The Creature in the Church

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The night was haunted. Heavy rain fell. Moonlight seeped through cracks in the dark clouds above. Below, wading through mud and dirt, a group of men were hauling a great wooden box across a waterlogged field toward a village. Guiding them: a humble vicar draped in sodden robes. He looked onwards with a piercing determination—something undetected amongst the exhausted labourers behind him. They groaned wearily as they pushed the heavy wooden box forward. Through the cold rain and the bitter wind, the vicar shouted forth. ‘There can be no rest. Not until we have homed the almighty.’ The labourers, drenched too in water and mud though more severely than the vicar, did little else but grumble to themselves and carry on. The word of the vicar was the word of God. And the word of God was the word of goodness. Pure and holy goodness. Through the fields, they had arrived at the village and carried on along the main street. Before them stood the church. Nothing about this church was unus...

The Decay

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I remember well the wonder of my ever-so-beautiful forest. It was bright and crowded with life and colour. Wonderful flowers of awesome shades and hues adorned the forest floor and sprouted upwards, gladly vying for sunlight beneath the canopy of the mighty trees. Creatures of all kinds scuttled, buzzed, and flew about the paradise. Altogether, it induced an unparalleled sense of calm in me. It shrouded me with a comfort and a stillness that I could never experience elsewhere.

But in and amongst the crowd of trunks, in the centre of the forest, was some kind of repugnant body: a mass of pure energy—a hostile energy. The blue light it shone was bitter and blanketed all around. With it, the mass emanated a biting coldness and, simultaneously, a blistering heat, that touched the skin to make it crawl incessantly. Its scent—a foul and rotten indictment—slithered from its core to invade the surrounding air. The bliss was gone.

When I first encountered it, it was small. Yet, as time passed, the mass gradually began to expand, as if it were feeding upon some awful nature beyond the forest that encouraged its hideous growth.

The more the mass grew, the more hostile it appeared to be. All that lived immediately around the mass began to wither and decay. The plants and flowers shrivelled, and the trees lost their greenery and their life. The forest worked to contain the energy, but it was all in vain. Great limbs of energy oozed from the mass, piercing the forest’s natural wall of wood and timber. I worried it’d soon collapse into death, and that my world beyond the forest would become infested by this horror. This shameful, twisted horror.