The Marrow in the Marble

I was twenty-three when I drove out to Coe Ridge with my girlfriend, Mira, to see the old parish. It sat on a hill above the flooded quarry, a white clapboard hulk with a bell tower that had lost its bell. The road to it was gravel and the gravel was pocked with potholes, and every mile felt like we were driving deeper into something that didn’t want us there. Mira had grown up nearby, and she told me the church had been shut down after the congregation fell apart in the early nineties. The man who owned it now lived in another state and kept it open for curiosity seekers and ghost hunters. It was deconsecrated, she said, but the ground around it was still consecrated enough for the dead to stay put.

When we got out of the car, the air was thick and green, like the inside of a greenhouse, and the trees around the cemetery were warped. The headstones were lopsided, some so old they’d gone soft and mossy. The church itself was a squat, two-story thing with boarded windows on the second floor. The front door was unlocked, and it swung open with a creak that echoed off the quarry walls. Inside, the pews were gone, leaving a vast empty hall, but the altar rail was still there, and the pulpit was still standing, though it was covered in thick dust and bird droppings. There was a staircase at the back that led up to a choir loft, and the steps groaned as we climbed. I remember thinking how the place felt like a body that had been emptied of its blood, but the skeleton was still here, and the bones remembered.

We took pictures—hundreds of them, I think. The light was thin and gray, coming through the dusty windows, and the air was so still that when I spoke, my voice felt muffled. We didn’t hear sounds at first, not the kind people expect. No whispers, no phantom hymns. But there was a pressure in the air, like the weight of the silence itself. Then, upstairs, a door at the end of the hallway slammed shut. Mira jumped, and I laughed, but I didn’t really feel like laughing. We opened the door again, and it stayed open, but as we turned to go back down, it slammed again, hard, and the latch clicked. We didn’t push it. We went back down.

I took a photograph of the graveyard from the front steps, a wide shot that caught the rows of stones and the tree line beyond. I didn’t think anything of it until we got back to Mira’s house and I uploaded the pictures to my laptop. In that particular image, there was a haze in the trees, a soft white blur that didn’t look like fog. It was too upright, too defined. I called Mira over, and she leaned in, squinting. I said, ‘Could just be mist off the quarry.’ Mira shook her head and pointed at the lower right corner of the frame. ‘Look at the headstone,’ she said. ‘The one with the small angel on top.’

I zoomed in. The angel was barely visible, a stub of stone with a chipped wing. And on the base of the stone, where the name should have been, there was an inscription. But it wasn’t a name. It was a date: 10/31/1998. And below that, in smaller letters that were too sharp to be carved by any human hand, were the words: ‘THEY STILL SING FOR US BELOW.’

My jaw dropped, and I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the house. Mira’s face had gone pale. ‘That wasn’t there,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to that church a hundred times. That stone is a blank. I know it.’

We went back the next morning. The stone with the angel was exactly where it was in the photo, but the inscription was gone. The face of the stone was smooth, blank, unmarred by any chisel. But when I put my hand on it, the stone was cold, impossibly cold, colder than the air, and I felt a faint hum coming from the ground beneath me. I dropped my hand and stepped back. Mira was already walking toward the church, her face set. ‘There’s something in the basement,’ she said. ‘I never told you, but there’s a trapdoor under the pulpit.’

We went inside, and she showed me the trapdoor. It was heavy, iron-strapped, and bolted shut, but the bolts were rusty and the wood was soft. We pried it open and found a stone staircase descending into blackness. The air that came up was damp and earthy, and it smelled like something old had died down there. Mira had brought a flashlight, and she aimed it down. The beam caught nothing but the steps, which were slick with moisture. We went down. The stairs were steep, and at the bottom, there was a room. Not a crypt, not a basement—a room. It was filled with stone benches, arranged in a circle, and in the center there was a well, capped with a stone lid. The walls were covered in carvings, now faint with age, but I could make out the same date: 10/31/1998. And all around the room, on the benches, there were small, dark shapes. I shined the light closer, and I realized they were children’s shoes. Dozens of pairs of small, worn shoes, arranged neatly, as if their owners had taken them off and left them.

I felt a tug on my sleeve. It was Mira. She was looking at the well, her face gray. ‘They’re still here,’ she whispered. ‘They’re still down there.’ I didn’t understand. She pointed to the stones on the floor, and I saw that there were thin lines of something dark, dried and crusted, leading from the well to the walls. I knelt down and touched one. It had a texture like dried blood. I stood up, my heart hammering. ‘We should go,’ I said. But Mira was staring at the well, and the lid was moving. It was rising, slowly, as if pushed from below. And I heard it then—a faint, high-pitched chorus, like children singing, but muffled, as if coming through water. The singing grew louder, and the lid slid off, and a hand reached out. It was small, impossibly small for an adult, but the fingers were long and white and had too many joints. The hand gripped the edge, and then another hand appeared, and a face rose out of the dark. It was not a child’s face. It had the features of a child, but the eyes were empty sockets, and the mouth was open in a silent scream, and it was not alone.

We ran. We scrambled up the stairs, through the church, out into the daylight, and we didn’t stop until we were in the car and the engine was running. But as we drove off, I looked in the rearview mirror. The church was still there, but in the window of the second floor, I saw a row of small, dark figures standing, watching us. They didn’t move. They just stood there, and I knew they were counting the years until the next October thirty-first, when the veil would be thin enough for them to climb out and find new shoes.

I never went back. I deleted the photograph, but I kept the memory of the inscription. And every night, when I close my eyes, I see the well, and I hear the singing, and I see the shoes lined up, waiting for feet that would never fill them. I wonder if the man who owned the church knew. I wonder if he was the one who made the shoes. And I wonder, sometimes, if the hand that reached out was the same one that carved the words on the headstone. Because they weren’t carved, not really. They were written from the inside. They were written with the marrow of the stone. And the stone still holds it, even now. Even now.