Before I begin my story, there is something you must understand. I have never been afraid of the dark or ungodly things that walk this earth. It is just not in my nature to be fearful of the unexplained. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I was raised in a monastery – a more sinister location I cannot quite imagine. Or perhaps that's the key – I am perhaps just of too simple a mind to imagine the horrors that others find in the shadows. Certainly I never foresaw the danger in this particular tale.
My story begins and ends in the Glass Cathedral. The Glass Cathedral is not, in point of fact, actually a cathedral. Its official title is the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, but it is known by locals and travellers alike as the Glass Cathedral, due to the large amount of intricate and wonderful glass work that is featured in the windows. It is not unusual for the church to receive visitors who have come purely to study (or sketch) the windows, particularly the altar piece that stretches from floor to ceiling. Father Micah preached a sermon last year welcoming such visitors. He doesn't mind if they have come for less than pious reasons. What matters is that they come at all. Of course, the glass work also attracts its fair share of less than savoury characters. That's where I come in. Not as a less than savoury character, but as a guard. I think the Glass Cathedral must be the only church in existence to have necessitated a guardian. Nevertheless, it was deemed essential by the powers that be, and I was called in.
I have been a guardian of holy relics before, but only ever in transit. I would ride with travellers who were carrying precious cargo, defending them from wolves and bandits. A skilled swordsman, with a letter sealed with the crest of the Duke, I came highly recommended. Fearless, the letter said. To an extent that’s true. I am never afraid. I see a problem, a threat, and I eliminate it. I have been in situations where I seemed unlikely to succeed – but as you can see, I always came through in the end. I always knew that my luck would end, and one day I would be defeated – by the thief, the bandit, or the wolf.
I just never supposed that my defeat would be at the hands of a woman.
This story really begins about a month after I accepted Father Micah’s offer. Bed and board, in return for the safekeeping of the Church’s most holy treasures – including the windows. At face value, a simple enough task. All it would take was a few strolls in the moonlight, carrying a weapon large enough to scare away prospective thieves. Easiest money I had made in a while. Also, somewhere to lay low. My time on the road had acquired me more than a few enemies alongside my glowing recommendations. I was becoming a liability rather than an insurance. I had accepted without hesitation.
That first night I took a walk around the Church. It is not a large building. There is the main chapel, a smaller office for the Father, a backroom where I slept, with a small fireplace and a privy, and the upstairs walkway for maintenance of the organ pipes. What the Church lacks in ground space, it makes up for in height. It is taller than any Church I have seen before, and I’ve travelled to a fair few places. I guess, if you were going to be poetical, you would say it reaches all the way to the heaven. While I doubt the literal veracity of such a statement, I have no doubt that was the architect’s intention. The closer the sky, the closer to God. It’s logical. That first night the weather was foul and dark. Rain lashed the windows, streaming down the cheeks of the lead lined saints, and snuck across the flagstones in quick, spitting shadows. I headed down the aisle, my boots sinking into the plush red carpeting. I ran my hands over the wooden pews, peered into the large, stone font by the door. I climbed into the lectern, stood with my hands bracing the sides, ready to preach my sermon to the silence.
It was then that I saw her.
This first time, it was only a glimpse. She was a passing shadow, a quick, bright movement, almost lost in the spitting rain. I heard, rather than saw, the rustle of her skirts, the laboured sob of her breath. She flittered across the aisle, unknowingly tracing my steps, until she drifted up the steps to the altar, bare of its ornaments, its draped cloth, a large stone table. There she stood, the shadowy rain running darkly across her. Running through her.
I was frozen in place – not with fear, you understand, but with surprise. I have fought all manner of things, both man and beast, but never before had I been confronted with such evidence of the otherworldly. I knew, of course, the tales of ghosts, ghouls, all such creatures. I just never gave them much credence, supposing them to be the work of weaker minds, easily influenced by superstition. And yet here, in front of me- Surely she must be a ghost? I knew of no other reason for the apparition. It never occurred to me that I might be mad. I knew I wasn’t. It wasn’t until she turned, walked to the door, and disappeared – not slowly, like a mist, but suddenly, as though she had never been there at all – that I moved. My hands left their vice like grip on the lectern, and I descended. My legs felt weak and I was breathing unsteadily. I checked the altar, the carpet, the door, for any sign that she had visited, any sign of her reality. There was nothing.
