"I’m sorry I had to do that.”
Preacher Preaker and I were standing at the back of the church, as he blindly blew out the candles lit there. I just stood and watched, one hand pressing fingertips gingerly against the spot where, only about an hour earlier, my right ear had been. I didn’t comment. What do you say to someone who just magicked away your ear?
But there was something else that kept me quiet.
I couldn’t get the image of the creature I had seen out of my mind.
Maybe seen wasn’t entirely accurate. Hallucinated? I decided to tentatively broach the subject, a sort of insanity litmus test for myself as much as fishing for information.
“What… what was that?” I asked, my voice low and incredulous.
The Preacher bent, his whiskered face coming dangerously close to the flame. But he pulled back, and blew it into a wisp of smoke, which curled like a tendril up and into his reddened empty eye socket.
“They call it My God,” he answered. “Though I am quite certain it is nothing of the sort.”
That? That was it? That was the alleged “My God”, the thing I had now seen two congregations and two Preacher passionately worship. Though, the way the Preacher spoke of it… something told me he wasn’t practicing what he preached.
“I—what—” I floundered for words for a moment. Then, I asked something very simple, something that in different circumstances, may have been the most important thing. “Where did my ear go?”
“Where all the ears go,” Preacher Preaker said with a small chuckle. His face fell at my lack of response. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. It’s just… compared to the loss that’s taken place here, it’s hard to take note of a single ear.” He cleared his throat. “You’ve seen the congregation, I trust.”
“Uh, yeah, I saw them,” I said, grateful that finally I had someone to talk to about the odd and terrifying things I had seen.
Preacher Preaker shook his head sadly. “They’ve given it all away. Bits and pieces of themselves traded as gifts in order to experience the glory of My God. And when there’s nothing left, well…” he turned to me, his two hollow eye holes seeming to stare directly at me. “They need to bring in newcomers. If I hadn’t taken your ear today, both you and I wouldn’t be here to have this conversation.”
I shuddered, feeling slightly better about my one less extremity. I hesitated a moment, before asking the next question on my mind. “Is that… is that what happened to your eye? The other one, I mean.”
The Preacher’s weak and withered hand rose to his face, his yellowed fingernails tracing the red blistered edge of his torn out eye. “Yes. And no.” He motioned to the pew in front of him. “Take a seat Samuel. I must tell you everything I know in its entirety, or not at all.”
I did as I was told, and then Preacher Preaker began to talk to me about worlds.
“As you may have guessed, the confessional at our Church of Habitsville, as well as the one here, are not what they appear to be. The best I can describe them, though I cannot begin to understand it, is as two ends of a single passageway.”
Already I was deeply confused. “A passageway…” I repeated, recalling the prolonged, terrifying journey I had traveled after being thrown into the box. “A passageway between what?”
Preacher Preaker shook his head. “Worlds? Dimensions, realities—perhaps dreams. I cannot pretend to know.” He raised a wrinkled, withered arm, and placed it on my shoulder, hunching in front of me, as though to look me in the eyes. “The important thing to know, is the Habitsville you now stand in, the Habitsville that hosts the air you breath at this very moment—it both is and is not yourHabitsville.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t getting this. “Even if that sort of thing exists… evil parallel universes out of sci-fi movies… how could it both be and not be the same place?”
Preacher Preaker stood back up, and brought his two slightly shaking hands in front of him, and carefully intertwined his spindly fingers. “Because, the two places are inextricably linked. Through passageways, like the confessional…”
“… or the bottom of Lake Lura,” I said, thoroughly shocked.
“I’m not aware of others, though I’m sure there are many,” he said gravely. “Through these passageways, the two have become mixed. Events in one world have an impact in the other, and bits and pieces of each filter through.” He paused. “That’s us, Samuel. We are bits and pieces that have filtered through.”
My mind raced faster than my mouth could form coherent questions. Two worlds, nearly identical—but this one… this one was far more terrible. And perhaps all of the odd and disturbing things that had been happening in my Habitsville, the things I had been reporting on—maybe they were just echoes of things and beings that belonged here.
