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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/scarymaxx on 2024-04-09 20:27:59.
Had we invented it, or was the Children’s Cathedral always there?
I know I wasn’t the first to arrive. Someone had built the moat, the drawbridge, and the great portcullis at the entryway, the one whose iron squares were just large enough for a child to wriggle through but barred adults from entry.
The cathedral was smaller when we first arrived. Elliot hadn’t yet built the winding staircases that led to the upper stories, and Naomi’s beautiful, terrifying tapestries wouldn’t grace the walls until we were all in nearly fourth grade. Of course, most of our building supplies were used for our own, private rooms.
I didn’t know the other kids in real life, though I believed they were real. Elliot said he lived in a big house in New Jersey, that his dad worked on Wall Street and bought him a new set of Legos every Friday when the market was up. Naomi lived in Canada and played hockey on a boys’ team. Maddie lived in Florida but hated the beach.
Maddie claimed that the cathedral’s first builder was Mr. Merchant himself, though he demured, saying he was simply the caretaker of the place. Indeed, we had never seen him lay a single brick. Instead, he tirelessly swept the dust from our various construction projects and helped deliver the various building materials we needed to build new rooms.
Nothing came for free. Mr. Merchant was hungry for stories. Not that we had much interesting to say, especially at first. He just wanted to hear about our days, the little victories and heartbreaks. You might tell him about pulling a tick from your dog’s belly, and his little gray face would light up, and then he’d cough and breathe out something deep and ashen from down in his lungs, a little swirl of particles that would cohere into a bucket full of bricks and a bit of mortar.
Early on, I watched with jealousy as Elliot and Naomi told stories that earned them great pallets of marble tiles and gold inlay. Elliot’s parents were going through a nasty divorce, and the tales of their fights and magnificent insults brought Mr. Merchant unending joy. As for Maddie, her teenage sister had died of an overdose. Her stories were sad and repetitive, not something I really wanted to hear, but Mr. Merchant listened and listened, gifting her crates overflowing with her favorite wallpapers and persian rugs.
I watched with jealousy as Maddie retreated to her room, carrying the crates behind her in that oddly weightless way they got in the cathedral. More than anything, I wanted to follow her, to see how her room was built and decorated. I took a step to follow her but Mr. Merchant put a hand on my shoulder.
“You know the rules,” he said, still coughing out bits of dust. “No visiting other children’s rooms.”
There were a lot of rules at the cathedral. Some unwritten. Most important of all was to never speak of the place when you were back home, awake. That one was surprisingly easy to keep. I didn’t like talking to my mom much anyway. Sometimes, when I woke, sweating, screaming that I was lost in the endless halls, my mom would ask me if I’d had a nightmare, and I’d say yeah, and she’d shrug her shoulders and go back to her room.
If I’m going to be honest, the cathedral was the best thing I had going on back then. Waking life was boring, sometimes cruel. School was an endless marathon of clock-watching, trying to slow down my mind enough to pay attention to the words coming out of the teacher’s mouth.
Home was worse. Flipping back and forth through the three channels we got on TV, while my mom brought home a parade of worse and worse boyfriends, guys with bad tattoos of NFL teams and an inability to remember my name.
Stories of my mother’s suitors were the ones Mr. Merchant wanted to hear most. He licked the ashes from his lips as I recounted the repulsive noises I’d heard through my bedroom wall, my mother in tears the next morning, shouting insults at a man after she found a wedding ring in the pocket of his jeans.
“Better,” Mr. Merchant said. “So much better than your usual tales.” He drew that last ‘s’ out, savoring it. As he spoke, more ashes flew from his lips, coalescing into a shining bucket of colored glass. I would have whooped with joy, if it had been allowed. I had never earned colored glass before. It was the rarest of treasures in the cathedral, used to build the great stained-glass windows that provided its only light.
Each of us was building one in our own room.
“What’s yours of?” I asked Maddie one day. “The picture in your stained glass, I mean.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. And we’re not supposed to talk about it anyway.”
I had just spent the morning building the bottom section of my own window. There was a generous amount of red involved, but what the exact image was destined to be was a mystery.
