The Three Crosses (Part 2)

 After the basement, I didn’t sleep for two days.

Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the name pressing behind them—trying to get in. Or trying to get out.

I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t even remember it. But I knew it had teeth.

The name lived in the dark, in the mold along the basement walls, in the dirt clinging to the soles of my boots. It whispered through the radiators, the wind, and the creak of old bones in the walls.

I started hearing things.

Not voices, not exactly. Just... repetitions.

Footsteps upstairs when I was downstairs. A knock at the door, but no one outside. A scratching sound in the ceiling, like a mouse—except the pipes bent toward it. Like they were listening.

Something was changing.

On the third night, I blacked out.

I was in the kitchen, making coffee, when the world skipped like a scratched record.

One second I was pouring water into the machine.

The next—I was standing on Cross Hill.

Barefoot.

Middle of the night.

No phone. No coat. Just me and the crosses and the moonless sky, black and roiling like a lid about to lift.

The three figures were still hanging. But something had shifted.

The middle one had turned its head.

Not much. Just enough.

I couldn’t see a face. Just burlap, rope, and the apparent, gut-deep certainty that it was looking at me.

That it knew me.

I backed away. One step, then two, then I was running. Stumbling through the field, grass slicing my feet, lungs burning. I didn’t stop until I slammed into my front door, palms bloody and shaking.

Inside, the clock on the stove blinked 3:33 AM.

Figures.

The following day, I found something at the foot of the bed.

A dead bird.

Its wings were snapped backward like broken arms, and its beak had been pried open and stuffed with dirt.

I vomited into the sink.

Then I called Tiller.

We met at the station. He looked worse than me—red-rimmed eyes, five o’clock shadow turned into midnight moss. He didn’t even pretend to smile.

“You’re not the only one,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Strange shit’s happening all over town. Cold spots. Radios turning on by themselves. Pastor Brenn called me screaming last night. Said his baptismal font turned to maggots.”

“Jesus.”

“Nope,” Tiller said. “He’s not the one answering anymore.”

He pulled out a folder and slid it across the table. Inside were photos—grainy, nighttime trail cam stills from a property on the south end of town.

In every image, the same thing.

A figure.

Tall. Unnaturally so. No facial features. Wearing what looked like robes, but wrong—like they were stitched from shadows and corn husks. In one photo, it stood directly in front of the camera.

The next, it was gone.

No footsteps. No disturbance. Just... gone.

“They’re calling it the Preacher,” Tiller said, voice flat. “Kids on TikTok think it’s a prank. I’m not convinced.”

“Do you think it’s Elial?”

He hesitated.

“I think it’s something we called by forgetting.”

That evening, I went back to my mother’s journals.

They weren’t in any obvious place—Ma never trusted shelves. But tucked inside a fake hollow Bible was a set of six slim notebooks, tied with black twine. Each one dated in her neat, looping script.

The last one was marked 1999 – The Attempt.

I opened it.

March 3 – The dreams are back. The hill is whispering. No one remembers what the crosses are for—not really. They just keep building. Like a reflex. Like a muscle twitch in a dying body.

March 6—Pastor Alden gave me a book. It was older and not a Bible. There was no title. The cover had a symbol—three nails in a circle—on it. He said it came from before the Chapel. He said it was a warning. He said we were worshipping something we buried but never killed.

March 9 – I tried to tell the town. I failed.

March 12 – The ground is stirring. I heard the name again last night. I can’t write it. Every time I try, my hand shakes too badly.

March 15 – If you find this, Ruth, I’m sorry. I tried to stop it. I really did. But we’re part of it. You and me both. Harper blood runs all the way back. Back to the first stone. Back to the mouth. Be careful with your voice. It knows you now.

I closed the notebook. My hands were shaking, too.

That night, I took a walk.

I don’t know why. The air felt too heavy inside. I needed space. Silence. Or maybe I just needed to see if the world was still accurate.

The fields were quiet. Too quiet.

No bugs. No frogs. Not even the wind.

Then I saw it.

At the edge of the cornfield—someone standing among the stalks. Watching.

Not moving. Just there. Like a drawing someone forgot to erase.

I froze.

And then it spoke.

Not with a voice. Not aloud.

It pressed into my skull like a thumb in wet clay.

“She remembered. Now you must.”

The stalks bent inward, folding around it like a mouth closing.

And then it was gone.

-----------------------------------------------

The new crosses went up overnight.

