It took every ounce of my willpower not to retch right there, on the Church’s doorstep.
The newly emerged Preacher was terrifyingly gruesome. Thoughtthe eyes beveled into his skin had been the first addition I had noticed, they weren’t the only change the Other Preacher had undergone during his time away—a few ears were sewn onto his arms like fins, poking through the holes cut in his shirt, the edges of which were frayed and tinged red. He had a nose grafted to his neck, and bits and pieces of flesh stuck to his chest, which I soon realized with horror were lips.
The blind Preacher Preaker didn’t look the least bit afraid, though I assumed this was a combination of good acting and not being able to see the monstrosity in front of him. I could hear the conversation they were having through the crack in the Church’s door. I thought, somewhat foolishly, that if I waited for the strange Preacher to leave once again, I could take Preacher Preaker—my Preacher Preaker—back to our Habitsville.
But after seeing this world’s Preacher’s new… accessories, bits and pieces of the citizens of my town, I knew I wasn’t able to wait long.
Like I said, I could hear the conversation that took place between the two identical voices, brief as it was.
“How were your travels?” my Preacher asked, his voice level and calm.
“A new and willing congregation, right behind that door,” The Other Preacher sighed, motioning back towards the confessional. “Though the reach of My God doesn’t extend to their realm, I have been an excellent stand-in, if I do say so myself. There were some second thoughts… but as you can see—oh, I’m sorry, I forgot—well, I took care of that.” He made a single sweeping gesture that my Preacher couldn’t see at the body parts that littered his being.
“Now,” he continued, marching up to my Preacher and placing two identical hands onto identical shoulders, though one of the Other Preacher’s hands had a small green eye in the middle of the back of it. He took a deep breath, his blue eyes staring into the cavernous sockets of his counterpart. Then, he asked a question.
“What have you done for My God Today?”
My Preacher cleared his throat. “I did as you asked. Took the boy’s ear, gave it to… to…” he seemed to have trouble saying what came next. “Gave it to My God.”
Other Preacher clapped his hand down onto his shoulder, causing my Preacher to jump. “Wonderful. I’m happy to hear it. I’ll be sure to send more interlopers through to your congregation. Those that can’t be convinced. Feel to free to just… you know. Make them like the others. Devout worshipers.”
My Preacher nodded, and Other Preacher smiled. “I’ll head back through in a few moments. I just need to get a few things together. Grab a few of our books for the new group,” he said. Other Preacher started to walk away, and I prepared to reenter the Church, grab the blind Preacher Preaker, and flee. But then, he turned back.
“Here. You can enjoy this for a little while. Just until I leave, of course.”
And then, the Other Preacher lifted his large hand towards his own face, pinched his slender fingers together, and promptly removed his right eye.
Then, bracing his hand behind my Preacher’s head, he placed the small sphere in his bloodied eye socket. Then, with one sharp push of his palm there was an audiblepop.
My Preacher Preaker shuddered, put his own hand to his face, then let it fall.
There, lidless, was a bright blue eye, moving around loosely in my Preacher’s skull.
He couldn’t blink, but once the eye steadied, it sat there, a look of permanent shock. And Preacher Preaker wasshocked at what he had seen. This was the first time he was able to see what his Other self had been doing, back in the Habitsville he and I call home.
But he could see the Other Preacher now. And there was no way to warn him, to tell him to remain composed when in the company of his mad doppelganger. I could only watch through the crack in the door.
My Preacher’s eye roved across the Other man’s body, taking in each of the terrible things he had stitched into himself. He raised a hand, as though to brush it across one of the eyes, a large soft brown one, that was in the man’s forearm. I remembered then that those weren’t just the bits and pieces of Habitsville citizens to him, as they were to me—they were his congregation.
“Five of them…” My Preacher said incredulously, taking a step back. “Five of them have lost eyes. Eight have lost ears, four noses, and three mouths…” he trailed off into horrified silence.
And then, something changed. It was difficult to read his expression, due both to my distance from the two figures and the Preacher’s lack of eyelid and accompanying eye, but there was a shift.
Preacher Preaker got angry.
“You—you sick son of a bitch!” he said, and reached out his hands for the Other Preacher’s throat. He held it tight for a moment, two identical blue eyes meeting each other, one raw and furious, the Other bulging with the new pressure. The Other Preacher’s face was turning red, then purple, when he finally pried Preacher Preaker’s hands from his neck.
“What are you doing Abraham?” he said between gasps, his voice raspy and panicked.
“Your mission—your manifest destiny, whatever you want to call it—it isn’t going to workin the other place, can’t you see?” the old man motioned to the body parts that littered his counterpart’s body. “Whatever your—whatever My God is, this isn’t helping it. You’re merely taking people apart for yourself.”
The Other Preacher’s breathing slowed. His eyebrows constricted, and if I had to put a finger on his expression, I would say he was… disappointed.
“You have not heard the call.”
My Preacher Preaker paused in surprise, as though he had been caught in a lie. “Yes, I have.”
The Other Preacher shook his head. “No, you haven’t. And if you do not hear My God, and you do not serve My God, well… how can you possibly do anything for My God?”
My Preacher took a step back, but it was too late. The Other Preacher lunged at him, knocking him onto his back. Preacher Preaker tried to pull himself up, but instead only dragged himself and his attacker behind the podium at the front of the room, which rattled against the blows.
I knew I should have run. I should have seized the opportunity that this brutal battle was, and used it to flee back to the only place that made sense: Lake Lura. The only place in my Habitsville that had ever taken me to another version of my own town, terrifying as it was.
