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I pace the bedroom, the photo clenched tight in my fist. The floorboards beneath the faded rug creak with every step, the sound hollow and familiar. The air smells stale, tinged with old perfume and forgotten linen. Every corner of the room feels smaller today. Clyde’s warnings ring in my head. I don’t like this feeling. I haven’t felt this uneasy since I was a child.

I stop and look around. So many relics of my childhood clutter this room. A cracked jewelry box, brittle photographs, a stack of old church bulletins bound with twine. Everything is tainted. My gaze lands on an open journal, splayed wide like a confession waiting to be heard.

“What begins as salvation ends in fire.” The ink looks jagged, the handwriting frantic, bleeding into the yellowed page. The words hum beneath the quiet, vibrating with an anger I can’t name.

Outside, a car hums past, headlights briefly sweeping the curtains. I don’t flinch.

Clyde’s father’s words from yesterday circle me like wolves. His gaze, knowing. Heavy. The unspoken accusation pressing down on my chest. Then the note left on my porch, Clyde’s warning last night.

I cross to the window, looking out over the dark yard. The porch light flickers, haloing the dead grass and the rusting swing set that still creaks in the wind.

Behind me, the house settles with a groan, the walls sighing under their own weight. I swear I can hear it breathing, the house, the past, or maybe just my father himself, lying in his bed downstairs, each breath a rasping draw through lungs blackened by secrets.

“You did this,” I whisper, my voice trembling with rage. “You built this. You made them what they are.”

The silence holds me in place, pressing against my back like a hand.

Somewhere deep in the house, a floorboard creaks.

I tighten my grip on the photograph. I can’t stay here.

I grab my coat, shove the photo into my pocket, and step into the hall, each step pulling me further away from the room, the house, the years I’ll never escape.

Moonlight slashes through the broken windows of the old church that house the Green Pastures Revival every year. The fractured windows cast patterns across the warped floorboards. The pews sag and lean like weary soldiers, their wood splintered and blackened by time. The air is thick, a sour cocktail of mildew, rotting wood, and something older, something fouler that worms beneath the scent and curdles in my lungs.

Green Pastures sits at the edge of Charleston, tucked behind a stand of dying oaks, it’s white steeple still visible from the highway, like a beacon of a promise never delivered. Cars used to line the gravel lot, bumper to bumper from sunup to sundown and then some. This was the one event my father looked forward to the most. I didn’t understand it when I was younger, but I understand it now. It wasn’t just about coming together to show God all the love; it was the one weekend a year when the Covenant came together. The last year of the gathering, I think I was fifteen by then, it ended in flames. Half the sanctuary gutted before the volunteer fire department got their hoses unrolled. I remember one of the attending pastors calling it a trial from God. He was testing their faith. I don’t remember hearing how the fire started. Maybe it was God.

I stand at the threshold, the chill seeping deep, and memory surges up unbidden. I see this place as it once was, bright light flooding through stained glass, the pews polished smooth by decades of bodies pressed close together. I remember my mother’s perfume, sweet and cloying, mingling with the hymnals and candle wax. Her voice rising beside mine, soft but steady, as we sang words I didn’t yet understand.

But now… now it’s a hollow carcass. Every note of those hymns has long rotted from the walls. The colors of the windows have bled into ash. Even the air tastes different, tinged with old sorrow.

My boots creak across the floor as I move forward, each step a soft shudder echoing through the empty chapel. At the front stands the pulpit. It’s smaller than I remember, battered, grimed, sinking into itself. But seeing it still slices through me like a blade. I can almost see him, my father, standing tall behind it, his voice rising and falling like a storm, breathing fever into the air.

A journal lies open atop the pulpit, its pages yellowed, worn at the edges.

I stop cold.

Even from here, I recognize the handwriting—my father’s. Neat once. Controlled. Every letter shaped by a man who believed his words were holy. But now the ink slashes wild across the page, jagged, uneven, like it was scrawled by a hand trembling too hard to hold the truth inside.

I step closer, slow, deliberate, as though the ground itself might betray me. Each footstep sends a hollow creak through the chapel, swallowed by the darkness pressing in.

I lean over the pulpit. My breath fogs the brittle paper.

The end is nigh. Those who follow will see the fire. Those who stray will become it.

The words crawl under my skin. I can almost hear his voice as he wrote them, muttering scripture low and fevered, a heat blooming in his throat.

I remember standing at the edge of this pulpit as a little girl, craning my neck to watch him speak. His hands gripping the sides, his knuckles white with conviction. His voice thundered so loud it made my chest ache. I used to believe him. Every word. Every warning.

But this… this is a prophecy soaked in madness.

I trail a finger along the ink. It feels raised. Alive. A vein still pulsing beneath the surface.

“You wrote this,” I whisper, my voice trembling, “knowing what you’d done.”

The memory floods me, my mother’s perfume beside me in the pew, her hand warm on mine, her whispered prayers while his words soared above us. And yet none of it was enough to stop him. None of it saved us.

I grip the edges of the pulpit, my nails digging into the rotting wood. “You brought us here,” I hiss under my breath. “You dragged us into this fire and watched us burn.”