Content warnings for this episode include: Suicidal ideation (mentioned), Violence, Death + Injury, Blood, Hand Injury, Gun Mention, Strangulation/suffocation, Drowning, Body horror, Drug Use, Smoking, Brain Death, Puppets, Racism, Homophobia, Refugee Crisis, Religious Trauma
The Empty Chapel
You were Ghulam Arman, eight years old, when you arrived in Paris, and you still remember the flashes of violence, the words scrawled against you on the sides of white stone buildings, the condemnation of politicians speaking on the radio in a language you could not yet understand that brought your mother to quickly give you the name Guillaume, and you have been Guillaume ever since. You have never quite decided what happened to Ghulam Arman, whether he still lives in you, hiding in the wet red clay of your heart, or whether he died on the journey, like so many other children on the roads across Europe. If any of your little friends that left with you from Afghanistan ever reached the cities they were bound for, they never wrote.
You grew, ten, then twelve, then fifteen, and moved just as often, and your mother did not often say much about it beyond that it was time, and that she had a friend somewhere or other, and that you were going to live with them and it was going to be better. Each move brought you further away from the smoke and the riots and the protests at the fiery heart of Paris. The last move brought you to a smaller town, Sainte-Loris, on the rising coastline, where a distant cousin named Malala had a few rooms in her house to spare, and so at fifteen you were introduced to the cold Atlantic Ocean. You kicked a football down the beach in the early morning, when the sky was still as grey as the water, and your companions were seagulls and children who crowed just as loudly.
They were never kind, but over time their demeanor changed from howling unfamiliar slurs to kicking the ball back to you to sharing contraband cigarettes out in a hidden cave in the black rock of the shoreline, beneath the foundations of the old abbey. You sat there late into the night learning how to tell crude jokes in French with the neighborhood’s boys and girls, but the one who sat with you the latest looked like both to you at different times, and called himself André.
It became a ritual, of sorts; the dwindling of your other friends until only you two remained, sitting long into the dark and watching the ships drift on the surface of the sea, and fancying that you could see the sunken neighborhoods beneath the ocean. Cigarettes tasted best when passed from his lips to yours. It was kind of a dare, at first, to see which contact would be too much, a joking caress on the hand, an arm around the shoulders of his faux leather jacket, his face hovering centimeters from yours. Neither of you backed down, and soon you did those things no longer out of irony. He confessed that his name had once been Josephine. You told him that your name had once been Ghulam Arman. He was the only one you ever told.
Your mother would be waiting up, most nights, when you returned, and direct a string of insults and questions at you as swiftly as a prayer. Why were you back so late? Who were you spending your time with, why were your grades so low, why did you reek of smoke, what drugs were you doing, reiterating to you that cousin Malala was much more traditional than she was and if she caught you fooling with neighborhood boys she would find a different family to rent the apartment, and you both would be out on the street again, and was that what you wanted? There was no defending yourself from her words and so you hurried past her up the stairs and barricaded yourself in your room until her sobbing quieted into sleep.
But each morning, she would prepare a breakfast and lunch for you and send you to school, with a kiss on the cheek, as if nothing had happened. And gradually, André was allowed in the house, and then to dinner, and then to stay over, and cousin Malala did not find a different family to rent the apartment after all.
You were eighteen when the world ended. You did not know that was what was happening, when it first began. You lay with André in bed and watched the rain form rivers down the window panes, and did not even notice the color of it. But the emergency sirens began in the early morning, and did not stop. And then the people on the television began to talk about what was happening in America, and there was a boy your age, dripping crimson, gesturing with a shovel towards a neighborhood home with a splintered door, a trail of blood. Pictures of bodies with strange features, hands stretched, skin mottled, fissures splitting skulls and offering strange eyes and teeth. Pitch-black rain, blooming across fresh water. You ran downstairs to find your door open that morning, and you watched your mother walk down the street with dozens of others, shuffling slowly north. She did not heed your calls, begging for her to return to the house, and that was the last you saw of her.
You and André stayed in the house all day, debating as to what was happening, why the sirens had not stopped, whether the rain across North America was going to come for you. And in retrospect, if it had only been the rain that had arrived, perhaps things would have been different. But in the morning hours, you looked up from the window of your small room in Sainte-Loris, and saw something glowing in the sky, burning like a cigarette stub, falling from heaven. The trail it left was black against the clouds, and it opened your world like a scar. When it fell, the power flickered, and the earth shook, and a window broke upstairs. But a meteor falling in coastal France was the last thing the world cared about that day.
