29 Mar Penance

Part I

Tom Bellamy hadn’t heard of the place before he bought the wood. Erin called him on a Tuesday morning with one of her usual leads, telling him she’d found something special—”prime old-growth oak, maybe a century old,” salvaged from a demolition site out past Lancaster. She said the salvage crew was still pulling it out in bundles, but she’d already flagged a few pallets in case he was interested.

He was. Oak like that didn’t come around often anymore. Most of what passed through his hands had been processed or laminated, treated with chemicals that dulled the grain and left a sour stink in the woodshop. When Erin described the haul, it sounded untouched—solid, clean, and dry. For someone with clients waiting, it was too good to pass up.

The drive took just over an hour. He pulled into the gravel lot behind the salvage yard where Erin was already waiting, clipboard in hand and her scarf whipping around her neck in the wind. She looked the same as ever—practical boots, faded jeans, ponytail pulled tight. They’d known each other since before Claire died, and though Tom didn’t let many people get too close these days, he still made time for her.

“I’m telling you, this stuff is solid,” she said, leading him toward the loading bays. “No rot, no termites, no paint to strip. Straight out of the 1940s by the look of it.”

“What kind of building was it?” Tom asked. He didn’t much care, but it was the kind of question you asked out of habit.

Erin flipped through a page on her clipboard. “Catholic orphanage, I think. Saint Joseph’s? No, Saint Anthony’s. Condemned sometime in the ‘50s. They were going to restore it, but the structure was a mess. Found asbestos and water damage all through the upper floors.”

They stopped at the edge of a wide stack of bundled boards. The planks were arranged neatly in rows, each bound in plastic and chalk-marked with dimensions. Tom knelt beside one of the stacks and ran his hand over the top piece. Even through the dust, he could feel the tightness of the grain. The wood was heavy but dry, not bloated with moisture or warped from age. Most reclaimed oak had some degree of cupping or rot, but this batch had held up remarkably well. Its color was unusual too—a deep, rich brown near the heartwood, fading into amber around the edges.

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath.

“I know,” Erin said with a grin. “You’re not the only one who’s interested, either. I’ve got three other buyers who’d kill for it. Thought I’d give you the first shot.”

He bought the whole lot before lunch.

By sunset, Tom had the first load back at his workshop. He backed his truck in under the overhang and carried the boards inside, stacking them one by one on the sawhorses. The air in the shop was colder than he expected, even for spring. It still held the dense, mineral chill of winter, the kind that clung to concrete and cinderblock no matter how long you ran the heater. He liked it that way. The cold made him alert.

As he sorted the boards by length and condition, he caught himself humming—a soft, tuneless thing he couldn’t quite place. He paused, recognizing it, though he couldn’t say from where. It was a habit he thought he’d outgrown.

The cabinets he planned to build were for a couple renovating a farmhouse outside of State College. They wanted something period-accurate but functional: upper and lower units with wide doors, smooth drawers, and visible grain. They used words like “rustic” and “authentic,” and they were willing to pay a premium. The reclaimed oak was going to bring the whole job together.

He began cutting rough lengths and running them through the planer. The machine’s high whine filled the space, bouncing off the stone walls and ceiling joists. With every pass, the boards came alive—rippling waves of grain emerging from beneath their dull, oxidized surfaces. Some patterns twisted like eddies in a stream, while others rolled evenly from end to end. A few bore minor flaws: hairline cracks, knots, and discoloration, but nothing unworkable. On the whole, the wood was some of the best he’d ever handled.

By midnight, he’d milled three full panels and sanded them smooth. He stacked them gently against the far wall and began tidying the space, sweeping the sawdust into piles and brushing it off the tool table. He unplugged the planer, locked the drawers, and flipped the overheads before climbing the ladder to the loft above.

The loft wasn’t much—just a bed, a small desk, and a kitchenette—but it had everything he needed. After Claire’s death, he’d sold the house they shared and moved into the shop full-time. The place was quiet, clean, and contained. There were no echoes of the past here, no memories hanging in the corners. He’d made peace with that.

That night, Tom woke twice.

The first time, he was certain he heard someone walking on the floor below—slow, uneven steps moving from one end of the shop to the other. He sat up and listened, but the sound stopped before he could swing his legs down. He stayed still for another few minutes, then lay back down and closed his eyes. Probably the building settling, he told himself. Old rafters always had one more groan left in them.

The second time, it was already morning. Light streamed through the slatted windows above his desk, brighter than it should have been. He cursed under his breath, realizing he’d overslept. Sliding down the ladder barefoot, he landed on something curled and coarse.

Wood shavings.

Fresh ones.

He bent down, picking up the spiral curls between his fingers. They weren’t old leftovers from the night before. The edges were still soft, the color a clean, pale yellow that hadn’t dulled with exposure. He followed them in a trail toward the center of the workshop.

His hand plane was resting at an odd angle on the workbench, its blade still extended. The top board in the stack now bore a fresh cut—a shallow but deliberate groove across its center, angled with the grain. He stared at it for a long moment, trying to recall whether he’d made that final pass before bed. He was usually methodical and would never left a tool exposed like that.

But he couldn’t remember.

The only explanation that made sense came with a jolt of unease. He’d sleepwalked. It hadn’t happened in decades—not since he was a kid. Once, his mother had found him in the front yard in the middle of the night, barefoot and glassy-eyed, staring toward the woods as if he’d seen something no one else could. The episodes had stopped before adolescence, and he’d never thought much of them since.

Still, he couldn’t deny the evidence. The tool, the shaving trail, the fresh cut—none of it matched the way he left things the night before. It had to have happened while he was asleep.

He cleaned up in silence, sweeping the shavings into a bin and retracting the plane’s blade. He told himself he’d be more careful going forward. He’d latch the ladder if he had to, just in case the old habits had come back. A misstep in the shop—especially around the planer or the table saw—could mean more than just confusion. It could mean a hospital visit. Or worse.

As he moved toward the kitchenette to make coffee, he caught himself humming again. The same familiar tune from the night before. He couldn’t recall where he’d heard it, but it lingered in his mind long after the coffee had cooled.

It didn’t feel like something he’d remembered. It felt like something that had remembered him.

