Okay guys this is only part one!!
— 1024 something words for FlashFicFriday ♥️
— romance smut (coming up in part two)
Church hunt
“I FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT for dragging you all the way out here, and then I can’t even find it...” The blonde woman, fairly childlike in her apperence considering that she was in her on her very last twenties; turned around in the woodland clearing and looked apologetically at her friend.
“… This blows. There really was an abandoned church somewhere around here.” She said, gathering her windswept hair in a tangled ponytail and tying it back so tight the skinny black elastic threatened to burst in her fingers.
The friend, a tall man who liked to call himself a ‘viking’ although he had dark features and was ‘Mercian’ to the bone, shrugged while looking at his phone.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s a good day to spend outside anyway. I can’t see anything on google maps though.” He said.
The woman shielded her eyes and looked up at the sky. The sun hung low, like a little dying star just above the treetops. The mild September gust tried once again to take a hold of her hair, but the tie held. The air smelled like the beginning of fall: warm-toned leaves, rich earth and something entirely crisper than both.
“Really? Aw. Double blow.” She frowned and waded over to him, through the tall grass, to look at the little screen too. He lowered the phone she could see. “I left my own Russian tracker in the car, but I had hoped you’d be able to see the ruin from above.”
The screen only showed miles and miles of deep emerald pine forest, a few lakes and clearings, like the one they stood in now, and the main road running through the forest, far off to the west.
There was no trace of any planes for old churches.
Her finger dragged the screen a little, following the road where she had spotted the ruin from her window last week, but alas. Nothing.
“Yeah. If it’s not here, it’s probably not here.” The man said, lifting his head to politely scout around. “Maybe it was further down the road?”
“No. We’re parked in the spot right where I parked last week. I’m sure.”
The woman sighed, frustrated that both her credibility and sense of direction were under question.
This was something that had always nagged her because truth was, she didn’t have any sense of direction! It was as if she took a step and the world sprung up around her – shaped and created itself from nothing to a vibrant environment as she made her way through it. Meaning that everything behind her was erased and everything in front of her was yet to be made.
Or that was what it felt like.
Her therapist would’ve maybe called it an ego-bubble or maybe a loss of reality anchoring, but either way it made finding her way back to her small secondhand Toyota a real bitch the other day.
When the woman had taken a drive out into the woods, and then impulsively gone exploring when she’d seen the church among the trees, she’d almost got helplessly lost.
She had parked her car, gone less than 500m into the woods, and landed smack in the center of an old stone church. It looked like something she recognized from her own country. Crumbling columns overgrown with vibrant green moss and ensnared in ivy. Gaping glass-less windows and a stone path, sunken so far into the grass you’d think they had been there for an era. It had been an ethereal place. A beautiful and haunting place.
She had lost track of time in the ruin and although she was sure her car was just beyond the trees, it had taken her an hour, with her phone as a rescue device, to find back to the main road.
In the comfort of her shabby car she’d texted her very best friend in the world: ‘come look at this creepy place I’ve found’ and they’d set up a date to go church exploring as soon as possible.
Her friend was almost as macabre and drawn to the mystical, as herself.
However now, a week later and after all that, the ruin had magically disappeared.
“We can look around some more? It’s not completely dark yet. And you invited me to a church ‘hunt’. If it was right there it wouldn’t really be hunting.” The man said, trying to cheer her up.
“Nah, I’m cold actually…” The woman sighed again, deeper, and leaned back on her heel. “Damn. It was so cool-looking. Kinda like a crypt, ya’know. Tiny, roof totally collapsed and tons of tombstones out front. You would’ve loved it...” She trailed off looking up at her companion who had pulled a ‘meh whacha gotta do’ smile and put his phone away.
The man looked nice with the blue sky behind his dark tousled hair. Deep azure and iron ore.
They’d been friends for years, but had never really taken it any further. Why that was exactly, she didn’t know. They we re both single now and it was definitely not because the woman hadn’t wanted to, but timing had always seemed to play a part. Partners, jobs and distance. And it was not like she knew if he wanted to go non-platonic.
Truth be told there had been a few ‘almost’ times – bad combinations of loneliness and vodka and late night conversations on the porch. Those nights had been full of cricket concerts, uncertain eye contact and hesitation. Maybe anticipation.
But somehow she had always managed to snap herself out of it. She didn’t have that many friends that could handle her vibe and some friendships were simply too important to complicate with a messy one-night-stand.
“So what do you want to do now?” Her friend asked and the woman blinked herself out of her train of thought.
“Well… I’m kinda disappointed. Do you want to just go?”
“Sure okay. We can hit a diner. I feel like pancakes.”
The woman prefered ghosts, bitterness and salt, and the man was the one with the overpowering sweet tooth, but pancakes sounded like a good plan B tonight.
She shoved her hands in the pockets of her black jeans and nodded. “Deal. Damn, I still can't believe I lost a whole flipping church in the woods. It was not that far off the road.”
The man laughed and turned to walk back the way they came — she followed.
“If anyone were to lose a haunted crypt in the woods, it would be you though. You have an awful sense of-” he started but the woman stepped in front of him and pointed a playful, but warning finger.
“Oi! Don't you dare say it.”
“Direction.” He finished with a grin, so bright and charming that felt like it could knock her off her feet.
In that moment, the woman would have usually defended herself. Maybe hit him on shoulder with her bony fist or augmented that the woods were hard to navigate - but she didn’t do either.
Instead the smile that had subconsciously crept up on her lips, stiffened, as the faint, but unmistakable, sound of a church bell sounded in the woods.
It was a hollow metal ‘clang … Cl-clang … clang’, entirely unmelodic and without rhythm. It sounded more like an overgrown tin hammered against a cliff, rather than a bell actually tolling.
A few birds in a grand pine tree over by the other end of the clearing, abruptly took flight, leaving the skeletal branches swaying in their wake.
The man looked over his shoulder, back at the clearing. “Oh. That’s interesting.” He raised a dark thick brow. “Right on que…”
She nodded and after a moment of listening to the unsettling bell, she said:
“Agreed. Come on. We can follow the sound.” A chill ran down the back of the woman’s neck. There was something deliciously ominous about the bells timing and the silhouette of the black birds flapping across the sky.
She gently pushed past him and waded back into the tall grass.
