Her Soul for Revenge Chapter 3

Victoria (fl friend)

"Lilith' we should go for a walk". Let's walk come on.I want to show you some interesting.

I wanted to lie there on the grass until it grew over me, until I became like the fallen pine covered in lichens and little patches of moss. But Victoria was pulling me up, so I took her hand and trudged with her, deeper into the woods. The sun had set. The light was gray, and clouds were filling the sky. I looked at my watch, for the first time in forever, but the numbers didn’t make sense. They were just digital marks on a screen, hazy and oddly three-dimensional, as if I could stroke my fingers along the edges of them. I put my wrist down hurriedly, and the moment I did, I saw where Victoria was leading me.

Lilith Ashford

“We’re not supposed to be here,”

Lilith Ashford

The old spires of St. Thaddeus cathedral loomed ahead, towering amongst the trees. Sober, I never would have been afraid of this place. The legends surrounding it were just that: old stories, made up. The paint had faded from its exterior long ago, leaving the wood dark and stained with the damp.

Lilith Ashford

This place had a story, like everything else in Belgaum. It was close to White Pine, the deep mine shaft where rescuers were once able to pull the only survivors of the mine’s cave-in back up into the light of day. It was said the three rescued miners stopped here, and dedicated the cathedral to the God they claimed spared their lives in the deep, dark, flooded depths. The Deep One, they’d called it. Sometimes, you’d still hear the old folks mutter about it. But to our generation, it was just a creepy story. Like Big Foot, or the Jersey Devil. History and myth intertwined in this town, utterly inseparable from each other.

Lilith Ashford

[The old church should have been dead, like bleached bones, but the air around it rippled like heat off the roof of a car in summer. I stopped abruptly, tugging back against Victoria’s hand, and she stared at me with wide eyes.]

Victoria (fl friend)

“Why not?” she said. “You’ve been in there before, Lili, we both have.” She shrugged. “It’s the same old church.”

Lilith Ashford

“Not...not now,”“Not when we’re tripping. Let’s go back. I want to go back to the trees.”

Victoria (fl friend)

“Just a little while. Please? I just want to walk through it.”

Lilith Ashford

[Something felt so unexplainably wrong. I could smell smoke, like a campfire. As the darkness around us deepened, and we got closer to the cathedral.]

Lilith Ashford

[The cathedral’s front doors weren’t chained shut like they usually were. When Victoria and I had been there before, to have fun or do whatever our little rebel hearts desired, we’d had to break in through a back entrance. But the chain was gone, and right before Victoria pushed the doors open, I knew we weren’t alone.]

Lilith Ashford

[Someone was inside. Someone was waiting. For the first time in my life, from behind me, from the woods, I heard a whisper. I heard the woods call my name.]