he Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Borrowed Body   
by Kathleen McCluskey

Evelyn entered the cathedral with the cautious silence of somebody intruding on a place that remembered pain. The air was thick with the scent of damp stone and burned out incense, carrying a heaviness that settled in her lungs as she moved between the collapsed pews. Her lantern cast a trembling amber glow that failed to warm the chill pressed into the walls. The gargoyle above the altar caught the light like something caught mid-resurrection. Its wings were warped into a shape that suggested torment rather than flight. It crouched as if bracing for a blow, its massive form straining in a posture too tight. Too intimate to have been carved by an indifferent hand.

She approached with a restorer’s fascination but fascination felt too light for the weight that gathered in her chest. The creature appeared to be male beneath its monstrous veneer, the muscles captured with an unsettling fidelity. Its ribs seemed to be carved from a study of a person whose body once heaved with breath. Its face, oh God its face, was frozen in an expression of grief so personal it felt intrusive to look at it. As if she had stumbled upon a confession carved into marble.

Her fingers twitched at her side before lifting them. She was drawn to this statue despite her own instincts screaming warnings. When she laid her palm against the pedestal, the cold beneath her skin swallowed thought. Darkness surged through her as if the cathedral exhaled. She found herself inside of a tunnel that pulsed like a throat swallowing her whole. A man crawled ahead, his body gaunt and shaking, his hands were raw from scraping on the stone floor. His panic bled into her, a tide she could not fend off, leaving her breathless with a terror she did not understand.

She ripped her hand back with a cry that seemed too loud in the cavernous hall. Her lantern sputtered violently then steadied into a meek flicker.

She tried to compose herself, studying the gargoyle even closer. She could see the carvings along its ribcage more clearly. They were not decorative carvings. They resembled fractures that had been mended, broken again, reforging themselves in a cycle of suffering. The stone looked as if it had tried to recoil from the sculptress’s hand.

Evelyn reached out before she could reconsider, her fingertips grazing one of the fractures. The surface was warm, wrongly warm, like flesh trying to cool after a strenuous exertion. Something inside the stone throbbed under her touch, a sluggish, laboring heartbeat. The gargoyle’s chest hitched beneath her fingers, its exhale dampening her wrist with fevered breath.

She stumbled back, but the statue’s shadow clung to her boots as if to anchor her in place. A fissure along its ribs split wider with a brutal snap, shedding a ribbon of stone that floated on the air. Dust swarmed her eyes and mouth. She coughed, clawing at her face but the particles burrowed into the corners of her vision, dimming the world into a gritty smear.

The gargoyle’s lips peeled apart with a wet, cracking sound. Inside was no hollow carved mouth but rows of warped, human-like teeth stretched into a demented sneer. A rasping voice seeped out, scraping at the air as it formed her name. The sound lashed across her chest in a way that felt like possession.

She tried to run but the dust had hardened around her ankles like wet cement. The gargoyle’s eyes dragged open, lids tearing like rancid scabs. Human eyes stared out. Recognizing. Wanting. Starving.

Its wings tore free from the wall in a shower of mortar. It stepped off the pedestal with a heavy thud that shook the cathedral. Its hands, stone no longer, closed around her arms like a lover’s tender embrace turned to cruelty.

Its breath crawled across her face as it whispered that the sculptress had not carved him from stone at all.

She had buried him alive in it.

And he needed someone to take his place.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!