Church ladies never die - a short story (FICTION)

A very short horror story. The church building is based on my curacy church, but absolutely none of this ever happened and the lovely people of my curacy church certainly don't care this much about linens!

She never turned the lights on when she arrived.
It was habit, mostly. Electricity bills were high enough as it was. And even with the door locked behind her, no point announcing with blazing windows that she was there on her own. Not that she didn’t trust the estate, but she hadn’t been there that long and it was as well to be realistic. And anyway, she needed to learn to love this church, to become at home in it, as her faithful were. Generations of the faithful, in this place; all living on the estate, all coming to St Peter’s. It was their church, really, she sometimes thought, and she was still a foreigner. An interloper, and told herself not to be silly. Can’t be a foreigner if you live here. Can’t be a foreigner if you wander round the church at night without even needing to put the lights on. Your own church, woman; duly collated, inducted and installed. Better act like it.

So she unlocked the door with the torch on her phone, locked herself in, and felt her way around the walls until she got to the sacristy door, in the corner, right at the back. It was very dark in the church. The grey walls were just a different texture of darkness. The black floor absorbed her footsteps. The odd shaft of moonlight sprang off the brass plates on the back of the pews, but did nothing to illuminate the rest of the space. She knew those brass plates, too. Sue and Sue in the back corner had died in the two years before she’d arrived. Jean who had made all the altar linens had died a few years before that. Bill and Joan and Arthur – that was going back further. Many generations of the faithful. And no memorial yet for lovely Anne,
whose funeral was tomorrow.

She reached the sacristy door and opened it. Still in the dark, she reached around to the light switch and turned it on.

Nothing.

Bloody lights. Suddenly she was very cold. She’d get what she needed for the funeral and go back home.
Just her vestments, that’s all she needed, and they were just there, just in the cupboard, just the other
side of the sacristy. Two minutes to do it, and she could go.

She fished out her phone and turned on the torch.

There was someone there.

She screamed. She dropped her phone and it smashed on the concrete floor. The light went out, but she could still see. Someone there, in a cold phosphorescent haze, as if the figure had absorbed the light of her torch and was giving it back in an unhealthy greyish glow. It turned. The glow was coming from its face, and its hands were full of linens.

‘You haven’t been taking care of these,’ it said, and the voice was greyish too, thin and full of menace,
maybe a woman’s once but nothing there now but spite. ‘We see you, you know. I gave my life to this
church.’

That was a phrase she heard a lot. Sometimes in funeral visits, sometimes in conversation at the back of church, sometimes when she met people in Tesco. It didn’t usually hang tangibly in the air as it did now, surrounding her, oozing like iced treacle around her feet, rising through her body and taking her muscles and nerves away from her, trickling suffocatingly into her mind, dragging her forward to the open cupboard and the drawers, pulled out invisibly as she approached and thumping to the floor.

‘Sort them.’ said the thin voice, and something behind her gripped her hands and moved them without her own muscles co-operating. The something prised her protesting hands open and moved them painfully to sort, unfold, smooth, fold, iron. It gripped and guided and she watched in horror as her own fingers repaired lace edging and darned tiny rips with skills not their own. It lifted her hands as they stacked neat piles in the drawers. 

When the drawers were back in the chest and the cupboard closed, the grip released. The cold treacly 

words drained out of her mind, and with them all her memory of the last hour. Things like that didn’t happen. Nothing had happened.

She picked up the vestments for tomorrow morning’s funeral and shut the door behind her. Back through the dark church. It really was very cold. She was shivering.

As she got to the back door, she looked across at the corner where moonlight still reflected from the 

brass plates.

‘Of course I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said aloud, ‘but really, sometimes I feel as if you’re still looking 

after your church. Keeping an eye on me.’

She laughed. It took effort. She was still shivering as she jabbed the key at the lock, wondering where her phone was, trying to find the keyhole in the dark. Her hands were shaking and it took three tries before she could turn it. There was a thump behind her.