Page 24 of Forever Dark
The churchyard vanished.Summer vanished.All that remained was that face at the window, fixed and terrible and impossibly there.
Ahand touched her shoulder.
CHAPTER FIVE
Selena flinched and turned.
Connor stood in front of her.Behind them, St.Bartholomew’s church stood, now twenty years older than it had been when they were engaged.
Connor watched, waiting for an answer.
Not the young man in a damp shirt with laughter still threatening around the edges of his mouth.This Connor was older.Forty now.Broader through the chest.Weathered a little.Still handsome, though life had left its marks around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.His sheriff’s jacket sat open over a button-down shirt.Concern had pulled a faint line between his brows.
“Are you okay?”he asked.“You seemed in a daydream.”
Morning air replaced summer heat.
The flowers were gone.The churchyard looked neglected now, the beds dead, the grass patchy, the stone darkened by time and neglect.The windows no longer glowed.Several were boarded.Others were cracked.Paint peeled from the trim.The tower stood above them exactly where it had in memory, but the place had changed into something hollowed out.
Selena blinked once and looked back toward the upper window.The memory of the dead woman’s face was engraved on her mind.Had it been part of the daydream?
Nothing there now.
Only dark glass.
Connor was still watching her.
For a second Selena could not answer.The flash of the dead woman’s face, the same face she had seen in the crime scene photos, had left a residue under her skin, something icy and unpleasant that did not belong to memory alone.She told herself it had been the mind playing tricks.Old places did that.Old fears did that.Yet the image lingered with such force it felt less imagined than witnessed.She was beginning to worry that Harlan County was having a more deleterious effect on her than she anticipated.
Connor shifted his weight slightly.“Selena?”
She drew a breath, steadied herself, and returned her gaze to the abandoned church.
“Yes,” she said.“I’m fine.Just thinking through my approach.”
The words sounded thinner than she meant them to.
Wind moved through the weeds near the path.Somewhere behind the church, metal clanged softly against metal, maybe loose fencing, maybe something else.The neglected building stood in front of them with its tower and its boarded windows and all the years that had gathered since she last came here for anything joyful.
Selena kept her eyes on the church and said, “I just didn’t think I’d ever go inside this place again.”
The front doors of St.Bartholomew’s gave way with a long, reluctant groan.
Selena stepped inside first.
Cold met her at once.Not the clean cold of morning air, but the kind old buildings kept in their bones.It carried damp wood, stale wax, mildew, and something mineral from the stone itself.Daylight leaked through cracks in the shuttered windows in thin blades that cut across pews, broken plaster, and years of neglect.
Connor came in behind her and pushed one of the doors partly shut.The sound echoed through the nave and vanished into the rafters.
He held out a flashlight.“You’ll want this.”
“I have my own,” she said, taking hers out and turning it on, though enough weak daylight filtered into the church to shape the room.The beam sharpened everything anyway.Empty pews.Dust layered over hymn racks.Flaked paint on the walls.The altar in front, stripped of anything sacred except its outline.
A strange pressure rose in her chest.
This place had once held weddings, baptisms, funerals, Christmas candles, choirs.Her own memories were tied up in it so tightly she could barely look at the front without seeing other versions layered over the ruin.A place where she should have wed but did not.It was the first broken promise of many, and their marriage had kept that sentiment going throughout its short duration.
Now there were only shadows and rot and the hush of abandonment to be found here.
