ex ossibus

original catholic horror & microfiction. told from behind the wall.

expect:

– haunted anchoresses

– relics that bite

– saints that whisper

– rituals you shouldn’t finish

🕯️

if you read something that stirs the veil, say a prayer in the tags.

first story: “The Anchoress”

The confessional had been locked for three months when Father Petrov found the smell.

Not rot. Not exactly. Something sweeter. Like incense left burning too long in a closed room. Like flowers pressed between the pages of a very old book.

The key hung in the sacristy with all the others, labeled in faded ink: *Confessional - South Transept*. He had never needed it before. The north confessional had always been sufficient for their small parish.

But someone had been using it.

He knew because of the line.

Every Sunday, after Mass, there would be a queue. Seven or eight people, sometimes more, standing patiently outside the locked door. When he asked them what they were waiting for, they looked at him strangely.

“For confession, Father.”

“But it’s locked,” he said.

They nodded. Kept waiting.

He watched one Sunday from the vestry window. Mrs. Kowalska, who had not been to confession in fifteen years. Young Dmitri, who never came to church at all. The pharmacist. The teacher. The woman who ran the butcher shop.

One by one, they approached the locked door.

One by one, they knelt.

Their lips moved. Hands clasped. Heads bowed.

After ten minutes, they would cross themselves and leave.

When he tried the door that evening, it opened.

Inside: dust. A wooden screen, split down the middle. The priest’s chair on one side, the penitent’s kneeler on the other. Everything precisely as it should be.

Except.

The kneeler was worn smooth. Polished by use. The wood shone.

He sat in the priest’s chair. The smell was stronger here. Thick enough to taste. He touched the screen. His fingers came away clean.

He waited.

The church was empty. Silent. Outside, snow began to fall.

Then, from the other side of the screen: breathing.

Slow. Wet. The sound of someone trying very hard to be quiet.

“Hello?” he said.

The breathing stopped.

He leaned closer to the lattice. On the other side, he could see nothing. Just darkness. But the darkness was *there*. Present. Occupying space.

“This confessional is closed,” he said, standing. “You need to—”

“Bless me, Father.”

A woman’s voice. Soft, polite. Familiar, though he could not place it.

“This booth is not in use,” he tried again. “Please, the north confessional—”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

He sat back down.

He did not mean to.

“How long since your last confession?” he heard himself say.

“Three months,” she said. “Three months, two weeks, four days.”

The smell grew thicker.

“And what sins—” His throat closed. He swallowed. Tried again. “What sins do you confess?”

Silence.

Then, quietly: “I stayed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I should have left,” she said. “When the door was open. When there was still time. I stayed.”

He gripped the armrests.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because someone needed to listen.”

The wood beneath his hands felt warm. Too warm. Like skin.

“I don’t—” he started.

“You will,” she said.

The breathing resumed. Slower now. Deeper.

He stood. Pushed open the door of the booth and stepped out into the nave.

Empty.

He circled the confessional, heart pounding, and yanked open the penitent’s door.

Nothing.

Just the smell. And on the kneeler, still fresh: two handprints. Small. Pressed into the wood as if the grain were soft clay.

He locked the door.

He locked it and hung the key back in the sacristy and told himself he would not return.

But that night, he dreamed of waiting.

Of kneeling in a small space, breath fogging the darkness, words spilling out like water from a crack in a dam. He dreamed of speaking and speaking and never being interrupted. Of a patient silence on the other side of the screen, listening. Always listening.

He woke with his knees bruised.

Sunday came.

The line was longer.

He watched from the vestry. Twelve people now, maybe more. Some he recognized. Others were strangers. They queued in silence, hands folded, faces calm.

He went down to disperse them.

But when he reached the transept, he stopped.

The door was open.

Just a crack. Enough to see the darkness inside. Enough to smell the flowers.

Mrs. Kowalska emerged, crossing herself. Her face was peaceful. Radiant, even. She smiled at him as she passed.

“Thank you, Father,” she said.

