Gargoyles
ashfilledsoul:
November 6th, 2017. 10am. St. Lucy’s Cathedral. Ashbourne, Nova Scotia.
@callowaycain
Ash still remembered the first time her freshly inhuman feet had stepped over the threshold of a church. She’d expected to burst into flames, staring at Alaric over her shoulder, eyes wide with fear and then surprise. Turned out the soulless could enter a church, or perhaps the bigger point was that she was no less sinful than some of the humans who sat in those pews every day.
When her heart still beat she’d never been devout in her faith. She wouldn’t call what she felt these days faith exactly, but churches calmed her, made her less afraid. St. Lucy’s was particularly beautiful, understated, homey and ethereal all at once. She’d missed it the three months she’d been out of town, and her favorite spot in the back pew was untouched and waiting for her.
The service itself was muted background noise. Ash preferred to take in the sounds of bodies shifting, people sighing, the not quite stillness that gave her mind permission to wander. One of the prayer books kept in the slots on the back of the pews was balanced on her knee, and she absentmindedly doodled around the passages and songs. Most of the time she was a practically invisible statue, but today she felt disapproving eyes on her, caught the sound of footsteps approaching, felt the body head of a figure standing beside her. Ash slouched in her seat, tilting her head back to appraise the upside down male looking down at her.
“Can I help you?” she asked in a low voice. “I mean, you’re in a house of God so there’s probably more qualified individuals to help you, but I could give it the good old college try.”
Calloway was not religious, and had never been, so his job as a St. Lucy’s only receptionist under the age of fifty-five was draining, and had been increasingly more so as of late. When he answered the ‘help wanted’ ad, he had expected to spend his shifts redirecting calls and photocopying bulletins, but lately the church had been pressing him into doing other things, like looking up scripture and helping people when the pastor was unavailable. Most of those tasks ended poorly, because he knew next to nothing about the faith and it showed when he tried to pretend he did.
So, in attempt to ‘fix’ their helpless receptionist, the church board had been scheduling Calloway to facilitate Sunday service, handing out bulletins and setting out candles, with the intention of forcing him to pay attention to the sermon. It was peaceful, he would admit that, but he spent too much time absently staring at the stained-glass windows and restraightening the bibles every few minutes to absorb any of the information.
He had spent the first half hour of the service this way, but he had noticed out of the corner of his eye someone paying even less attention than himself, which in itself wasn’t a problem, but the stranger was drawing in one of the hymns, and he could practically feel the disapproval radiating from some senior receptionist once they found the book in a pew in direct sight of where Calloway always sat.
So, he leaned forward on the pew and couldn’t help but smile at the woman’s offer. “I’m supposed to reach out to the secular crowd, and like, help you find God or something to get you to stop drawing in the hymn books, but if I tell you our budget is super small, and my pay is even less, will that work?”















