We came unto the church not as men arriving at a house of prayer, but as condemned souls who had, by some clerical misfortune of Providence, been granted leave to walk bodily down the stairwell of Hell before the final accounting of our names.

  The plain stretched outward in every direction like a parchment abandoned by the hand of God Himself. It was flat, wind-scoured, and written only with the wandering script of scrub, and in the midst of that lifeless manuscript rose the church of New Haven, its stone tower thrust into the lifeless husk of skyline, while above its weathered crown the noon sun hung in the heavens with such terrible and unsleeping brilliance that I could not help but feel it was no mere star burning above us, but rather the single open eye of the Almighty, gazing downward through the furnace of eternity upon the wretched theatre of men.

  Henry walked beside me with the slow and laborious gait of an old mastiff that has fought many winters and carries in its bones the knowledge that the next battle may be its last. Gabriel followed close behind in broken silence, his heart had been hollowed out and left echoing like an abandoned well, so that the only sound among us for a long while was the shuffling percussion of boots across gravel and the uneasy breathing of three souls who suspected, though none dared say it aloud, that the threshold before us might very well prove the final door we would ever cross.

  The spire cut solar light into a swift succession of shadow that fell across the churchyard stones with precision, and I remembered then the words written upon that blood-soaked scrap we had pulled from the ruin of Gabriel’s home:

  There shall the body of man be measured again by Our Lord.

  I felt in that moment as though the entire town had been nothing more than a prelude, a slow orchestration of suffering designed only to bring us at last to this solitary altar beneath it all. The doors of the church stood half ajar. They did not groan upon their hinges nor tremble in the wind, but rather waited with a dreadful stillness, like the parted lips of a corpse that has something left to say. Henry muttered something low in his throat, perhaps a prayer, perhaps a curse, and we stepped inside.

  The interior reeked not of incense nor of old hymnals, but of damp earth, iron, and the sour rot of opened graves. Sunlight spilled through the high windows in brief shafts that fell across the nave as pillars of some ruined temple, and in that pallid illumination the pews seemed less like places of worship and more like rows of silent witnesses gathered for the solemn viewing of a crime that had not yet concluded.

  For several moments nothing moved. Even the wind appeared reluctant to cross that threshold. And then… something breathed. It was not the breath of man, that lifelong substance we all fight for. It came instead as a wet and ponderous laboring sound, like bellows dragging air through lungs that had forgotten the proper covenant between flesh and breath.Gabriel floated frozen beside me. Henry’s hand crept toward the revolver at his hip.

  From the darkness beyond the altar there came a craggly movement, accompanied by the sickening rasp of leather or sinew sliding against stone. What emerged into the fluttering sunlight was a figure so grotesquely assembled that my mind at first rejected the evidence of my own eyes, much as a sailor might deny the rising of some impossible leviathan from the sea simply because the world he believed in contained no room for such abominations.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The thing was taller than any man ought to be, and its limbs bore the unmistakable asymmetry of stolen anatomy, as though the architect of its body had rummaged carelessly through the depths of departed and selected his components with the indifferent haste of a butcher filling a sack. One arm hung thick and muscular like that of a laborer accustomed to hauling brick, while the other seemed slender and pale, its fingers elongated in a manner that suggested they had once belonged to a woman; the legs were bound together with crude sutures that shone black beneath the light, and across its torso ran the unmistakable latticework of surgical thread where disparate pieces of flesh had been drawn together like mismatched cloth beneath the desperate hands of a tailor.

  But it was the head that froze the marrow within me.

  For the face (if such a word could be used for that dreadful collage of humanity) was composed not of one identity but several, skin stretched and joined in such a manner that the features seemed to argue among themselves about what expression they ought to hold, while the eyes, God help me, the eyes burned with a dull and wounded consciousness, like the lanterns of a shipwreck survivor who has awakened to discover that his body no longer belongs to him. As he… it, shit they smiled, Jeffery’s voice echoed through my mind. There really was only one succinct way to describe this thing; its bones were not on correctly.

  Gabriel uttered a broken whisper. Henry drew his revolver. The creature stepped forward. Each movement carried with it the stiff resistance of newly awakened sinew, as though the limbs themselves were still negotiating their unnatural allegiance to one another, and when it opened its mouth the sound that emerged was not speech but a low and guttural moan that trembled through the nave like the mourning wind of a graveyard at dusk.

  I knew then, with the terrible certainty that sometimes arrives like divine revelation in the mind of a condemned man, that this was the purpose of the stolen bones, the disturbed graves, the vanished flesh: this towering blasphemy stitched together beneath the silent supervision of the church and the terrible eye of the sun above.

  Henry fired first. The report of his revolver shattered the stillness like thunder. The bullet struck the creature in the chest, yet the thing did not fall. It staggered only slightly, as though pain itself were a language it had not yet fully learned. Gabriel cried out. The monster lurched forward with dreadful inevitability. What followed was less a fight than a collision between human frailty and the grotesqueries of man assembled without regard for God’s limitations; in those frantic seconds of smoke and shouting and stumbling violence I felt as though we had crossed fully into some apocryphal state in which man, having presumed too boldly upon the architecture of creation, was now forced to wrestle with the consequences of his own imitation.

  The creature roared. Henry fired again. The church echoed with the thunder of iron and the crack of splintering wood as pews overturned beneath the beast’s weight, and the terrible patchwork of its flesh glistened beneath the fractured sunlight like some obscene parody of resurrection.

  It was then that by divine providence a voice spoke from the darkness beyond the altar.

  “Enough.” The word was not shouted. It carried instead the calm authority of a man who has long ago grown accustomed to obedience. The creature halted. Its enormous frame shuddered once, like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been drawn tight. From the shadows behind the altar there stepped a figure clothed in black, slender and composed, his silhouette cutting through the falling sunlight with the quiet inevitability of judgment descending from the heavens. For a moment I could see nothing of his face. Only the outline of a man standing calmly in the presence of his own monstrous creation.

  He stepped forward, and when the light reached him… I felt the cold hand of realization close around my heart.

  The killer had finally come to greet us.