Tales from the Boer’s Head

Written by P.H. Boer

Father Elion Mirk arrived in Grimsby Hollow in the winter of ’81, when the frost clung to the earth like a desperate widow and the sky bore the color of old bones. The church he was sent to revive was a crumbling stone husk with a steeple bent from lightning and time, its bell long silent, its pews warped like bodies buried improperly.

The congregation numbered thirty-one, and never more.

He found their silence unnerving. Their confessions meandered like half-remembered dreams, heavy with sin but devoid of names, places, or dates. One woman, a hunched, bird-boned thing named Agnes Crill, spoke of peeling skin from her child’s back with a silver spoon, though she had no children. A man, always smelling of smoke and rust, wept as he described drowning a lover in milk, though none in town knew him to be touched by anyone.

Father Mirk prayed more fervently each night, kneeling before the altar until his knees bruised like rotting fruit. He believed the devil prowled Grimsby Hollow, sowing lies into the weak-minded. So when the floor beneath the altar collapsed one storm-thrashed evening, revealing a stairwell hewn in red-black stone, he saw it not as ruin, but revelation.

The earth breathed down there.

He descended with a lantern and his rosary, each step slick with moss that pulsed faintly as if drawing breath. The chapel below was wrong in its geometry, subtly skewed, as if the architect had studied scripture through a funhouse mirror.

The altar was obsidian, veined with a shimmering red like coals beneath skin. A crucifix, but warped: Christ’s arms formed a circle, his face eyeless, mouth open in silent song. And beneath the altar, something churned, slow, like molasses stirred by invisible hands. It exhaled heat and whispers. Not words. Hungers.

Mirk fell to his knees, gasping. He believed he had discovered a relic of the first Church, perhaps even predating Rome, proof of Eden or Gethsemane. He sprinkled holy water and ashes, chanting the Rite of Purification. But the ashes fell upward, drawn to the crucifix like iron to a magnet, disappearing into its empty eyes.

That night, the first miracle occurred.

Agnes Crill stood at the back of the church, her posture unnaturally straight, her eyes milky white. She spoke a benediction in a language no one knew, and when she collapsed, a black moth flew from her mouth, winged with script no scholar could decipher.

Father Mirk called it cleansing. Others called it plague.

More parishioners confessed. Each more grotesque than the last. A child of seven claimed to have skinned her brother with piano wire. A war veteran described building a woman from lamb parts and laying with it in a pigsty.

But these were simple, God-fearing people. They couldn’t have done such things. Not really.

And yet, something claimed them.

One by one, after their confessions, they began to fade, like candles snuffed by an unseen breath. No illness. No violence. Just silence, followed by stillness.

Their bodies were curious things.

No blood, no visible wounds. Only a sheen of sweat across their brows, a faint perfume of scorched myrrh, and expressions of peculiar peace, as if death had absolved them of sins they never truly committed, but believed with all their trembling hearts.

Father Mirk wrapped each corpse in linen and laid them in the churchyard himself, lips murmuring blessings even as the fog swirled around his feet like a living thing. The soil accepted them too easily, too quickly, as though it had been hungry for them.

Below, the chapel grew warm.

The moss now glistened with a golden dew that tasted of salt and copper. The crucifix hummed with vibration, and in moments of silence, Mirk could hear scratching behind the walls, like fingernails tracing sigils into flesh.

He took it as sacred music.

Word of his “miracles” reached other towns. Grimsby Hollow saw visitors again, devout pilgrims, curiosity-seekers, and the broken. Mirk welcomed them all. He performed Mass daily. Confessions multiplied. The pews creaked beneath the weight of strangers eager to speak sins that did not belong to them. One man confessed to cannibalizing his wife, though he’d never been married. A child whispered through cracked lips that he’d buried his baby sister alive.

None of it made sense. All of it was believed.

Mirk’s own dreams shifted. Once, he saw the chapel submerged in a lake of white milk. Christ, the circular Christ, rose, but his face was gone, replaced by a fleshy mask stitched from mouths, each singing a different Psalm.

He awoke to find ash in his bed and the taste of honey on his tongue.

The land began to rot subtly. Flowers bloomed then withered in the same day. Livestock were found boneless, their skins limp like shed clothing. A piglet was born with a human tooth lodged in its snout. The ground grew soft beneath the graves and pulsed faintly, like a drumbeat from far below, or the twitching of something enormous asleep in the soil. The earth no longer felt like earth. It was warm. Spongy. Breathing.

Still, he prayed.

Still, he believed.

And then came the child.

Not born of any local womb, not known to any name or family. She arrived on a Sunday morning without sound, barefoot, pale as morning fog, her dress the color of wet parchment left too long in a grave. Her hair hung in limp strands, matted with dew. Her eyes, though open, saw nothing, milked over with cataracts that rippled faintly, like something inside them was swimming.

She did not speak. She never blinked. She simply entered.

When she stepped over the threshold of the chapel, the crucifix above the altar shuddered. The sound was almost delicate, like the twang of a harp string stretched too tight, except it resonated deep in the bone, as though some hidden part of the body remembered that sound from a dream of drowning.

She walked the aisle with terrible grace, each step deliberate, soundless. And when she knelt at the altar, she turned and smiled.

A smile too wide.

With too many teeth.

No one claimed to see her leave.

That night, drawn by instinct rather than intent, Father Mirk descended once more into the chapel below.

He found it transformed.

The walls were no longer stone, but living flesh, slick, hairless, and quivering, stretched tight and weeping. They emitted a high-pitched hum, barely audible but constant, like insect wings vibrating behind the walls of the world. A thick, black sap oozed down their surfaces, glistening like oil in a dying fire. The crucifix, once merely unsettling, now bled from its open mouth, a steady stream of tar-colored ichor that hissed as it landed, smelling of hot metal and decayed orchids, pouring into the basin below.