* * * * * *

The second sleepwalking episode didn’t feel like a dream. Tom awoke with his feet planted firmly on cold concrete, the workshop dark but not silent. The planer still hummed, its motor winding down, the belt clicking softly as it slowed to a stop. A bitter copper taste clung to the back of his throat. He blinked, dazed, and looked down.

His right palm was bleeding.

A thin but deep cut ran diagonally across the fleshy part below the thumb. Blood dripped steadily onto the shop floor, leaving dark spatters on the unfinished concrete. For a moment, he couldn’t register where he was. The overheads were still off, and the only illumination came from the distant orange glow of the security light above the rear door. Its dull gleam barely reached the center of the shop, where something large now stood that hadn’t been there before.

A cabinet.

It stood upright beside the sawhorses, tall and freestanding, framed in the same reclaimed oak he’d been milling earlier that week. It was a base cabinet, about three feet high and four feet across, with two doors and no hardware yet attached.

The grain shimmered faintly in the half-light, and the face of the piece was smooth, the edges beveled and even. The craftsmanship was unmistakably his. The corners were square, the joints tight, the panels aligned with millimeter precision.

But he hadn’t built it.

At least, not consciously.

He approached slowly, clutching his hand with a rag pulled from the workbench. The wound stung, but his attention was elsewhere. The cabinet’s appearance gave the impression that it had been sitting there for years rather than hours.

He reached out with his uninjured hand and pulled one of the doors open.

Inside, the cabinet was empty—smooth-faced oak, freshly sanded and clean. But on the inner face of the door, near the top corner, something had been etched into the wood. The marking was no more than three inches wide, carved lightly into the grain as if by a knife or awl. Tom leaned in, angling the surface toward the glow of the security light, and couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

It was a symbol. A triangle, not equilateral, with a single eye in the center. Around the edges, curling lines looped and spiraled in a script he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t decorative. It felt purposeful, not the kind of thing someone doodled or etched absentmindedly.

He stared at it longer than he meant to. There was something unsettling in its shape—something that seemed to shift the longer he looked at it. The eye at the center seemed slightly asymmetrical, the lines around it tapering in ways that didn’t conform to the grain of the wood. When he stepped back and blinked, the shape looked different again, as if it had rearranged itself by degrees.

He closed the door.

The rag he’d wrapped around his palm had soaked through, and a sharp throb had begun beneath the fabric. Still, he made no move toward the loft. He stood in front of the cabinet a moment longer, trying to piece together how it had come to be there. The tools were laid out, nothing broken or out of place, and there were no signs of struggle or disarray. The clamps were still set up on the side table, the wood glue closed and wiped clean. Even the sanding block had been returned to its usual drawer.

Everything was in order—everything except the fact that he had no memory of building the damn thing.

He checked the clock. It was 2:38 a.m.

Tom climbed the loft ladder and cleaned his hand in the sink, wincing as the water found the cut. He wrapped it again with gauze and medical tape, then sat at the edge of the bed, struggling to make sense of the recent events.

He told himself it was stress. That between the new clients, the reclaimed oak, and the deadlines creeping up, his brain had gotten ahead of him. He’d worked himself to exhaustion and simply moved through the motions in a fugue state. A second sleepwalking episode wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Maybe this one had lasted longer. Maybe his muscle memory had done the work without him even being present.

But even as he reasoned through it, he couldn’t explain the symbol. That wasn’t part of the design. It wasn’t part of any design he’d ever seen.

He lay down without turning out the light.

Part II

The crying began four days after the second sleepwalking episode.

At first, Tom thought it was the wind. The workshop sat at the base of a narrow ridge, and early spring storms had a way of turning even the lightest breeze into a shrill moan as it funneled through the eaves. He had grown used to the sound over the years, enough that it barely registered anymore. But this time, it was different. It carried a cadence that the wind did not. The sound would rise and fall in irregular waves, sometimes trailing off mid-breath, sometimes catching on a note that bent slightly upward, like the beginning of a word or a whimper.

He didn’t hear it when the tools were running. It was only in the quiet moments—while waiting for glue to set, or sanding a panel by hand—that the sound would surface. It was faint, almost imperceptible, but unmistakably human. And young.

He paused the first time he noticed it, allowing the sanding block to rest against the edge of the cabinet frame. The noise seemed to come from somewhere behind the stack of completed panels leaning against the wall. He crossed the room slowly, straining to listen, but the sound faded as he approached. He moved a few boards aside, checking for loose ductwork or a trapped animal, but found nothing. When he returned to his workbench and picked up the sander again, the sound resumed—closer now, as if responding to the rhythm of his hands.

He didn’t say anything to Erin when she stopped by later that afternoon to drop off a few hinges he’d ordered. She commented on how pale he looked, how there were circles under his eyes, but he waved her off and said he’d been pulling long hours. It wasn’t a lie. He hadn’t been sleeping well, and when he did, the dreams came in fevered flashes—shadows along the rafters, something knocking from inside the cabinets, small hands scraping across the insides of unfinished drawers.

That night, after locking up the shop and climbing into the loft, Tom lay awake long past midnight. He listened to the ticking of the old wall clock and the occasional settling of the floorboards below. Just as he began to drift, a sharp thump broke through the quiet.

He sat up.

Another thump followed, then another. They were dull but deliberate, each tap spaced a few seconds apart, the sound echoing from the center of the shop.

Tom descended the ladder, the steps cold beneath his feet. He moved cautiously through the dark, passing the outline of his workbench, the planer, and the drying racks. The thumping had stopped by the time he reached the cabinets. He stood in silence, waiting, ears tuned for any sign of a disturbance.

After several minutes, he stepped forward and opened one of the cabinet doors. There was nothing inside.

He opened the next, then the next, working his way down the line. All were empty, smooth-faced and clean. There were no nails out of place, no splinters or signs of intrusion. And yet, when he stepped back and looked over them as a whole, a sense of unease settled into his chest. The cabinets didn’t feel empty. They felt vacant—as though something had just escaped and was now watching from somewhere nearby.

He went to the tool wall, took down a hammer and a box of finish nails, and returned to the row of cabinets. He began driving nails through the corners of each door—two on each side, angled deep into the frame so they couldn’t swing open. The process took nearly an hour. He worked without gloves, without his usual precision, without bothering to measure. His only goal was to make sure the doors stayed shut.

