Page 17 of In Her Prayers

Stained-glass windows that once told stories of saints and miracles bled their colors into one another, pooling on the floor in luminous puddles.Wooden pews, usually aligned with precision, were twisted into gnarled shapes.The air around Jenna shimmered with an unearthly glow, casting the nave of St.Michael’s Catholic Church in a strange light.

Jenna called out, “Is anyone …?”But before she could finish the question, her voice echoed back in a chorus of dissonant tones.The sound bent and folded upon itself around her, filling the surreal architecture with a strange melody.

In that moment, Jenna became lucid.She knew she was dreaming and that she needed to pay close attention—any detail she saw here could be a clue to the puzzle she was working on in her waking life.

Turning away from the liquefied colors and ghostly echoes in the nave of the church, Jenna moved toward the Sunday School room.Her steps created ripples in the carpet as though she were walking on the surface of a still pond.She glanced down at her feet, watching the wavelets dissipate, leaving no trace of her passage.

In the realm of her dream, the usual simplicity of the Sunday School room took on a fantastical guise.The fresh yellow paint, the posters, the crayon drawings all blended together, as though they had been smeared by an artist’s brush.When Jenna’s hand touched the closet door, it swung open, revealing an ordinary shelf with books and art supplies haphazardly arranged.The wall behind it looked solid.

When Jenna knocked twice on that back wall, it peeled away like the curling of smoke, leaving only a void.From this nothingness, a young woman stepped out, as if crossing from one world to another—her appearance solid one moment, translucent the next, confusion on her features.

Jenna tried to speak, to ask who this apparition was, but her own words transformed, leaving her mouth not as sound, but as delicate butterflies, their wings beating gently.Jenna watched them disappear, a silent acknowledgment that some questions were too complex for mere words.

She extended her hand to the wavering figure before her.The woman hesitated, then took a tentative step forward, following as Jenna led her toward the nave.As they walked through the church’s twisting corridors - which stretched and snapped back like rubber bands - a sad tune began to fill the air from nowhere in particular.As they proceeded, to Jenna’s surprise, the ghostly woman began to sing.

“I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees,” the spirit’s mournful alto revealed.Each verse that followed touched Jenna’s consciousness.“Asked the Lord above ‘Have mercy, save this poor girl, if you please’,” echoed the refrain.Jenna listened to the notes dissipate, certain that the spectral song was a message cast across the divide between the dead and the living.

In the church nave, she and the singing woman now stood near another familiar closet.With a determined motion, Jenna rapped her knuckles against that wooden door.As she did so, the surface before her began to waver, and then, with the gentle sigh of a secret being unveiled, the barrier dissolved entirely.

A second woman stepped out, wearing a robe that shifted through shades of white and gold, as though undecided on which best represented her essence.Her expression showed the same confusion that marked the face of the singer.

Finding her voice, Jenna asked, “Can you tell me your name?”But when the robed woman spoke, her words fractured into a clamor of foreign tongues.Finally the spirit managed one word: “Listen.”

Jenna paused.“Listen,” she repeated internally, grasping at the significance.Her lucid dreams had always been more than mere phantasms; they offered guidance through the cryptic language of the dead.She stood motionless, attuned to the silence around her.Then she heard the music of a harp playing somewhere unseen.Trying to follow the sound, she guided the two ghost women along with her through the church.

As they walked, the second woman—the one in the fluctuating hues of choir robes—lifted her voice to harmonize with the unseen harpist, adding words to the haunting melody.Her song melded seamlessly with the man’s strumming, converging in a chorus that spoke of loss and longing, of mysteries unraveling at the edges of consciousness.As their voices entwined, patterns spiraling around them in a dance as old as time.

“In shadows deep, the secrets keep,” she sang.“Through courage, truth we strive to reap.”

Jenna followed the harp sound, and the robed ghost kept singing: “In dreams they stir, in whispers speak.Guiding the lost, the brave, the meek.”The first ghost woman joined in softly.Although Jenna couldn’t grasp its meaning yet, she knew there was a message in those harmonies.

