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The choir sang Lauds in the dark, yet their voices echoed wrong, as though the stones themselves joined in with a chant older than Rome. When silence fell, a thirteenth voice still lingered, patient and low, begging not to be left alone.

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beneath the cloister, they found a stair that was not marked on any plan, its steps soft and glistening as though carved from flesh.

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THE LITANY OF VEINS

The stone floor sweated with cold, and each drop that fell from the vault above landed like a bead of blood upon the chapel’s silence. A single candle sputtered on the altar, its flame thin and restless, as though aware that it burned in a place that did not wish for light. Dust clung to the carved crucifix, thick as gauze on a corpse, and in the shadows the painted saints seemed to turn their faces away. The friars had abandoned this wing generations ago, and still it breathed, still it groaned, as though the walls themselves remembered their psalms. Rats never entered, birds never nested; it belonged to silence, and silence was jealous.

Brother Marius came with the key in his trembling hand, muttering prayers beneath his breath. He had been sent to lock away the book, the one unearthed during the refectory repairs, the one sewn in skin that was not animal. He thought to place it within a reliquary of bronze and let it rot in secrecy, but secrecy, he soon learned, is never enough. When he opened the iron gate, the silence deepened. It was not the hush of reverence but the sudden clamp of a hand over the mouth. He stepped inside and the key rang in his hand like the toll of a small, pitiless bell.

The book lay on the altar cloth, its covers shrunken and pale, veins like black threads crawling across its surface. He dared not read it, yet even closed it whispered, the words rising not through air but through bone. His teeth ached with it. He felt his gums throb as though the whispers pressed upward from the roots of his skull. He laid his hand upon the cover to steady himself and in that instant saw a vision behind his eyes: corridors of flesh, pulsing and endless, candles drowned in blood, the whole monastery drawn down into a throat that had no stomach. He smelled iron and smoke, and in the echo of that vision he heard the names of the dead monks rasped like prayers.

He tore his hand away, gasping, and in that same moment the candle guttered to darkness. He was not alone. Something pressed against him from every side, invisible but undeniable, like water swallowing air. His ribs tightened. His heart thrashed. He opened his mouth to call upon Christ but the air turned solid in his throat. He fell upon the altar steps, clawing at his cassock, while the whispers surged from the book in a soundless tide. His body convulsed once and lay still, eyes burst wide, tongue fattened and blue. A faint tremor lingered in his fingertips before they stiffened into silence.

The candle flared back to life. It illuminated his corpse where it lay twisted, limbs askew, and the book gleamed as though polished with oil. From the folds of his habit, a trickle of blood seeped down to the floor and spread in a thin vein across the stone. The vein did not dry. It reached outward, dividing, multiplying, mapping itself into a grotesque lattice that joined with the cracks of the flagstones. The floor began to breathe, shallow and steady, as though the chapel itself had grown a pulse.

By midnight, Brother Abel came searching, lantern in hand. He found the iron gate open and the candle still burning. He whispered Marius’s name but no answer came. His lantern flame stretched long and thin, as if drawn toward the altar, and he followed against his will. When he saw the body he dropped to his knees, overcome not by grief but by a dread that made his stomach turn to water. He reached for his brother but the corpse shuddered, spasmed, and burst. From its mouth spilled rivers of blood, not thick but impossibly thin, streaming like threads of silk, writhing as though alive. They hissed across the floor, burning as they touched the stone.

They wove themselves around Abel’s wrist before he could flee. He screamed but the chapel swallowed his voice. The blood threads sank into his flesh and pulsed with a rhythm not his own. His veins burned. He felt them rewriting him, unmaking him, twisting his marrow to echo their litany. His eyes filled with red, his skull hammered with pressure, and still he could not break free. With a violent snap his spine bent backward, his ribs cracked like dry wood, and he collapsed beside Marius, his heart no longer his own. The lantern fell from his hand, flame smothered, leaving only the candle to burn.

The candle burned lower. Its wax streamed down the altar like fat. The book trembled and opened without hands, pages fluttering though no wind moved. The script upon them writhed in letters too sharp for human eyes, strokes cut deep enough to bleed. The chapel walls heaved as if with a single breath, and every stone joined the rhythm of that beating pulse. The crucifix groaned upon its beam, as though the wood remembered agony, and the painted saints seemed to cry with eyes that bled dust.

When the matins bell rang, the monks who entered found only silence. The bodies had vanished. The altar cloth was stained dark as rust. The book was gone, though veins remained, spidering across the stones and vanishing into the walls, pulsing faintly like capillaries beneath the skin. They spoke of sealing the chapel forever, yet when they barred the gate the candlelight remained, steady and unyielding, as if daring them to extinguish it. Some swore they heard a heartbeat behind the walls, slow and patient, as though the monastery itself waited for the next soul.

And so it waits, within stone that remembers, within silence that devours, its litany echoing in every drop of blood that beats against the ear of God.

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THE VEIL

They found the veil in the locked sacristy cabinet, folded three times and sealed with wax. No one remembered the key. The bishop said a linen-faced woman came to him in a dream and told him to show it to the faithful. When the sisters broke the seal and eased the cloth onto the credence table, it rose at the center as if someone beneath it drew a careful breath, then settled again. The air smelled faintly of salt and candle soot.

It was yellow with age, soft as water. The gold threads were crooked, like tiny fishhooks, and the light always bent back into the eyes that watched it. Sister Lucienne lifted the hem to inspect for moth damage and felt the chapel hush. That night she woke to find the veil hanging above her mouth, hem brushing her lips in a slow tide.