“I didn’t—”

But she was already gone.

The next person stepped forward. Dmitri. He glanced at Father Petrov, nodded once, and slipped inside.

The door closed behind him.

Father Petrov stood very still.

He could hear it, faintly. Dmitri’s voice. Low, halting, confessing something he could not quite make out. And beneath it, that wet breathing. Patient. Waiting.

When Dmitri emerged, his eyes were red.

“Thank you, Father,” he said.

One by one, they went in.

One by one, they came out lighter.

Father Petrov did not move.

He stood outside the confessional until the line had finished, until the last penitent had left, until the church was silent again.

The door hung ajar.

He should have locked it.

He should have called the bishop.

He should have left.

Instead, he stepped inside.

The smell wrapped around him like a shroud.

He knelt.

The screen was dark. But he could feel her there, on the other side. Waiting. Listening.

“Bless me,” he whispered. “For I have sinned.”

The breathing grew softer. Gentler.

“Tell me,” she said.

And he did.

They found the confessional empty six weeks later, when the new priest arrived.

The door was locked from the inside.

The key was still in the sacristy.

But the wood of the kneeler—both sides now—had been worn smooth as glass.

And every Sunday, without fail, the line forms again.

They wait patiently.

They kneel.

They confess.

And someone, behind the screen, listens.

Always listens.

Bless me, Father.

The chapel of Saint Oris stood alone where the old road bent toward the river, too small for a parish and too stubborn to collapse. Stones dragged from the riverbed showed pale shells in their grain, and damp mortar carried a faint taste of brine. No bell hung in the tower. Travelers passed without looking, yet their steps slowed on the worn flags.

Inside, the air stayed close even when rain hissed outside. The pews were gone. What remained was a narrow aisle and, at its end, a stone font sunk into the floor. Water fed the basin from a hidden pipe. It arrived clear, then clouded with a faint milkiness that never settled.

A niche behind the font held a reliquary: a glass capsule bound in tarnished wire, containing a single tooth the color of ash. The label beneath it had been rubbed nearly blank. Someone had replaced missing letters with scratch marks. The capsule leaked no liquid, yet stone around it stayed damp, and cloth that touched that dampness stiffened, then tore, leaving grit along the fibers.

The chapel had been used when the main church could not be reached. When that need ended, the visits did not. People still went in fog and dark and left small things on the sill: a ring, a braid of hair, a mitten stiff with dried mud. They returned quieter than they arrived.

A new clerk named Elowen began sorting what had been neglected. She found the chapel key and wrote “Saint Oris” beside it, as if naming could restore order. She brought two men the next morning, not to pray but to inventory what might be stolen.

The lock resisted with stubbornness. When it gave, it did so without a click. The men stepped in first and stopped. Their mouths opened as if to speak, then closed. Elowen took it for cold and pulled her coat tighter. Breath seemed delayed.

Dust lay everywhere except in a crescent around the font, where stone shone as if rubbed daily. In that shine, Elowen saw a dark line circling the basin, kept clean.

One man found a framed sheet of vellum behind the niche. A short litany was written in cramped script, stained along the edges. Certain letters had been traced so often the vellum had thinned beneath them. He lifted the frame and tilted it. A droplet fell from the bottom edge and struck his boot. Leather darkened instantly, not with water but with something that spread like bruising.

He tried to curse and made only a thin clicking at the back of his mouth. His lips pressed together, then fused, smooth as if poured. He raised both hands, palms up.

The second man lurched forward to help and slipped. He caught himself on the rim of the font. The water rose to meet his wrist. It did not spill. It climbed, curling around his forearm in a clear sleeve. He jerked back, but it held. Under the sheath his skin blanched, then mottled with pale shapes that resembled letters. The sleeve tightened. His fingers curled and stayed curled.

Elowen snatched the frame and set it face down. The wood struck stone, and the vellum inside shifted with a soft rasp, as if something had turned a page. She flipped it over. One phrase near the center sat wrong, as if a petition for release had been replaced with one that asked for keeping.