I did not sleep that night. I wondered upon the spirit’s purpose. All the stories I had heard spoke of weeping lovers, or scorned, vengeful demons. The lady I had seen had not seemed to be either. Her breathing had been laboured, and perhaps sorrowful, but it was not the mournful wailing that was so often parodied at a roadside campfire. She certainly hadn’t seemed angry. There had been no air of menace, no sense of threat. She had been walking the Church with no more sense of purpose than I. I resolved to think no more of it, but to simply observe, and watch the next night for her coming.
She did not appear the next night, nor the one after. She did visit again, when I had given it all up as a chance occurrence. I still believed quite firmly in her reality – my dreams never came with such precision. I had thought that perhaps she had become aware of my presence and I had scared her away. The second time she appeared I was above, looking at the pipes. Again, I heard her before I saw her. That same rustle, magnified so that even my ears could hear it. That sobbing breath. I looked down over the railing, and she was there, shining, drifting down the aisle. She seemed different – the light did not penetrate quite so deeply as it had before, and while I could see the carpet through her skirts, they were dull, as though seen through a great bank of fog. I ran to the stairwell, to get a better look, but by the time I reached the ground, she was gone.
I saw her often after that. She appeared irregularly, at strange intervals. Never when I had company. Never, I noticed, on the night of the full moon. No one else knew the Church to be haunted. When I asked the Father, he asked if I was losing my nerve. I did not ask again, for fear that he might suggest that I leave. The lady did not scare me, she intrigued me. I was rapidly becoming obsessed with her. I wanted to know who she was, why she walked the church in silence, why she wore a dress of white. Was she a bride? Was she here to guide us? Or for evil purpose? I still did not sense malice in her presence, but I wanted to be sure. After all, she seemed to be growing less transparent each time I saw her. I searched the Church’s history, the old texts and tomes of its past, and found nothing. I tried to ask the locals, discreetly, you understand, but heard nothing reliable. It took many weeks of frustration before I realised the one source of information that I had so far overlooked. The woman herself. I must simply ask her.
The night after I came to this realisation, she did not visit, nor the night after that. I began to wonder if she had become aware of my increasing boldness, and did not approve of this next step in my plan to uncover her secrets.
She returned on the third night. I had not expected her. The moon was full and bright, lighting the chapel with a thousand glass stained colours. She wandered the aisle, as she did every time before. Her skirts were dappled with the red of a cloak, the gold of a halo, the blue of Our Lady’s dress. She approached the altar, and as she stood, bathed in the glass light, blue, green, a vivid, royal purple, I stepped silently out of the shadows. She turned to face me, and for a moment, the light pooled strangely over her veil, and I had the strangest impression that there was no face underneath. The vision soon dispelled, and I suspected that beneath the fabric was a face of such loveliness that I must know its likeness, and immediately so. I approached her slowly, and reached to touch her. Her hands were cold, like a gravestone in the shade. I could see her watching me from beneath the veil, her eyes large and dark and lovely, but she made no sound, and did not move. I asked her name. She did not reply. I asked if I could see her face. She did not reply. In the face of such meekness, I became bold. I took hold of the veil, and raised it myself.
Never before have I felt such fear. An intense, cold feeling, like frost fire in my bones. I shrieked and let the fabric fall. Such a sight I had never seen – there, under the bridal veil, was a devils face, leering, eye sockets empty and dark, skin stretched so tight that the face was the face of a skull. I could see too the reason for her strange, sobbing breath – the bottom of her face was fallen away, hanging down onto her chest in a gaping mockery of a mouth.
I am not ashamed to admit: I ran. I ran from that place as though Satan himself were on my tail. I still have not given Father Micah reason for my departure. Let them wonder. Let them think me a trickster, they will soon know the truth of it. For the most horrific thing I saw in that creature’s face was not the empty eyes, not the pallor of the skin, or the inhuman gape of the mouth, but the evil that I could see, bright and sickening in every pore. I could smell her hatred, her malice, her intent. I know what she will do.
That brings my story to a close. I have, at the time of writing, decided to return to the Church. Father Micah will need me if he is to fight her devilry. There may be a moment, when I ride close, and I see the spire, its wicked dark silhouetted against the moon, and I have a change of heart. I do not know what I will do in the face of such fear. I have never done such a thing before. I do not know what kind of a man I am, but what I do know, with a certainty that I feel in the very heat of my blood, in every beat of my fearful heart, is that I must at least try to find it out.