When it was done, he stepped back and surveyed the line. There were nine cabinets. Eighteen doors. Every one of them sealed.

He returned to the loft and finally fell asleep sometime after dawn.

The next morning, the shop was quiet when he woke. Too quiet. The usual creak of joists in the walls, the faint hum of the fridge in the kitchenette—both were absent.

He descended the ladder and walked toward the workshop floor.

The cabinets stood exactly where he’d left them. Same angles, same alignment. But as he approached, he felt a tightening in his gut. The first cabinet’s doors hung open, the nails removed. The holes were still there—tiny, perfect indents where the finish nails had once been driven—but the fasteners themselves were gone.

The second cabinet was the same. And the third.

By the time he reached the fifth, he’d stopped checking for nails. Every door had been opened. Every cabinet was hollow.

He stood motionless for a long time, hands at his sides, eyes fixed on the last open door. He didn’t understand how it could have happened. No one else had access to the workshop. Erin didn’t have a key, and there were no signs of forced entry. He checked the locks twice a night, sometimes three times. The only explanation was that he’d done it himself.

Another sleepwalking episode.

He considered sealing the doors again, maybe even screwing them shut from the inside, but something stopped him. A quiet voice at the edge of his thoughts suggested it wouldn’t matter.

The cabinets weren’t meant to stay closed—not anymore.

* * * * * *

By the following week, Tom had stopped listening to music while he worked. The usual background hum of the radio, the soft rise and fall of folk guitar or static-crackled blues, had been a fixture in the shop for years. It was something to fill the air, but lately, he found the noise intolerable.

It was during this silence that he began noticing the patterns in the wood.

At first, they appeared as odd clusters of knots, nothing more than imperfections near the edges of certain panels. A dark patch near a drawer face would remind him vaguely of an eye socket. A cluster of three knots aligned in such a way that they resembled a flattened nose and chin. It was the sort of pareidolia he’d seen before. People sometimes found faces in clouds or animals in bark. He didn’t think much of it.

That is, until the shapes became more distinct.

One morning, as he ran his hand over a sanded cabinet door, he paused at a strange indentation near the lower left corner. The grain curved unnaturally there, the lines looping into a spiral that terminated in a small, puckered divot, no larger than a dime. Around it, the wood darkened subtly, as if bruised. The overall impression was that of a clenched mouth—tight, closed, and silent.

The next piece he examined had a face.

It wasn’t detailed, not exactly, but the suggestion of features was undeniable. It featured a high brow, sunken cheeks, and the vague contours of a nose turned slightly to the left. The face looked compressed, as though trapped beneath the surface of the panel and pressing outward. The wood had not been carved or shaped in any way that might have produced it, and yet, there it was—etched in grain, its expression pained and twisted.

He took it to the planer and passed the panel through, shaving off a full millimeter of surface. The lines remained. He sanded them, first with coarse grit, then with fine, moving in long, even strokes until his wrists ached. When he finished, the panel looked clean again.

The next day, the face had returned.

Beside it, another panel bore a different figure—thinner, more elongated, as if stretched through knots and burls. The suggestion of an eye was there, and what might have been fingers, curled inward as though clawing through from the other side.

Tom didn’t show Erin. She’d stopped by twice that week to check on his progress, both times remarking on how little sleep he seemed to be getting, how the circles under his eyes had darkened to the color of bruises. He nodded, told her the job was wearing him down, and thanked her for the hardware and supplies she’d brought. He didn’t tell her about the symbols or the faces. In truth, he wasn’t sure how much he could explain.

By the end of the week, his sketchbook was full. He didn’t remember drawing on most of the pages. He’d wake each morning to find the notebook open on the workbench, graphite smudged across his fingers, half-finished symbols spiraling across the paper. Some bore resemblance to the symbol he’d found in the cabinet door—the eye within a triangle—but others were far more complex. Interlocking arcs, latticed crosses, shapes formed from layered sigils and branching script.

The markings did not follow any pattern he could recognize. They weren’t geometric, nor were they decorative—but they were painstakingly precise. The lines flowed like handwriting, but from a language he’d never seen before. The more he looked at them, the more certain he became that they weren’t merely drawings but instructions. Each shape felt orchestrated, as though conveying something he could almost understand, if only he stared long enough.

He began transcribing them onto loose sheets, copying each design by hand and pinning them to the walls of the workshop. Within days, the western side of the shop had become a veritable gallery of graphite and charcoal, black spirals against yellowing paper. Some pages were pinned upside-down, others arranged in layered grids. There was no clear system, only a compulsion to get them out of his head.

And still, they came.

Some nights, he would wake to find a new sketch tucked beneath his pillow. Other times, they appeared beneath his coffee mug or inside drawers he hadn’t opened in days. Once, he found one folded between two sanded panels, pressed flat as though it had been there for weeks.

Despite everything, he kept working.

The cabinets multiplied, each one crafted, with the same precision and care, from the same wood. Each bore new markings, some visible only under angled light, others hidden inside drawers or on the undersides of frames. And though Tom told himself that he was still in control, that his hands obeyed his will, he began to sense a shift.

The wood was no longer merely responding to him.

It was guiding him.

Part III

The episodes no longer confined themselves to the early hours of the morning. Tom began waking in places that made no sense, in positions that left his joints stiff and his muscles aching. Once, he came to while sitting cross-legged on top of the workbench, both hands resting flat against the surface, palms open, as if in silent offering. His tools were laid out in front of him in a perfect semicircle, sorted by size and type, the blades gleaming with fresh oil he didn’t remember applying.

Another time, he woke in the cabinet itself. Somehow, he had wedged himself into the lower compartment of a finished unit, curled with his knees to his chest and the doors shut tight around him. It took several minutes to push his way out. When he finally freed himself, he discovered that the doors had been locked from the outside with a set of custom latches he hadn’t installed. The metal brackets were bolted to the frame with screws he did not recognize, the kind used in antique furniture restorations—oval-headed, single-groove, blackened with age.

The worst was the night he found the cupboard on the ceiling.

