When the door of the confessional shut behind me, something odd happened.
The voices that had been chanting that same strange question over and over outside in the church—they were gone. Not like the congregation merely stopped chanting. It was as though I had been plunged into a deep pool of water, and was no longer a part of the events taking place in the world outside of my box.
To say I was unnerved would be an understatement.
I felt the surface of the panel of wood behind me, eager to find whatever latch was keeping the door shut. But, I found nothing but ragged wood. I pushed on it, leaning my weight on the aged material, but it was no use. I was stuck.
It was so dark that I might have well have kept my eyes shut, so little use they were to me. It was incredibly disorienting, and I found myself instinctively bringing my fingertips to my face, as though to make sure I was still there.
But soon, I wouldn’t need to remind myself of my presence.
I tried calling out. “Hello?” I said softly, then winced. It was bizarre—somehow, even that small sound made me flinch, like every sound wave was a needle piercing my ear drums. I tried calling out louder while plugging my ears, even pounding on the box’s walls, but nothing seemed to have any accomplishment besides hurting me immensely.
As I sat, hunched in the small square space, I grew more and more uncomfortable. Not because of my cramped position, or the peculiar situation I found myself in, no. It was something else: the sound of my heart.
It was loud. Not just the ordinary pounding in my chest I usually felt when I was anxious,. I could feel it pulse in my ears, a terrible pressured rhythm that threatened to drive me mad. I tried to shake myself of it, making little jokes about Poe in my head, but thoughts couldn’t drown out the sound of it. Thump thump, thump thump, thump thump, thump thump.
But that wasn’t all. Each breath I inhaled sounded like a gale force wind, entering through my nostrils, whistling shrilly in my nasal cavity, passing through the wet flesh of my lungs and coming out moist. Some would filter back into my nose, the sheer sensation of it making me sick.
I began to try to hold my breath as long as I could, just to have a brief break from the terrible cycle. In these periods of silence, I could hear them—the other sounds, the one’s covered by the noise of breathing. My blood trickling through my veins, my intestines churning through what was left of breakfast.
I sounded like a little train, all moving parts and wet organ, whirring and pulsing to some unknown beat. I sat there, aware of each and every piece of my body, inside and out, hating my clumsy flesh and muscle for breaking the silence.
But the symphony persisted, and I found some new, worrying thought rising to my head: if my body was creating the beat, my brain seemed to be hell bent on writing the lyrics. And so, as I produced the wretched fugue, a single phrase repeated in my mind, like my own personal congregation:
What Have You Done For My God Today, What Have You Done For My God Today, What Have You Done For My God Today, What Have You Done For My God Today--
I’m sure my neurosis would have gone on like that forever, had I not been interrupted by the first sound I had heard in a while that had come from something besides myself.
I had hoped it was the opening of the confessional door, that the congregation had come to their senses and decided to let me out of their terrible box. But it hadn’t come from the correct side, emanating from somewhere in front of me, rather than the panel behind that I knew I had entered through.
The sound, sharp and aggressive in the stillness, was something I recognized. It was the distinct noise of human fingers snapping.
“I’ve found that this helps.”
I jumped violently at the voice, knocking my head against the low confessional ceiling. Though I could tell the person had spoken softly, their words came cutting through the silence, piercing my eardrums. I was surprised to feel that it actually hurtto hear it. But that wasn’t the only thing to catch me off guard.
The voice was familiar.
“Preacher Preaker?”
There was a pause, the churning of my body resuming in my ears at the same unbearable pace. I resisted the urge to snap while I waited for an answer. After another few breaths, it came:
“What’s left of him.”
I tried not to let my panic intensify, settling instead on creeping my fingers back towards the side I believed the door was on, and felt around for anything I could pry my fingers into to try to open the panel.
There was nothing.
“You cannot go out the same way you came in,” he said, as though he could see what I was doing. “Come forward.”
The silence returned, and I was confused. This was the man who had so roughly thrown me into my situation to begin with. To follow his directions seemed foolish. And yet, there was little else I was capable of doing. Having realized my limited options, I tried inching forwards.
The sound of my body scrapping against the wooden sides and floor of the confessional was so heinous it made my eyes water and my jaw clench tight. Imagine the sound of a nail on a chalkboard, then multiply it by a thousand, and you might come close.
I kept moving, sliding slowly and painfully. And, after some distance traveled, I noticed something strange: I wasn’t hitting another wall.
“Keep going,” Preacher Preaker’s disembodied voice said, and reluctantly, I did.
The shrill scraping continued to assault my eardrums as I kept moving. At one point, I lifted a hand to the side of my face, and it came back wet. I could only assume that my ears had started to bleed from the noise.
Still I persisted.
I kept shuffling despite my agony, and I realized something that seemed impossible: the confessional wasn’t a box at all. Instead, somehow, it was a long narrow tunnel. Though from the outside it had been two connected squares of wood, it was, well—it was bigger on the inside.
“How much farther?” I cautiously called out, but I received no answer. And then, I hit something—something made of flat, rough, ragged wood.
I tapped on it, but the resonating sound only added to the cacophony of pain already swirling around my head, so I stopped. “Preacher?” I whispered, my shaking voice betraying the fear I felt.
And then, there was light.
With the loudest sound yet, the panel I had reached creaked open. The light that assaulted me was so intense after the sensory deprivation that I nearly passed out. Blood dripped from every opening on my face, and if I could see if there was anyone in front of me, I could only imagine their reaction at uncovering such a hellish figure.
“Be calm, son,” Preacher Preaker’s voice said from a distance, though I was anything but.
I blinked over and over, trying to get my pupils to readjust, and when they did, I was struck by a peculiar sight. It seemed impossible, seeing as how long I spent in the box and how far I had felt myself travel. But somehow, I was back in the Church of Habitsville, in exactly the same place I had entered in, only now I was emerging from the left side of the confessional.
As I surveyed my surroundings, I found that wasn’t the only difference.
Though the confessional when I had entered had been on the right of the Church display, I could tell plainly that this one was on the left. Had they picked it up and moved it for some reason? With me inside? The podium still stood in the very center, and it was still chipped, but the painting behind it had changed. It was still a rural scene, but it was far from idyllic.
The shepherd, rather than having his crook raised in guidance and authority, held something very different in his hands, brandished proudly in front of the rest of the flock: a lamb’s severed head, dripping scarlet blood down onto white fleece.
I ignored the terrible feeling of dread that clawed at my chest, and instead turned to the pews, where the congregation had been sitting previously, when they had chanted that strange and unanswerable question.
They were empty.
The entire congregation was gone, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I had no way of knowing how long I had spent in the confessional, so it was entirely possible that the service had ended and everyone had gone home. But this seemed different. This space at that feeling, the same as ghost towns and abandoned houses—no one had been here in a very long time.
“You made it.”
I looked around for the source of the voice, and eventually, I spotted him. There, at the end of the aisleway, was the shape of Preacher Preaker. He was kneeling on the ground, in front of a series of candles, his hands in front of him, as though I had interrupted him in prayer.
I asked the only question that made sense. “What happened?” My voice came out quiet and tasting of blood, my ears still readjusting to the presence of sound. I walked carefully towards the Preacher where he knelt, each echoing food step on the cold hard floor making me wince.
“That’s a good question, Samuel,” he said, “though I’m afraid you’ve used the wrong tense.” I saw his shoulders fall, and heard the slight breath of a tired sigh. Then, Preacher Preaker stood up and turned around. I took several steps back.
“What is happening to you, is happening to me,” he said with a solemn grin full of teeth.
Both his eye sockets, however, were completely and utterly empty.
---
Credits
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