They say the house on Saint Mary’s Hill rings its bell only on Easter Sunday, but no one remembers who rings it.

Locals avoid the place. Some claim it shifts position ever so slightly each year, as though it were slowly crawling uphill toward the old cemetery. Others whisper that it’s the house itself that mourns, that its rotted bones remember every prayer ever whispered and every sin left unconfessed.

I went there once, years ago, when grief had hollowed me out like a cathedral with no saints. My mother had just died. My faith had burned down with her. I needed something that felt like a miracle, or a death I could borrow, just long enough to understand my own.

The path was overgrown. Branches curled like arthritic fingers, the earth soft with ash and moss. The door was open when I arrived, though no wind had blown.

Inside, it smelled of lilies and smoke, like something holy had caught fire but refused to burn out. Candles dotted the floor, flickering without flame. At the front, beneath a crumbling archway, stood a font filled with what looked like blood but glowed like wine.

A bell rang. Not with sound, but with something deeper. My body reverberated, my heart answered. It wasn’t a toll. It was a summoning.

“Easter is not a day,” a quiet voice echoed. “It is now. Always now.”

I turned toward the altar. Something waited in the shadows. Not a person, not quite. It wore no crown of thorns, no nailed limbs, but the air bent around it like reverence.

Its face was shifting. Flesh and ruin, grace and ash. A heart pulsed visibly in its chest, too large, too red. Every beat shook dust from the rafters.

I fell to my knees, not in terror, but in recognition. A voice, low and layered with centuries, spoke not from the figure, but from within me:

“You wanted resurrection, but not death. You wanted grace without surrender.”

The candle nearest me flared. My skin grew warm. I wept. I laughed. I forgot why I had come.

I don’t know how long I stayed. Time folds strangely in places like that. I returned home with soot beneath my nails and the scent of lilies tangled in my coat.

I dream of the house often. And on Easter, no matter where I am, I hear the bell. It rings not once, but twice. The second toll always slower, like a breath held, then released.

The others still say it’s haunted. They speak of spirits, of curses, of cursed spirits. But I know better. What haunts that house isn’t a ghost.

It’s the truth. And it waits.

Always now.

The End