Chapter 10: The Drowned Church

Chapter 10: The Drowned Church

The house was a sterile, hollow thing. Every blank wall and empty shelf was a testament to Leo’s self-inflicted erasure. He had packed away his life, boxed up his past, and in doing so, had created a vacuum. He moved through the rooms like a ghost in his own home, the silence so profound he could hear the blood pulsing in his ears. The Offering Game had stopped, for now, but the victory felt as empty as his surroundings. He was safe, but he was also nothing, a man without a story in a house without a soul.

He couldn't live like this, hiding in a self-made prison, waiting for the enemy to find a new way in. The incomprehensible Atlas of Wards sat on his dining table, a massive, mocking monolith of power he couldn't wield. He needed a key, a Rosetta Stone to unlock its dangerous secrets.

His thoughts returned to his aunt's first journal, the primer to the grimoire. Perhaps he had missed something, a clue buried in her more lucid, academic observations. He spent the better part of the morning poring over the familiar pages, his eyes scanning for anything he might have overlooked in his initial panic. He found it on a page brittle with age, tucked between a sketch of a local mushroom and a note on funeral rites.

It was a short, cryptic entry.

The infestation is not sourced in the woods, but anchored by them. There is a Nexus, a place where the veil between their world and ours has worn so thin it is but mist. It is the drowned heart of the town, where they were born in water and fire. Look for the spire that points to heaven and hell simultaneously. In that thin place, offerings have the most power. In that thin place, they can be most easily bound.

Drowned heart. Spire. Nexus. The words vibrated with a terrible significance. Leo grabbed his phone, his hands shaking slightly, and called Clara.

He read her the entry, his voice tight. "Does any of that mean anything to you?"

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, a silence so heavy he could almost feel its weight. "The reservoir levels are the lowest they've been in thirty years," she said finally, her voice hushed, as if speaking a blasphemy. "The drought. People have been talking about it for weeks."

"What does the drought have to do with anything?" Leo asked, frustrated.

"The 'drowned heart' of Dam's End isn't a metaphor, Leo," she explained, her words slow and deliberate. "It's the old town. The original settlement, from before the dam was built. They flooded the valley in '35 to create the reservoir. Drowned the whole town."

A cold dread trickled down Leo's spine. "And the spire?"

"St. Jude's," she whispered. "The old church. Its stone steeple was the highest point in the valley. They said on clear days, you used to be able to see the cross at the top just under the surface of the water. With the levels this low… it might be visible again. The spire that points to heaven… and to the hell of the drowned world below."

The Nexus. The center of their power. It wasn't some abstract concept; it was a physical place.

"I have to go there," Leo said, the decision forming instantly.

"It's not a place for the living, Leo. It's a gravesite."

"Your methods aren't working," he shot back, his voice raw with desperation and anger. "Hiding, appeasing, it's just a slower way to die. Mrs. Steinhop told me about the others, the 'accidents.' The Sheriff is leaving offerings. This town is feeding them! I need to understand what we're up against, and Steffy's journal says that's the place to do it. Will you come with me?"

He heard her take a long, shaky breath. "Meet me at the turnoff for the dam in twenty minutes," she said, and hung up.

Leo grabbed his coat, hesitating at the front door. He was leaving the safety of his warded prison to walk directly into the heart of the enemy's territory. He looked back at the sterile, empty house, and realized there was nothing left here for him to protect. His identity was already gone. All that was left was the fight.

He met Clara at the deserted turnoff. She sat in her old, beat-up station wagon, her face pale and drawn, her dark eyes filled with a grim foreboding. She got into his truck without a word, and he drove them down the winding, poorly maintained road that led to the dam. The woods grew thicker here, ancient trees crowding the road, their branches interlocking overhead to form a dark tunnel. The air grew colder, heavy with the scent of damp soil and decay.

Finally, the trees broke, and they were there. The dam was a monstrous concrete wall, a brutalist scar across the landscape, stained dark with age and watermarks. It held back the reservoir, a vast, unnaturally still sheet of dark green water that stretched to the horizon. The shoreline was a wide band of cracked, dry mud, littered with pale, skeletal driftwood—the bones of trees that had drowned eighty years ago.

"There," Clara breathed, pointing a trembling finger towards the center of the vast lake.

Leo followed her gaze. About two hundred yards out, a shape broke the water's glassy surface. It was a dark, slender finger of stone, encrusted with algae and slime, tapering to a point. A simple stone cross, tilted at a drunken angle, still clung to its peak. The steeple of the drowned church of St. Jude's. It was a horrifying, lonely sight, a gravestone for an entire town.

He grabbed the old pair of binoculars Steffy had kept in the truck's glove compartment and raised them to his eyes. The steeple swam into focus, every detail sharp and clear. But it wasn't the spire that held his attention. It was the water around it.

At first, he thought it was just more driftwood. Small, pale shapes bobbing gently in the water's slight chop. But as he looked closer, he saw they weren't random. They were clustered around the steeple's base, a silent, floating congregation. They were dolls. Small, child-like figures carved from wood. Some were ancient, their features worn smooth by decades in the water. Others were newer, their forms more distinct. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all tethered by strings to unseen anchors below.

"What are they?" he whispered, though he already knew.

"Offerings," Clara said, her voice barely audible over the wind. "From the townspeople. For generations. Every time there's a sickness, a run of bad luck, a new face in town… they come here. They add another one. To keep the peace. To keep the Children focused on the water, and away from their homes."

It was the whole town. The Sheriff, Mildred from the store, maybe even Mrs. Steinhop. All of them, complicit in this generations-long ritual of appeasement, this conspiracy of fear.

Leo swept the binoculars across the bobbing army of effigies, a cold fury rising in his chest. His gaze snagged on one that was floating slightly apart from the others, closer to the shore. It was different. The wood was pale, fresh, the carving sharp and new.

He twisted the focus ring, the image sharpening until it was painfully clear.

The doll was carved with crude but undeniable detail. It was slightly thicker in the middle than the others. Its head had the unmistakable shape of glasses etched across its face. Its body was cross-hatched with lines that mimicked the pattern of a flannel shirt.

His flannel shirt. The one he was wearing right now.

The breath left his body in a ragged gasp. Someone had carved a doll of him. And it was new. It had been placed here very, very recently. The town hadn't just been watching him, pitying him. They had been preparing him. They had marked him, judged him, and offered him up to their hungry, drowned gods.

He lowered the binoculars, the world blurring around him. He wasn't just being haunted. He was being sacrificed.