HIS MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD

Let me just preface this post by saying that I’m not a very religious man. I’m not sure if that matters, truth be told, but it seems like the thing to say when your story centers around a church. My wife is—was?—the religious one, a staunch Catholic practically since birth. She’d been having a hard time since we moved from Austin to a much smaller town on the border between Texas and Louisiana and felt like she’d lost a once-in-a-lifetime community by leaving our hometown. I understood how she was feeling. After all, I’d left all my friends back in Austin, and I felt pretty lost without them for a few weeks. My new job, though, allowed me to make friends much faster than my wife, who stayed home with our one-year-old daughter.

I’d suggested the church to her, after seeing a flyer for it on the bulletin board at work among flyers for other Christian and nondenominational churches. “His Most Holy Blood Catholic Church” was what caught my eye. It seemed like an odd name for a church, Catholic or no, but I figured it could be a good way for my wife to start connecting to our town and maybe starting to feel like she belonged here. I took a picture of the flyer and texted her, saying that she could take our daughter Sunday. I wished I’d gone with her that time or even the times after, traded shifts with someone else for once, just to see what she saw in that god-forsaken church. Either way, my wife went the Sunday after I sent her that text, bundling my daughter up in her car, leaving around the same time I did for my shift.

That night, she’d raved about the service, telling me how beautiful the church was, with a ceiling filled with frescos, lifelike statues of saints, and an elaborate altar like a cathedral, and wishing I’d come with her. She rambled on and on about the service, how the choir sang Handel’s “Alleluia” (“I felt like I was up there with the Heavenly Host!”), the priest performing the service in Latin (“how clandestine!”), and how kind the other mothers were (“I joined a prayer group!”). Looking back on this conversation now, I guess it should have struck me as odd that such a small town would have a church like this, especially considering the population was less than 1,000,the large majority of whom were Protestant. Yet, I was only half-listening to my wife at the time, pretending that a stuffy old church might actually be interesting. I was just glad she was making friends, and things continued in our new town like they had in Austin: me working long hours and my wife filling her days with taking care of the house and our daughter, visiting friends from church, and attending mass without me on Sundays.

Now, I’m not a completely inattentive husband, and I did start to notice some changes in my wife as months passed. She seemed to be losing weight, which, I thought was a good thing. We’d both gotten comfortable, and I figured she had probably started worrying about her health, since her father had died of a stroke last year. In fact, I started trying to eat a bit healthier too in solidarity, but as weight dropped off her scarily fast, I started to worry. She was getting pale, and I was finding clumps of hair in the bathroom. I confronted her about it, and she told me she’d just been too busy to eat much for the past couple of weeks, which definitely seemed odd to me. I offered to help out more with the housework so she’d have more time to herself, but she brushed me off. Most days we didn’t eat any meals together due to my job, so I couldn’t monitor her eating. I wish I had pushed the issue more, because that weekend was when things got weird.

I walked into our house Sunday evening, and it was dark. I called for my wife and received no answer, and I started to panic. I felt my way to the light switch, and almost screamed when I saw my wife sitting on the couch staring straight ahead, tears streaming down her face. I rushed to her and, fearing the worst, grabbing her hands and asking her to look at me, asking if our daughter was alright, asking where our baby was. She shook me off and sneered at me, telling me our daughter was fine, just sleeping. I rushed to our bedroom and found our daughter exactly where my wife said she was and watched her chest rise and fall for a good ten minutes before I was satisfied. I walked back to the living room to find my wife still sitting on the couch, now staring at something in her lap. My voice came out shakier than I intended when I asked her what it was.