And then there was the fact that there were two Preacher Preakers, and two congregations.
And there was what I had seen at the bottom of Lake Lura.
Could it be that everyonefrom my Habitsville had a double living here?
“I know you must have quite a few questions,” Preacher Preaker said gently. “But I’m afraid I don’t have the time nor the knowledge to answer them. He’ll be back soon.”
I swallowed. “He?”
“The other Preacher. You won’t want to be here when he does.”
I gazed into the old man’s face, my eyes once again drifting to that reddened spot where one of his own should have been. “Did he… do that?” I asked, making a gesture towards the wound despite knowing it wouldn’t be seen.
Preacher Preaker’s hand twitched slightly, the urge to touch the empty space not yet gone. “Yes, yes he did.”
“Why?”
“The thing they worship here—My God, as they call it—is something that members of the Church are constantly trying to feed. From what I understand, if the being experiences hunger, it could wreak havoc on their very existence. It’s the same reason that I had to take your ear. And the same reason the other Preacher attempted to take my eye. Or rather, attempted to use My God to take my eye.”
“But there’s a difference, between our Habitsville and this one. We don’t have My God, and its power, for whatever reason, does not extend to our world. This is why, when the other Preacher found me in the confessional,my confessional, not yet crossed over into his realm, he was unable to call upon My God to take my eye as a sacrifice.”
The old man shuddered, the expression of fear easy to see, even with the gaping holes. “To put it short, Samuel, so determined he was in his religious endeavors, that he took it…manually.” He grimaced. “And when My God did not answer him—well, he took it as a sacrifice to himself.”
My stomach lurched. The miracle that the Church of Habitsville—my Habitsville—had celebrated, the fact that their Preacher had returned out of the confessional with two eyes instead of the one he had entered with, wasn’t a miracle at all.
The other Preacher Preaker had taken this Preacher Preaker’s eye and popped it into his own head.
I tried to push down the bile that rose in my throat. “So… the other Preacher…what’s he doing at your Church?”
The old man cleared his throat. “I suppose he’s trying to form his own congregation. Because shepherd to a new flock.”
My eyes glanced back to that mural behind the pulpit, and I shook my head. “You don’t mean—”
“Yes, I’m afraid. I believe he plans on taking those people apart, piece by piece.”
The mental image itself was enough to incite panic within me. It had been horrible enough, seeing the effects of what had taken place here. But without that bizarre creature to give it too, the congregation from my Habitsville wouldn’t be left smooth and featureless.
They would be physically torn apart.
And who’s to say the other Preacher would stop at the congregation?
“What do we do?”
The old man gave a tired smile. “Destroy the Preacher’s access to your Habitsville, stop the influence of My God there, and I believe they can be saved.” He paused.
“You have to go back, Sam.”
Suddenly, there was a sound. A deep, whooshing noise that caused a terrible pressure in my ears—well, ear—and very quickly, Preacher Preaker turned his head towards the confessional, then gripped me by the shoulder, and led me to the door at the back of the Church.
“He’s coming. You must leave.”
“But the confessional—how am I supposed to get back?”
He pulled open the door and shoved me outside, into the sunlight. “You say you know of other portals. I’m sure this version of our town is no different. Now go. And Godspeed.”
And then, the door shut behind me.
I looked around. it was a familiar place, of course—the outskirts of town, near Idle forest. Despite all of the heinous things that the Preacher had just told me about this version of home, it was difficult to believe. Birds were chirping, the sun was out...
I decided to risk another peek back into the Church.
I now wish I hadn’t.
Preacher Preaker—my Habitsville’s Preacher Preaker—had walked briskly back up to the podium at the front of the room. That was where he was standing when an identical shape emerged from the confessional. I say identical, but it had a few key differences.
The eyes, for one. Not just the two that rolled around in the Preacher’s head.
There were about five of them, bloodied, all different colored, pushed into carved-out holes in his skin.
---
Credits
Comments