The days that followed changed you rather suddenly. You had been a child, before, and the world was large and the ocean filled with boundless potential for your life. And then you were an adult, almost overnight, and you and André had only each other, and there was no escape from the neighborhoods of Sainte-Loris as fear became your neighbor. Supermarkets began to limit purchases and then to halt open traffic entirely, allowing only rationed lines in order to avoid chaos within the shelves, and in time, the offering of those shelves dwindled until they were closed entirely. The television continued to tell you of a world collapsing, and they seemed surprised, as though they had not been witnessing it as long as you had been alive.
Dreams you had of escaping the collapse died, and you felt as you had years ago, arriving in vaunted Paris. And you knew, as you did then, as your mother had steadfastly taught you, that you were going to have to fight tooth and nail if you wished to live.
You left the apartment by the shore; it was set into the ground and had no defensible doors, no means of protecting yourselves. André followed in a shock; he was quiet those days, and you half worried that he would one day be gone out the door when you turned, but at night he kissed you in a passion as if he was desperate to be alive, and he stayed. You found instead a home up on the old abbey on the shore, which had been a museum more than a holy institution, but its walls were thick grey stone and its windows were barred. You were not the only ones, but you staked a claim for a room over the gatehouse in the early days and it was respected by those who came after.
The earliest days were the most unpleasant, when the world still ground against you like stone against teeth. Soldiers and police tried to insist that the abbey was theirs alone, but you kept the doors shut and in time they gave up on their assaults. The world roared and howled with beasts of all kinds, and the rain darkened day by day, and friends that you had played on the beach with were lost one by one in a storm of blood.
But that was only at first. A year passed, and you and André were still alive. And then five years, celebrated around a bonfire in the abbey’s large front court, ringed by gardens. And then ten, and by then few indeed came to challenge your abbey. A strange calm had begun to assert itself in the world, one that made you think of the chanting prayers of your mother, of the images she had dreamt of serene Jannah. You could, on quiet nights, close your eyes and think that you could hear the sound of the vines growing up the abbey walls, the grass breathe in the fields, the trees reach higher than they had before and break the foundations of the city with their roots.
But life at the abbey was plagued by one thing, and it was that there was, connected by walls trailing to the next hillside, a chapel. You had never been inside, and somehow you had felt repulsed by it from the start, as if you had come across a rotting cat outside your door. Your neighboring survivors felt this way too, began to shake and vomit if they stepped too close to the chapel door. From a safe distance, you could see that no light seemed to penetrate the stained glass windows; only a deep darkness lay behind the glass. The bricks you threw at it from afar spread spiderweb cracks across the glass, but it never fell. And you felt the same dread that you had felt when you looked up to see the dark meteor falling, and gave up on the chapel.
It was André, out of all of you, who first set foot inside. He had always had a knack for finding his way into forbidden places. You dashed out into the courtyard below when you heard that he had gone, and you arrived to find him stumbling out of the doors; they were shut again before you could see. He took shaky steps towards you, and vomited black liquid upon the abbey stones, and his hands trembled, but he did not then or in any day to come speak of what he had seen within, only begged you not to ask, never to enter the chapel. But André was not well after that.
The cisterns of the abbey ran deep, and the water stayed fresh; it was not the black rain that changed him, you were sure. But over days and weeks his face shifted; his skin grew paler, and shone in the light as if he had at all times a thick sweat. His irises blossomed out across the whites of his eyes. He sat for hours in a languid state, staring at the wall, in the chapel’s direction. He ate little and then ceased to eat entirely. No former nurse or field doctor within the Abbey’s community could determine what was wrong with him, but you knew it had begun with entering the chapel. And a storm of flame, like gunfire at night, illuminated your spirit.
You refused to lose him; would do anything to keep him safe. You had not survived for all these years of chaos to see him die now. You were angry at him, for jeopardizing himself this way, angry at the chapel, for its blasphemous presence upon the doorstep of your lives, angry at any god that listened for their cruelty. And the chapel itself taunted your pain. There were reports at night of a sound from within it, refrains of the Ave Maria that some swore they could hear and others denied any whisper of.
You were twenty-eight years old when you awoke in the early morning to find André gone from your bed, and a scraping sound, like fingernails against a sink drain, coming from within the gatehouse bathroom. You called his name, and he did not respond; only the sound continued. At length you cracked open the door, and were paralyzed with fright. He sat, cross-legged and naked, on the ceiling, and when he turned to look at you, his face was expanded, inflated in uneven patches, his skin hard and white like shards of porcelain. His eyes were black, and rheumy with yellow grit, and he opened his lips to smile as his gaze fell upon you, and his hands scratched slowly at his own skin, sloughing it off to make room for the porcelain surface underneath.
