Emma’s eyes opened. The darkness she had left behind in her sleep once again enveloped her. With her vision rendered useless, she became acutely aware that the hypnotic rhythm of the rainfall which had been her lullaby had ceased. The only noises she heard were the occasional drops of water landing in puddles somewhere in distant sections of the sanctuary.

     As if it were instinctive, Emma started feeling around the pew for her purse, searching for her phone. She felt nothing. Just the fabric covering of the pew cushion. A small pit of anxiety settled in her stomach as she realized she had no flashlight and would have no directions for how to get home.

     And it was dark.

     How could it still be dark? How short of a time had she slept? 

     Emma felt a bead of sweat form on her forehead, and she dug her nails into the fabric of the pew, scratching into the material in an attempt to distract herself from her thoughts. 

     She forced herself to think about how gritty the fabric was, and the shrill grating shriiirk-noise her nails produced as she dragged them across it. As she kept dragging her nails into it, she started to relax. She could wait longer. The sun would be up soon.

     Shriiiirk. Shriiiirk. Shriiiirk. Shriiiirk. Shrriiii- “ssshush”-rkk. Emma froze in place. She thought she had heard something – no, the voice of some one, whispering right next to her in the darkness. She scratched the pew’s surface louder to break herself out of the spell she had constructed for herself. 

Shriiiirk. Shriiiirk. Shriiiiiiirk. Shriiii -“Shh,” she thought she heard the sound of whispers closer, somewhere off to her right.  

     Shriii- 

     “It’s…” and again closer still. There was no way anyone could be here with her, she reasoned that she had to be asleep still. 

     Shriiii–

     “Leave.” a soft but masculine voice whispered with full clarity from the darkness right beside her. She felt the warmth of its breath on her ear as it spoke. 

     Leaping from the pew, Emma’s hand shot to cover her ear as a tingling sensation rippled through her arms and neck. Goosebumps formed on the surface of her skin.

     Now standing in the darkness, she frantically tried to get a glimpse of the source of the voice that had been so close to her ear, with no success. She could barely make out outlines of the pulpit in front of her, but the stairs on either side which descended down into the nave of sanctuary were more visible, now scarcely illuminated by faint shafts of light shimmering down through patchwork roof overhead, but also by something else. 

     A soft, dim yellow-glow emanated from five wax candles burning atop an antiquated brass candelabra, which had four arms jutting out of a central stem. Having no alternative source of light, Emma walked over to it and picked it up by the base. 

     Now holding it, she could clearly see that the candles had hardly any wax dripping down their sides. 

     Not letting herself dwell on the implication, Emma continued on. Walking down the stairs of the altar and descending into the nave proper, the dim light of the candles only allowed her to see about ten feet in front of her as she went. However, even with her sight being limited, it was immediately clear to her that the water which had engulfed the floor previously before her slumber had vanished, and strangely, there was no sign of water damage on the floor or on the wooden bases of the pews as she walked past them. 

     There didn’t even look to be damage at all on them. The color of their baseboards was pure white, and the cushioning green and in good condition. These did not look like the pews she had passed when she had entered the building tonight. 

     A knot started to churn in her stomach and she lowered her head. Focusing on her feet moving forward.

     Unfortunately, the silence in the room made her incredibly aware of the sound of her own footsteps, and she thought she could hear the sound of her own heartbeat as she walked up the center of the aisle.

     Thump…Thump… As she continued walking, the noise became clearer and more consistent in its frequency; Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

     Was the noise just her pulse in her ears? She stopped in place. She could feel a pressure building in her ears, but the noise retained its level of volume, neither growing louder or fainter. Thump-Thump. Thump-Thump. 

     She reluctantly forced herself to look up. Seeing nothing ahead except for rows upon rows of pews on either side of her, and the shroud of darkness beyond the dim light of the candles, she stepped forward slowly. 

     Thump-Thump. Thump-Thump. THUMP-THUMP. 

     The pressure in her ears had kept building, but she was almost certain that the sound was not coming from within her own body. She kept walking forward. 

     THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP!! THUMP-THUMP!!!

     It was so loud that she could feel it now; reverberating throughout the very floorboards beneath her feet. There was no doubt in her mind now  that whatever she was hearing was now coming from something else in the room. Something in front of her. Something just out of sight.

     Emma felt nauseous.

     She had only found one entry point into the church when she had entered it, in what felt to her now like a lifetime ago, and she knew that if she wanted to leave the way she had entered, she would have to go forward. There was only one way out of this sanctuary, and only one way she knew out of the church, and it was forward.

     Clutching the candelabra she had found tightly, she walked forward until she started to see something of note at the edge of the candlelight. Four pew rows ahead of her, both of the pews on either side were slanted away from her instead of being parallel like the rest of the pews she had been passing, angled pointing towards the entrance to the sanctuary, like they were pointing the way to her escape, but between them, as she continued forward, she noticed a circular form of darkness forming in the floor. As her light revealed more of the area ahead, she saw visible cracks leading into full on missing sections of flooring, until that too eventually gave way to sheer vertical drop – an open pit of earth beneath the surface of the church.

     She felt the urge to turn back — to go back to the pew behind the pulpit and sleep until morning, but the thoughts of the voice in her ear flashed through her mind, and she realized that the idea of going back to sleep here terrified her far more than any risks she would face attempting to leave the dilapidated ruin she now found herself in.

     She walked past the pews pointing inward towards the sinkhole ahead of her. Stopping herself short of the edge, she extended the candelabra downard to illuminate the abyss below.

     Thump Thump. Thump Thump.

     The soft orange glow of the candlelight revealed that the edges of the sinkhole were almost perfectly uniform. If there was any part not equidistant from the center, she couldn’t tell. More notably, she could just barely see what she thought was the bottom of it. Far below, she thought she could just make out layers upon layers of thorny vines, covering a large central mass of some oozing, wet dark red material.

     Thump. Thump. 

     She watched the vines below with disgusted transfixion. They were convulsing and constricting in synchronization with the beat of the thumping, ooze leaking from the center of whatever they had wrapped themselves around with each beat.

     As she stared down into the pit, she started to hear the indistinguishable mutterings of whispering voices somewhere in the near distance, in the dark corners of the room around her. She quickly jerked her head up and outstretched her hand holding the candelabra in an attempt to see into the closest corner. 

     The light barely reached, but enough of it did so for her to see that nothing, or rather no one, else was with her. Emma felt an immense wave of distress hit her. Sweat began to bead on her forehead, and she could feel her heart thumping inside her chest.

     “You’re not funny! Do you hear me?! You’re not funny!” She yelled, her voice echoing and bouncing off the walls of the sanctuary around her. 

     Her outburst was rewarded with the sound of silence; even the thumping noise of the plant in the pit below seemed to settle in response to her cry. Feeling uneasy, she quickly made her way around the edge of the pit and continued walking past the remaining pews in the room. The weight of every moment pressed down upon her as only the sounds of her own hurried footsteps filled the chamber around her, right up until the moment she reached the shut door of the sanctuary.

     She yanked the door open without hesitation, revealing a stone stairwell that only descended downward behind it.