As she stared, the wrong phrase faded. The ink did not smear. It withdrew, leaving pale surface, and earlier words returned as if they had always been there. The air above the frame warmed. The damp stone by the reliquary brightened.

Elowen reached for her notebook. Her pencil tip snapped as soon as it touched paper. Graphite dragged when she tried again, leaving grooves as if the page were already written upon. Behind her, the first man staggered toward the door.

At the threshold he stopped. Outside daylight lay beyond him, and he could not cross. He pushed. His forehead touched the air and left a smear, like a fingerprint on glass. He pushed harder. His skin flattened at the point of contact, but the rest of him stayed behind. His breath left a cloudy oval that did not fade.

The second man fell to his knees. The sleeve of water had reached his elbow. His arm beneath it looked too smooth, as if planed. He tried to pull free, and his fingers slipped as if grasping glass. The water did not slosh. It simply held and tightened.

Elowen seized a bucket and tried to scoop the font. The water bent around the bucket and returned to the basin, leaving the pail dry. She tried to speak a prayer remembered from childhood. The words left her mouth and fell short, dropping into the air like heavy cloth.

The second man’s arm released suddenly. Not by freedom. By separation. The sleeve slid back into the basin, clean and smooth, leaving his forearm on the flagstones with no blood, only a faint darkening where skin met air. The man stared at the stump, then folded forward and lay with his cheek on stone. His remaining hand twitched once, fingers tracing shapes in the dust. Then it went still.

The first man had stopped pushing. He stood pressed to the threshold, a figure half offered to the outside and refused. Grit gathered along his lashes. When his knees gave, he sagged like a heavy garment on a peg, still held upright by the invisible surface that would not let him pass.

Elowen backed away. Her notebook slipped from her fingers. The page she had tried to keep clean was now filled line after line with a single petition written in her own hand, but written as if the hand had been guided. Each repetition carried a small difference.

She fled into fog. In town, she spoke of an accident. The diocese sent a locksmith. The locksmith returned with the key still on his ring and his hands wrapped in cloth that would not stay white. The chapel was boarded and chained.

The monastery stood at the edge of the valley like a wound that never closed. Its walls, pale beneath drifting clouds, held a hush that felt carved rather than merely kept. Travelers who approached spoke of an unease that settled in the bones long before the gates appeared, a heaviness that seemed not hostile but watchful, as though something unseen waited for a trespass no one understood.

Within, the corridors breathed a cold that did not rise from earth or winter. Lamps burned low, their flames small and strained, as if burdened by the weight of long forgotten prayers. Along the passage leading to the inner sanctum, carvings of saints stared with hollow calm, their stone faces bearing traces of an order that had endured beyond its own decay.

Brother Eamon walked slowly, robes brushing the floor in measured rhythm. His hands carried a candle that flickered each time he passed a threshold, as though each doorway resisted the light. He had been sent to prepare the chapel for the nightly reading, though no voice had dared read aloud from the sacred texts in weeks. The brothers whispered of a book discovered behind a collapsed reliquary shelf, bound in dark hide and inked in a script that seemed to shift when glanced at too directly. It was said to be older than any liturgy preserved in their archives, older than the walls themselves. Some called it cursed scripture, though no formal declaration had been made. Even in fear, the monks chose their words with care.

As Eamon approached the chapel, he noticed again the smell lingering at its threshold. Not the usual dust nor the incense pressed into the stones over generations, but something faint and sweet, carrying a suggestion of rot beneath a veil of sanctity. He paused, listening. No sound greeted him, only that uncanny silence that seemed deeper than the absence of noise, as though it had its own slow pulse.

Inside, the chapel lay dim. Candles guttered in iron sconces, their weak light glancing off polished reliquaries arranged in solemn rows. Within them rested bodies that had never surrendered to decay. The incorrupt forms, dressed in embroidered vestments long dulled by time, lay as though in gentle sleep. Yet lately their presence had grown uneasy. Several brothers claimed the closed eyes of one relic had almost opened during prayer. Another insisted that the fingertips of a long dead abbot had changed position between one vigil and the next. No one spoke of these things openly, for naming a fear within consecrated walls risked feeding it.