I felt Mr. Merchant’s hand on my shoulder. His touch was cold, and his fingernails were long and thick but well-trimmed. He held one up to his black-gray lips.
“Loose lips sink ships,” he said. Then he contorted his mouth a little, moving his lips so that they distorted around his teeth, revealing their too-long roots.
Usually, I was smart enough not to talk about the cathedral, but sometimes I drew it. Late at night, I’d sketch the towering spires that seemed to scrape the sky. Sometimes, too, I’d draw Mr. Merchant. I wasn’t much of an artist, so it took a lot of tries, but eventually I was able to capture the way his pupils pulled up at the edges, like a cat’s eyes.
In my best drawing, Mr. Merchant was standing on two bodies as they floated in a boiling lake. The two people are screaming as Mr. Merchant looks down at them in delight. It wasn’t too hard to identify them: my mother and her latest boyfriend, Tim. They were cartoonish and exaggerated, but the essence was there, and the tattoos were in all the right places.
“What the fuck is this?” my mother shouted on the day she found the drawings from where I’d squirreled them away under my mattress.
“Nothing,” I said. I wasn’t worried about what she’d do, not really. But I knew Mr. Merchant wouldn’t like this one bit.
My mother took my by the ears and shouted into my face. “Stop. Fucking. Drawing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“And we’re getting married, by the way,” she added. “Over in Reno, next week.”
“Okay,” I said, my hot tears still running down my face onto the crumpled drawings, making the ink run.
When I got to the cathedral that night, I found that my body had grown. When I tried to squeeze through the portcullis, I could barely squeeze through. Halfway through, I found myself stuck, the rusted iron tearing into my skin, drawing blood.
“Telling makes you fat,” said Mr. Merchant, suddenly. Where had he appeared from? He smiled with his too-big teeth, and they all looked sharper than before.
“I didn’t mean to tell,” I said.
“But you did,” he said. “You did! So what am I supposed to do with you now?”
He reached out to where the rusty metal had bloodied my shoulder. Then, he gently dragged his fingers across the room, and brought them up to his nose, smelling it ever so slightly.
“I’ve invested a lot in you over the years,” he said. “I still remember the first time you called your mother a dirty word. I gave you a piece of glass for that. You remember, don’t you?”
I nodded weakly. I was having trouble breathing. My body felt too big, like I’d be stuck forever.
“I want you to finish your room,” he whispered, leaning down. “But we can’t have any more slip ups. We have to be more careful. Promise?”
“I promise,” I said.
“Swear.”
I nodded again, still wondering if he’d reach forward and snap my neck with his long fingers.
Then, he reached forward and pulled me into the cathedral.
“Come on,” he said. “I don’t want you to miss tonight. We’re celebrating.”
Inside the cathedral I found Maddie and Naomi standing in the cathedral’s central room where a small feast had been laid out. The food was all a bit strange, like pizzas made of soggy bread and ice cream and apple-shaped fruits that tasted like butter. It was if it had all been made by someone who had only seen pictures of food but never actually eaten it.
“Where’s Elliot?” I asked.
“Elliot’s job is done!” announced Mr. Merchant with a flourish. “His room is complete. And because today is a day of celebration, I will allow you all just once to visit it and behold his work!”
The girls and I looked at each other nervously. We’d never seen Mr. Merchant look so gleeful before. Then, like a drum major at the head of a marching band, he proceeded down the hall toward Elliot’s room, opening the door with the wave of a hand.
We walked inside and gasped. Inside, we found a lush room with a thick, tufted carpet and mahogany furniture. Everything smelled of vanilla tobacco. It might have been beautiful if not for the stained glass window, which stretched nearly a hundred feet high.
In the window, a boy was driving a car off the edge of a seaside cliff. His expression contorted with rage. All around him, the sky looked like it was on fire, but the waiting ocean below was black and filled with arms, all reaching up to drag him down.
I remembered Elliot’s first days in the cathedral, whispering stories to Mr. Merchant in exchange for cartful after cartful of black glass. Now we knew what he’d been building.
“What I love most about this one is the little details,” said Mr. Merchant. “Take the trunk for example. Look carefully and you’ll see a little sliver of red coming down the side. That’s…
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