No town meeting. No warning. One day, the hill was bare. The next—three towering things looming against the sky.

But they weren’t like the ones before.

They were wrong.

Too tall. Too thin. Built from blackened wood that creaked and groaned even without wind. Each one was carved with strange symbols—deep, looping cuts that spiraled and intersected in ways that hurt my head if I looked too long.

People gathered to see them. No one spoke. Not even a whisper. Just that same tight-lipped small-town silence we’d all grown up with—the kind that buries secrets deeper than coffins.

I spotted Pastor Brenn near the front. Hands folded. Eyes red-rimmed and gleaming.

I pushed through the crowd.

“You did this?”

He didn’t flinch. Just nodded. “The Lord revealed the proper shape.”

“That’s not the Lord’s shape.”

He looked at me then, full-on, and I saw it.

The cracks.

Not just in his eyes—behind them. He was sleep-deprived, pale, twitching at sounds no one else could hear.

“I found the original designs,” he said, voice steady but distant. “In the old Chapel ruins. Buried beneath the cornerstone. Scripture etched into stone. He was part of the foundation. Always has been.”

“You don’t even know what He is.”

“He is what was before the Word,” Brenn whispered. “The first truth. The Fourth Light.”

I stepped back like he’d slapped me.

“You’re not saving the town,” I said. “You’re feeding it to Him.”

He smiled then.

And that smile… wasn’t his.

I drove straight to Tiller’s house.

He met me on the porch, rubbing the back of his neck like he’d been expecting me.

“You knew,” I said.

“I suspected.”

“You helped him.”

He didn’t answer.

“Tiller, goddamn it!”

He closed his eyes. “I didn’t know what else to do. People are seeing things. Hearing things. We’ve had five suicides in the past month. The town’s cracking, Ruth. I thought if we just... put the crosses back up, maybe it’d stop.”

“So you let that preacher raise abominations and call it holy?”

He opened the screen door and motioned for me to follow.

Inside his living room was a war zone of books, old maps, and scribbled notes. Strings connected articles, names, and years. It was a corkboard straight out of a conspiracy movie.

At the center: Elial.

And above it, in big red letters: SEAL. NOT WORSHIP.

“I knew the ritual mattered,” Tiller said, gesturing at the chaos. “But I never found the how. Brenn claimed he did. He said he had texts, carvings, and translations. I let him try.”

“You made a deal.”

He didn’t deny it.

“I’m not trying to betray you, Ruth. I’m trying to stop whatever the hell is coming up through our dirt.”

I looked at the corkboard again. One name caught my eye.

Harper – Matron Line

“What is this?”

Tiller hesitated. “Your family’s tied to it. Deep. Way back to the settlers. Your blood was used in the original seal. You weren’t supposed to know. Your mom—she tried to pull away, but it was already in her veins.”

“So what,” I said, voice hollow, “this thing wants me?”

“No,” he said. “It needs you.”

That night, I dreamed in reverse.

I watched my mother die. Over and over.

Not the quiet death in a hospital bed I saw with my own eyes. No—this was violent. Ancient. She hung from the middle cross, hands bound in prayer, mouth sewn shut with corn silk.

And below her, the earth cracked open.

A tongue, wide as a barn roof and slick with moss, slithered out to taste the air.

I woke up screaming, blood trickling from my nose.

The following day, the bodies were gone.

Just… gone.

No burlap. No rope. No blood in the grass. Only the crosses, taller and darker than ever.

No one spoke of it.

They avoided the hill like it was cursed ground—which it probably was now.

I went back to the Chapel ruins. Or what was left of them.

The foundation stones were still there, half-swallowed by weeds and time. I dug around with a rusted trowel until I hit something solid.

A flat slab carved with the same sigils as the new crosses.

And in the center, an indentation—shallow, palm-sized.

Like something was meant to be placed there.

A hand.

Or a head.

Or a heart.

I touched the stone.

The world reeled.

I was no longer standing.

I was falling.

Through time. Through memory. Through bloodlines.

I saw a village in flames. A screaming baby in swaddling cloth. A man nailed to a tree with iron spikes, singing in a tongue no one remembered.

I saw my mother as a girl, kneeling before an altar of bone.

I saw myself—but not me. Older. Eyes black as oil. Chanting that name I still couldn’t say.

And behind all of it, a shape.

Tall. Crowned in antlers. Wings like parchment soaked in rain.

Not Elial.

The one before Elial.

The truth beneath the lie.

It turned toward me.