Eamon set the candle upon the altar, noticing faint scratches on the stone surface. They formed no clear pattern, though they seemed recent, pale dust still clinging to their edges. He brushed them gently, then withdrew his hand when the cold beneath the marks seemed sharper than the surrounding air. He steadied his breath and arranged the lectern, though no one would read from it tonight.

As he turned to leave, a soft sound rippled through the chapel. Not a footstep. Not a breath. A subtle shift, like fabric settling in a room forbidden to movement. He looked toward the nearest reliquary. The glass was unbroken, yet a faint mist had gathered on its inner surface. The incorrupt body within lay perfectly composed, hands folded, mouth closed. Still, something about its stillness felt different, as though the air around it had begun to listen.

Eamon bowed his head and stepped backward. The candle on the altar dimmed without wind.

Later, during the night watch, two brothers failed to arrive. A search was ordered. The monastery stirred with reluctant lantern glow as monks spread through its halls. Eamon joined them, though the weight in his stomach urged caution. The hunt led to the old cloister garden, where frost lay upon bare soil and the air felt untouched by breath.

There they found Brother Soren, kneeling beside the crumbling fountain. His body leaned forward, palms pressed flat against the stone edge, head lowered as though in devotion. But his chin rested at an unnatural angle, and the back of his robe was torn as though some unseen grip had wrenched him downward. His face bore neither fear nor peace. Instead, his eyes held an unfocused blankness, as if fixed upon something behind the world. No wound marked his flesh, but the stone beneath him carried dark streaks, as though sanctum and flesh had mingled in some unspeakable moment.

Some brothers attempted prayer. Their voices faltered. The silence swallowed each syllable before it reached open air.

Eamon looked upward. Shadows clung tightly to the cloister arches. The stars beyond seemed distant, dulled, as if separated by a veil drawn for a funeral no one had been invited to witness.

Before dawn, another body was found. Brother Tomas lay in the hallway leading to the archive, stretched upon his back, arms rigid at his sides. His throat bore a faint imprint, not of fingers, but of something smoother, colder, like the press of a vessel carried too long in reverence. His eyes were closed, yet tears had dried upon his cheeks in crooked lines. Beside him rested a fragment of parchment. Eamon lifted it only long enough to glimpse a single phrase written in trembling ink: The holy does not forget.

The abbot ordered the monastery sealed. No one was permitted to leave. The brothers gathered in the chapel, though the air there felt heavy with presence. The reliquaries stood untouched, yet each monk avoided looking directly at them. The incorrupt bodies seemed to lean invisibly closer, not in motion but in intent. A sense of being judged radiated from their unmoving forms, a scrutiny older than mercy.

Eamon dared lift his eyes to the altar. The scratches he had seen earlier had multiplied. They curved in narrow arcs, like marks left by something drawing itself upward from beneath the stone. The candle he had left there was gone. In its place rested a dark smear, faint but undeniable.

A hush fell over the brothers. Not a peaceful hush, but one that wrapped itself tightly around the lungs. The air carried the same sweet scent he had detected before, the quiet perfume of hidden rot. Something unseen shifted through the chapel, brushing past ankles and sleeves without touch, only pressure. Several monks flinched. None spoke.

Then every candle went out.

The darkness held them. Something moved within it, not in space but in presence, passing through the gathered bodies without sound. One monk collapsed. Then another. A third tried to shout a warning, but the silence smothered his voice before it could rise.

When light finally returned with the morning, Eamon alone remained standing. Around him, the monks lay arranged in perfect rows, each body composed with reverent precision. Their faces were peaceful. Their throats bore that same smooth imprint.

The reliquaries were empty.

At the altar, the stolen candle reappeared, standing upright in a pool of cold wax. Its wick had never been lit.