The church sits on the outskirts of town, a tall steepled building with white peeling paint and a small fenced cemetery by its side. It’s small and traditional—the men show up with hats and suits, the women in dresses, the children uncomfortable in their tiny versions of their parent’s outfits. If you take a walk down the shaded grove outside of Idle Forest at seven in the morning on a Sunday, you can hear the echoey sound of the congregation singing their haunting hymns out into the brisk air.
If you walk by at a later time, you hear something different—the loud, powerful boom of a man’s voice, adamantly speaking to his audience. The Preacher, Abraham Preaker, addresses his Church with the same amount of forcefulness and gusto each week. He has a straggled white beard below a bald and shiny head. He only has the one eye, but it’s a bright, vibrant blue. The other he doesn’t cover, just lets the empty socket rest on his face uncovered.
He keeps to himself, rarely traveling into town and instead subsiding on the produce from the Church’s garden. His congregation is small, but devout, and this commands a certain amount of respect. For the most part, the rest of Habitsville leaves the Church and it’s Preacher alone. I certainly don’t know him.
And now, I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to.
Ironically, it happened on a Sunday. A crowd had gathered around the police station halfway through the morning, and officers were trying to take statements from the distraught mob. I can see the station from the window of the Habitsville Gazette office, where I work, which is pretty handy for spotting potential news stories in the making. I could tell from their outfits that it was the Church’s congregation, which was an odd sight—to see them there, in the middle of town, talking to the police on a Sunday morning.
I quickly made my way over, trying my best to blend in with the oddly dressed crowd. I’ve got a little press badge with my name, Samuel Singer, which usually gets me into most places without too many questions.
Women with hair to their waists were crying, children tucked into the folds of their dresses, while men stood by them, jaws clenched and solemn. I could hear bits and pieces of what they were saying, and slowly put together an incredible story:
“Preacher Preaker went in to the confession box…”
“He went in, and we waited, like usual…”
“We kept waiting, and waiting,”
“Finally Joseph opened the door, which normally we would never do, and—”
“And the Preacher was just…. Gone.”
A disappearance. Not something entirely unheard of in Habitsville, but certainly something strange and alarming. No one was quite sure what had happened, or why the Preacher was going into the confessional in the first place. I jotted a few details down into my notebook, as the police did the same onto their pads of paper, and then made my way back to my office, feeling a cold chill I hadn’t before. Even though I’m used to the strange things that happen in Habitsville, sometimes they still get to me.
About a week passed, and there was no sign of the Preacher. The police came to the Church, examined the confessional where he was last seen, looked through the things in the loft above the service room where he had slept. Still, there was nothing.
Some believed he went on some sort of religious retreat, while others thought perhaps he had been called away by some higher power.
And others believed that something very, very bad happened to Preacher Preaker.
I tried not to pay these rumors any mind. They were founded in a long-standing discriminatory stance the majority of the town had taken against the Church, many citizens believing that there was something suspicious or sinister happening at their meetings. I figured this was just because the Church’s members were separated from the rest of the town, both physically and culturally, and people tend to fear things they don’t understand.
Then, something happened. Something the Church’s congregation called a miracle.
The Preacher returned.
If you walked on the outskirts of Idle Forest the following Sunday, you would have heard something unique: a few dozen gasps, a few screams, and the thud of someone fainting and hitting a wooden floor, hard.
As the police would record it later, the members of the Church had shown up that Sunday dressed in black, mourning their missing leader. They had sat in their usual pews, and bowed their heads to pray before an empty pulpit, collectively begging their God to bring Preacher Preaker back to them.
And then, the door to the old confessional had creaked open, and there he was: bald head shining under the dim morning light with a grin wide and crooked.
Preacher Preaker was back.
What happened afterwards is hard to pin down. Once the police got their information and their crime was somewhat solved, it became harder for me to find information from primary sources, and instead I only had a constant stream of rumors filtered down through the countless mouths of Habitsville’s gossipers.
One thing that was certain: things had changed for the Church of Habitsville.
The biggest change was the most obvious. Although the Church had had little to do with the town before, content with their symbiotic long-distance relationship with their namesake, the members of the congregation were now routinely seen about town.
They stood on street corners, in their strange outfits, and handed out flyers. Brightly colored bits of papers passed from their hands to the reluctant grasps of Habitsville citizens, the text encouraging them each to do something they had never been asked to do before: to attend the next Sunday sermon.
Though the majority of these strange advertisements ended up in the garbage can, the Church’s influence reached at least one Habitsville citizen.
Me.
The next Sunday, there I was: sitting on the uncomfortable wood of a church pew for the first time in years, sticking out like a sore thumb amongst strangers, waiting for Preacher Preaker to take the stage.
I hadn’t taken a suddenly religious turn, no. I just had that feeling, a sense I’d been cultivating during my career as a reporter, one that got me into more scrapes then I can count.
There was a story here.
The Church pulpit had a plain display, with just a small chipped podium in the very center—behind it, an aged oil painting of an idyllic rural scene, the classic pasture full of sheep. Standing next to them the shepherd, armed with his curved crook raised above his head. I knew it was meant to look like he was giving them guidance, but it honestly looked like he was about to bludgeon them.