It was just past three in the morning when he opened his eyes and saw it there, suspended directly above the planer. The entire unit had been hoisted and mounted flush to the rafters, anchored with thick nails driven into the crossbeams at precise angles. The effort alone should have taken hours and a second pair of hands, but there was no one else. There was only Tom, standing barefoot on the concrete, arms sore, shirt damp with sweat.

At first, he didn’t move. He simply stared up at it, trying to understand how he had done it, and why. The unit wasn’t small. It measured nearly five feet across and weighed enough that even with clamps and pulleys, the installation should have required scaffolding or a hoist. Yet there it was, balanced perfectly above the workspace, its seams flush with the ceiling joists, the nails hammered deep and clean. Its doors were shut.

He fetched a stepladder and climbed up to inspect it more closely. There were no markings on the exterior—no symbols or notches, no carved grain patterns that suggested guidance. He opened one of the doors and peered inside. The interior was dark, empty, and unremarkable. But as he stared into it, a thought rose quietly in his mind, unbidden and unwelcome: Something had been inside it.

That same night, he woke again—this time not in the shop at all.

The cold woke him first. His skin was damp, his fingertips numb. He opened his eyes to a sky littered with stars, pale and flickering behind the bare arms of skeletal trees. Snow crunched beneath his back as he sat up slowly, his clothes soaked and stiff with frost. The air was still, and for a long moment, he couldn’t place where he was.

He was lying in the woods behind the workshop.

He had no memory of walking there, no recollection of leaving his bed or opening the back door. His boots were gone. His soles and heels were torn and raw, red with burst blisters. Both of his arms were scratched and riddled with fine splinters, some of them buried so deeply in the skin they bled when he flexed his fingers.

By the time he stumbled back to the shop, the sky had begun to lighten.

He didn’t try to clean the wounds right away. He sat on the floor near the workbench and stared at the footprints he had left in the snow, trying to trace them to a beginning. They led toward the tree line, into a dense cluster of pines that bordered the rear property line. He didn’t remember ever walking that far. In all the years since he’d bought the workshop, he had never gone beyond the fence.

He couldn’t stop thinking about what might have brought him out there.

Later that morning, Erin arrived with a box of brass pulls and soft-close drawer slides. She let herself in through the front door, which Tom had forgotten to bolt, and froze when she saw him. He was seated on the floor against the far wall, hunched over his lap with his arms wrapped around his knees. A bandage hung loose from one hand, and dried blood streaked the side of his shirt.

She called his name twice before he looked up.

When he finally did, the first thing she noticed was his appearance. His face was hollow—not gaunt, exactly, but drained. The lines around his mouth and eyes had deepened, and there was something dull in the way his gaze moved. It was slow and unfocused, like that of someone waking from a long illness.

“Jesus, Tom!” she said, crossing the room. “What the hell happened to you?”

He didn’t answer right away. His lips parted to speak, but he thought better of it. He looked around the shop as though seeing it for the first time—at the ceiling-mounted cupboard, the scattered drawings pinned to the wall, and the open cabinets lining the walls.

“I think I’m losing time,” he said finally. “I’ve been doing things in my sleep.”

She crouched beside him, lowering her voice. “You need to see someone. A doctor. Maybe a neurologist. This isn’t just stress, Tom.”

“I know.”

She touched his arm, her fingers gentle but firm. “Let me call someone.”

“No,” he said, more quickly than he meant to. “I just need to finish the job. Once the build is done, I’ll sleep. It’ll stop. I know it’ll stop.”

“You’re bleeding.”

He looked down and flexed his fingers. A splinter the length of a matchstick worked itself loose and fell to the floor between them.

“Please,” she said again.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he stood and crossed to the workbench, where a fresh panel waited. The wood caught the light as he picked it up, and for a moment, the grain shifted in a way that made Erin flinch. She didn’t say what she’d seen, whether it was the shadow of a face or the outline of a hand pressing outward, but when she looked back at Tom, her expression had changed.

She looked terrified.

* * * * * *

Erin didn’t return to the workshop for nearly a week. Tom hadn’t answered her calls, and the texts she sent remained unread. She had debated whether to contact the authorities, to request a wellness check, or to report him missing, but she wasn’t sure it would make a difference. Tom had always been private—reclusive, even—and the line between isolation and collapse could be hard to define from the outside. But what she had seen during her last visit unsettled her enough to act on a different instinct.

She drove to the salvage yard where she had first located the reclaimed wood and asked to see the purchase records. The man behind the counter was reluctant at first, citing policy and privacy, but she had dealt with him before and knew which levers to press. Eventually, he retrieved a clipboard from a file cabinet and thumbed through the carbon-copy forms until he located the receipt. She recognized her own handwriting on the item log.

“Saint Anthony’s,” she said aloud, tapping the top of the form.

“Yeah,” the man replied, rubbing his beard. “Place was falling apart. Some church bought the land ten years ago but never fixed it up. Sat empty until the city condemned it. Real shame. Heard it was an orphanage back in the day.”

“Do you know who owned it before the church?”

He shook his head. “Might be in the county records.”

That afternoon, she drove to the municipal archive center two towns over and requested property histories and zoning records for the site. What she found unsettled her more than she had expected.

The orphanage had operated from 1904 until 1957, when it was abruptly closed following a state investigation. The official reports were vague, citing “structural deficiencies,” “unregulated care practices,” and “inconsistent disciplinary records.” There were no listed fatalities in the state filings, but a separate bundle of newspaper clippings, brittle with age and stained at the corners, painted a clearer picture.

Between 1949 and 1955, at least six children had died on the property—three from exposure, one from blunt force trauma, and two by suicide. The deaths were never officially connected, and no charges were filed. The director during that period was a priest named Father Gideon Marks. His name appeared again and again in handwritten notes from former employees, some of whom testified anonymously to practices involving prolonged isolation, corporal punishment, and what one referred to as “ritual penance carried out in wooden confinement.”

According to the notes, Father Marks believed that sin could be drawn out through sensory deprivation. He had converted one of the chapel’s side rooms into a crude penance chamber, where disobedient children were locked inside for days at a time. Then he demanded they kneel and recite scripture without light, warmth, or food, forcing them to survive on water alone, distributed through a small hole via a crude funnel. The term used by several witnesses was “closet,” though the dimensions were closer to a cupboard or cabinet. One source claimed that Marks carved symbols into the walls of the chamber, inscriptions drawn from a “hidden gospel” he claimed had been delivered to him in a dream.

