The White Pieta

Driving along the coastal highway, I saw the old stone church on the bluff, its bell tower leaning slightly against the salt wind. I’d passed it dozens of times, but that afternoon, something pulled my eyes to a patch of scrub grass between the church and a newer, boxy chapel that had been tacked on behind it. I was a marine biologist, not a religious man, but a strange pressure built in my temples, so I turned into the gravel lot.

The asphalt shimmered with heat. I stopped near a covered grotto at the edge of the property, where a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary stood, her hands outstretched. The statue had been painted a brilliant white, so bright it almost glowed against the dark granite. I got out, and the air was thick with the smell of seaweed and old incense. As I approached, the thrumming in my head grew sharper, and I realized I was gripping the car door hard enough to whiten my knuckles. Then I saw them.

From behind the statue’s pedestal, they came. A procession of figures, not quite solid, their edges fluttering like heat haze. A man in a rust-colored suit, clutching a stopwatch. A girl in a yellow dress, her hair braided, but her eyes were empty sockets. And behind them, a tiny figure, a child with a porcelain face, dragging a toy boat. They didn’t walk toward me—they seemed to seep out of the ground, each step leaving a faint oily stain on the gravel.

‘Why are you here?’ I whispered, and the words felt wrong in my mouth. The child looked up at me, and its mouth moved, but the sound was a discordant chime, like a music box left out in the rain. It pointed to the church’s foundation, where a crack ran from the ground up to the stained-glass window. Inside that crack, I saw something that shouldn’t exist: a small, white, fleshy root, pulsing with a sickly glow.

The pressure in my head focused into a single point behind my eyes. I remembered the town records I’d read years ago—a fishing village that had vanished in a storm, the church built on the site of a mass grave. But the villagers weren’t dead, they had been absorbed into the earth, their souls condensed into a mineral that the church’s builders had used in the mortar. And the statue, it was poured from that same sea-watered lime, a holy image that imprisoned them. The more I stared, the more I understood: the figures weren’t angry at me; they were angry at the white, which would not let them fade.

I stumbled back toward my car, but the gravel had become soft, tarlike. The figures surrounded the statue, their forms dilating. The child threw its toy boat, and it landed at the statue’s feet, then dissolved into a dark puddle. The puddle began to spread, and with each inch, the statue’s whiteness dimmed, as if it were being soaked in oil. I heard a low, resonant hum, and the church’s foundation began to crack along the same line as the statue’s base. The figures turned their sightless faces to me, and in unison, they spoke not with voices but with the grinding of pebbles: ‘Free us, or become our vessel.’

I tried to flee, but my body went rigid. The pressure in my head burst, and I felt something ebb out of me—my fear, my curiosity, my sense of self. I fell to my knees as the figures streamed past, entering the church through the crack, which widened and swallowed the light. The last thing I saw was the statue’s face, now a deep black, weeping tar. I woke up in my car, parked on the highway, with no memory of how I got there. The church and the chapel were gone, and in their place was a field of white, dead grass. The only remnant was a small, unblemished white guitar pic, lying on the seat beside me, stamped with the number 1934. I knew that was the year the village disappeared. And from that day on, every time I see any white statue, I hear that chime, and I know it is calling me back to finish what was begun.