Forsaken Sanctuary

Father Giuseppe stood in the empty nave, breathing hard as he poured gasoline in thick, vengeful streams across the altar. Shadows loomed heavy and still, wrapping the statues of saints in the darkness of the church’s high rafters. They seemed to watch him with stony, accusing eyes, but he felt nothing but rage. If God was not here for her, then God does not belong here at all.

Emily’s death was burned into his memory—a tortured mosaic of her anguished cries, her fingers gripping his hand until her strength gave out, her final desperate whispers for mercy. Father Giuseppe had pleaded, begged, even shouted for God’s intervention, but the only answer had been silence. Emily had died alone, her faith rewarded with agony. Now, he would repay that divine cruelty, and he’d burn God’s house to the ground.

The sanctuary lay silent as a tomb, but as he struck the first match, a cold draft swept through the room, extinguishing it instantly. Then, a sound—a low, guttural whisper—rose from the shadows. The whisper grew louder, filling the space, threading into the hollow rafters, winding through the pews like the hiss of snakes.

He spun around, heart racing, clutching the gasoline can like a weapon. The whispers twisted into words, but they were fractured, foreign, voices layered upon voices speaking in a language as old as rot, as insidious as blight. And then, beneath the jumble of voices, a familiar one surfaced.

“Giuseppe…”

It was her voice. Emily’s. Fragile and full of hurt, echoing from somewhere deep within the darkness.

“No,” he breathed, his heart pounding. He took a step back, but the shadows seemed to close in, narrowing around him. The statues were no longer lifeless stone; they looked down at him, eyes following, cold and lifelike. A flicker of something moved in the shadowed alcoves—just a glimmer of pale skin, a face sliding in and out of sight, watching him. Watching and waiting.

“Do you believe this will save me?” the voice whispered, icy and scornful.

“Emily?” His voice cracked, but there was no answer, only the sense of something shifting behind him, moving closer. He spun, but saw nothing except the gleaming, empty eyes of the saints, which had somehow multiplied, surrounding him in every direction.

With trembling hands, he struck another match. This time, the flame sputtered, clinging to life. He held it up, casting a weak, shivering light over the altar—and he froze. His breath stopped as he took in the sight.

The altar cloth was soaked, not with gasoline, but with blood. Thick, dark, pooling blood that dripped in slow, rhythmic pulses from the crucifix. And then he noticed the twisted shape hanging there—not the carved Christ he had known, but a living, writhing figure.

The thing on the cross was Emily. Her head hung limp, blood dripping from her mouth, her eyes open but void. Her limbs were twisted into the wood, bound and broken. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out, only a slow, guttural wail that climbed higher and higher, echoing in the vast silence. He clamped his hands over his ears, but it only grew louder, filling his mind until his own screams joined hers.

He tried to back away, but the blood-soaked floor clung to his feet, refusing to let him go. He looked down and saw hands, thin, withered hands, clawing up from the blood, gripping his ankles with icy fingers. The hands multiplied, thousands of them, surging up and wrapping around his legs, his waist, pulling him down, into the growing pool of blood.

He clawed at the edge of the altar, but a pair of burning eyes opened in the darkness above him, piercing through the shadows. They were not Emily’s. They were not even human.

A voice, older than language itself, whispered directly into his mind, each word a lash of fire. “Do you think you can judge me, Giuseppe?”

The blood climbed higher, seeping into his skin, sinking through his pores like acid, his bones burning from the inside. A relentless pressure wrapped around his skull, filling it with an endless parade of nightmares—a lifetime of Emily’s pain, each second of agony stretched into eternity, replaying in vivid detail.

“Stop! Please!” he screamed, but his voice was swallowed, lost to the unending whispers of the dead. He could feel their cold breath on his neck, their fingers digging into his skin, stretching it, pulling his mouth into a rictus grin as if they were puppeteering his body from within.

He looked up again at the thing on the crucifix, and in place of Emily’s face was his own, twisted in pain, his own dead eyes staring back at him. His vision blurred, darkened, until all he saw was that face, mirroring his terror, his mouth moving in silent screams, his own voice echoing in his mind with words he could not control.

“They wanted to save you,” his own voice whispered back at him, guttural and wrong. “They wanted you to come home. But you chose… this.”

The blood now filled his throat, choking him, burning as it poured into his lungs, suffocating him from within. And with one final, desperate breath, he saw the world turn black, the whispers silencing in an instant.

They found him the next morning, his body hanging from the altar, twisted and broken, blood pooled around him in thick rivulets. His eyes were wide open, mouth frozen in an eternal scream, with a single word scrawled in blood across the altar wall behind him:

"Forsaken."

The whispers never left the church, lingering in the shadows, bound to the stones, trapped with the priest’s final, damning scream. And those who entered would swear they saw him still, moving in the corner of their eye, forever reaching out, begging to be saved from his own haunting.