would not answer.

  God, please don’t let them kill her, Hope. Please.

  A figure now loomed over her, the robes of his tunic dark and lusciously thick, Ellie knew the robes at once. They belonged to whatever had come to her that morning and who had no doubt been in Henry’s room the night before. The Man. Only here he was in life, face fresh, skin clear and blue eyes that should have looked angelic, yet burned with an insidiousness that seemed beyond human.

  Change.

  She was back in the second girl, now living the same fate as Lindie had, held on that unforgiving stone the exact same way, and that same face looking upon her, smiling its reptilian smile with abhorrence.

  “Through the child, you will become," his voice boomed.

  “Become,” said the voices of an unseen congregation.

  Above Ellie watched the shadows. They squirmed and moved, the way shadows might dance in the guttering light of a candle left by an open window. Only these shadows moved with more purpose and the longer she observed them she saw how they seemed to hold an intelligence beyond the randomness of breeze. They slid and slipped smoothly over the beams with a silky ease and danced together, and although they were many, they were also one.

  Change.

  The third girl now, another infant bawling in terror, the same robed man stood over her as shadows danced above.

  I’ve seen enough now, Ellie shouted in her head, the words unable to form as speech on the borrowed lips of her host. I want to wake up, I’ve seen enough.

  Change.

  Another girl, and as before the changes came faster, the towering robed man always there, although now his face seemed to morph to blankness, then come back, its skin rippling as if unsure of what form to take.

  Change.

  Faster now, as it had happened in the wood, how many years she tumbled through she had no idea, decades, maybe centuries. But it couldn’t have been that long, the face of the robed man had been pretty much unchanged with every sacrifice she'd embodied, the blankness and morphing she'd seen likely no more than a product of the dream.

  This isn’t a dream, Ellie, a voice that sounded like her own, although she wasn’t quite sure was her own, said in her head. You are being shown, you are being warned.

  Warned, against what? Ellie questioned herself.

  With a start and the sensation of falling, Ellie awoke. Her breath came in rapid pants, the way a dog might breathe when locked in a hot car. Her room was dark, unnaturally so, especially as she’d fallen asleep with the light on.

  “Henry,” she said softly. There was no reply. Breath caught in her throat as she listened for the rhythmic sound of his breathing, but all that met her ears was silence. Feeling panicked she swung her legs off the bed, only instead of the floor being a few feet away, her feet met it immediately, sending pain through her heels. Her mind spun, why was she on the floor? Had she switched to the pull-out bed in the night? That had to be it. Then with dread, she realised something else was wrong, her feet were not stood on a thick, plush woollen carpet, beneath her now was hard, packed dirt.

  Chapter 16

  Carol awoke with a jolting start and not the usual rise from the depths of slumber that she was used to. Her head pounded rhythmically as if a lone monkey were pedalling a bass drum over and over behind her eyes. Blinking in the bright sunlight of a new day she realised with some confusion that she was in the lounge on the mezzanine level, half sat, and half slumped on the grey velour sofa, and not in bed in the Altar room on the ground floor where the heavy drapes kept the morning at bay. Her neck creaked and protested with all the stiffness of an old unoiled gate hinge as she sat herself up. Rob was in the matching recliner next to her; the footrest was up, and his head tilted back to an angle that opened his jaw as if he were a carnivorous plant waiting for a juicy fly. She had no recollection of actually falling asleep, nor why they hadn’t made it to the bedroom.

  I must have drunk more than I thought, Carol surmised as the pounding of a hangover-like headache continued, and then the argument with Ellie came back to her and she winced. Winced the way she had done many a time as a student, waking up still half drunk and remembering something of particular embarrassment that she’d done the night before.

