My wife’s church mornings went on a year without me, and for eight months, I imagine my wife was faithful. To be fair, she’d invited me. I’d refused. We’d already grown distant, and I wouldn’t bob my head in the morning with a hundred strangers when I had a night shift mopping blood from the operating room floors. But around that eighth month, she became frigid toward me, refusing even to share the dinner table. We spent nights back-to-back now. Yet I glimpsed a wistfulness in her demeanor whenever she spoke of the church. She’d uncovered something more than God in that church, and when suspicion alone became too difficult to bear, I insisted upon joining her. If I’d been a churchman, I’d have avoided much of this.
The church was a triangular prism with countless rows of unsullied benches. Every inch was modern and immaculate. It felt like entering a court. Every eye seemed to train on me as I passed. The look they gave me was a mix of sympathy and incredulity. As if they knew something I didn’t. My wife led me to the front-most bench, and once we picked our seats, she trained her eyes on the pastor who greeted churchgoers at the doors. As she ogled him, a look I had only ever experienced on our dating days spread across her face.
When our eyes met, she smiled and shrugged, implying it was my choice to come.
She wasn’t making the slightest effort to hide the affair. I dropped my eyes and patted my pockets as if I’d forgotten something. I felt her gaze leave me a second afterward. Down the aisle, a man’s gaze met mine with a smirk. I hoped he smirked at some joke he’d heard earlier, but his weren’t the only eyes on me. A glance over my shoulder, I saw them. At least three other pairs of eyes watched me with that same sardonic grin. They all knew about the affair. How could they be okay with that? This was church, for Christ’s sake! There had to be a rule condemning my wife in their Bibles. Amusement, not pity or sorrow, filled the congregation. If I hadn’t already known our relationship was over…
When the sermon began, a robotic tranquility settled upon the congregation as they turned their eyes on the pastor, bobbing their heads to his every word. The look of hunger returned to my wife’s face. The pastor met it with one of equal passion. Despite not making eye contact, he seemed aware of my presence and purposely avoided acknowledging me. My face grew hot and my fingernails cut into my palms, so I glanced away from my wife and the stage. It was in that moment I discovered the gate.
A short distance right of the main stage, a dusty stone staircase punctured the waxy hardwood floor, a not-so-minor blemish. At the bottom, an iron gate rusted in a decrepit archway. It seemed an ancient civilization’s misplaced artifact.
Something moved just beyond that alien gate, a curious red mist that seeped from the breathless void, wafted up the stairs and drifted across the floor, filling crevices between floorboards. It didn’t meander, but came straight toward me. I might have fled, but for a strange sense–in a church full of unfriendly, ill-disposed head-bobbers, solely this held any benevolence toward me. Why did I feel that? I don’t know. I just did. No one else seemed to notice it. But I couldn’t touch it–not just yet. I did not know what it might do to me if I did, so I pulled my knees to my chest, placed my feet upon the bench, while it licked the base of my front-row seat.
No one else reacted. My wife snickered but didn’t even glance my way. Her hands were motionless in her lap. The pastor’s words allowed no distractions, and the biding sense of calm still infected the congregation as they listened. They’d long since rejected any curiosity towards the stairs, the gate and the mist. Or the mist didn’t care about them, didn’t show itself to them. Either way, nothing disturbed their quiet repose. No one else lifted their legs off the floor. I looked like an idiot squatting with my legs up, but I was unsure of the consequences of touching the mist. Still, I couldn’t stay like that. I’d have to walk out of there, eventually. So, with my palms against my trembling legs, I eased them back to the floor as if entering the operating room after a botched surgery.
A strange warmth greased my heels. It felt like stepping into fresh blood, but they remained dry. A tingling sensation crept from my legs and up along my spine. Something was happening within me, something caused by it. I cringed, expecting pain, but there was none. Then, as the mist rushed around my ankles, my mind drew me to a childhood summer by the beach, the constant shifting of the earth beneath, each ocean swell stripping away more sand to uncover my buried feet. It felt very much like that, like it was stripping away the floor beneath me. Despite the fear, I felt drawn to it, like a mesmerized baby drawn to a mobile.
Yet still that devilish air in the church persisted. In my wife, in the congregation. They all sat, listening with anticipation to words that had at some point become a murmur to me. The mist was invisible to them. The lulling comfort it promised me, unoffered to them.
It had come for me. After all, I alone could see it. Not my wife. Not the pastor. No one else reacted to it. No one even looked at it. What made me special, I didn’t know–but of everyone here; it chose me.
It chose me. Did that mean it was a conscious thing, or else part of one? An appendage to find the rejected. What breathing creature waited at the opposite end of that dark splendor?
An urge arose in my gut, inexplicable, but strong. Past that gate, something beckoned me, and God, I’d take any excuse to heed its call. I wanted to run across the stage and down the steps, but what about the others? What would they think?