Erin sat alone in the microfilm room as she read, the machine’s screen flickering softly in the dim space. She copied what she could by hand, then printed the scans that were still legible and stuffed them into a manila folder. On the way out, she stopped at the front desk and asked if architectural plans for the orphanage had ever been submitted to the city prior to its demolition.

The woman behind the counter raised an eyebrow, surprised by the specificity of the request, but typed a few commands into her terminal and retrieved a set of blueprints from the records archive. Erin paid for a copy and carried it with her back to the car, where she spread the pages across the passenger seat and scanned them quickly for anything unusual.

The layout was fairly standard for the time—dormitories on the second floor, kitchen and dining hall in the rear, offices and classrooms along the east wing. But it was the chapel that caught her attention.

Drawn near the back of the property, the chapel occupied a separate wing with its own foundation and basement access. The plans showed a small room off the vestry, labeled “Confession and Correction,” with dimensions that matched the size of the cabinets Tom had been building—tall, narrow spaces just wide enough for a child to sit inside, facing forward, with no windows or proper ventilation. At the center of the blueprint for that section was a hand-drawn seal, circled in red ink. The note beside it read simply: Father Marks—Final version—use with caution.

Erin leaned in and studied the symbol. It was the same one Tom had shown her months ago when he first started working with the reclaimed wood—the triangle with the single eye, surrounded by those looping, indecipherable lines.

She stared at the blueprint for a long time.

The seal had not been decorative.

It had been a warning.

Part IV

Erin’s calls continued to go unanswered. She had left messages for Tom twice a day for nearly a week, alternating between concern and frustration, her tone shifting from gentle reminders to quiet pleas. Each time she reached his voicemail, Erin told herself it was nothing—that Tom was probably buried in work again, tuning out the outside world the way he always did when deadlines crept up on him. But she knew this was different. The last time she had seen him, he was pale and hunched, speaking in half-sentences with dried blood clinging to his skin. He’d looked through her more than at her, his eyes clouded and unfocused. She hadn’t heard from him since, and neither had anyone else.

By the sixth day, she stopped waiting.

She drove out after sunset. The roads had begun to ice over in the early dark, and her headlights sliced through a thin veil of mist rising off the slush-lined shoulders. By the time she pulled into the gravel lot behind the workshop, the building was bathed in shadow, save for a faint flicker of light leaking from one of the rear windows. The front door stood partially open, swaying gently on its hinges in the wind.

Inside, the shop smelled of wax, wood dust, and something metallic just beneath the surface, faint but persistent. The lamps were off, and only a single bulb over the workbench glowed softly, its light haloed by dust motes suspended in still air.

Tom sat slumped over the bench, arms folded beneath his head, legs curled awkwardly under the stool. His back rose and fell in uneven rhythm, and scattered across the surface around him were pages of dense scribbles, half-finished cabinet blueprints, and pages torn from his sketchpad. Several sheets bore intricate looping symbols she didn’t recognize. A few had been drawn directly onto the wood surface in what looked like ink.

She reached out and touched his shoulder.

Tom jolted upright with a gasp, his eyes wild for a moment before settling on her face. It took him longer than it should have to recognize her.

“Erin,” he muttered, voice thick with sleep. “What—what time is it?”

She glanced around the shop, noting the disarray, the tools left out, and the open cabinet doors hanging slightly ajar. “Late,” she said. “You weren’t answering your phone.”

He blinked slowly. “I haven’t checked it. I… I don’t know where it is.”

“You look like hell.”

He looked down at his arms. Black smudges ran up both forearms, curling into unfamiliar shapes just below the elbow. His fingertips were stained, and his nails were packed with grit and graphite.

“I’ve been working,” he said quietly. “It helps me stay grounded.”

Erin hesitated, then pulled the envelope from her coat. She set it on the bench beside the drawings and opened it, laying the materials out in sequence—the newspaper clippings, the copies of the blueprints, and the church record with the chapel’s seal.

“You need to see this.”

He looked over them without touching.

“I know about Father Marks,” she said. “The punishments. The closets. The rituals he carved into the walls. And I found the original layout of the orphanage chapel. That symbol you’ve been drawing—it’s not random. It’s the same as the seal from his penance room.”

Tom didn’t speak right away. He leaned back on the stool and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, smearing ink across his temples. When he looked up again, his voice was steady, but low.

“I think I knew. Not the details, but… pieces of it. Things I saw in my sleep. Things the wood shows when I… cut too deep.”

She sat across from him, folding her hands over the edge of the bench. “Then why haven’t you said anything?”

“Because it won’t stop,” he said. “Not when I ignore it. Not when I sleep. It just keeps moving, even when I don’t.”

“Tom, this isn’t something you can just outlast,” Erin said. “It’s not a splinter you wait for your body to push out.”

“I know.”

“Then let me help you.”

He shook his head, slowly at first, then with greater certainty. “I’ve had therapists, been to doctors. They’d never believe this. Hell, I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t lived through it.”

“I’m not talking about doctors.”

He met her eyes then, a flicker of curiosity breaking through the fatigue.

She hesitated, weighing her words. “My grandmother,” she began, “was Slovakian. Came to the States after the war. Settled in Ohio with my grandfather and raised four daughters—my mom was the youngest. They were all raised on a kind of… mix of faith and folklore. Catholicism twisted together with older practices. Things from before the Church arrived in the villages. My grandmother kept them alive—charms, wards, stories meant to keep spirits away from doors and hearths.”

Tom listened without interruption, his gaze steady.

“When I was sixteen,” Erin continued, “there was a boy who drowned in the river near our town. A neighbor’s son. My grandmother said he hadn’t crossed over properly. That he’d become nepokoja duša—an unrested soul. I thought she was just telling stories until one night, when she took me and my cousin into the basement and had us help her perform a ritual. She called it a calling rite.”

Erin looked down at her hands, lowering her voice.

