He didn’t remember having that much to drink, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t had any to drink at all, but after last night, he was sure that he had drunk enough to drown an Irishman. 

He had wanted to break into the church for years. Not that they had any money, or gold, or holy grail’s, but rather for the instinctive lure to be satisfied. He loved the church, yet had never set foot in it. Sure, he’d looked through the windows, but then headlights would roll over the grassy knoll and threaten to silhouette him against the rotten siding and chipped white paint. He knew the local cops looked down on snooping around the old place.

No one really knew how old the building was, but many had guessed. The most common answer having to do with the war; Revolutionary, that is. 

He took his camera, equipped with night vision like in all the corny television shows, and parked his car near the river. He crossed on the railroad bridge, hearing phantom whistles as he jostled across anxiously. 

When he arrived at the church, he didn’t peek through the windows, nor did he look around for any onlookers that may tip off the authorities. The enemy of successful lurking is caution. He dove through a broken window that he had been eyeing for some time now. 

He landed hard, crunching glass under his back as he rolled. He groaned, sitting upright to complete darkness.

He switched the camera on, peering through the 2”x3” LCD screen, the red dot flashing in the corner. The green light illuminated the screen, and he saw a giant room in front of him. Pews lined the floor all the way to the front where a stage sprawled across the front of the sanctuary. A confession booth, or so he thought, sat near the stage and a small wooden cross hung from the wall behind it. 

He walked forward carefully, noting the cool air that swam across the back of his neck. At the first pew, he reached down and grabbed a hymnal, flipping it open. Dark black symbols adorned the pages, followed by lines of music that resembled musical notes, but plainly weren’t. He looked closer at the writing; certainly not English. He tried to mutter along with the jostled language, thinking it may be old English, but even speaking it uncovered no clues. He flipped the book closed and placed it back on the pew, freezing in place.

His ears strained to confirm what he was hearing. He flashed the camera towards the stage, catching the outline of a figure.

He crouched low, beginning to shake. Squatters, he thought. More frightening than imagined ghosts. 

He shook his head. He should have assumed that there were inhabitants in the abandoned church. But he wasn’t ready to leave.

He stood, and walked slowly down the aisle of empty pews, eventually reaching the woman praying at the altar.

“Hello?” he said quietly.

She didn’t move, but rather prayed more intensely, the words sounding as foreign as the words in the hymnal. 

“Do you mind if I look around?” he ventured. “I’ll be gone soon.”

She stopped praying, her body shaking. She stood, her eyes darting left and right as she turned and stumbled into the confession booth. 

He noticed a cross on the booth, matching the one on the wall.

He looked through his camera screen, and zoomed in closely to the booth, just as the woman grew upset. Her voice rose from inside the insulated box, flashing from whatever language she had been speaking back to English. 

“They’re here!” she screamed, followed by gibberish. “Looking for you, too!” She began laughing.

He backed up, the camera shaking in his hands. Her laughter grew louder and louder, then stopped abruptly, and he heard her body slam against the walls of the booth time and time again, until only silence filled the air. 

He gasped, realizing that he had not been breathing. His breath fogged the camera screen in the cold sanctuary, and he wiped it clear with his t-shirt. In his terror, he couldn’t help but remember how hot it was outside. The July heat had been record breaking for the past week.

Then he was back, staring at the silent wooden box.

“You ok?” he asked, the words hanging in the air like the echoes of a gunshot in a silent canyon.

“Hey!” he yelled.

The booth stood silently.

He walked forward, rocks and dirt crunching under his foot. He approached the confession booth and reached out his hand slowly. He grabbed the knob and jerked the door open, knocking the camera out of his hand. 

He dropped to the ground, grabbing the camera and haphazardly aiming it towards the open door, only to find a small, empty room. It was only 3 feet wide and maybe 7 feet tall, no deeper than it was wide, yet the woman was nowhere inside. He panned the camera up and down the walls, but there was no other exit.

He stepped inside.

The other half of the booth was supposedly where a priest would sit, and he pointed the night-vision through the thick mesh but couldn’t manage to get a clear picture of the other room.

On a small shelf sat a bible, and he picked it up, flipping it open. Page after page of the bible was blank, and he sat it back on the shelf.

“Confess, and the pages will fill themselves,” a deep voice said, coming from the other side of the mesh. 

He jumped backwards, slamming into the now closed door. He held the camera close to him, stuttering.

“Geez, man, you scared me,” he said shakily.

“Confess!” the voice demanded, yelling so loud that the walls of the booth shook.

He reached for the knob behind him, pushing on the door.

“Are you a priest?” he asked, fidgeting with the stiff doorknob.

The voice was silent.

The door wouldn’t budge, and he began throwing his weight against it.

“Of sorts,” the voice finally answered, and then began to laugh.

The laughing continued while he continued trying to break the door down, and he eventually did as the voice’s laughter rose louder and louder. 

When he ran out of the booth, he slammed the door, and as the loud crash of the door hitting the latch reverberated throughout the room, the laughter stopped.

He turned to leave, kicking something that lay on the floor. He panned the camera down. 

It was the cross from the booth, and it slid across the floor towards the aisle. He stepped over it as he ran for the exit, and as he held the camera screen close to his face so he could see as he ran, he noticed that the empty pews were now filled. Bowed heads rose and fell as he ran, their voices melding into one, speaking in hisses and loud moans. Organ music began, and they all rose to their feet. 

He sprinted harder, finally reaching the window that he had dove through to enter, yet now was fully intact. He didn’t care, and dove through anyway, breaking the glass. 

The next morning, after having not slept at all in his own bed, he pulled out the recording and reviewed it. It showed him entering the church, interacting with no one at the altar. An empty confession booth, empty pews, and a silent organ. 

He threw the camera at the wall. He watched as it came to rest in the corner of his room, the battery pack flopping out and the screen cracking. He stood and walked over to the camera before kicking it and running out of the house. 

There, on the floor, next to his broken camera screen and busted battery pack, sat the wooden cross, propped up on the wall and watching him.