> The doll is gone.
But the church is already inside her.
And now the prayers are trying to finish what they started—through her voice.
---
I didn't sleep that night.
Every time I closed my eyes, I heard breathing.
Not mine.
Shallow, wet, and rhythmic—coming from the floorboards beneath my bed. Like someone was lying beneath the house, just inches under the wood, matching my breath until I dared to hold mine.
I tried to speak, to wake my mother in the next room, but I couldn't.
Because I couldn't open my mouth.
It was sealed shut.
Not stitched.
Not locked.
Held.
From the inside.
---
When I finally forced it open—fingers trembling at my lips—my jaw clicked, and a rush of cold air escaped, along with a soft, distant whisper:
> "Ave... Vox... Mortis..."
It wasn't coming from the room.
It was coming out of me.
---
I ran to the bathroom.
Turned on every light. Pulled the mirror closer. And for the first time, I saw what the second tongue had become.
It was no longer just a tongue.
It had veins.
It had teeth—tiny, jagged, pearl-like things blooming near the base.
And as I stared, it uncoiled itself in the back of my throat like a slug stretching awake after a long sleep.
It moved.
Not as part of me—as something inside me.
Something using my mouth like a room it was rearranging.
I tried to scream.
But what came out wasn't my voice.
It was a choir.
A single sentence chanted in hundreds of layered voices:
> "The church remembers."
---
I blacked out.
When I came to, the bathroom mirror was shattered.
My face was untouched—but carved into the wall behind the glass, etched with what I now realized were fingernails, was a phrase in Latin:
> "Fiat ecclesia. Vox in carne. Corpus in voluntate."
(Let the church be made. Voice in flesh. Body in will.)
---
I didn't know where else to go. So I went back to the sealed coffin beneath the floor. The one marked Mouth 1 of 7. I needed answers.
The dirt caved easier this time, as if it wanted to be moved.
The box was still there. Still scorched.
I braced myself. Then forced it open.
Inside—
Not a child.
Not bones.
But a throat.
That's all it was.
A living, pulsating throat—still warm, still moist, still wheezing like it had been screaming silently underground for decades.
It wasn't dead.
It was waiting.
Waiting to be filled again.
---
I stumbled back in horror—and knocked something over.
A second, smaller box.
Inside it:
A wax cylinder. The kind used in old phonograph recordings.
Next to it, tucked in cloth: a single note.
Scrawled in blood:
> "Play it and die.
Burn it and she forgets.
Bury it and she returns."
I took it.
I didn't know why. Maybe because I needed to hear the truth. Maybe because some part of me had already started turning into something else. Something that needed to know.
---
At home, I dug through my grandmother's things.
Found her phonograph.
Wound it. Placed the cylinder. Set the needle.
Static.
Then—a voice.
Feminine. Familiar. Croaking with age.
> "If you are hearing this, then the church has chosen you."
> "It doesn't need buildings anymore. It needs mouths. Warm ones. Moving ones. It needs someone who will confess, speak, remember."
> "You are the fifth. The mouth that sings."
> "I was the fourth. The mouth that buried."
> "If you let the chant finish… the altar will rise again. It will not be built of stone. It will be built of flesh."
Then silence.
Except for one last whisper, not in the recording—from my throat:
> "Sixth mouth listens.
Seventh mouth opens.
Eighth… devours."
---
I tried to pull the tongue out.
With pliers.
With prayer.
With everything I had.
But every time I reached into my own mouth, my fingers curled away like they didn't belong to me anymore.
My reflection started moving out of sync.
It smiled before I did. It blinked too slow.
Then one night, it spoke:
> "You're already the church."