Flash Fiction - Sisters of the Sacred Rite

A stream of consciousness story for an image prompt

I have been wanting to take part in the Sunday Scare image prompts since the start, but I haven’t been able to find the time. I finally got around to it today, and while the image was amazing, nothing was coming. In these situations, I force myself to write to see what comes out. This was what I got. No stopping, just typing until it felt done.

There is an overgrown path that cuts through the forest that was once a well-known shortcut. The path led to a clearing where chapel once stood, spires raised to the sky in silent prayer. Nowadays, the building is in decay, falling apart from the inside out, like a rotting tooth.

The parishioners did not die out or move away; they simply stopped attending services. Some say it was the fire and brimstone sermons from the priest that put fear in the flock, but others tell a different story.

Those people speak of the Sisters of the Severed Rite. Witnesses spoke of a pair of women dressed in robes of black, dead flowers serving as crowns atop their covered heads. It was their faces that turned blood to ice in the veins. Some claimed they wore cattle skull masks, the black, hollowed-out sockets lifeless, yet still somehow able to gaze into your soul and know that you were not quite right.

They were not masks, but rather growths of bone carved to mimic their master. The Sisters saw all, and they passed judgement. Even the holiest of the congregation feared being seen and found wanting, so they stayed away, because once the Sisters of the Severed Rite found their way inside your head, the never left.

I stand at the end of the path now, looking across the clearing to the chapel. It’s roof sags, exhausted after years of standing proud. The women stand at the entrance, the doors of which hang open, listing sideway like a weekend drunk.

They see me, and I feel them inside my head. I can also feel their fear once they realize that I am the nightmare man that feeds on darkness and hate. I beckon them closer, and they come, ever so slowly. When I pull them into an embrace, their bones seem to sigh as they transfer all previous transgressions to me.

And so, I become stronger.