The church rises like a blackened shrine from the heart of the woods, half-swallowed by kudzu and crawling ivy, the stones chipped and the wood warped from rain and time and something deeper, something wrong. The steeple juts crooked toward the sky, as if in mockery of prayer. Its bell is long gone, but sometimes the trees hush like it still tolls. What's left of the stained glass doesn’t catch the light anymore. It drinks it, swallowing the last rays of sun with a hunger that feels almost deliberate.

There’s no road leading here. You had to hike through brush and briars, boots catching on roots, branches clawing at your jacket. You both joked about it at first. You called it cursed, he called it holy, you both called it home. There’s something magnetic about it, wrong in a way that makes you want to stay longer just to see what else it gets wrong.

Outside, the air is warm and thick with humidity. Inside, it's cold. The pews are rotted through and slick with moss. The altar’s been defaced, cracked in half like something burst out from beneath it. There’s old blood in the shape of a handprint on the wall behind it. You don’t know if it’s real. Sunday hasn’t looked at it. He’s been watching the floor.

You’ve been sitting together in one of the back pews for hours now, talking like it’s nothing. Laughing. The kind of laugh you only get away with when you're somewhere you shouldn't be, sharp and echoing, too alive in a place that now only holds dead whispers. It made the dust dance in the light through the ruined windows. It made the place feel less hollow.

But now the sun is bleeding out behind the tree line, and everything is going quiet in that animal sense way. The laughter dies in your throat like something smothered. The shadows stretch long down the aisle. The light’s gone gold and then gray, then gone completely far too quick. The air feels heavier. Wet, almost. Like a basement no one should be breathing in.

Then you hear it.

A noise under the floorboards. Not a creak, not a groan. A dragging sound. Wet, slow, deliberate. Like something with too many limbs pulling itself toward the surface.

Sunday goes still beside you. Not tense, not startled. Just... quiet. Quieter than he usually is.

His eyes track up to the arched windows. Then the doors.

You follow his gaze.

The windows and the door are all boarded up, covered in half-rotted slabs of wood, dark with mold. The nails are rusted like they've been there for years. You didn’t hear hammering. You didn’t see movement.

Sunday's voice is barely more than breath.

"They were open when we came in, weren’t they?"

You both know that they were.