I work at a national park you’ve never heard of. There’s a chapel on the land you should never enter

There’s a white chapel on the land of Ebony Gorge National Park that doesn’t stay in one spot.

Usually, it’s nowhere, either hidden somewhere in the deep backcountry or somewhere besides this world entirely. It can disappear for months at a time. Years even. When it does show up, it’s always somewhere new, near a stream or nestled in a grove of birch trees, or occasionally, at the edge of the town just outside the park. Some say it appears to help travelers in need.

Some say it appears to prey on them.

But whatever it wants, for whatever reason it appears, it’s agreed among us park rangers that one should never enter lightly. Its grounds are consecrated.

Consecrated to which god, however, nobody knows.

------------------

Part 1

Based on the comments from my first post, many of you seem to be wondering about the fall-out from my incident with the doors. I thought it would be good to start by providing the desired answer―namely, that I don’t have one (sorry). I didn’t understand the repercussions back then.

At least, not at first.

After I informed Winona, the chief ranger of Ebony Gorge, of my experience the night before―being woken up, locking the doors in the canyon walls, one of them being open―she shot to her feet and swore. I’d never seen her make such a big reaction.

She snatched her keys, ordered “wait here,” and marched from the room.

I did wait. For hours. I missed my shift at the visitor center, stomach-churning in her office, a child inside the principal’s office, dreading the possibility of expulsion.  

This was it. I would be fired. Coming to Ebony Gorge was the last hope of escaping my past life, and yet what if my actions had released something that couldn’t be contained? What if I’d ruined everything?

When Winona finally returned, uniform crusted with sap and boots caked in mud, I knew what I had to say. 

I exhaled in defeat. “If you need to let me go, I understand.”

Some part of me, the part that was raised on Disney and nourished with a stream of buddy cop shows, expected her to place a hand on my shoulder, smile reassuringly, and tell me, we all make mistakes. You’re new. This could have been a lot worse.

Instead, she slammed her wide-brimmed hat on her desk. “Good. That’s probably happening.”

“Uh. Right. Ok.”

“What are you still doing here? Get out.”

Nothing dramatic changed in the next few weeks. There were no sudden disappearances. No wildfires or lights in the sky or reappearances of my fake chief in the middle of the night. The only sign that something was amiss at Ebony was Winona’s absence. 

She was gone more than usual, her and a few of her most trusted full-time rangers. Where they went, nobody knew. But they vanished during night hours. The rest of us seasonal rangers were left to pick up the slack.

Just before the next quarter moon I offered to pick up a shift locking doors “to help out. You’ve been so busy.” Winona didn’t even grace me with a response. She only peered wiltingly at me.

“Really, anything you need,” I insisted. “I just want to help.”

She continued staring until I retreated backwards from her office, the way one might from a mountain lion.

It was coming. The final thump of the guillotine as it snapped down on my neck. Every day, in every moment. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, the day after. For now, it just hung above me as I went about my days―checking permits, redirecting confused hikers, giving recommendations at the help desk―the knowledge that my brief time at Ebony Gorge was coming to a violent, headless end.

And then, nearly a month after the incident with the doors, Winona knocked at the door to my tiny room at the ranger lodgings. “You still want to help out?”

“Anything at all.”

“Don’t be so perky. Boot-licking doesn’t make me like you more, son.”

“Uh. Right.”

“You heard of that toddler girl who went missing a few miles up north?”

I searched my mind. If by ‘a few miles,’ she meant more than a hundred, then yes. Ruby had been everywhere on social media for the entire week. She disappeared from her bedroom on her rural farm without appearing in any of the security cameras. One second she was in her bed. The next, the nanny cam feed flickered and she was gone. I’d seen clips of the footage myself.

“The farmer’s daughter?” I offered tentatively.

“That’s the one. One of our SAR rangers is helping in the search here. She could use a partner. Might be gone a few days, and you’re the easiest to replace.”

The insult wasn’t lost on me. Neither was the other obvious next question: why would a toddler, who’d disappeared a hundred miles away, be here? But I was on the weaker end of this power dynamic, and also desperate to boot-lick without appearing like I was boot-licking, so I simply asked, “who am I going with?”

