Where the Red Stigmata Grow

Candlelight tiptoed down wooden pews, danced along the hard edges of stained glass saints and twinkled in the hollow eyes of prostrate sinners. Hushed, mumbled prayers reached out into the dusky chamber and died on deaf or uncaring ears. Heads bowed and raised, bowed and raised atop a blood-red wooden floor. Moans and sobs. Pleadings and misgivings. Sins and salvation.

I closed my eyes tight. The faint, flickering light made traces of thin veins visible on the opaque, crinkled lids over my pale gray eyes. My mind drained of all thought as I searched for the words that would make Him listen. I was empty. I could no longer hear the beguiling chants around me or feel the pain in my knees pressing into the unforgiving floor. I drifted and rocked lost in a void, a vacant prison deep in the desolate wilderness of my troubled mind. I feared that I might be locked there forever.

Then, like the soft blowing of an autumnal wind, the words arrived and tripped across my lips. The Lord's Prayer filled first my mind and then my mouth. The void still surrounded me, but I no longer felt alone. There was a peace in the solitude, a disturbing peace, a peace only felt inside a plush, satiny coffin.

At the end of my remembered plea to lead me not into temptation but to deliver me from the Evil One, I opened my tear-filled eyes. The watery lines trailing down my gaunt face was a reflection of an emotion I did not feel. I am empty.

I blinked repeatedly into the illusion I heard and didn't see. The rhythmic droning of monastic-like prayers continued around me reverberating off the distant walls, echoing down from the lofty rafters, but aside from the harmony I was eerily alone. Or so I thought.

As I stood up, shaking the reawakened pain from my knees, I noticed something that made me fall back against a confessional. Slowly sliding across the floor as if dancing with the prayers were unattached shadows, the haunted replica of human forms. Even stranger, unlike ordinary shadows compelled to disperse in the direction dictated by light, these writhing silhouettes defied the iridescent light of the melting candles and pointed to a common source. I followed the grayish lines with my eyes to a corner. On either side of the corner, two thick pools of blood the size and shape of jagged-edged saucers collected with fresh splashes.

In decency and horror I should have looked away, walked away; but I couldn't. A large wooden cross, suspended ten feet above the blood, pointed in a direction just above the horizon. A waxy-fleshed Jesus, ankles hammered into the base of the cross, arms and chest pulling against nails driven through palms, dangled limply. Blood dripped from the corners of his open mouth making the pools below. His eyes turned toward me showing mockery and indignation. Of all the sin in the world, he only hated mine. He smiled and the blood poured.

A breath caught in my throat.

In collective awareness, the shadows noticed me. Turning with one mind, they angled toward me. Then the closest ones crept closer. They moved as if blind, fading on top of each other, congealing into dark masses, heading in directions helter-skelter to me, before again finding my "scent" or whatever it was that brought them my way.

I slid down the confessionals, then flat against the wall stepping over reaching shades between me and the door. One shadow broke from the others, darted, rolled over my shoe and struck up half my leg before I could dance away. The pain was not immediate but started gradually and erupted through the bones of my foot and shin. I felt the coldness of death and the fire of hell in the shadow's touch.

I collapsed. My leg was dead. They assaulted. I was dead.

Jesus yelled out to me, taunting me, "Into your hands I command my spirits."

{word count: 666}