Sanctuary of a different sort

So we hit up the local baptist church last night. It was the former Church of the Faceless Angels/Derosier residence, although we had to check in books at the library, because no-one seems to remember where it was. Not even people who were members for 20 years. (It's a pattern we've noticed. They remember the church, but they can't relate it to the town as it currently is. We try not to press them on this, for obvious reasons)

Now, the church is fully operational and regularly used. The Derosier residence is pretty much boarded up. No-one's been in there since Caleb Derosier, the last head of the curch, was arrested back in 1987, following the slenderization of his wife and daughter.

This said, we read an interesting tidbit in an old journal - that even before that, they'd already boarded up the basement, supposedly where the old, mad Lucas Derosier was locked away.

Oh come on. We couldn't not break in.

So we broke in.

At 3:30, we crept over. It was the night before church, so everyone was in bed early to be up for service. The church is pretty well away from the residential part of town, so we didn't disturb anyone as we went. Most of the old boards had rotted away from the nails holding them in place and we just lifted them off. Just enough to be able to crawl in. We'd pulled out the old maglites for the first time in a couple of months, and they lit up the inside of the old house like floodlights. As Natalie, Shannon, Rachel and I all got through, we looked around. The room still had the family's mess out after almost twenty-five years, like ruins preserved under a magma flow. Old magazines and books, a sturdy mahogany dinner table, a sizable kitchen. This would have been a nice house, at the time, but now everything was grimy and covered in dust. It smelt wet and dank, like old sodden rot. The larder in that kitchen was probably full of the results of twenty five years of decomposition. The family died here. This isn't a home, I told myself.

My torch found the stairs - one going to the first floor, one going down to the basement. We moved over to it quickly and headed down the stairs, but as I headed down I thought I caught a glimpse of crusted-over brown crimson on the floorboards, illuminated in the torchlight.

I flash back to that night in the hospital, and all the blood and sickness and horror and death and

I feel sick to my stomach.

There's two doors in the basement. One is open, and appears to be a boiler room. The other has great thick planks of wood across the door frame, that once would have barred entry. But, like the boards outside, they had decomposed to the point where they could be pulled off very easily.

Just a bedroom. Almost entirely bare. An empty wardrobe and chest of drawers. A bed frame with no mattress. The book made him seem like some mad prophet, some wizard. I half expected some massive charm to be scratched out on the floor, but nothing.

Another dead end.

What is it that makes this town so different?