“She built a small box out of applewood. She put some things inside—river stones, wax, and a scrap of his clothing. Then she marked it with chalk, whispered prayers in Slovak, and set a candle burning on top. Nothing happened that night, but the next morning, the neighbor’s house was covered in dew, even though the air was dry. And their youngest son said he saw the drowned boy waving from the field behind the barn. After that, the family said they could finally sleep again.”

She lifted her head and met Tom’s eyes.

“I haven’t done anything like that since. But I remember how it works.”

Tom looked down at the drawings scattered across the bench. One of them—a circle of spiraling symbols—had smudged beneath his arm while he slept, staining his sleeve with a dark crescent. He traced its edge with one finger.

“If someone’s still in there,” he said, “maybe they’re waiting for someone to listen.”

Erin gave a quiet nod.

Tom stared at her, his face etched with grim determination.

“Show me what to do.”

* * * * * *

The workshop looked different by candlelight.

Tom had turned off the overhead lamps, and Erin had unplugged the remaining floor lights before drawing the curtains tight across the windows.

Erin moved with quiet purpose. She had brought her materials in a canvas satchel lined with beeswax cloth and set them out on the cleared workbench one by one. Among them a shallow ceramic bowl filled with water from her grandmother’s spring, a small candle made from rendered tallow and rosemary oil, a piece of coarse salt, a lock of her own hair bound in thread, and a length of chalk she had ground herself from an old white stone she kept in her kitchen drawer.

Tom said little as he watched her work. His hands stayed folded in his lap, and though his eyes followed her every movement, there was no skepticism in them now. Something in him had shifted—not into belief exactly, but into submission. He no longer needed convincing. He only needed answers.

She knelt at the center of the floor and drew a circle large enough to contain the two of them and the cabinet they had chosen. The chalk line was thick and clean, and she added four smaller marks at each cardinal point—symbols she remembered from her childhood, copied long ago from a piece of linen her grandmother kept pinned above her stove.

When the circle was complete, she placed the bowl and candle directly in front of the cabinet, with the salt and hair in between. She motioned for Tom to sit beside her, and he did so silently, crossing his legs and lowering himself to the floor with the care of someone preparing for something sacred.

The candle flickered as she lit it. Its scent was sharp and medicinal, cut with earth and a bitter sweetness that lingered at the back of the throat. The shadows danced across the cabinet’s face, catching the edges of the grain and pulling the carved shapes into motion.

“Close your eyes,” Erin said softly, “and listen.”

Tom obeyed.

Erin lowered her head and began to whisper in Slovak. The words came slowly at first—tentative, slightly mispronounced—but gained fluency as she repeated them, shaping each syllable with careful intention. They were phrases she had heard dozens of times in her youth, chanted during long nights spent in the basements of relatives’ homes, when sickness took hold or bad dreams returned too frequently.

She held the salt between her palms, then dropped it into the bowl. The water hissed softly, though it had not been heated. She placed the hair beside the candle and pressed her fingers to the floor.

“We are listening,” she said. “We are here to know who remains. We are here to see what you need.”

The temperature dropped. Tom felt it before he heard anything—the same creeping chill that had haunted the workshop for weeks, now intensified and more focused. The air inside the circle remained still, but beyond it, the shadows deepened. The grain in the cabinet’s door seemed to pull inward, curling into unfamiliar configurations.

Then came the first sound. It was quiet—so quiet it might have been mistaken for a breath—a low exhale, long and strained, followed by something like a syllable broken in half.

Erin continued whispering, this time alternating between Slovak and English. “You are not forgotten. You are not lost. If you are still here, you may speak.”

The cabinet shuddered.

Tom’s eyes snapped open as a knock rang out from within the wood. It was soft, almost tentative, as though the knuckles behind it were small and uncertain.

A second knock followed, louder this time. Then a third.

The candle flame whipped sideways and nearly died before steadying itself again. The bowl of water rippled once, then went still.

The knocks continued, growing faster and more rhythmic. Then a voice emerged from behind the cabinet door. It was faint at first, a single name spoken in a voice neither fully child nor fully human.

“Lyyyy… diiiia…”

Tom’s chest tightened. The voice repeated—louder this time, the vowels drawn out and frayed, as though the speaker had forgotten how language worked.

“Lydia…”

The pounding returned—harder now, with urgency.

“Lydia… Lydia…”

Erin gripped Tom’s hand. Her own voice had fallen silent, but her mouth continued to move, repeating words she had not spoken in years.

Then, from somewhere above them, there was a crack. Both of them looked up just as a narrow panel near the top of the back wall split open along an old seam. A brittle snap rang through the rafters, and something fluttered loose from the cavity behind the wall, drifting downward like a leaf.

Tom rose and stepped carefully out of the circle. The pounding had stopped the moment the panel gave way.

He retrieved the object from the floor.

It was a photograph—curled at the edges, faded to a soft ochre hue. The image showed two dozen children standing before a brick building, their faces blurred with age and overexposure. Behind them stood a tall man in dark robes, his hands resting on the shoulders of the front row.

One of the girls had been defaced, her eyes gouged with something sharp, leaving ragged white holes where her gaze should have been. Across her forehead, drawn in smudged ink or soot, was a triangle. Inside it, there was a single staring eye.

Tom turned the photograph over. On the back, written in delicate pencil strokes, was a name: Lydia M.

He looked at Erin, his voice quiet but firm. “She’s the one who’s still in there.”

Erin nodded, though her hands trembled.

They sat in silence as the candle burned low.

Part V

The workshop no longer followed the rhythm of day and night. Tom moved between sleep and wakefulness without distinction, slipping into fugue states that seemed to lengthen each time he resurfaced. When he did wake—fully, consciously—he often found new pieces of furniture waiting around him, assembled with a precision that exceeded even his own fastidious standards. The dovetails were flawless, the finishes smooth to the point of reflection. Entire drawer systems had been built and installed while he slept, yet he had no memory of cutting the panels or sanding the joints.

They no longer resembled the farmhouse cabinets he had originally been commissioned to build. The proportions had narrowed, the dimensions warped to favor tall, confined interiors. Every new piece echoed something he had seen before, something drawn from the orphanage’s blueprints—slender penance closets, wooden enclosures with high backs and sealed bases. The new constructions towered along the workshop’s edges, their doors shut but never latched, their interiors lined with markings he did not remember carving.

