9She's walking through a chapel. The one she used to attend as a child. St Michael's. Same raggedy red carpet down the aisle beneath her feet. Same intricately carved wooden pulpit pews. The same imposing crucifix on the wall with its thoroughly miserable looking Christ, and the same tiny confessional booth on the floor to the left of the dais, dark wood panels, brass fixings, looking like an upright coffin.
There are no walls to the left or right, only deep banks of vaguely shifting darkness where votive candle flames flicker like a yellow starfield. The air's heavy, cloying with the sweet smell of incense, and a voice, old as Death and dry as moldering bones, ghosts around the shadowy room, insidious, reverberant, as if spoken in a stone cathedral rather than the little chapel of Luce's