Spoke in a voice made of storms and sermons.

“Three is the seal. You are the key.”

I woke up on the floor of the Chapel ruins.

My palms were bleeding.

In the distance, I heard a bell ringing.

But Ashwood hadn’t had working church bells in years.

-----------------------------------------------

I returned to the ruins at dawn, shovel in hand, like some half-mad gravedigger.

The old Chapel had burned before I was born, but the foundation was still there—limestone bricks half-swallowed by thorns and stubborn prairie grass. Most people never went near it. Too many stories. Too much ash in the dirt.

But I’d seen the slab. I knew what it hid.

Tiller offered to come with me. I told him no, not out of pride, but because I wasn’t sure I could trust him anymore.

I started digging where the slab had cracked. The earth was wet, dark, and rich with decay. Worms squirmed like nerves under the blade.

After an hour, I hit something.

Not stone.

Wood.

The basement door was under three feet of dirt and time. It was a trapdoor reinforced with rusted iron and old faith.

It creaked when I opened it, screaming like something that didn’t want to be woken.

The air below smelled like rot and cold stone. I clicked on my flashlight and descended the narrow stairwell.

The Chapel’s bones were still here. Old beams sagged above my head, blackened from fire but not fully collapsed. Mold bloomed on the walls like frostbite. The floor was thick with silt and broken glass.

And at the far end—an altar.

Cracked. Covered in dust.

Behind it, a stone wall etched with more of those impossible sigils.

There was a mirror nailed to it. Oval. Tainted with age.

And above the mirror, in black paint:

“DO NOT SPEAK THE NAME”

My hand tingled.

The same hand that had touched the slab outside.

Like it remembered something I didn’t.

I crossed the room slowly, the flashlight beam trembling. Something about the mirror drew me in. It was not like a reflection—more like a window.

When I looked into it, I didn’t see myself.

I saw the Chapel whole again.

Candles flickering. Pews filled with silent, unmoving figures.

At the altar stood a woman.

It was my mother.

She was younger—mid-thirties maybe, same as in the newspaper clipping. Her hands were red. She held a book bound in something living. It pulsed in her arms like a heartbeat.

She looked straight at me through the mirror.

And said, “It has to be you now.”

The glass cracked.

I stumbled back, heart in my throat.

Behind the altar, I noticed a small and square recess, almost like a storage niche.

I cleared the dust.

Inside: a leather satchel. Bone clasps. No label.

I opened it with shaking hands.

Inside were six items:

1. A knife made of flint, stained with something black.

2. A yellowed page from what looked like a handwritten Bible—but the language wasn’t English.

3. A drawing of the three crosses—but with four shadows beneath them.

4. A locket. I opened it. Inside was a tiny painting of my mother.

5. A cloth bundle tied with hair.

6. And a name, carved into wood I couldn’t read.

It was not because it was in another language but because my brain refused to see it. Every time I looked, my eyes slid off like oil on water.

I knew what it was.

The real name.

The one before Elial. The one the Chapel tried to bury with stone and silence.

I wrapped everything up and left the basement as fast as I dared. The stairs groaned behind me like they were waiting for me to fall.

Outside, the sky had turned a weird, flat gray, which meant a storm was coming—not rain, but something else.

Back in town, the silence was heavier.

People had started locking their doors in broad daylight. The local diner had a sign on the window now:

“Closed for Lent. Or Longer.”

I stopped by the Rusty Nail for information. The place was empty except for Marla, the bartender, and a guy at the end of the bar with his hoodie up and head down.

Marla was jumpy.

“You look like you been to hell,” she said, sliding me a whiskey without asking.

“Getting there,” I muttered.

“You hear about Brenn?”

My heart dropped. “What about him?”

She leaned in close. “He’s gone. Vanished last night. Sheriff says he left town. But folks say they saw him walkin’ out toward the Hill. Just before sunrise.”

I didn’t answer. Just drank.

The guy at the end of the bar lifted his head.

It was Reese.

Old Man Reese. The same who told me the crosses weren’t for decoration.

Only now his eyes were glassy, and his lips were moving soundlessly.

“Everything okay there?” I asked.

He didn’t blink. Just kept whispering.

I moved closer.

His breath smelled like dirt.

“The seal is breaking.”

“Reese—”

“She’s calling from the root. She remembers the blood. The Fourth doesn’t sleep anymore.”

He reached out and gripped my wrist with bony fingers.

“You brought it back.”

Then he collapsed.