He had begun etching symbols into the exterior panels. Some came to him during brief dreams, etched into the margins of stairwells or pressed into the backs of children’s hands. Others appeared spontaneously in his notebook, scrawled across full pages in looping patterns that bent the grain beneath the pencil marks. The symbols felt purposeful—architectural, even—like pieces of a larger diagram he hadn’t yet been shown.

Erin returned on the third day after the séance.

She arrived to find the cabinets arranged in two rows stretching from the back wall to the center of the room. Each one faced forward, doors closed, forming a path not unlike a church nave. At the far end stood a much larger structure—more like an altar than a cabinet—sealed on all sides, its surface covered with layered carvings and thick, blackened nails. The workshop lights had been removed entirely. What illumination remained came from six taper candles placed in wrought iron holders along the aisle.

Tom stood near the altar cabinet with his sleeves rolled to the elbows and his hands stained with what looked like ash. He did not turn when she entered, nor did he greet her. His focus remained fixed on a small chisel, which he used to carve a narrow spiral into the lip of the cabinet base.

“Tom,” she said gently.

He paused, the tool still pressed to the wood. “I didn’t sleep last night.”

She stepped closer. “How long has it been since you left this place?”

“I can’t leave yet. She’s still speaking.”

Erin glanced around the shop. The dust was gone. Every surface had been wiped clean, the shavings swept into bags that now sat tied and stacked neatly along the walls. The air held the sharp tang of freshly planed oak mixed with something older—an almost organic musk that reminded her of wet stone and old cellars.

“I’m worried about you,” she said. “This has gone too far. Whatever’s happening here, it’s taken over everything.”

Tom turned to face her. His face was pale and drawn, but his eyes were bright. Not frantic, but fevered, lit with the same intensity she had seen in people on the brink of breakthrough or collapse.

“I’m close, Erin. I don’t know what it is yet, but she’s leading me there. I can feel it. Every time I finish a piece, the next one becomes clearer. It’s like following a thread through the dark.”

She stepped up beside him and placed a hand on his arm. “Then let me take you away from it. Just for a day. Rest, clear your head, and maybe you’ll see the pattern without needing to tear yourself apart.”

He shook his head. “If I stop now, I might lose the thread.”

She looked past him toward the altar cabinet. “Is that what this is? The final piece?”

“I think so.”

Erin moved to the workbench, where she saw his sketchbook open to a page filled edge to edge with cramped handwriting. The language wasn’t English—or any language she recognized. The characters curled in unnatural angles, dense and complex, layered atop one another. She flipped to the next page and discovered more of the same. Each entry had been signed with Tom’s name, but the loops of the T and the B were exaggerated and distorted, as though someone had traced over them repeatedly.

“This isn’t yours,” she said quietly.

Tom glanced over. “It is.”

“No, I mean—it’s your hand, but it’s not your voice.”

He returned to the altar and knelt beside it, pressing his palm to one of the symbols near the base. “It’s hers.”

Erin turned toward one of the completed cabinets near the wall. Its finish gleamed beneath the candlelight, and when she crouched beside it, she noticed a discoloration at the seam between the door and the frame. At first, she thought it was oil, but as she leaned closer, she caught the smell.

It was iron.

She opened the cabinet door slowly. The interior was dark, the grain twisting in familiar warped patterns. Toward the back of the panel, streaks of something dark ran down the inside wall, pooled slightly at the base. She reached for the flashlight she kept in her coat and flicked it on.

The light caught something pale. Erin reached in and retrieved a small object no larger than a coin. It was hard and slightly porous. When she turned it in her palm, her stomach clenched.

It was a human tooth.

She dropped it instinctively and stepped back. Her eyes moved across the floor of the cabinet. There were more—scattered in the corners, half-buried in the drying pools of reddish-black stain. A sick, coppery odor rose as she backed away.

“Tom.”

He did not look up.

“There’s blood in this one.”

Still, no response.

She turned toward him fully. “There are teeth in it.”

He finally stood and faced her. “She’s showing me what they did to her.”

His voice was steady, almost reverent. There was no horror in it—only certainty.

“I’m not building furniture anymore,” he said. “I’m building memories.”

* * * * * *

Erin returned again just before dusk. A thin haze clung to the air above the workshop’s roofline, rising from the chimney vent in sluggish curls. Inside, the space had taken on a strange, amber gloom. She stepped through the open door without knocking.

Tom stood in the center of the room, hunched low before the altar cabinet, his body swaying gently. One hand guided a chisel through the final grooves of a wide, circular pattern etched across the face of the cabinet. The other hand rested flat against the frame, fingers splayed, knuckles strained white. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, trained not on the wood but on some distant point within it.

The other cabinets had been moved again. Now they lined the perimeter of the workshop in concentric arcs, all facing inward toward the altar. Dozens of them stood silent, their doors ajar, each bearing symbols that overlapped and interwove like a language too old to be translated.

Erin’s boots echoed across the floor.

Tom did not react.

She moved slowly around the altar, noting the blackened wax trails near its base and the strange, layered geometry burned into the concrete beneath it. Symbols she had once been taught to draw for protection—circles meant to repel sickness, death, and unrest—had been inverted, turned inside out, and fused with runes she had never seen before. The shapes formed a kind of funnel, all of them converging beneath the center of the altar, as if pulling something inward.

“Tom,” she said.

He hesitated, slowing his hand for just a moment.

“You have to stop,” she continued. “Whatever this is, it’s killing you.”

He blinked, slowly. His head tilted, but his eyes remained fixed on the wood.

“I’m almost finished.”

“No!” she said, firmer now. “You’re not building, Tom. You’re performing a ritual!”

Tom’s mouth opened slightly, but the voice that came out of it felt too hollow to be his.

“She deserves justice.”

Erin stepped forward. “You can’t help her. Not like this.”

“I can show them what they did,” he replied. “I can make them see.”

Her eyes moved again to the sigils at their feet.

“This is summoning, Tom, not remembrance. You’re not just showing her story—you’re inviting something in.”

He stood then, the chisel falling from his hand. His eyes seemed clearer for a moment, but panic flickered behind them.

“I—I thought I was helping,” he whispered.