But it was hard to leave Preacher Preaker like that.
In a movie, when a murder happens, there’s usually a soundtrack, a weapon, and a tasteful cut away from the gore, depending on the rating. But in real life, killings are strangely silent. I could hear ragged breathing, Preacher Preaker’s feet scraping against the floor as he tried to get a foothold on the wood, the sound of the Other Preacher’s fist coming down hard onto his head—then, the feet didn’t move anymore, and it grew even quieter.
The Other Preacher stood up behind the podium, looking down at a body I couldn’t see. He bent forward. When he rose, he brought his hand back to his face, and there it was—the two eyes of Preacher Preaker.
And then, they turned right towards me.
I was running before his feet even started to move. Thankfully, the Church was on the outskirts of Idle Forest, in the depths of which Lake Lura resides. My familiarity with the path didn’t keep my heart from pounding in my chest. I knew what was waiting for me if the Other Preacher—the only Preacher, now— caught up to me. Perhaps I was to be beaten to death like my Habitsville’s Preacher—or, more likely, my senses would be sacrificed to that beast and I would become another faceless member of the congregation of My God.
I was tearing through the briars and the thickets faster now, aware of the matching set of footsteps behind me. I didn’t dare take a chance to glance back. I would already imagine what I would see: the Other Preacher Preaker, racing through the trees, twigs scraping against the open eyes on his body, his own face the picture of hunger. I wondered if he would give my pieces to My God after all, or if he had acquired a taste for the feeling of bloodied noses and ears against his skin.
I broke through another line of trees and I felt it—that same stillness, that silence that had hung in the air back in my own Habitsville, at my own Lake Lura. A few more trees, and there it was—that same still surface.
I shuddered at the thought of what awaited me in the murky, endless water—and yet, I jumped in.
I swam down, light still streaming in from the surface, waiting for whatever creature lie there to drag me to another world, hopefully my own.
And then, as I waited, my lungs beginning to ache, I looked up.
The Preacher had not jumped in after me. In fact, he hadn’t even followed me to the Lake.
No, there standing on the bank of Lake Lura, warped by the water in my eyes but recognizable all the same, was a person staring down at me, smiling.
I opened my mouth in shock, immediately taking in the foul lake water. And that was when that terrible and familiar tendril wrapped itself around my leg, and pulled me away.
I went racing through the blackness, the thing having no regard for how much water was going into my nose, into my lungs, until finally, it let go.
I broke the surface, and looked around. The same trees as my home, it seemed, but I couldn’t be sure. I climbed out of the water, and took a moment to be confused. The Preacher hadn’t chased me through the forest, or to the Lake, though he undoubtedly knew I was planning on getting rid of his access to my Habitsville.
Unless, he didn’t know about Lake Lura. The other Preacher hadn’t, when he was first talking to me about the different passageways. So, the other Preacher had thought I was just running away, still stuck in his world. Which meant, he wasn’t worried about me stopping him. Which also meant he most likely went ahead with what he was planning to do instead.
The other Preacher Preaker was coming here, through the confessional.
Though my lungs burned and my legs were soaked and heavy, I ran back to the Church as fast as I could.
I reached it, and pushed open the wooden doors, praying that I had found it back to my Habitsville, and that the Preacher hadn’t arrived yet.
The sight that met me was worse than anything I had seen up to that point.
The congregation sat in their pews, though it was far into the afternoon by that point. Their clothes were smudged with dirt, their heads bent and tired, as though they hadn’t been permitted to leave the Church in quite some time. The air was rotten with unwashed bodies and human waste. But that wasn’t all.
Blood splattered the pulpit, a great smear of it across the painting depicting the shepherd and his flock. And the people—well, I had found the source material for the other Preacher’s accessories.
There were men and women with pieces of their faces simply… scraped off, or else gouged out. Flat stumps where noses once were, red raw gashes for mouths, or empty bloody sockets where an eye once was. I even saw a little girl, no older than seven, crying out of the only large brown eye she had left.
They barely looked at me when I came in, and that was fine, because I needed to move quickly. I made my way over to that wretched box, that wooden confessional. I bent down, and on a whim, pressed my ear against its flat surface.
I could hear him, in there. The other Preacher Preaker, scraping along in the place between my world and his.
The question was, how to destroy it? A few heads turned my way as I gave the confessional a kick, but the decrepit looking wood didn’t splinter, hardly even creaked.
And then, I had an idea.
I made my way to the back of the Church. Just like in the other Habitsville’s, there they were. The candles I had seen my Preacher Preaker bent over, back when was stuck in a cold and unfamiliar place.
I took as many as I could carry, and made my way over to the confessional. The wood was dry and old, and as I held each to its surface, the flame caught.
None of the congregation tried to stop me. In fact, a few got up and helped, as though they knew the man that was coming through was not the Preacher they once knew, and My God was not theirs to worship.
We carried all of the candles over, lighting every part of the confessional we could, until it was smoldering. It burned bright in the Church, and we all watched it solemnly. I felt as though I should have been thinking of my Habitsville’s Preacher Preaker, or pondering what My God truly was, or else considering the idea that there were two Habitsville’s in existence, perhaps more.
Instead, I was thinking of only one thing. The figure I had seen, looking down at me through the surface of Lake Lura, before the creature dragged me back home.
It was me. It was Samuel Singer.
The confessional kept burning as we all stood around the fire, each thinking our own separate thoughts.
There was beating on the door, the Preacher finally making it to the other side.
No one moved forward to open it for him, and eventually, it stopped.
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Credits
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