You withdrew your hand from the door in horror, but when he spoke, it was not a greeting, or any voice of his at all, but as if played through a radio speaker, a single high voice in the Ave Maria. You fled down the hall, and collapsed at the end of it, and wept. The scraping sound continued, as did the singing, and eventually you could bear it no longer; you pulled on your coat and boots, and went to fetch help of the doctor, the abbey wardens. You did not have time to more than speak a few words to the medic, however, before you looked up across the misty courtyard of the abbey to see a pale figure walking away, and you knew it was for the chapel that André was bound.
You ran to catch him, but by the time you reached him, he stepped through the chapel doors and vanished into the darkness within, and you heard the rising refrains of that heavenly choir singing from somewhere deep inside. And you trepidated on the doorstep before dashing in after him. And what you saw, you have never been able to describe.
You stood on a causeway, extending out into an abyss, and it was lined with silver filigree that curled across the obsidian stone in great circles and patterned letters. Saints and disciples of a kind you had never known were inscribed across the floors beneath your feet, with heads and hands and eyes disintegrating and heavenly. The abyss itself went infinitely up and down; down into shadow and up into light that was violet and gold, long sunbeams of some alien nihilus cast through dimensional windows.
Clinging to the infinite stone archways that formed the walls on all sides, there were… children. Or flowers. Infants, with heads ten feet tall of cracked and bloated porcelain, lending their voices to the Ave Maria. They were tended by a single apostle, which stood at the end of the causeway, wrapped in the curtain of a starless night and with a face of smooth white glass, and it reached out for André with seven hands, each palm crucified with a twisted iron nail, and André, naked and porcelain himself, walked slowly towards it as if to his baptism.
You called his name, and in some way your scream was a part of the recitation. And André walked into the grasp of the apostle, until one of its seven hands graced his jaw. And then it reached to twist his head around on its neck until André looked straight back at you over his own spine, and silver strands burst from his neck and cheeks and skull, and his body of porcelain bones fell away into the abyss, so that the apostle held only his porcelain face.
And André smiled, and the silver tendrils formed a new body, one like a stingray or a butterfly or a bird of paradise, one that carried the smiling face of André in porcelain, still singing, upon its back. And the apostle lifted what remained of André into the air, and set it to fly in the chamber of song, and you looked up to find that the small drifting creature that André had become was not alone, but floated in a swarm of hundreds, drifting in an infinite spiral upwards into the nothing-lights that surrounded you, casting glittering gold and silver reflections across the heads of the thousand blessed children, across the dark apostle, and the song that you heard as the Ave Maria grew loud and resplendent.
And you understood, when you escaped, when you spat black liquid from your lungs upon the steps of the chapel outside, why André had never been able to tell you what he had seen, for you could not to the doctor explain a single word. Only that André was gone, but this is a lie, always will be a lie. For he will always live in the chapel. He will live eternal in the tabernacle of the Black Eternity.
Years have passed, and you have placed tarps upon all the windows of the chapel, put great bars over the doors, and in time its music has faded for those who live here. You hope they will stay. You hope they have enough disciples.
You are fifty-three years old, and long have you guarded the gates of Abbey Sainte-Loris, now. That which lies eternal in the chapel has not sung to you in all these years. Your skin has not turned to porcelain or your tendons to silver, but you feel hollow still, as if perhaps the boy you used to be has died and is trapped within your own skin. You dream, sometimes, of the desert where you were born, but you dream too of a forest which you have never seen.
You are awakened too soon by the sound of pounding on the doors downstairs, and you lean out of your window to inspect who has come to the abbey in this early hour. You can see at the foot of the gates far below you, a small man with a cane and a wry face, a larger one bedecked with scars, a black woman in a large coat holding hands with her daughter, and behind them two women in black dresses. They are all drenched to the bone, as if washed up on your shore. You call down in French asking who they are, why have they come, but your words falter as you hear for the first time in two decades a trace of the Ave Maria.
They call back in English, which you have picked up a little of, saying that they are survivors of a wreck in need of help, and that they are willing to help with whatever you need in exchange for a place to spend the night, and bid you a Hello from the Hallowoods.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Loris and is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Patreon. Consider joining for access to all the show's bonus stories, behind-the-scenes and more! Until next time, dreamers, be careful to whom you make your confessions. It can be difficult to tell through the screen whether you are speaking with a father or a fey, and they will feed your sins to vastly different creatures.
Comments