“You were,” she said. “But this has changed. You’ve done enough. Just, stop. Please.”

She reached for the tool bench and retrieved a pry bar. Its weight felt reassuring in her hands. Without hesitation, she crossed back to the altar cabinet and placed the end of the bar beneath the lower lip of the frame.

Tom’s voice cracked as he stepped between her and the wood.

“No!”

She didn’t stop.

“You’ll ruin the penance!” he screamed, grabbing her shoulders.

They struggled in a circle, his grip desperate, hers unrelenting. He wasn’t trying to hurt her—only to protect the structure. But in his frenzy, he lost balance and stumbled sideways. Erin took the opportunity and drove the pry bar deep into the seam where the door met the cabinet face.

The wood split with a sharp crack, and a gust of frigid air poured out from within the cabinet as the front panel broke loose, slamming against the floor with a splintering thud. The candles around the room flickered wildly. For a moment, the light held.

Then Erin saw what had been hidden inside.

There was no shelving, no compartmental design—just a hollow interior lined in raw oak, stained dark with long-set moisture. At the base of the cavity sat a pile of small bones—so many they filled the bottom of the enclosure. Most were fractured. Some bore tool marks. Resting atop them was a crude crucifix, carved from the same reclaimed wood, its surface slick with something black and glistening.

A second wave of cold swept outward from the cabinet, siphoning the heat from the workshop in an instant.

Then came the voices. Not one, but dozens. Hundreds. Those of children, whispering and weeping, their words overlapping in desperate fragments. Erin froze as the sound engulfed her, surrounding her from every direction—words in English, in Latin, in other languages lost long ago to the annals of time. Some cried. Some begged. Others muttered prayers that rose and collapsed in frantic repetition.

Tom backed away from the altar, his mouth open in horror. His fingers trembled as he raised them to his ears, as if trying to block the sound without actually making contact. His knees gave out, and he dropped to the floor, whispering along with the voices, echoing them as if in a trance.

The overhead bulbs burst one by one in rapid succession—glass shattering outward, sparks raining across the floor. Erin shielded her eyes as the last light died, plunging the workshop into a darkness broken only by the flickering, failing candles.

A force struck her from behind, thrusting her forward into the altar. Her head struck the edge of the broken cabinet door, and pain bloomed behind her eyes.

The voices roared in unison, then dropped away all at once, as though sucked inward through a narrow funnel.

The candles went out.

Everything fell still.

And Erin saw no more.

Part VI

She woke to the smell of ash and found herself lying on the gravel just beyond the edge of the workshop’s foundation. Her head throbbed, and when she reached up to touch her temple, her fingers came away streaked with blood. The cut had already clotted. Cold air prickled her cheeks, and the sky above her was a colorless veil, rife with smoke.

The workshop was gone. Only the concrete slab remained, surrounded by scorched beams and skeletal fragments of wall. What hadn’t collapsed inward had been torn away by fire. Steam rose from the wet remains, and firefighters moved slowly through the wreckage, their boots crunching over cinders and metal. A perimeter had been marked with hazard tape, though no one seemed to notice her lying just beyond it.

A medic crouched beside her minutes later. He asked her name, the date, and what she remembered. She answered as best she could. He examined her eyes with a penlight, shone it from side to side, and then gave her a blanket and a plastic bottle of water. When she asked about Tom, he looked away and said nothing.

An investigator approached soon after. He wore a windbreaker with a county seal on the chest and carried a clipboard under one arm. His questions seemed intended to pin her in place: Had she seen anyone else in the building? Had she noticed strange smells beforehand? Was she aware of any chemicals or accelerants that might have been on site?

“I don’t know,” she said, again and again. “I didn’t see.”

When she mentioned the cabinets, he frowned and jotted a note she couldn’t read. He asked if she or Tom had a history of drug use, or if she had ever seen him act violently or erratically. She answered no to both.

“The place went up fast,” he said. “Faster than it should have, honestly. Might have been an old solvent spill under the floor. Or an electrical issue. But if you think of anything else, you can contact the department.”

She asked if they’d found a body. He shook his head.

“No human remains,” he said. “Just ash, timber, and metal.”

That night, she didn’t sleep. She returned to her apartment just before midnight, her clothes still smelling faintly of smoke. She showered twice but couldn’t wash it out. The cuts along her arms stung beneath the water, and her ribs ached when she moved too quickly. She cleaned the dried blood from her scalp and bandaged the cut without looking in the mirror.

Her apartment felt claustrophobic. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the faces in the wood—the warped grain bending inward, the knots morphing into sockets and mouths. The sound of whispering had not followed her home, but something else had—a lingering presence, with unfinished business.

For a week, nothing happened. She avoided the news and answered only the most necessary emails. Erin told her boss she needed time off, citing a personal emergency she didn’t elaborate on. Her home grew quieter, the spaces between thoughts stretching longer with each passing day.

Then, on the seventh morning, a package arrived.

It was small—no more than six inches across—and wrapped in unassuming brown paper, bearing no return address. The postage was local. Her name and apartment number were written carefully on the front in pencil.

She opened it at the kitchen table. Inside was a small wooden figure, wrapped in linen. The doll was simple, carved from a single piece of oak, its limbs joined by tiny dowels. Its shape was childlike—no more than four inches tall—but its face had been rendered with surprising detail. The eyes were wide, the mouth set in a soft, closed line, and the cheeks were slightly hollow. She recognized the shape of the nose and the set of the brow.

It was the girl from the photograph.

On the back of the doll, etched into the grain in block letters, was a single name:

LYDIA.

Erin sat motionless for several minutes.

She touched the doll’s face with the tip of one finger, then turned it over again and again, half expecting the name to disappear or change. It remained the same. She placed the doll on the edge of her desk, facing the doorway to the hall.

That night, the apartment was colder than usual.

She lit a candle on the kitchen counter and left the overheads off. As she stepped into the hallway, she paused.

A sound had come from the kitchen cabinets.

It was faint, almost indistinguishable at first, like water shifting in a pipe, then more distinct—a small voice, muffled by wood, sobbing softly just beyond the latch.

It was quiet, patient, and filled with sorrow.

Erin turned toward the sound, already knowing what she would find when she opened the doors.