The next morning Mass began late. The veil lay over the chalice and paten; the wine had thickened to something tarry and hot, the host was gone. Father Renaud whispered he had heard it breathing into the cup and would not approach the altar again.

The sisters tried to put it away — cedar chest, reliquary, lead box in the crypt — but each dawn it returned to the altar, flat and swelling faintly as though something inside was sleeping. Its gold threads darkened day by day. The sacristy smelled of wet rope.

Pilgrims came. A mechanic claimed the veil cured the tremor in his bones. A woman said her dead child called from inside the folds. A girl pressed her cheek to it and fainted when it rose beneath her skin. The bishop encouraged the crowds, and offerings piled high: coins, rings, teeth in silver lockets.

At night the veil roamed. It slid along the choir stalls, leaving a line of moisture that tasted of salt. The sanctuary lamp refused to go out. The Book of the Gospels cracked open to the passage where the dead man sat up and spoke. The words looked right, but the spacing was strange, like handwriting with a hidden tremor.

The bishop ordered a glass reliquary with brass clasps and placed the veil inside with prayers and four guards to keep watch. By morning the glass was fogged from within, the clasps bent, and each guard had a faint red mark around his neck.

On the seventh day during vespers, the veil lifted higher — a figure with arms and no head, or a head with no face. Candles guttered, the choir stopped, the air sweetened and then soured. It folded in on itself until it was no larger than a coin, then dropped to the altar rail with a sound like a bell struck underwater.

Where it had been, a mouth yawned in the marble, red and wet, breathing slow and deep. The bishop murmured the Salve Regina and stepped forward. The breath pulled him in, folding him neatly in half, drawing him down into the stone until the surface closed smooth and cold.

Silence. The veil lay slack on the altar, then rose once, as if waking.

The next night Sister Lucienne sat alone in the choir with the veil in her lap. It was heavy now, like a pelt soaked in seawater. The breath beneath the weave matched hers, then lagged, then caught up, as if learning her rhythm. She told it softly to give back the hosts it had taken and to leave the dead where they lay. The hem seemed to taste the word mercy as it left her mouth.

At dawn, Father Renaud arrived with a hammer and ribbon. He said they would bind the veil to the altar. The hammer shook in his grip. When the nail bit, the veil tightened and the ribbon split like a vein.

The ninth day began with a humming that came from the walls, not within the range of the organ or human voice. It filled the crypt, the dormitory, the refectory, and the mouths of the sleeping. The sisters woke choking — then realized they were only inhaling in a pattern that was not theirs. The veil swelled round at the center and flattened again, as if listening.

At vespers, the veil rose and opened like gills. The choir began the psalm and could not stop; the chant had become their lungs. Father Renaud struck the altar twice. The sound went down instead of out, and the marble darkened in a thin, damp line.

Then the altar opened its mouth.

It smelled of candles, old wine, and seaweed. The psalm dropped to a lower key. The bishop reached to close the mouth. The breath drew him in headfirst, and he exhaled once, softly, before the stone sealed again.

The veil lay still. Then it lifted. Sister Lucienne touched it and thought of the bishop beneath the altar, of incorrupt saints, of fogged glass. She thought holiness was not a place you entered but a mouth that asked to share your breath.

The city asked for an explanation. Rome sent a letter sealed with a ring none recognized. The faithful kept bringing hair and teeth. The organ played notes no one claimed to touch.

On the thirteenth morning the veil was gone. The sisters lifted the altar cloth and found a seam in the marble like a lip, cool and damp. They did not open it. They waited until sunset. The seam widened, and a breath rose from the stone that fit the choir perfectly.

Sister Lucienne stood at the rail. She realized the church had learned to pray without them. The veil slid from the seam like a tongue and pressed softly to her lips, and for a moment she breathed a prayer that did not belong to her at all.

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The abbot prayed over the monstrance, but the red-veined glass pulsed like a heart. The novices turned away, clutching their rosaries, but every bead felt slick with blood as though unseen fingers pressed each Ave into their palms.

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they said the host never spoiled, but this one bled so long the chalice rusted from within.

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The sacristy smelled of incense and wet stone, but beneath it lay a sweeter stench. The brothers had opened the coffin to show the novices incorruption, yet when the candlelight reached her face, her mouth was full of writhing soil as though the earth itself was trying to speak through her.

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the stone lips of the saint's reliquary moved, and the whisper that escaped was a litany no priest alive could name.

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The statue of the Blessed Virgin began to tilt forward, slowly and with intention. It took a full hour before her outstretched hands touched the altar cloth. By then, every sister was on her knees, bleeding from the eyes and praying in Latin none of them had learned.

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At Matins, the thurible swung as if held by unseen hands. The smoke clung to the rafters in the form of a man, nails in his shadowed wrists. His mouth opened in a silent psalm, and each monk felt their tongue still until the smoke dispersed.

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The cloth was centuries old, its embroidery faded but still intricate. As I traced the thread with my fingers, I felt the grit of enamel. Lifting the hem revealed row upon row of human teeth, each drilled and stitched with reverence, their roots pointing toward the Host.

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✖︎ a horror game in which every creature fucking hates you ✖︎

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his shadow knelt before him. he wasn’t praying.

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the water in the font was black but my reflection was clear.

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every saint in the reliquary had turned its face toward me.