> Your grandmother wasn't trying to contain the evil.
She was trying to delay the resurrection.
And now that you speak the prayers, you finish what she feared most—
becoming the altar.
---
The next morning, I found her journal.
Not the one everyone knew about—the innocent blue one she left by her bedside with shopping lists and verses and memories that made her look harmless.
No.
This one was bound in flesh-colored leather, cracked like dried lips. The first page had only one sentence written on it in blocky, shaking ink:
> "If I don't remember what I did, she will."
There were no dates. No entries in order. Just fragments of thought—scrambled, scratched, some written over one another like she was fighting herself with every sentence.
But some words reappeared again and again:
Mouth
Ecclesia in Carne (The Church in Flesh)
Seven children. Seven voices. One body. One song.
And this one:
> "She made me sew her mouth shut.
Because if she spoke again, the veil would tear."
---
I didn't know what it meant.
Until the voices started speaking from mirrors.
Not reflections. Not illusions.
Whispers.
When I stared too long into the bathroom mirror, I heard one voice—a child's—giggling under the surface.
In the hallway mirror: chanting, like a congregation warming up.
In the antique hand mirror my grandmother kept in her prayer box: a voice that sounded like my mother, but wasn't.
> "Do you know why she sewed it shut?"
> "Because mouths become doors when you pray into them."
> "And you… you prayed."
---
My reflection no longer followed me exactly.
It blinked out of rhythm.
It turned its head before I did.
It even smiled when I wasn't smiling.
One night, it leaned closer and whispered without opening its lips:
> "The sixth mouth listens.
The seventh mouth opens.
You are not the eighth.
You are what it opens into."
---
That was when I ran to the basement.
My mother tried to stop me, but it was too late.
I knew there had to be more than one coffin.
The first one was Leora. Me.
Mouth 1 of 7.
The rest had to be here.
I tore through the crawl space behind the furnace, past the mold-rotted beams, and smashed open the fake concrete wall with a sledgehammer.
Behind it—
A staircase.
Stone. Spiral. Leading down.
And with every step, I heard a different voice.
Some whispered.
Some cried.
One sang.
At the bottom, I found them.
Six coffins.
Laid in a circle.
Each burned.
Each humming with heat.
On the lid of each:
Mouth 2: BURIED
Mouth 3: WATCHED
Mouth 4: BLED
Mouth 5: LISTENED
Mouth 6: SUNG
Mouth 7: OPENED
In the center of the circle, lying like a sacrificial seed between them:
A porcelain torso.
No head. No arms. No legs.
Just the chest of the doll, cracked wide open.
Inside it:
My grandmother's tongue.
Still wet.
Still alive.
Still chanting.
---
The tongue twitched when I stepped closer. The chant quickened.
Latin, Latin, always Latin—but this time, I recognized the rhythm.
It was the same cadence I had been hearing in my head for days. The one my own voice sometimes spoke when I wasn't paying attention.
The voice inside me wasn't just mimicking prayer.
It was syncing with hers.
And together… they were finishing something.
Something stitched together decades ago—now trying to wake up.
I dropped to my knees and screamed:
> "What do you want from me?!"
And then—
the tongue answered.
Not aloud.
Not in Latin.
But in my grandmother's voice, from deep inside me:
> "To remember what I did to stop her.
And to undo it."
---
The coffins began to crack.
From inside each: scratching. Weeping. Fingers pressing against lids. Porcelain shattering.
Mouth 7—labeled OPENED—burst first.
A headless porcelain doll climbed out, dragging a chain of rosaries behind it like intestines.
And it began crawling toward me.
The others followed.
Each one headless, armless, faceless—just torsos and mouths sewn shut, now ripping loose, chanting, praying, remembering.
And above them all, louder than any voice—
Mine.
My mouth moved on its own.
My throat vibrated.
And the words came:
> "Fiat ecclesia. Vox in carne. Corpus in voluntate."
(Let the church be made. Voice in flesh. Body in will.)
---
I don't remember how I got back upstairs.
But when I looked in the mirror—
I wasn't alone.
My reflection had changed.
Seven mouths opened across my face.
Each with different teeth.
Each praying something different.
Only my eyes remained.
And even they were flickering.
Like candles inside a chapel of flesh.