The church had become an impossible labyrinth: staircases led to dead ends, doors opened onto blank walls, windows revealed landscapes that morphed with each blink.And there he was—a figure playing the strings of an autoharp as he wandered aimlessly through this ever-shifting dreamscape.And he sang the hymn as well, his pure tenor voice resonating harmoniously with the woman’s soprano.

The church stretched and morphed around him, stone columns wavering like reeds in water.Jenna called out, her words urgent, but as they left her lips, they twisted into spirals of smoke, dissipating without reaching his ears.As he played, the man navigated the shifting pews and aisles with an otherworldly grace, his fingers dancing across the strings in a rhythm both ancient and new.The music didn’t just fill the space; it transformed it.Each note seemed to be an echo of a thousand untold stories.

The autoharp player kept moving.He peered into mirrors reflecting impossible angles of this dream-church; he opened books whose pages fluttered out, ascending toward the stained-glass windows; he paused before an ornate mirror hanging askew on the wall.Jenna’s own reflection was absent, yet the man’s image stared back from impossible angles, his expression one of profound loss.

“Maybe he’s looking for himself,” the first woman whispered.Her words shimmered, casting a pale glow that lingered before dissolving into the silence.The second woman, her choir robe a cascade of shifting hues, nodded, and for a moment, her figure turned translucent, the lines of her body blurring with the shifting air.

Jenna pondered the cryptic statement.Was this man seeking a piece of his soul lost in the afterlife, much as Jenna sought her missing half in the world of the living?

The mixed melody began to dissipate, the song winding down like the final turn of a key in a music box.As Jenna’s surroundings began to melt away, she sensed the approach of dawn’s reality.Still, she clung to the vestiges of the hymn.She understood that song from before, and the directive to listen.With a clarity born of necessity, she committed every detail to memory: the colors, the sensations, the plea to “listen.”

Piercing the turmoil, Jenna’s alarm snapped her out of the dissolving dreamscape.Gasping for breath as if she’d been submerged, she bolted upright in bed, her nightgown clinging to her skin.Her eyes opened to the stark reality of her bedroom, where morning light crept through the curtains, casting a gentle glow across the space she called her own.Her heartbeat slowed as she processed the remnants of the dream.She swallowed hard, the adrenaline of revelation still coursing through her veins.The dream had been nothing less than a summons from the dead, a plea for her to uncover what had been concealed.

Jenna reached for her notepad, the pages bearing witness to the many late-night musings and revelations that had visited her before.Her pen hovered momentarily before she began to etch the details of her nocturnal encounter onto the paper.In the dim light, she scrawled down the fragments of the dream that clung to her memory—the harp’s string notes, the labyrinthine passages of the church, the golden robe, the imperative to listen, and the words of the blues song, followed by the haunting hymn lyrics.

The words were more than mere poetry; they were signposts, each one a potential clue that might lead her to the answers she sought.Jenna understood well the power of her dreams, the way the departed could reach her through this ethereal channel, offering guidance.She trusted her intuition, honed through years of navigating the thin line between what was seen and unseen.And though the true identities of the spirits often remained cloaked in mystery, their messages resonated within her with clarity.

With the song lyrics and fragments of visions captured on paper, Jenna remained still for a moment longer, allowing her breathing to steady.Then she swung her legs over the side of the bed, grounding herself with the solid feel of the cold floor beneath her bare feet.She dressed methodically, donning the uniform that marked her as Genesius County’s sheriff, and braced herself for the day ahead.

She remembered the words one spirit had spoken, “Maybe he’s looking for himself.”She knew that was true.The man with the autoharp, his wandering was not purposeless, but a solemn quest—a search for something lost, something essential…

His own body...that church."And replace with "Suddenly Jenna knew beyond certainty--somewhere within...undiscovered.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The morning sun cast a warm glow over Trentville, but Jenna still felt only the cool residue of her nocturnal vision as she rolled her car to a stop in front of Jake’s modest bungalow.She tapped the horn, a signal that had become their routine, and Jake appeared at the door, travel mug in hand.He moved with a lazy confidence to the car and got into the passenger seat, bringing with him the rich aroma of dark roast coffee.

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