  But I hadn’t been that drunk last night, she consoled herself. And certainly not drunk enough to fall asleep without making it to bed, still wearing my evening clothes. Reaching beside her, Carol fumbled for her phone, locating the handset stuffed between two apparently gadget-hungry cushions. She frowned when she saw the time was 09.45. For a few long seconds, she stared at the screen as if the display were lying to her. After a few of those lengthy seconds, when it sunk fully in that it was a quarter to ten, a feeling of wrongness germinated like a fast sprouting beanstalk in her tummy. Something felt wrong. The silence which bestowed itself upon the room was consuming, she strained her ears against it as if it were a sound itself that needed to be heard over. Nothing. No running water from a shower or a bath, no tinny but chirpy music that often played from Henry’s tablet, the bloody thing always up so loud that you could hear it in another room no matter how often she told him to turn it down. The chapel just had an empty feel to it, save for her and Rob. Empty the way you could sometimes tell a house was void of its occupants even before knocking the door to get no answer.

  They’re probably still asleep, she tried to fool herself, fighting against a mother’s intuition that had her alarm bells ringing. The headache forgotten, and the yet unfounded panic flowering inside her rapidly, Carol rushed down the hall; first, she came to Henry's room, she flung the door open. Empty.

  He was in with Ellie, that’s what the argument was about, stop panicking yourself. By the time the thought had run through her head she was at Ellie's door, her hand on the cool brass of the handle. In a swift movement she threw the door open. Empty. Her legs went weak and she leaned against the door frame for support.

  It’s late, they’ve likely gone to the garden, or maybe the games room, it’s not time to panic yet. Carol stepped into the room, the thoughts firing automatically through her head, one running fluidly into the other. Ellie's bed had been slept in, the covers were pulled back, the pillow was at a slight angle. The images flashed before her as if viewing them as pictures and not real life. On the floor was the pull-out that she’d been so reluctant to let Henry bunk on, his covers were disturbed too. His pillow had slid back off the low-slung mattress and now lay on the thick grey carpet. She bent and placed a hand on the mattress where his body would have slept. Cold. As if the bed had not been slept in at all. Her eyes scanned the room and found Henry’s tablet on Ellie’s bedside table, still plugged into the charger and next to it lay her daughter's phone. For one, Henry was always glued to his tablet in the mornings, and two, Ellie never went anywhere without her phone, even here where the nearest signal was a few miles up the road. The Old Chapel had Wifi, it worked
as far as the garden if you were near the back of the property. Booster routers had been placed throughout the building and they carried the sluggish signal to every room. Ellie had been using web-based apps to stay in touch with friends at home. Carol paused, listened again. Silence. Not a peaceful silence that might be enjoyed by a parent when the kids had been offloaded to a friend or relative. A wrong silence, one that seemed nefarious.

  Back in the hall she reached the far end of the mezzanine level and descended the rear stairs, her bare feet making no sound on the thickly carpeted and well-built staircase. Reaching the bottom, she came out by the Altar Room, The Old Chapel’s master bedroom, the door was ajar, and she pushed it open and rushed into the gloom, the morning sun held at bay by the drapes. Empty. Silence.

  Leaving her room behind she rushed down the short service passage to the kitchen. Empty. From the kitchen to the games room, the door was closed. She grabbed the handle, the panic so strong now that she felt as if it were a real beast that would birth from her throat in a scream. She swung the door open. Empty. Silence.

  On legs of jelly, she retraced her steps back through the kitchen and into the entrance lobby. The internal balcony of the lounge lay above her where Rob still slept, blissfully unaware of her growing dismay. She wanted to wake him, but not yet. If she found them enjoying the morning sun in the garden, he’d think her foolish. But you’re not going to find them, a voice whispered with silky smoothness inside her head. Carol wasn’t sure if it was her own internal monologue or something more sinister.

  They had to have gone out, that’s it, they woke and Ellie took Henry out for a walk. She went out yesterday, remember, went out and when she got back she banged the door so hard because a spider fell in her hair, remember, it gave you a fright because of what had happened to the moisturiser. But then that other voice, the voice that spoke a truth she couldn’t be ready to face said, Ellie would have woken you, she’d not have left you to sleep on the sofa. Or if they’d gone out, you’d have woken from the sound of the door, or from Henry, he can never be quiet, never. The least Ellie would have done is left a note. Her head reeled, she both wanted to explore the grounds and didn’t want to explore the grounds, for she knew that once she found them as empty as the many rooms of The Old Chapel, she’d have to face a terrifying possibility.