After the service, while everybody else conversed near the exit, my wife told me she needed to use the bathroom and abandoned me sitting with my feet in the mist. A moment later, amidst the post-sermon bustle of bobbing heads, the abundance of blessings, she stood face-to-face with the pastor. She glanced right at me, resentment incarnate, then took the pastor’s hand between hers and whispered into his ear. A hot anger swelled within me.
But then all rancor drained into the mist. I needed to get downstairs to that gate. My wife may have broken us, but she left me to my own desires. Only the gate mattered. If I stood up, would the mist follow? I left my bench, and, to my satisfaction, the mist followed me past the stage. I descended those musty stone steps, my footsteps echoed hollow, and at the bottom, I clutched the bars and stared through that primordial gate. Dark and secret whispers breached the room ahead, but I detected only shadows. No faces owned the whispers. A panicked rat dashed around the room. What thing terrified the creature so? I should have turned back then. Left well enough alone. Curiosity overtook me, and I strained against the bars to see the source of the sound. This near the gate, the smell of rust was overwhelming. And then I spotted it. A delicate red glow stood like a veil against the wall just ahead, not lit from a sole point like lamplight, but emanating from a single plane. The mist oozed from that wall. The muffled voices I’d heard resonated from a farther, unseen point. Like they were calling to me from behind the veil. That’s what the rat was fleeing. For whatever reason, the rat hadn’t considered squeezing through the gate.
As I gazed into the glow, heat built behind my eyes as if a great fever seized me. What was that thing? Could something enter where the mist exited? Not knowing made my shoulders shake and hands quiver. Behind me, out of sight, my wife still flirted with the pastor. She was leaving me with only a bloody night shift. Did she know about the gate? Did the pastor? However unlikely it was that the pastor did not know, it seemed true. This thing was here for me, after all. Me and that rat.
The mist was drifting off the surface of the veil, beckoning me forward. What were the chances of getting back out if I went into it? Was it a one-way trip? The faint voices confirmed this with a melancholic dirge. Bereft of life and love, they called to those who understood from beyond the veil. I understood. I wanted to go to them, share my pain. The mist’s call and the whispered voices revealed their covetousness towards me. I had to confirm it was safe. I gripped the rusty gate to push it open, but paused. Did danger await? Something painful and unending? My heart began to thunk rapidly against my chest, and my hands trembled. What if I regretted it? There was no coming back.
That rat would do. Opening the gate, I stepped into the room and felt the warmth of the veil. The rat skittered away from me, but not towards the veil. Not wanting it to get away, I leaped to the floor, cupping my hands over it.
I stood up and threw the rat into the veil without hesitation. It vanished on impact.
A moment passed in that eerie quiet, the whispers echoing off the surrounding walls.
The veil turned darker crimson and moments later, something red burst through and splattered on the floor. The thing had erupted, jagged bone around torn flesh, the viscera on display. I hardly believed it was the same rat.
Panic stole over me, and I staggered back and ran from the stairs.
•••
The crimson glow consumed my thoughts during many sleepless nights in the family room. My wife hadn’t noticed what I’d seen and would think me insane. We didn’t talk any longer. We’d already made a silent agreement to end things. It was just a matter of when we would go our separate ways.
When sleep arrived, it came hazardously. I fell from the couch often, thrashing awake and hating my wife for it.
One Sunday afternoon, months later, when she was late returning home, I remembered the glances cast between her and the pastor and became furious as the day moved into afternoon and evening. When I could no longer stand it, I made at once for the church.
Upon arrival, the red mist bled across the shining floor away from the podium and stage to the gate. The familiar fever swept over me, mixed with the jealousy I was feeling. That was where I’d find my wife. She and the pastor sought a private place to enact their treachery. Remembering their betrayal, the fever took hold, and I imagined haunted faces and writhing arms dragging them to the depths. They had long ago forsaken me. I remembered the mirth on my wife’s face when I’d caught her eye in the church. I didn’t care what condition I found them in, wanting to subvert them–to rid of the betrayal and the mirth. Beyond the veil, there was more than relief.Alone, I descended those steps, pulled open the gate and peered through into the room beyond. I saw them there. He had her pinned against the wall, one hand grasping her wrists, the other clutching her ass. His pants were down around his ankles, and her dress was at her waist. This tapestry of aberrant flesh convulsed, thrusted, moaned, and then she saw me. That look of mirth returned to her. I had had enough. They didn’t react to the veil beyond them, as if they couldn’t see it. But I could, and I knew what happened when something entered it. I thought of the rat. They weren’t rats, but they’d do. I started toward them, my mirth matching her own.
When he’s not homeschooling and parenting, Max Blood spends his days spinning horror tales for online audiences. He specializes in the weird, the cosmic, and the monstrous. With a passion for turning cryptid stories into positively horrific monsters, he has created many tales of monster horror. He has also dabbled in ghost stories and body horror.
He currently lives in Bakersfield, California where he writes his novels and short stories, and in 2023, he launched Max Blood’s Mausoleum, a magazine of original horror stories.
