When I finally cleared my lungs enough to breathe, I was sitting beside the half-open door, light-headed and aching. I stared into the darkness of the half-open door, the beam of my fallen flashlight crossing it at an oblique angle, and strained to listen. I’d been making a lot of noise. Had anything heard me?

Nothing sounded from the halls and rooms behind me; nothing emerged out of the black. I pushed myself up unsteadily, careful not to disturb any more dust, and dragged my flashlight up and through the heavy door.

It was empty behind. There were shattered slabs of some sort of metal, blackened in places by what looked like a great heat. They looked like they’d been shelves once, before age and destruction had knocked them out of their slots in the walls. Now, they lay sunken in the very fine, ashy dust that covered the ground. The room, or closet, or whatever, was very deep—I could lie down in the room, on one of the shelves maybe, with my head towards the door and my feet would just barely graze the far wall.

At the far wall was a grate, blackened old metal. It looked like the grates in church for confessional. All that was missing was a priest.

My head was pounding so hard I couldn’t be sure whether there were motes of dust in the room, or my vision had gone spotty. I tried to swallow again, and could not.

What was the confessional liturgy, again? It had been years since I’d gone to a church. The God Who Shed His Blood For Us wasn’t worshipped often outside of Kystrom. I thought it began: The darkness of sin surrounds us all.

The God Who Shed His Blood did so for us, that we may come to the light. Do you believe in Light and Blood?

“I do,” I said. The ash and dust absorbed my words.

Despair is the false Word the Darkness tries to teach us. Do you turn your back on Darkness and Despair?

“I do,” I said, though it hurt my throat to shape the words.

Do you swear to do good and bring light as He did, regardless of the cost of your own blood?

“I do.” What I wouldn’t do for a glass of water, even if that water was made of light, like my dream.

What sins do you have to confess?

“I was mean to my sister,” I said aloud, and this time the words fell heavy into the silence of the ash, like a thick snowfall.

There was no water in this strange closet, and I was wasting time lingering here. I noticed, as I left the closet behind, that there was no handle or latch on the inside. If the door shut on you, you wouldn’t be able to get out.

The three doors were sepulchral as I left the room, silent and heavy as tombstones.

I chased Brigid across half the park on her thirteenth birthday. She hadn’t wanted me to join her and her friends for the party, though half her friends had been my friends too. She’d wanted them to herself, the sovereignty of not having her big brother around. With stupid mean impish spite, as soon as she’d said I couldn’t come, I’d gone and chased her.