She told me.

I wished I’d refused to go. 

------------------

Here’s the thing you had to understand about Lenore.

If you had to choose between two rooms, one with a boa constrictor and one with Lenore in it, your best bet would be to choose both. Then maybe, after Lenore was done gutting the boa constrictor, she would be slightly winded before she came after you. 

Don’t get the wrong idea. Lenore wasn’t evil, but it also wasn’t fair to say she was merely intimidating.

Once, when a family set up their tent in the wrong campsite, she dismantled it and handcuffed the father in front of his kids. On her weekends off, she would commonly disappear into the wilderness (outside the park, to clarify) with only a knife and return with an elk. And the year before, the other rangers told me she arranged for a seasonal ranger to be fired after he used up all the hot water in their shared shower. Full-time rangers had more pull, and she seemed to have most of all, even though she was barely older than I was.

From what I’d seen, she was standoffish, grumpy, and occasionally violent. She was also who I would be spending the next three to seven days with, in the absolute middle of nowhere, entirely alone, the perfect situation in which an  accident might befall me, such as―oh, I don't know*―*premeditated murder.

On the plus side, she was none-too-thrilled about the arrangement either.

“Don’t you dare make me slow down for this runt,” she told Chief.

“Harris has been insistent on sticking in pairs recently. New safety procedure. This is his call, not mine.” Harris was Ebony Gorge’s superintendent and also Winona's boss.

“Besides,” she continued. “The boy wouldn’t dare complain. He’s far too scared of me firing him.”

“Are you planning to?” Lenore asked.

“Probably.”

“I am right here,” I said.

“Shut up,” Lenore snapped.

“Right.”

The first day we hiked in tense silence. Lenore led, always two paces in front―or perhaps I was two paces behind. Hard to tell really, but the feeling was mutual, so did it matter? We descended through redstone hoodoos to the canyon floor, past cottonwood and fir trees and through the occasional slot canyon. All of it in eerie silence.

That first night, however, as we boiled water for our dehydrated meals, I couldn't restrain myself from asking, “where exactly are we going?”

Lenore pretended not to hear me. 

“Look,” I said. “I’m not trying to be a suck-up, or runt, or whatever it was you called me, but we’re looking for that toddler Ruby, yeah? If I understand what we’re looking for, I might be able to help. There’s got to be some reason we think she could be here.”

Lenore considered. She twisted the hissing knob on her mini-propane stove to kill the flame. “You’ve heard of the white chapel?”

I nodded.

“We’re looking for that. Sometimes kids…they end up there.”

The second day of hiking we were nearly as silent as the first.

I’d gone on multi-day solo trips in Ebony before, to survey campsites and such, but we were already further into the back country than ever before. There was a ruggedness to it. Even on low visitor days, when you could hike popular trails without seeing another hiker for hours, there were still tags on the trees and cairns to guide you in the right direction down a well-defined path.

Here, the only sign of humans were the broken twigs our steps left behind, and the only noise was our breathing. There was a sense of wrongness to it all*.* I’d noticed it ever since the incident with the doors, but here, this deep into the canyon, it was more pronounced. Before, as I would hike, I would feel a hundred eyes on me from every direction. Now, there was only one pair. 

Somehow, that was even worse.

A little past noon, Lenore stopped in her tracks. I narrowly avoided crashing into her and followed her gaze. In the nearby canyon wall was a light-colored, spruce-wood door.

“I didn’t realize there were any so far out,” I said.

“There shouldn’t be,” she growled and continued on.

The latter half of the day, we spent navigating unofficial switchbacks to get to the top of the canyon. At the top, Lenore surveyed the rocky desert terrain, a far-off stone arch smeared against the landscape. I got the sense she’d been expecting something that wasn’t here. Eventually, we descended again.

The third day, I noticed a pattern. We weren’t hiking randomly. Lenore knew this canyon. She would take us to a location, look around, then immediately retrace our steps and take us somewhere new. Each stop, she radiated with more and more frustration.  

The white chapel. The other rangers said it never appeared in the same place twice, but what if that was wrong? What if there were places it appeared more commonly than others, and those who had worked here longest knew about them?

