Chapter 6: You Are Forgiven

You are forgiven.

The words echoed in the dissolving darkness of the confessional, each syllable carrying a weight that pressed against Liam's chest like stones. But there was something wrong with the forgiveness—it felt cold, mechanical, like the closing of a contract rather than the absolution of sin.

But you must stay. You must atone.

The voice had changed now, taking on harmonics that suggested multiple speakers, a chorus of the condemned offering their twisted benediction. The confessional walls faded like smoke, and Liam felt himself being pulled backward through space that defied geometry, reality bending around him like heated glass.

He crashed onto the chapel floor with bone-jarring force.

The impact drove the air from his lungs, and for a moment he lay gasping on the wooden planks, his body aching from the sudden return to physical form. The chapel around him had changed—or perhaps he was seeing it clearly for the first time. The blood symbols still covered every surface, but now they pulsed with a rhythm that matched his heartbeat, glowing with a dull red light that cast writhing shadows on the walls.

And the congregation had returned.

They sat in the pews exactly as he'd first seen them, but now their faces were turned toward him with expressions of welcome. Men and women from different eras, all wearing the same look of hollow-eyed acceptance. Their mouths moved in silent unison, forming words he couldn't hear but somehow understood:

Welcome, brother. Welcome home.

A young woman in the front row—the one in the flannel shirt who had first acknowledged their presence—turned fully to face him. Her neck moved with that same grinding sound of rusted hinges, but now Liam understood it wasn't mechanical. It was the sound of bones that had been broken and reset wrong, of joints that had been twisted beyond their natural limits and forced to function anyway.

"You confessed," she said, her voice carrying the same hollow quality as the entity that had interrogated him. "You told the truth. The weight is lifted, the burden shared."

Liam struggled to his feet, his legs shaking beneath him. Something fundamental had changed inside him during the confession. The guilt that had driven him for twelve years—the engine of his obsession with horror, his need to document the supernatural—was gone. But in its absence, he felt empty, scraped clean like a bowl that had been scoured too thoroughly.

"Where are my friends?" he demanded, though his voice lacked its former authority. The words came out flat, emotionless, as if the capacity for genuine feeling had been carved away along with his guilt.

The woman smiled, revealing teeth that were too white, too perfect, like porcelain replicas. "They are learning, as you learned. Each in their own time, each in their own way. The chapel is patient. The chapel is thorough."

Liam turned toward the door, desperate to escape, to find Caleb, Rose, and Matthew, to somehow undo whatever had been done to him. But as he approached the threshold, the air itself seemed to solidify, forming an invisible barrier that his hands couldn't penetrate.

He pressed against it with growing desperation, his palms flat against what felt like a wall of solid glass. Beyond the barrier, he could see the van in the clearing, its windows still barricaded with equipment cases. Through a gap in their makeshift fortifications, he caught a glimpse of movement—Caleb's profile as he checked his watch, Rose clutching her camera, Matthew's nervous gestures as he spoke.

They were right there. Less than fifty feet away. But they might as well have been on another planet.

"They can't see you," the woman explained, her voice carrying a note of almost maternal sympathy. "You exist in the space between now. The chapel's time, where past and present converge in eternal service."

Liam pounded against the invisible wall, his fists striking the barrier with dull thuds that his friends couldn't hear. He shouted their names until his throat was raw, but the sound seemed to die inches from his lips, swallowed by the chapel's hungry silence.

"Caleb!" he screamed, watching his friend's familiar silhouette through the van's window. "Rose! I'm right here!"

But Caleb continued his methodical check of their supplies, Rose adjusted her camera settings, and Matthew fidgeted with nervous energy. They showed no sign of awareness that their friend was trapped mere yards away, separated by a gulf that transcended physical distance.

The woman in flannel rose from her pew and approached him with fluid, unnatural movements. Up close, Liam could see the truth written in the lines of her face—she had been young once, probably in her twenties when she'd first entered this place. But decades of spiritual imprisonment had aged her in ways that went beyond the physical. Her eyes held the weight of years spent in endless atonement, consciousness stretched across time like a rubber band pulled to its breaking point.

