Chapter 3: The Blood Sigils and the Loop

The screaming had stopped, but its echo seemed to linger in their bones. For several minutes, none of them spoke, their eyes fixed on the chapel's dark silhouette against the star-drunk sky. The building looked innocent now, almost quaint in the moonlight—just an old wooden structure that time had forgotten.

"We have to go back in," Liam said finally, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands.

"Are you insane?" Matthew's voice cracked. "Did you not see what we just saw? Those things in there—"

"They weren't things," Rose interrupted, her camera back in her hands though she hadn't realized she'd picked it up. "They were people. Or... they used to be."

Caleb shook his head firmly. "No. Absolutely not. We're done here. We got our footage, we got our story. Time to go home."

But Liam was already walking back toward the chapel, his journalist's instincts overriding his terror. "Think about it. We just witnessed something unprecedented. Real supernatural activity. We can't leave without documenting it properly."

"Liam, stop." Rose caught his arm, but her grip was weak. She was staring at the chapel with the same hungry expression that had made her reputation as an editor—the look of someone who had glimpsed something beautiful and terrible and needed to capture it.

"Five minutes," Liam said. "We go in, cameras rolling, document what we saw. Then we leave."

Matthew was shaking his head so violently his glasses nearly fell off. "This is how people die in horror movies. This is literally the exact moment when the smart characters become the dead characters."

"We're not in a horror movie," Caleb said, but his practical certainty had cracked. "We're investigators. This is what we do."

The chapel door still stood ajar, darkness pooling beyond like spilled ink. This time, they approached facing forward, their equipment raised like shields. Rose had her camera recording, Matthew clutched his audio gear with white knuckles, and Caleb swept the area with their portable lights.

The threshold felt different now—not the crushing weight of before, but something almost welcoming, as if the building had decided they belonged here.

They stepped inside.

The pews were empty.

"Where did they go?" Rose whispered, panning her camera across the vacant chapel. The wooden benches sat in perfect rows, their surfaces worn smooth by decades of use. No trace remained of the dozens of figures they'd witnessed just minutes before.

"Maybe we imagined it," Matthew said hopefully. "Collective hallucination brought on by stress and—"

His words died as Caleb's light swept across the altar.

Every surface was covered in symbols.

They stretched from floor to ceiling, carved deep into the wood with something sharp enough to leave clean lines. But these weren't the weathered carvings they'd glimpsed on the door. These were fresh, the wood around them pale and newly cut. And they were drawn in something dark and wet that caught the light with a viscous sheen.

"Jesus," Caleb breathed. "Is that—?"

"Blood," Liam finished. The metallic smell hit them all at once, thick and warm and wrong. Fresh blood, still wet enough to gleam under their lights.

The symbols covered everything—the walls, the altar, even the floor where they stood. Intricate patterns that seemed to spiral inward toward some central point behind the altar where the darkness was so complete their lights couldn't penetrate it. The designs were hypnotic, drawing the eye into loops and whorls that made their vision blur.

Rose's camera captured it all, her artistic eye automatically framing shots even as her rational mind recoiled. "These weren't here before. They couldn't have been."

"Someone did this while we were outside," Matthew said, his voice rising toward panic. "Someone was in here with those... with those things, and they—"

"No one could have done this in five minutes," Liam interrupted, studying the intricate work. The symbols were too complex, too precise. Each line connected to the next in patterns that seemed to follow mathematical principles beyond human understanding. "This would take hours. Days."

The smell of blood grew stronger, making their eyes water. The symbols seemed to pulse in their peripheral vision, writhing like living things when observed indirectly.

"We need to go," Caleb said, his practical nature finally asserting itself. "Right now."

They backed toward the door, their lights playing across the blood-soaked walls. The symbols followed their movement, seeming to shift and rearrange themselves when caught in the flashlight beams.

They stumbled out into the night air, gulping clean oxygen like drowning swimmers. Behind them, the chapel sat silent once more, giving no indication of the horror contained within its walls.

"The van," Rose gasped. "Get us out of here."

Caleb was already moving, keys in hand. He slid behind the wheel and turned the ignition.

Nothing.

He tried again. The engine didn't even turn over. No click, no grinding—just the hollow sound of dead metal.

"What's wrong with it?" Matthew demanded.

Caleb popped the hood, his experienced hands checking connections with growing desperation. "I don't understand. Everything looks fine. The battery connections are clean, the engine was running perfectly..."

"Try it again," Liam said.

Another turn of the key. Nothing. The van's electrical system was completely dead—no dashboard lights, no radio static, nothing.

"Cell phones," Rose said suddenly. She pulled out her device and stared at the screen in disbelief. "No signal. Not even emergency service."

They all checked their phones. The same result. Devices that had been working perfectly showed no bars, no connection to the outside world.

"We walk," Caleb said grimly. "Follow the road back. It's only eight miles to the main highway."

They gathered what supplies they could carry—water, some food, flashlights. The plan was simple: follow the dirt road they'd driven in on until they reached civilization, then send help for the van.

The walk started normally. The road stretched ahead of them, a pale ribbon winding through the dark forest. Their flashlights cut through the night, revealing familiar ruts and landmarks they remembered from the drive in.

Fifteen minutes passed. Then twenty. The road seemed longer than it had in the van, but that was normal—everything felt farther on foot.

Thirty minutes. The trees pressed close on both sides, their branches forming a tunnel overhead that blocked out the stars. But they were making progress. They had to be.

Forty-five minutes of steady walking. Matthew was complaining about his equipment pack, Rose was documenting their journey, and Caleb was maintaining their pace with military precision.

Then Liam stopped.

"Do you guys see that?"

Ahead of them, through a gap in the trees, stood a familiar silhouette. Wooden walls weathered to bone-white. A twisted steeple with a crooked iron cross. Boarded windows like closed eyes.

Angels Chapel.

"That's impossible," Caleb said. "We've been walking in a straight line for almost an hour."

They checked their compass. The needle pointed steadily north, just as it had when they'd started. They hadn't turned, hadn't deviated from the road.

But somehow, they were back where they'd started.

"We must have gotten turned around," Matthew said desperately. "In the dark, with all the stress—"

"Look at the van," Rose interrupted.

Their vehicle sat exactly where they'd left it, in exactly the same position. Even the equipment they'd abandoned lay scattered around it in the precise configuration they remembered.

"This isn't possible," Caleb said, his practical worldview crumbling. "Roads don't loop. Geography doesn't work this way."

Liam pulled out his journal and began writing frantically, his hands shaking. The symbols from inside the chapel seemed to burn in his memory, their twisted patterns suggesting explanations his rational mind couldn't accept.

"We're trapped," he said quietly.

The words hung in the air between them like a death sentence. They looked at the road they'd just traveled, the van that wouldn't start, the chapel that waited with infinite patience.

Somewhere in the darkness beyond the building, something that might have been laughter echoed through the trees. Or it might have been sobbing. In this place, there seemed to be very little difference between the two.

The iron cross atop the chapel's steeple creaked in a wind that touched nothing else, and the boarded windows seemed to watch them with the patient hunger of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere left to run.

They were no longer investigators documenting a haunted location.

They were specimens in something else's collection.

And the collection was just getting started.