When we set up camp the third night, at the edge of a pond, Lenore didn’t even look at me. The flame from her stove reflected in her eyes. She crawled into her sleeping bag, and I crawled into mine. How many more days of this, before we gave up and turned back? We didn’t have enough food to go much further.

My answer came not four hours later.

When I woke up, shivering, only the moon lit the pond. The air. It was colder than usual. Much colder. We hadn't packed for this temperature, and―

I inhaled sharply.

On the opposite side of the pond, partly obscured by drifting wisps of mist, a chapel leered down at me, a pristine white steeple and white timber frame. My (admittedly inexperienced) guess of the architecture was post Civil War, similar to the other buildings left in Ebony Gorge from the early pioneer days.

“Lenore.” I untangled myself from my sleeping bag. “You need to wake up―Lenore?”

She wasn't there. Her sleeping bag was fully unzipped and discarded in the dirt. Her boots sat untouched where she’d placed them before sleep. Her headlamp lay next to them.

“Lenore!” I hissed again, but even then, groggy and disoriented, I knew what I had to do and where she would be.

The temperature dropped the closer I trudged to the white chapel. Ice spiderwebbed across the surface of the pond closest to it. I clutched at my arms, teeth chattering, but it was no use. A single icicle hung from the eaves above a pair of main doors that had been cast open.

Tall stained glass lined either wall, decorated with what looked like faces, leading up to a lifted dais. On that dais? A single altar. Slumped across that altar?

“Lenore!”

She didn’t turn or move in any way. I hadn't expected her to. She was barefoot. Her sleeping garments were torn, and her head lolled to one side of the stone block. A puddle of something gathered on the stone where she knelt.

I hesitated for a moment, just one, considering every reason this was a terrible, awful idea―then I shoved them down. I crossed the threshold and approached.

Her eyes were open but unseeing. Her hands were clasped awkwardly as if in prayer, though she was otherwise fully limp. She made no acknowledgment of me, as much as I nudged her.

Something dark dripped from above onto the altar. High above her, something bulged from the ceiling, like a bubble of liquid pushing through layers of paint. Any moment ready to pop. To give birth to something.

“We need to go,” I said.

No response.

I maneuvered my arms as best I could around her body (feeling quite manly, situation aside), and lifted.

The stained glass wall nearest to us exploded. 

I shrieked (nevermind about the manliness) and shielded my face, forgetting I was still holding Lenore, but it was alright, because she had jerked awake and stumbled to her feet. Her arms flailed wildly, like she was drowning or fighting off an attacker.

“We need to get out!” I screamed as a second window exploded and grabbed her wrist to guide her to the door. We sprinted madly. Behind us came a pop and the splosh of a hundred gallons of liquid pouring over a stone floor, but that wasn't the main concern. Glass was raining from every angle, slicing through our clothes and lacerating our exposed skin.

We tore from the chapel as the last set of windows shattered. We ran, and we ran, and we didn’t stop, until we’d rounded the pond.

When we looked back, the white chapel was already gone.

------------------

An hour later, we sat huddled on either side of a crackling fire far, far from the pond.

 The cold was gone. We didn’t need the heat, not on a summer’s night like this, but there was something about the ethereal glow of a fire that settled the internal part of us that hadn't yet escaped the chapel’s cold.

“You never told me your name,” Lenore said.

“It’s Wade.”

We sat some more.

“I think you might not actually be a pushover.” The firelight carved caverns into the nooks of her face. “That’s just what it seems like.”

“Thank you?”

“You’re just desperate to stay. That’s what it is. You’re so desperate to stay in this park that you’ll do or say anything. In your normal life, you aren’t like this.”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Wasn’t planning on asking.”

We sat some more. 

“What now?” I asked. “We found the chapel, but it didn’t help us find that little girl. Do we keep looking?”

Lenore shook her head. From her pocket she pulled a shard of glass, one of the ones that had rained down on us, though how it had ended up in her possession, I couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was just supposed to. 

She handed it to me. “We go back now.”

Lit by the firelight, a girl stared up at me from the shard. The chubby face of a toddler made from a hundred strokes of color, preserved forever in glass.