The Blessed - By Tonya Hurley Page 0,65

iron handle.

Lucy’s jaw dropped as the interior came into view.

“No need to wait for Sebastian. I think he knows where this place is.”

Cecilia slid by her and through the doorway into the room, with Agnes in tow. Their reaction too was silence, turned mute by complete sensory overload.

Unlike the dinginess of the stairwell and church above, the circular room was beautifully lit with station after station of burning votives in opaque rose-colored glass cups. Semi-hardened pools of melted wax grew drop by drop on the floor beneath them. The blazing light was almost painful, shining into every crevice of the chapel. It was vibrant and bright, brimming with signs of life and reminders of death all at once.

Most striking was an enormous chandelier—more of a candelabra—hanging above the center of the chapel, made masterfully and entirely of human bones. It swayed gently at the breeze of fresh air admitted by the open entrance, candleholders full of melted paraffin bubbled menacingly, straining to contain the overflow and threatening to spill over. Bone fragments of various shapes and sizes were strewn about like broken clamshells on a pebble beach.

Two large monstrances were bookended by a small altar, legs also made from bone, along with two lecterns, each holding an open book.

The front of the altar was bordered by three wooden and velvet kneelers. Behind the altar was a floor-to-ceiling fresco of the Sacred Heart, pierced and encircled by a crown of thorns oozing blood. Four sculptures, veiled with linen sheets tied tightly with twine, sat on marble pedestals before it.

“Not a courtroom or a prison,” Cecilia observed faintly.

“A tomb,” Agnes offered.

They walked in slowly, turning their necks up and around with each step, trying to take in the compact magnificence of the space. It was beautiful but eerie, conjuring a far more intense reaction in them than the larger edifice above.

Heavy leaden stained glass windows depicting horrific scenes of torture and death, brought nearly to life in the flickering flames, lined the perimeter. Beheadings, beatings, burnings, and worse were ornately rendered in the most beautiful and gruesome detail. In the shimmering candlelight, the windows took on an almost 3D quality, their images floating on the fog as if at the command of a midnight movie projectionist. It was part chapel, part chamber of horrors.

“We think we’ve got problems,” Cecilia said to Lucy, studying the panels.

Cecilia thought it was odd that the perimeter was lined with windows when it was literally impossible for any natural light to sweep through them at that depth.

Lucy walked over to one of the pedestaled figures and unsuccessfully attempted to loosen the knot. In front of the statues on a base of its own, Cecilia saw a gold-framed glass case, the same exact one from her nightmare, misted over and shattered on the front side, through the haze. She wiped the dust and grime away carefully, looking for the rings from her dream.

She rolled the grit around her fingertips for a while, confused.

“What is this place?” Cecilia mused.

“A crypt?” Agnes said, awestruck.

“This actually looks like a place I visited with my father in the Czech Republic,” Lucy said. “Like an ossuary. A bone closet. It was a chapel constructed entirely of skeleton parts under the Cemetery Church of All Saints.”

“You went there for vacation?” Cecilia asked.

“It was grotesque, but extraordinarily beautiful at the same time, just like this place,” Lucy explained. “All these bones of people who died during the Black Death were dug up and intricately sculpted into furniture and religious fixtures by a half-blind monk.”

“It just keeps getting better,” CeCe murmured.

“It was an unbelievable sight, like this. A work of art. A real masterpiece. We talked about it for hours, days, after,” Lucy rambled, the thought of being with her dad forcing out the fear that was making its way in as she scanned the windows that lined the entire perimeter of the room.

Agnes approached the lecterns on either side of the altar and stopped. Both books were open. One book was clearly a Bible; a five-ribbon marker hung from it and she opened the book to the page indicated by the first one. It read “Psalmus.” Frustrated at both her difficulty seeing the pages in the smoky room as well as her inability to read it, she moved over to the other lectern and noted three bookmarkers streaming from that book.

It was a leather-bound and elaborately illustrated tome, sitting inside a wooden case. A tiny key, for a lock, she assumed, sat on the open