And off to the right, I could see it—the confessional, short and wooden. It wasn’t like the one’s I had seen on television, or in movies. There was no ornate woodworking, no sense of divinity. They were two square boxes, so stout that it would uncomfortable for a grown adult to get inside. They were unpainted, and old. There was something I didn’t like about them. Maybe it was just because of what had allegedly happened to the Preacher, or maybe it was something else—but there was something not right about that confessional. Like it had a permanent shadow over it, cold and overcast.
There were murmurs in the crowd around me, but not in the usual style of the average church service. There were no “good mornings” being exchanged, no handshakes or kisses on the cheek—instead, the speaking was strangely low and energetic, filling the room with a humthat resonated up in the dusty rafters.
But the sound was cut sharply with a sudden creakas, bizarrely, the door to the right side of the confessional opened, and out emerged the Preacher.
A hush fell over the crowd. The Preacher unfurled himself from the bent position he must have held in the confessional, his ordinary button up shirt and jeans making my brows furrow. He smiled at his attendants. When I saw his face, I jumped—there was something the rumors around town hadn’t spoke of.
Before the Preacher went missing, he was missing one of his eyes. Now, as he stood in front of me, I could see it—two bright, vibrant blue eyes, a shepherd gazing upon his flock. It wasn’t glass, I could tell that much from the naturalness of his movements. It was like he recovered the one he had lost, and popped it right back into his skull.
His eyes wandered over the crowd as he made his way to the podium. I swear, they lingered on me for far too long. Then, he spread his arms, and spoke.
“Thank you for coming children,” he said in a southern drawl that wasn’t standard in Habitsville. “It’s nice to see that we’ve brought in a new face this blessed Sunday morning.” I felt the attention in the room shift towards me, and as I looked around, I noticed something—I was the only new attendant in the church. Whatever advertisements the congregation had been attempting on the streets hadn’t attracted anyone new.
Except me.
The Preacher stepped away from the podium and began to walk, hands still outstretched to either side, as though he was balancing . “I was walking by the stream earlier today,” he started, pacing the length of the stage, “and I was thinking about the two single most important factors of my existence. My God,” he said, then turning his head to the audience, “and all of you.”
“And as I thought about these two very important things in my life, I came to a conclusion: we have a major issue.” The crowd looked around worriedly, but I kept my eyes on the Preacher as he reached the end of the stage and turned, the side of his face that should have had the empty eye socket now the one closest to us.
“We have a major issue with accountability.”
He turned to face the front again, and smiled, softer this time. “I know we talked about this just a little bit at our last meeting, and I thank you for your ready and willing participation.” His eyes flickered once again, just for a moment, towards me. “I know in the past I’ve preached words of introspectiveness, and self-evaluation. I encouraged asking yourself how you can live your life better, for yourself and for My God.”
He raised his arms even higher. “And now I propose to you a different question—one that I have found to be far more important.” He paused, and when his voice spoke again, it was a low growl.
“What have you done for My God today?”
The crowd began to murmur again, quivering with that same excitement as before. “Now this is not a question for yourselves,” the Preacher said forcefully. “It is a question to ask of your fellow man. Go ahead. Do it now. Turn to your brother or sister beside you and ask. What have you done for My God today?”
The crowd moved in unison, and as the old woman next to me turned and asked me that strange question, I myself didn’t move my lips.
“It’s okay to get angry,” the Preacher shouted above the din, and as he did no, the crowd grew even louder. “Modern religion would have you believe that everything, all the misfortune you suffer, the heartaches of this world, all of it is resting on your shoulders. But that’s not true, is it? There’s always someone else who could be doing more. This was what I thought of, as I walked along the stream.”
This felt wrong. That same feeling that I got when I let my gaze creep over to the confessional sunk in to my bones, and I fought the urge to get up and leave that congregation, to never enter the Church of Habitsville again.
My hands curled around the thin seat of my pew as my mind sought an escape route, a way to quietly exit the Church without drawing attention. As my eyes darted from blank wall to blank wall, I realized the only exit was the set of double doors at the very back of the room, the one’s we had all entered through.
“Sam Singer.”
I looked up. The congregation had gone silent. The Preacher had walked off the stage, and now stood, hands behind his back, at the end of my pew. He stared down at me, one familiar eye and one a stranger, and he bent at the waist to bring his aged face closer to mine.
He smiled that wide grin with crooked teeth, and then he asked.
“What have you done for My God today?”
I didn’t know how to answer. Everyone was watching me, and my hands had grown slick with sweat where I still gripped my pew seat.
“What have you done for My God today?” he asked again more forcefully.
“I—I, uh—” I spluttered, but those eyes were staring at me, and under their gaze I couldn’t form any useful words.
“What have you done for My God today? What have you done for My God today?” he chanted, over and over, and soon the entire congregation had joined him, their shouts growing so loud that if you were walking on the outskirts of Idle Forest that morning, you could surely hear it.
My heart was pounding in my chest as my head turned towards the only exit. Preacher Preaker must have known my thoughts, because as the crowd continued to change, he grabbed me hard around the arm with his huge hand.
He dragged me by my elbow to the front of the room, walked directly past the podium, until we stood in front of those two terrible boxes.
Amidst the crowd cheering, I could hear what he said to me:
“If you aren’t ready to answer the call of My God, boy,” he muttered lowly, “then confess.”
Then, he threw me in.
---
Credits
Comments