Ex-Voto

A thick, musty scent of mildew and rot greeted Maggie’s nostrils the instant she set foot inside the Chapel of St. Giles. The air was meaty. Particulates of rotting wood and fabric wafted through the tight interior, glinting in Maggie’s flashlight beam, like microscopic sea life floating through the abyssal zone. She gagged as she inhaled, wishing she’d brought a mask. She’d thought about it, knowing that exploring old buildings could be accompanied by asbestos with a side of black lung, but had decided it was just another scab for Adriana to pick at so she’d left her N95 at home. A mistake.

She’d been right about the chapel though: it was too small for a full mass and clearly intended to be devotional rather than ceremonial. There were two short pews, one on either side of the door, with just enough room for a few individual kneelers, scattered for privacy, before the altar. The wood, once oiled and gleaming like the heavily polished pews at Maggie’s parish, was now rendered dry and brittle from water damage and neglect. The prayer books abandoned in the kneeler drawers were bloated, their folded forms distorted by the elements. Great swathes of plaster hung from the walls and ceiling like drapery, lending credence to Colby’s fears about the chapel’s structural integrity.

Even the crucifix centered above the altar looked as if it had been to war. The white face of a sarong-wearing Jesus, mouth gaped in agony, was pitted and scarred, exposing the blanched olive wood beneath, and a broken nose lent a realistic terror to his woeful, upcast eyes. A statue of the Virgin Mary sat tucked into an alcove on one side, her blue robes and serene expression mostly unscathed by the damage wrought upon the rest of the chapel, and on the opposite wall, the painted full-body icon of a saint clung to the cracked and peeling wall from a single, crooked nail.

But as Maggie scanned her flashlight around the tight interior, all thoughts of mildew and mystery saints vanished. Her jaw dropped, her panic restored with a vengeance, and though she instantly wanted to flee the claustrophobic chapel, she found that her feet were rooted to the ground in horror at the images before her.

Affixed to the long wall around the altar, were hundreds of body parts.

Legs and feet, arms and hands dangled from wire that had blackened with age. Some of the limbs bore braces and splints, as if cleaved directly from the body to which they once belonged. Waxy patches of skin, textured with rashes and scars, and even entire human ears had been tacked up. Hearts—some shiny in red ceramic right out of a Valentine’s Day display, others shockingly realistic with valves and aortae—were lined up on a shelf and the altar itself was littered with craniums: brains, skulls, and swatches of hair that looked almost like toupees. Tiny bits of who-the-hell-even-knew-what dangled from ring votive holders mounted to the wall, and as if all that wasn’t macabre enough, an entire bowl of eyeballs sat on the tiled floor, staring up at the peeling paint of the chapel ceiling.

Glass eyeballs. Or Maggie sure the fuck hoped so. Some of them looked remarkably lifelike. But actual eyeballs, like actual arms and legs, would have decomposed years earlier, so she had to be staring at wax and plaster, wood and plastic.

Right?

“Holy shit!” Khalil said, pressing in behind Maggie, camera pointed at the altar.

“Dude!” Dax practically howled. “I was hyped when I saw this place, but it’s even better than I thought!”

Adriana, for all her bravado, loitered in the doorway of the century-old chapel. “What the fuck is even happening here?”

Khalil stopped filming and rubbed Maggie’s shoulder, an affectionate gesture, but Maggie flinched away, worried he’d feel her body trembling.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she lied. “Just processing all…” She swirled her light beam around the offering wall. “All this.” Processing, weathering, stashing away for future therapy sessions—Maggie was confident these images would haunt her sleep for decades.

Khalil explained it had been Dax’s idea to take his urban expedition group to a creepy site for their channel’s winter solstice episode. But the chapel? Maggie should have objected. It was on consecrated ground in a Catholic cemetery. Years of CCD classes had ingrained in her that you didn’t fuck around with faith.

But then Khalil had suggested she tag along, and she’d been crushing on him for the better part of a year. She wanted them to be closer…

Khalil squeezed her shoulders, a thrill of warmth spreading through her body, then he stepped around a kneeler to film an antique polio leg brace mounted on the wall. “I’m assuming you’ll tell us why all this shit is here, Professor Dax?”

Only it wasn’t Dax who answered. “Ex-votos,” Maggie said, her voice catching in her throat.

Read Ex-Voto here.