Tiller met me at the clinic an hour later. Reese was unresponsive. Catatonic. Eyes open, but not seeing.

I told Tiller what I’d found beneath the Chapel.

He went pale. Real pale. Like paper dipped in milk.

“I think we’re out of time,” I said.

He nodded. “We’ve got one move left.”

“And that is?”

“You give it what it wants.”

I stared at him. “You mean me.”

“Or the town burns.”

He said it like it wasn’t even a hard choice.

That night, I sat on my mother’s bed, the satchel open in my lap.

I took out the drawing. Four shadows beneath three crosses.

The fourth one wasn’t kneeling.

It was standing.

Arms outstretched.

Waiting.

-----------------------------------------------

I stayed up all night reading the page from the satchel.

It wasn’t in English. Not Latin. Not Greek. It read like sound made flesh—looping characters, slashes, spirals, things that felt like words when I touched them but left a coppery taste on my tongue.

Somehow, I understood it.

Not in my head. In my blood.

A ritual. A lineage. A cage made from faith, flesh, and three-fold sacrifice.

The Harper bloodline was bound to it long ago.

We weren’t just witnesses.

We were the lock.

Every generation, the line continues.

A daughter is born.

She stays in Ashwood.

She remembers.

And Elial sleeps.

But I left.

I left—and my mother didn’t stop me.

Now I was the only one left.

And the god was stirring.

I returned to the Chapel ruins just before dawn, holding the flint knife in one hand and the locket in the other. The clouds overhead churned low and gray, and the air was thick with pressure.

The crosses loomed in the distance—silent sentinels, wrong in all the right ways.

As I crossed the basement threshold again, the sigils on the wall shimmered faintly.

The mirror was broken.

But the altar was glowing.

Pale red.

Like something alive was pulsing beneath it.

I opened the satchel and took out the cloth bundle.

Inside: a single strand of braided hair. My mother’s, I think. Bound with a thorn.

I placed it on the altar.

The glow deepened. The stone beneath me groaned.

Then—a voice.

Not external. Not internal either.

It came from below.

“One remains. One fails. One forgets. The seal thins.”

My mouth moved before I could stop it.

“What do you want from me?”

No answer.

Just a sound.

A heartbeat.

But not one heart.

Thousands.

All beating from deep within the ground.

When I came up from the Chapel, Sheriff Tiller was waiting.

He didn’t flinch at the satchel. Didn’t ask what I’d seen.

He already knew.

“You figured it out, didn’t you,” I said.

He nodded. “Before you did. But I prayed I was wrong.”

“And now?”

“Now we’re out of time.”

He handed me something wrapped in cloth.

A wooden carving. Weathered. Older than the town itself.

It showed four figures on crosses.

But the fourth wasn’t dead.

She was watching.

We met that night at the hill.

Tiller had already gathered wood. Ropes. He said he would rebuild the crosses again—the right way.

But this time, he needed something more.

Someone.

I stood at the foot of the hill as he raised the center post.

He looked at me like a man breaking his own heart.

“This isn’t murder,” he said. “It’s renewal. You die here, and the seal resets. The town lives.”

“I’m not going to die,” I told him.

And I wasn’t.

Because death wasn’t the answer.

Memory was.

The ritual didn’t require blood alone.

It required remembrance.

That’s why the crosses had to be built every year.

Not as a cage—but as a vow.

And they’d forgotten.

They’d let the burden fall on one family.

Until I was all that was left.

And even I had left.

I stood before the center cross and cut my palm with the flint blade. Let the blood fall into the dirt.

And then I spoke.

Not in words.

In name.

The name I couldn’t read.

Couldn’t say.

But had always known.

It spilled out of me like a scream, a hymn, like the last gasp before drowning.

And the earth answered.

The field split open.

Just a crack.

Not wide. Not yet.

A thin, pulsing fissure beneath the cross. Red light bleeding through. Screams not from mouths but from memory.

Tiller fell to his knees, covering his ears.

I stood still.

And offered my blood again.

Not in sacrifice.

In witness.

The light receded.

The ground closed.

The wind died.

Silence fell.

And I knew:

It wasn’t over.

But it was sealed.

For now.

Later, in the morning fog, I found the locket again at the base of the cross.

It had opened.

Inside was a second picture.

A girl.

Not me.

Not my mother.

But someone older.

Same eyes.

The same scar on the left brow.

And scrawled beneath it in faded ink:

"We remember, so He forgets."