At my question, my wife burst into tears, mumbling something that sounded like “I didn’t mean to.” I sat beside her, and hushed her, looking down to see what looked like a stone finger resting on her thin legs. I frowned, putting my arm around her, and asking for her to explain to me what happened. She looked at me with wide eyes, telling me she didn’t know how it happened, that something told her to touch the statue after mass, and the finger just broke off in her hand. I almost laughed then, relieved it wasn’t something horrible. I told her I’d fix it, and was glad to see her smile at me shakily. I had a plan, I told her. I’d take the finger to the church late that night and put attach it back to the statue so no one would notice. She hugged me, whispering that it belonged to the St. Catherine of Siena statue in the far-right corner of the church and thanking me profusely. So, that accursed night, two Sundays ago, I drove to His Most Holy Blood, armed only with a flashlight, a bottle of superglue, and a stone finger.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, I guess something more grand, or at least more well-kept, but the building I pulled up to looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades. I shone my flashlight to reveal a stone façade that was crumbling and mostly covered in vines. The statues on the outside of the church had no noses and were badly chipped all over, with water damage on their faces that made it look like they were crying. The heavy wooden doors were rotted, but unlocked, and I made my way inside. It was incredibly dusty, and the pews were covered in cobwebs. This couldn’t be where my wife was spending every Sunday. I thought maybe the church had been rebuilt in another part of town, and this was just the old building. Yet, something told me to keep walking. I made my way to the front of the church, shining my light on dusty statues that seemed to be watching me as I went. As I walked, I read the engravings of their names on the stone slabs beneath them: St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Therèse of Lisieux, St. Cecelia, St. Catherine of Sien—my heart stopped.

Though there was a pedestal that read “St. Catherine of Siena,” there was no statue there. I saw imprints where the feet of the statue would have stood on the stone slab at the very end of the row of saints, but no statue. Before I could even move, I heard the heavy wooden doors creak open. Somewhere above me, I heard an organ hum and groan to life, playing a discordant melody as a skeletal priest in tattered vestments walked in with two equally starved young men walking behind him. I ducked down in one of the pews and watched as they slowly made their way to front of the church.

I remained hidden in my pew, holding my breath as a few more people, all scarily emaciated, filed into the church. The priest began to speak when the last person stood in their pew, speaking a guttural language that sounded nothing like the church Latin I had heard a few times during my childhood. The service continued, and I remained in my place, watching as one of the gaunt young men at the altar handed the priest an oddly pristine looking silver chalice and matching bowl. The priest placed these on the altar and held his bony hands over them, muttering in that odd, throaty language. The garish gold of the altarpieces clashed sharply with the faded, hole-filled cloth that failed to conceal the damage time had done to the altar, and made the service seem even more out of place. Soon, each of the starving churchgoers made their way up to the priest laboriously, receiving whatever was in the bowl and chalice greedily, as if they were dying of hunger and thirst. I used this time to sneak my way out of the church, hurrying to my car and speeding back home.

When I arrived back home, my house was much like I had found it earlier in the evening, all lights off and not a sound to be heard. I flipped on the living room light as I had earlier, but my wife was not where she had been. I slowly made my way to the bedroom, checking on my daughter, who was fast asleep, face scrunched in a frown and legs kicking a bit restlessly. I turned to the bed I shared with my wife to find that she was not there. I searched the house for her, but she was nowhere to be found. I called one of my friends from work and explained the situation, and he and his wife offered to come over and watch my daughter while I went out to look for my wife. I drove around for a while, but I soon realized I knew nothing of her prayer group or friends from church. I couldn’t go to the police station and tell them she was a missing person, since it had only been a couple of hours since I had last seen her. Not knowing what else to do, I drove to His Most Precious Blood.

The place was deserted, as it had originally been when I first entered, now that it was nearing 4 A.M. I shone my flashlight as I had earlier, walking down the middle aisle and listening closely to see if I could hear anyone else in the church. I heard a rustle near the front of the church, and turned my flashlight toward the light, nearly jumping out of my skin. The Saint Catherine of Siena statue was there, next to the statue of St. Cecelia. I rushed over to it, shining my flashlight from the head of the statue to its feet. It looked like a normal statue, but I realized that unlike the others, whose hands were held together as if they were praying, this one’s hands were outstretched with its palms facing up. Something red caught my attention as the light from my flashlight passed over the statues hands, and I almost vomited when I took a closer look. In the statue’s right hand was a bony finger, nail painted with the light blue polish my wife always uses.

Unfortunately, that’s where my story ends. The police have been searching for my wife for almost two weeks after I waited a day for her to return. They don’t seem very interested in finding her, though. They seemed to barely listen when I was giving a description of her and very reluctantly took the picture of her I had brought. I’m not sure if it was my imagination or not, but they seemed incredibly uneasy when I mentioned that she had been going to His Most Precious Blood each Sunday. They told me they’d call if they had any leads, but I’m not hopeful. Whatever is going on, I think they’re in on it, or they at least know who took my wife and won’t challenge them. I think my best option might be to take my daughter and leave this town. I found a stone nose sitting on the welcome mat near our front door this morning. I’m pretty sure that’s a warning.