"I came here in 1997," she said, though Liam hadn't asked. "Camping trip with my boyfriend. We thought we were being rebellious, spending the night in a haunted chapel." She laughed, a sound like wind chimes made of bone. "I confessed to letting my little brother drown in a bathtub when I was supposed to be watching him. Twenty-three years I've been here, and every day I understand more clearly what I took from the world."

The revelation hit Liam like a physical blow. "You—you killed a child too?"

"We all did, in our own ways," the woman continued. "The chapel doesn't call to the innocent. It calls to those who carry the weight of another's ending. Murder, neglect, cowardice that led to death—we are united in our guilt, bound together in our eternal service."

Other figures in the pews began to turn, their movements accompanied by that same grinding of broken joints. An elderly man in a Union Army uniform, his beard stained with substances Liam didn't want to identify. A teenage girl in 1980s clothing, her face pale with the particular horror of someone who had died too young and been forced to remain aware of it. A middle-aged woman in hiking gear that looked recent, her eyes still holding traces of the terror that had brought her here.

"Each of us confessed," the Civil War soldier said, his voice carrying the weight of over a century in this place. "Each of us was forgiven. Each of us remains to atone for what cannot be undone."

"The chapel feeds on our guilt," the teenage girl added, her voice high and sweet and utterly mad. "It grows stronger with each confession, each soul added to the congregation. We are its food and its children, its prisoners and its priests."

Liam felt his sanity beginning to fray at the edges. The confession had stripped away his psychological defenses along with his guilt, leaving him vulnerable to truths that his mind wasn't equipped to process. "This isn't forgiveness," he said desperately. "This is torture."

"Forgiveness and torture are often the same thing," the woman in flannel replied. "True forgiveness requires perfect understanding of what was done. Perfect understanding requires perfect memory. And perfect memory, experienced across infinite time, becomes indistinguishable from eternal punishment."

Through the invisible barrier, Liam watched his friends preparing for what they clearly believed would be a long night. He could see Rose setting up her equipment to capture whatever might emerge from the chapel, Caleb organizing their supplies with military precision, Matthew making nervous jokes that no one could hear but everyone understood.

They had no idea their friend was already gone.

The congregation began to whisper in unison, their voices blending into a sound like wind through cemetery grass. The blood symbols on the walls pulsed brighter, responding to their collective presence. Liam realized with growing horror that he could understand their words—not because he recognized the language, but because it was being inscribed directly onto his consciousness.

They were calling to the next victims. Drawing them in with promises of answers, of understanding, of the ultimate supernatural experience. The same way they had called to him through that anonymous email, through the coordinates and three simple words that had sealed his fate.

"Angels Chapel. Kape," he whispered, understanding finally flooding through him. The message hadn't come from a helpful informant or mysterious benefactor. It had come from the congregation itself, using whatever technology was necessary to lure new souls to their eternal gathering.

His laptop—their laptop—was still in the van, still connected to their social media accounts. Soon it would send another message, carrying the same coordinates and the same three words to another group of paranormal investigators eager to make their mark on the digital world.

The cycle would continue. The chapel would feed. The congregation would grow.

And Liam would be part of it all, his consciousness stretched across decades of watching new victims discover the truth too late, of participating in their spiritual vivisection, of welcoming them into a forgiveness that felt exactly like damnation.

Outside, dawn was still hours away. His friends would wait through the night, growing increasingly worried about his disappearance, never suspecting that he was watching them from a prison made of his own confessed sins.

The woman in flannel placed a cold hand on his shoulder. "You'll learn to find peace in service," she said kindly. "We all do, eventually. The chapel teaches patience above all else."

Liam pressed his face against the invisible barrier one last time, memorizing the sight of his friends while he still remembered who they were to him. Already, their names were beginning to feel distant, like words from a half-forgotten song.

Soon, he knew, he would greet them not as companions but as fellow penitents, welcoming them to the congregation with the same hollow-eyed smile that now felt natural on his own face.

The chapel's whispers grew louder, more insistent, calling across the digital void to whatever group of investigators would next receive those three simple words.

The harvest was far from over.