Chapter 9 : The Church
Balkan Church rose from the fog like a tombstone.
Gothic architecture, transplanted wrong. The building shouldn't have existed in a Maine resort town—pointed arches and flying buttresses, stained glass windows depicting scenes that belonged to no Bible he'd ever read. The doors hung open, spilling candlelight into the grey, and the fog itself seemed reluctant to cross the threshold.
"Looks abandoned." Cybil swept her flashlight across the entrance. "Recently, though. Those candles haven't been burning long."
She was right. The wax had barely begun to pool. Someone had been here within the last few hours, lighting votives and arranging hymnals and then leaving in a hurry.
Dahlia. Preparing for something. Or someone.
The main chapel was empty—pews in neat rows, altar draped in black cloth, crucifix that showed a figure he didn't recognize instead of Christ. Symbols covered the walls: the seal of the cult, variations on the mark of Samael, geometric patterns that pulled at the eye like visual quicksand.
"What religion is this?" Cybil's voice echoed in the vaulted space. "I've seen churches before. This isn't—"
"It's their own." He moved toward the altar, where a door stood half-hidden behind a tapestry. "Dahlia's people. They've been here for generations, worshipping something that isn't God."
"You're talking about a cult."
"That's exactly what I'm talking about."
The door led to stairs descending into darkness. His flashlight carved a weak tunnel through the black, revealing stone walls slick with moisture, air that smelled of mold and paper and something older. The basement hadn't been designed as storage—the architecture suggested ritual purpose, a space carved out for ceremonies that required privacy and containment.
Filing cabinets lined one wall. Dozens of them, labeled by year, going back decades. The earliest dates he could read were from the 1800s.
"Records." Cybil started pulling drawers at random. "Birth certificates, death certificates—these are all children. All of them."
He moved to a cabinet labeled with more recent years. His meta-knowledge guided him to the right drawer, but he made a show of searching, opening files and discarding them, working toward the documents he already knew were there.
"Harry." Cybil's voice had changed—gone flat and professional, the tone cops used when they found something they wished they hadn't. "You need to see this."
She held a folder marked SACRED PREPARATIONS — CURRENT CYCLE. Inside: photographs of children. Ages ranging from infancy to adolescence. Each photo accompanied by detailed notes on physical characteristics, family history, "spiritual aptitude." At the bottom of the stack, a name he recognized.
GILLESPIE, ALESSA — VESSEL CONFIRMED — PREPARATION IN PROGRESS.
The photograph showed a girl of seven. Dark hair, dark eyes, expression too old for her face. Beautiful in the way children shouldn't have to be—haunted, knowing, already carrying burdens no adult should bear.
"They were selecting children." Cybil flipped through the pages, jaw tight. "For decades. Looking for—what does 'vessel confirmed' mean?"
"It means they found what they were looking for." He took the folder from her hands, forcing himself to read with detachment he didn't feel. "Alessa Gillespie. Dahlia's daughter. Seven years ago, they performed a ritual. Something happened—a fire, maybe. The town's been like this ever since."
"And your daughter?"
"Cheryl was—" He stopped. How much could he explain without revealing how he knew it? "I found Cheryl on the side of the road. A baby, abandoned. No papers, no parents, nothing. I adopted her. Raised her as my own."
"But she's connected to this Alessa somehow."
"I think so. I don't know how yet."
Liar. You know exactly how. They're the same person, split in two, and Dahlia wants to put them back together.
He kept searching. The Burned Photograph reference from Dahlia's story—it had to be here somewhere. The game had never shown it, but the outline indicated it would be planted in this batch, this location. He moved through drawers with increasing urgency, pulling files, discarding them, reaching—
There.
A photograph, slipped between unrelated documents like someone had hidden it there in a hurry. Black and white, faded with age. A young woman holding a baby, face turned toward the camera in what might have been a smile. The woman's features had been burned away—literally, chemically, someone had taken acid or flame to the image and destroyed everything that might have identified her.
But the baby was clear. Alessa Gillespie, infant, held with obvious tenderness by someone who loved her.
He pocketed it without fully understanding why. Something about the pose, the care in those burned-away hands. This image mattered. He didn't know how yet.
"Harry."
Cybil stood at the base of the stairs, arms crossed, face unreadable.
"You navigate this basement like you've been here before."
"I—"
"You knew Alessa's name before anyone said it. Back at the antique store, you said it before Dahlia did." She didn't raise her voice, didn't reach for her weapon. That made it worse somehow. "You haven't panicked once since I met you. Literal monsters, nightmare dimensions, cult conspiracies—and you adapt like you've been preparing for this your whole life."
The confrontation. I knew it was coming. I don't have a good answer.
"You're asking what I am."
"I'm asking what you know." She took a step closer. "Because either you're the unluckiest father in history, stumbling into Hell on a vacation trip, or you're something else. Someone who came here with knowledge he shouldn't have."
The silence stretched between them. He could lie—had been lying, by omission and misdirection, since they'd met. He could tell the truth and watch her face as she tried to process that he'd died in another world and woken up here, carrying memories of a video game that hadn't been invented yet.
He chose a middle path.
"The town shows me things." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Since the crash, I've been—seeing. Visions, maybe. Glimpses of what's happening, what's going to happen. I don't understand it, and I can't control it, but—"
"You're psychic."
"I don't know what I am." Half-truth. The best kind of lie. "I know my daughter is in danger. I know the people who run this place are monsters in ways that have nothing to do with the things in the fog. And I know that if I don't find her soon, whatever Dahlia is planning will make all of this—" He gestured at the basement, the files, the decades of documented child abuse. "All of this will look like the beginning."
Cybil stared at him. He couldn't read her expression—couldn't tell if she believed him, if she'd decided he was insane, if she was calculating the best way to restrain a potential threat.
Then she nodded, once, sharp.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"I don't believe you." She moved past him, grabbing a stack of files. "Not entirely. But you've been right about everything so far—the hospital, the cult, Dahlia. So either your 'visions' are real, or you're the most well-informed liar I've ever met." She met his eyes. "Either way, I'm not leaving a little girl in the hands of people who keep records like these. We find your daughter. Then you explain everything. The real everything."
"Deal."
They gathered the evidence—files on Alessa, on the ritual preparations, on the children who had come before her and failed whatever test the cult required. Decades of suffering, documented with bureaucratic precision. He tucked the burned photograph into his jacket, separate from the rest, something that felt personal in ways the official records didn't.
At the top of the stairs, his Otherworld Connection pulsed.
The sensation was stronger now—a pressure behind his eyes, a wrongness that had nothing to do with the church or the cult or the files in his arms. The boundary between worlds was shifting. Thinning. Something was coming.
"We need to move." He grabbed Cybil's arm. "Now."
"What—"
"The transition. It's coming again." He pulled her toward the door, ignoring the pain from wounds that had started bleeding again. "We need to find shelter before—"
The first siren tore the air.
Distant, rising, that same air-raid wail that had heralded the Otherworld in the school. The candles in the chapel flickered—orange to black to something that wasn't light at all. The walls began to change, surfaces peeling back to reveal rust and meat and chains.
They ran.