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SANCTUARY WITH STRINGS ATTACHED: By Paula Ray

Monday, November 16th, 2009

The Baptist church with crooked steeple leaned like a drunkard in a pointy party hat, snoozing through a Sunday sermon. The congregation had abandoned it and moved across town to the grand sanctuary with beautiful stained glass eyes.

No one visited the crippled old church with head-stoned lawn, fenced by cast iron spears aimed at heaven as if to blame or perhaps threaten, no one except Harold.

He claimed the pastor’s study for his own and set up a workshop where he made marionettes. The baptismal pool was converted into an aquarium and the choir loft, with its high ceilings and risers, made the perfect display area for his masterpieces. He stored a stock pile of canned goods in the kitchen and replaced the rusty pulley from the dilapidated well with one that had been used to open the stage curtain in the fellowship hall.

The water had a sulfuric odor, but it was drinkable. Dusty mattresses robbed from broken nursery cribs were linked together to provide a king-sized bed for Harold, the king. At least, that’s what he preferred to be called by vagrants who shopped at the Good Shepherd charity closet alongside him.

Homeless people frequently followed Harold, curious where he slept and how he managed to stay so clean. He wanted to keep his sanctuary, with its very own burial ground, a secret. He took various meandering routes whenever he came or went, which was seldom. The roller-blades and disguises he toted in his knapsack came in handy during numerous getaways.

On full moons, he dug up graves from the adjoining cemetery and removed jewelry from the cadavers. Jewels for the king, he told himself.

The skeletons were sometimes covered with bits of decomposed tissue he fed to his pet piranha in the baptismal aquarium–letting them clean the bones, such willing servants. Once these bones were washed and stripped bare, they were made into marionettes.

The infant skeletons were fashioned into wind chimes and hung in the belfry where they rattled eerily in the breeze.

Harold wasn’t always so strange. There was a time when he held a prestigious job at a local bank and wore the finest clothes of anyone in town. Sadly, he never married the girl of his dreams, the one who ran off with the choir director more than thirty years ago. Her name was Charlotte.

She had a beautiful voice and a love for all things chocolate. Harold never minded her pudgy figure and had grown quite fond of the way her dough wrapped phalanges molded themselves around his own when they held hands. He had to have her engagement ring resized five times before it would slide onto her short stubby finger.

He convinced himself the reason she didn’t return the ring before she ran off, wasn’t because she was greedy or selfish, but because she had gained so much weight, she couldn’t remove it.

Harold was proud of the fact Charlotte had become as skinny as all the other women seated in the choir loft. Many times she had voiced her dream of someday being able to wear a size six. She would have been tickled pink to discover she could squeeze into a size two.

Charlotte was his first and favorite marionette, the prima donna in the chorus line of beauties seated in the loft, adorned with beaded and feathered hats to compliment their fine frocks. He did enjoy drilling the delicate pelvic bones of women, but he also created an abundant supply of male counterparts to balance out the ensemble.

The choir director nearly killed him. That’s probably why Harold never bothered to make a marionette of him. Instead, he buried his bones in the recycled coffin of an old woman. Some claimed the old hag had been a witch. There was never any proof of her black magic tendencies, but people being superstitious, especially religious ones, well… she wasn’t permitted on holy ground dead or alive. Harold had to go out in the swamp to dig her up.

He didn’t make a marionette out of the witch’s bones. However, that idea crossed his mind, but he was afraid if she were reassembled, she might have sprung back to life. Harold pulverized her wicked bones to form a plaster he molded into a gruesome rendition of the Virgin Mary.

He placed the statue on the altar and prayed to it daily for guidance, never forgiveness, of course.

One hot summer night, the aquarium reeked from putrid flesh and fish excrement. Harold accidentally knocked his prized statue off its pedestal while cleaning the fish tank. The statue rolled down the aisle, picking up speed as it went downhill, then burst through the front door, bumped down the stairs, and came to rest on the lawn. Harold was so distracted by the commotion, he fell into the piranha tank.

There was an immediate frenzy of teeth, blood, screams, and thrashing. A couple of young fellows, riding by on their bicycles, heard him.

These two chaps bounded up the stairs and stormed into the church. By the time they reached the baptismal, Harold was dead.

It wasn’t long before cops and news reporters arrived. In fact, every media vulture within a hundred miles pushed their way into that sanctuary and snapped pictures. The town folk held a meeting. After lengthy discussions and multiple surveys, they took a wrecker ball to the old church.

The caskets that had gone untouched were relocated to another graveyard.

They chose to bulldoze the headstones of the marionette victims, because they didn’t know who was who and what went where.

The witch statue found its way into the hands of an antique dealer. His previously meager business boomed shortly after he placed the statue in his storefront window.

Paula Ray is a demented musician from North Carolina. She has a disobedient pet sax named Pegasus and itchy fingertips that like to scratch poems and stories. Her work has haunted the pages of MicroHorror, Everyday Weirdness, Thrillers Killers and Chillers, and New Flesh, among other small press literary zines.Her primary blog is: http://musicalpencil.blogspot.com/