Arriving at THE CHURCH ⟳ ˚ ╱ written for @endlesswoes !
𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘 𝗜𝗦 𝗔 𝗣𝗢𝗘𝗧𝗥𝗬 𝗢𝗙 𝗔 𝗦𝗢𝗥𝗧 𝗧𝗢 𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗦, the dichotomy of life and death belonging in the same body, the concept that all things must END and then become new. But for most, the lyrical nature of it stops at the concept. For most, the cyclical nature is apparent only to those who can encounter the aftermath of it ( whether that be the reaper itself or those proposing a eulogy, memorializing the departed with an insight only afforded when looking backward ). Meryl thinks she's died a million little deaths, yet the torment this town has brought upon her seems worse than the former life lived.
The second night swarms into her veins like ink in water, curling, diffusing, staining, just as the first night. The dreams had begun the night prior, creeping into her mind like a parasite, whispering riddles and promises of torment. The first time, she had shaken it off, convincing herself it was nothing more than the echoes of exhaustion, the strain of Arcadia masticating at her nerves. But now, the weight of the dream still claws at her ribs, curling, diffusing, staining all the same. It did not slip from her upon waking; it clung, webbed and whispering, a living thing burrowed into her marrow. The bruise where Cheryl had struck her pulsed like an open eye, dark as an eclipse, as if it too is watching, waiting. The words from the dream scuttles through her skull like spiders weaving WEBS in the hollows of her bones: the ice will claw... The morning staggers before her, a fever haze of twisted air, the town outside her window silent in a way that felt unnatural, predatory. No beasts. No howls. Only a brittle, waiting hush, thick as stagnant breath against glass.
A flicker. A smear of movement in the periphery, a presence slides just behind her sightline. Meryl has seen ghosts before — has lived in their company long before Arcadia swallowed her whole. The specters of her father and brother had LINGERED at the edges of her sight since the day she had killed them, shadows caught in the turning of her head, echoes warping the quiet ( they would stand just beyond reach, in doorways where no one stood, at the foot of your bed, watching with eyes that saw past flesh and into marrow; they had never spoken, never reached for you, never clawed their way into the space you occupied; they were there but distant, half-formed figments of grief, specters born of the past, shackled to your mind's quiet agony — until Arcadia ). But Cheryl — Cheryl has never been here. Never once. Until now. The mirror. No. Not the mirror. She refuses to look, refuses to acknowledge the weight pressing against her spine, the too-cold fingers of recognition creeping up her ribs. But the gravity of the thing in the glass is a force that demands surrender. Her eyes dragged against her will, and —
Meryl’s breath snaps, caught between throat and ribs, trapped in the tight hollow of her chest. Her twin stands behind the silvered surface, abnormal, her face blurred at the edges, features slipping like oil on water. Not still, but seething, moving at the periphery, shifting through reflections fractured by something unseen. The mirror bled, the edges no longer defining the boundary between real and not. Cheryl reaches out. Frostbite. Her fingers graze Meryl’s skin through the glass, and the cold is a living thing, a hunger burrowing deep into the bone. The riddle. Again. Again. AGAIN.
She does not remember to put on her coat. Does not remember stepping into the streets, the fog swallowing her whole, pressing into her pores like damp rot. The town bends around her, streets twisting inward, narrowing, guiding her somewhere unseen. Cheryl follows — no, not in form, but in PRESENCE, always just beyond reach, a whisper of breath at her nape, a tension in the marrow. Arcadia pulses with something unseen, something coiled beneath its surface, waiting to slip its fingers through the cracks of reality. Was she running, or was she merely circling a place she had never left? The church rose before her, its door ajar, dark and waiting. A mouth parted in expectation. No thought, only instinct, only the urgent, desperate need to be elsewhere. She stumbles inside, breath clotted with the thick scent of wax and aged wood, the hush within pressing against her skin like a second presence.
The stained-glass windows fractured the light, and in their broken spectrum — Cheryl. Always Cheryl. Her face contorts in the colored panes, fragmented into something almost DIVINE, something otherworldly varnished. Seven nights. Meryl’s vision wavers, body swaying under the weight of unreality. Was she still alive? Had she ever been? Or was she merely spiraling some fevered dream, a body half-decayed in a bed elsewhere, trapped in an eternity of unraveling?
Meryl feels the convulsions come, cruel and sudden, as if strings have been snapped and her body no longer belongs to her. A violent arc, her spine bending, limbs seizing with an unseen force, her muscles wrenching against her own control. Her fingers curled into claws against air, scraping at the unseen, her breath a choking rattle in the cavern of her throat. Something slithers beneath her skin, illicit, tightening like wire COILED through flesh, a alien thing burrowed into her essence. Her head snaps back, mouth open in a silent cry, her eyes rolling, whites stark and gleaming against the dim candlelight. It is inside her, creeping through her veins, whispering in a voice that was her own but not. The world blurred, edges distorting, collapsing into themselves.
A shadow moved in the periphery. A warmth at her side. A presence, pressing gentle hands against the violence of her body’s betrayal. The pastor? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it did not matter — her mind is a sieve spilling into the darkness. Cheryl’s voice tangles through her thoughts, a whisper threading itself through every synapse, burrowing deep, deeper. I grow until the day I die. You’ve seen me once, if you don’t see me now you won’t survive. The church was spinning. The walls were bending. The floor tilted, and Meryl plunged, ENGORGED by the yawning chasm of something ancient and unfeeling, as if the world had cracked open beneath her and spilled its secrets in a spiral of suffocating black. The darkness does not simply consume; it coils around her like a serpent, whispering in tongues long buried, a chorus of echoes that gnawed at the edges of her sanity. She is falling, not through space, but through something deeper, something bottomless, an abyss stitched from the frayed remnants of forgotten things. Shadows wrap around her, thick and suffocating, pulling her downward in a spiral of weightless descent, her mind unraveling thread by thread into the abyss.
