Caravellum

“I pray, nothing answers.”
She spoke, in a feeble voice that barely lifted above the tremors and echoes of the growing storm outside. A rumble rocked the stained glass windows, darkening their vibrancy with the rich clouds gathering. She shifted her weight, feeling a sense of subtle numbness that spread across her sore knees. Her reflection stared back at her in the thick glass partition that spread wall to wall in the divine hall of the Cloud Shepherd’s church. It watched her as her eyes flicked to a small, barely noticeable patch of grey in its otherwise full and complete painting of a cumulonimbus stretching through the heavens, the Shepherd holding its crook to gather the masses. The grey was a mark that she knew where to find, for it was where she had scratched at the screen as a child, desperate to see the face of the almighty god. She had squinted through it, body contorted, in the thought that they were waiting beyond it to hear her prayer. She continued.
“Nothing answers me, and I wonder, despite myself, if there was ever a time when something did. My mother assures me that there was, yet she speaks of it in the past tense, as if she struggles to truly remember.” She hesitated, uncertain of whether she could truly speak about these feelings. Yet, the other side of the partition, where she had learnt the priest would sit and relay their woes to the Shepherd in communion, remained silent. She nodded in silent assent, for her own benefit in the otherwise empty hall, and then continued in a hushed whisper.
“I have been having doubts about my faith, and my doubts are considerable.” She fiddled with her ill-fitting church gown, a relic of a time when it had fit her, when she was so much younger and without these feelings that wracked her. She had sought some type of comfort in visiting here again, that it might spark her faith, but she knew now that this place was no longer her home.
She wondered, as she had before, if she might see through once more. She lifted up her skirts to bend to place her eye at the scratched-off paint. The hesitation was lessened as she fell into the rhythm that she had adopted as a child, hands clasped over her face with a slight crack between her ring and little finger – the tan line of the wearied ring remaining on her hand – to pretend she was in a state of despaired prayer should anybody spot her. She placed her eye by the hole. An eye stared back.
She yelped, scrambling back from the partition until her back collided hard with the solid oak of the front pew. Her head cracked against the wood and she crawled into a ball, cradling the growing wound as the faded gret of that iris had stared into her. The pain dissolved into fear like a feeling of a shot through her soul. There remained no sound from the other side of the clouded partition. Her eyes flickered to the door out of the church as her legs propelled her to the other door, the one she knew was forbidden, the one that led to the other side and was reserved solely for the priest. As she had all her life, she found her curiosity propelling her at a rate too fast for her, too fast for her brain to tell her to stop and think about whether she was ready to confirm what she had seen on the other side of that wall. She found her hand had gripped the handle, twisting ever so gently until the door popped forward in its frame, ever so easily, ever so invitingly. It was as if the hinges had been oiled with the smoothness of the door’s opening.

She stepped through into that hallowed space, itself a stark contrast to the world beyond she had often imagined. The walls, perhaps originally a shade of blue, or grey, were scarred awfully by some gaping wounding implement. In the wounds of the wall, a rotund grotesque curiosity emerged, a bulbous intrusion that evoked the pipework of a boiler room but glowed with an urgent shade of purple, something passed through its internality, with it the flesh of the casing flexing and compressing to allow its passage. The veins were in an incomprehensible network that drew patterns upon the walls and crept across the sacred scrolls as if a strain of ivy. She looked about the room as her eyes followed its impossible connection across the holy space. With it, it led her gaze past the communion table, past the altar of purity, and to what she had dreaded to find. Shepherd Albury lay upon the floor, his habit turned in such an unnatural way that she thought that he was long dead had immediately been made clear to her. Still, she found her once again being propelled towards the prone corpse. His hand, upon which remained the ring of communion with the Cloudflock god, though its usual pure white lustre was no longer present, was in a crippled vice-like grip, ravages of this biological infestation bulbous roots entering through his skin like an open blister. The veins of the dead man still pumped, oozing out a viscous lump of viscera, though he did not stir. She pulled him to face her, habit damp with his expiration, emitting a stench that she failed to hold through, doubling over as she ejected the contents of a long-empty stomach upon the ground. There, the shepherd’s eyes stared back at her, as chilling as they had been through the partition. The ring of communion, upon his finger, spoke to her. It was a wordless, silent cry without form or intelligence. Yet she found herself wrenching the ring from the emaciated fingers of the shepherd. She looked at it, her actions now no longer her own, entirely compelled as her eyes tried desperately to process what she was doing as she placed the finger in the ring. There was a deep, endless silence, without end. Then, a voice spoke from the depths.