Its maw had widened, no longer symbolic, no longer metaphor…

A tunnel had torn itself into the stone behind it.

And from that tunnel, it emerged.

Not in full, no, never in full, but as a feeling. A pressure behind the eyes, a cold breath in the lungs, a hand stroking the inside of his heart.

He could not describe Its form. Only that it smelled like burnt angels and tasted like rusted prayer. He fell prostrate. He wept. He laughed. He felt himself unraveling and reforming as something else.

And it spoke.

Not with words. With knowing. With memories he didn’t own. With sins he’d never committed, but now believed were his.

It told him it had slumbered beneath the bones of Eden, beneath Hell, beneath even the nameless dark where the first betrayal was born. Its voice was not heard but felt, a warm wetness behind the eyes, a tickle in the gums, a pressure in the groin that pulsed with sacrilegious delight. It was older than sin. It had no name, only hunger. And its sacrament was ash.

It demanded devotion.

Mirk obliged.

But devotion, true devotion, was not prayer or piety. It was surrender. Of flesh. Of thought. Of soul.

He remained on the stone floor of the crypt for what may have been hours or centuries, his body convulsing gently, like a man wrapped in the deepest dream. The thing behind the crucifix fed him sensations: the warmth of mother’s milk curdled in the mouth, the sharp joy of biting a lover’s tongue, the memory of drowning, not his own, but as if inherited like a sacrament passed hand to hand through generations of guilt.

He crawled from the maw’s chamber reborn. His collar still clung to him, but the God it once served had been devoured by a greater appetite. In the reflection of the cracked baptismal font, he saw not his face but a shadow stitched together from candlelight and ash. And still, he smiled.

For now, he understood.

The confessional became his pulpit of transformation. He spoke not forgiveness but invitation. His sermons were riddles of rot and flame, yet the parishioners came still. Something in them, some hidden sickness they could not name, was drawn to the ruinous poetry that dripped from his tongue.

And so the church became a lighthouse for the damned.

Those near death came and left their confessions, trembling and eager. The old, the forgotten, the diseased, each climbed the hill where the steeple still pointed crookedly toward an uncaring sky. They came whispering stories that curdled the blood. Stories of sins too perfect, too crafted, to be real, yet when their eyes met Mirk’s, they wept as if they were.

He welcomed them all.

And when they died, and they always died, he said the rites in the voice that had been given to him below, in the chapel of writhing geometry and blackened light.

And the earth below drank deep.

He stopped burying the parishioners. Instead, he fed them to the maw. Quietly. Reverently. He said grace before each descent. He chanted in reverse tongues and smeared ash across his brow, his chest, his thighs.

The congregation did not question. Those who had survived, the oldest, the most devout, sat in the pews with bones too brittle to move. They rocked gently and murmured sermons no one had preached. Their eyes bled slowly, tears thick with soot.

One by one, they passed.

Their mouths still whispering.

Even in death, they would not rest. Their bodies stiffened, blackened by whatever sacred poison lingered in the chapel’s breath, but their lips kept moving, dry and cracked, yet ceaseless. Some whispered fragments of old hymns, others wept prayers in dead languages. A few simply mouthed syllables with no meaning at all, sounds scraped from the throat of some deeper thing that had borrowed them.

Mirk no longer feared death. He wore it like a vestment.

He walked among the dead with a shepherd’s reverence, whispering back to them, listening as if their mutterings were revelations still unfolding. And in his chest, something vast and hollow fluttered, the gate widening.

He knew, at last, that he had become the final disciple of something that had waited beneath the world before even the Fall of Lucifer. And like all prophets, his time to spread the word had come.

In the end, fire was the only gospel left to preach.

Not words. Not rites. Fire.

A cleansing not of sin, but of certainty.

The thing beneath had begun to speak through the stones. The walls bled ash instead of plaster. The windows wept when the wind blew through. It was no longer a church, it was a mouth, and its hunger would not remain a secret forever.

The surrounding hills began to whisper. Fields on the edge of town blackened without flame. Birds flew in circles until they dropped, hollow-boned and silent. Farmers spoke of dreams where their fields bled ash and their barns hummed with teeth. Letters were sent. Questions rose. Somewhere far from Grimsby Hollow, a man in a clean office circled the name on a report and dispatched a team, not out of belief, but because rot, no matter how sacred, tends to attract bureaucrats.

That was when they came.

A group of surveyors, strangers to the land, arrived under the guise of bureaucratic necessity. They had blueprints, cameras, and laughter that sounded too sharp, too clean. They came to measure rot with rulers, to diagnose blight with clipboards.

They did not bring faith.

And so, they brought death.

One stepped into the lower chapel and paused mid-joke, face slackening as the black geometry enfolded him. He did not scream. He gurgled. Another turned to flee, but the stairs betrayed him, each step reversing as if time had grown sick. His limbs bent the wrong way, spine folding like parchment until he collapsed in a heap of unnatural angles.

Mirk watched this with detachment. He had already slit his palms and bled into the basin beneath the altar. He had become its vessel. Its tongue. He preached to the dark now. He tasted sin and called it sacrament.

When the third man, a skeptic, a lapsed Catholic, struck a match in horror, the ash ignited.

Not red. Not orange. But blue and hungry.

It swallowed the walls, the pews, the sky.

The church burned for three days. The foundation hissed like a living wound. Firefighters could not approach, equipment failed, water turned to steam before it touched stone. When the last beam fell, they found no bodies. Only a single child’s dress, folded on the altar. No soot touched it.

And in the blackened earth beneath, the ash remained cool.

Waiting.