The Figures in the Stained Glass Have Started Facing Outside

From inside the chapel, we saw only the backs of their heads.

From the sidewalk, thirty-two faces stared out through boarded windows at passing traffic.

I restore architectural glass. I had been hired to remove, catalog, and crate the windows before Saint Orison's demolition. The chapel was not famous. It occupied a narrow city lot between a pharmacy and a parking garage, abandoned after a roof collapse and sold to a developer.

The windows were its only valuable feature.

My assistant, Kade, blamed vandals. He spent an hour explaining how someone might have cut the lead cames, rotated every face, and resoldered the seams without leaving marks or entering the locked building.

I let him talk until he reached the part about doing it in one night on three stories of scaffolding.

Then I showed him the dust.

Each figure had left two colored footprints on the sill beneath its panel. Blue feet below the north windows. Red below the west. Amber below the altar. The prints were not pigment. Light itself had stained the stone.

When I covered one with my palm, I saw bones through my skin.

The chapel records offered no explanation, but inside the glazier's cabinet we found a cedar box sealed with black wax. It held spare glass, horseshoe nails, and a folded instruction sheet dated 1923.

REMOVE PANELS ONLY WHILE THEIR SHADOWS FALL INWARD.

DO NOT REPLACE A CLEAR EYE WITH COLORED GLASS.

IF THEY TURN TOWARD THE STREET, BOARD THE WEST WINDOWS BEFORE SUNSET.

Someone had written one final line beneath the rules: THEY ARE NOT LOOKING OUT. THEY ARE WATCHING SOMETHING COME CLOSER.

It was 2:10 in the afternoon. Sunset was at 6:41.

The west windows had been unboarded that morning so we could photograph them.

I called the developer and requested an emergency delay. He reminded me demolition began at seven the next morning and threatened penalties if the glass was not packed. I called the city preservation office. Their voicemail said to submit concerns through an online form.

Kade suggested we follow the old rules, which was how I knew he was finally frightened.

We began boarding the west windows from inside. Each sheet of plywood required covering part of a panel, plunging a figure into darkness. Whenever the drill bit entered the stone frame, glass teeth clicked above us.

The first three boards went up without incident.

At the fourth window, Kade noticed a missing pane in one figure's eye. The figure wore a green robe and carried a silver branch. Its left eye was painted brown. Its right was an empty, eye-shaped hole looking onto the street.

Wind whistled through it like a quiet breath.

The exact replacement lay in the cedar box: a sliver of dark red glass with a black pupil fired onto its surface.

The second rule said not to replace a clear eye with colored glass. The hole was not clear glass, Kade argued. It was nothing. He worried the panel would crack during removal unless we stabilized it.

Before I could stop him, he pressed the red eye into the gap.

Every window blinked.

The painted eyelids did not move. Instead, daylight went dark behind them for one simultaneous instant. When it returned, thirty-two sets of eyes reflected the interior of the chapel, although they were facing outside.

The new red eye reflected Kade.

His reflection stood on the street with its back to us.

Kade was beside me on the scaffold.

Outside, the reflected Kade began walking west.

The real Kade followed.

He climbed down without answering me, crossed the nave, and reached for the front door. I tackled him before he touched the latch. His eyes were open but reflected only red glass. Beneath his shirt, patches of colored light moved through his chest like fish under ice.

He whispered, 'It has reached the river.'

There was no river west of Saint Orison's. The city had buried it in a concrete channel a century ago.

A church history pamphlet said the chapel was built where Orison Creek once surfaced. During construction, workers found hundreds of colored glass fragments in the mud—far older than the settlement and painted with parts of human faces. The architect incorporated them into the windows.

The first congregation complained that figures changed posture between services. In 1923, a glazier named Mara Bell rebuilt every panel so the figures faced the altar. Parish records called it a correction of devotional orientation.

Mara's private note called it turning the Watchers inward.

At 4:30, the west wall warmed.

Sunlight had not reached the windows yet, but their shadows lengthened across the floor. They stretched east instead of following the sun, thin bands of red, blue, and yellow searching through the nave.

Where a shadow crossed a pew, carved faces emerged from the wood and turned toward the door.

Where it touched plaster, painted eyes opened.

The shadows found Kade.

Colored bars wrapped his wrists and ankles. They pulled him flat against the floor while his red reflection continued walking through streets visible only inside the figure's eye. Traffic passed through it. Buildings changed. The buried river appeared beneath the pavement as a black current full of glass faces.

'It is following the water,' Kade said. 'It wants a window.'

The colored footprints on the sills stepped down.

One by one, shapes detached from the windows and descended the walls. They had no weight, only outline. Thirty-two human shadows made from stained light crossed the chapel floor. Each carried the posture of its glass figure but wore the face of someone outside.

A pharmacist. A cyclist. A woman waiting for the bus. As their shadows entered Saint Orison's, the real people on the street stopped moving.

The Watchers were borrowing faces to look for whatever approached beneath the city.

At 5:52, all thirty-two turned toward the western doors.

Something knocked from below the foundation.

The blow lifted dust from every stone. A second knock cracked the pharmacy window next door. A third traveled up through the scaffold and rang the stained glass like a vast, discordant bell.

The red eye in the green figure widened.

I saw the buried river reflected inside it. A darkness moved against the current, filling the channel from wall to wall. It had no fixed shape. Wherever broken glass lay in the mud, an eye opened on its surface.

The rules were not meant to imprison the figures. They kept them facing inward so they would not show the thing below where the windows were.

Kade had given it a colored eye.

The sunset touched the west wall.

Every unboarded panel ignited.

The figures stepped out of their windows as solid bodies made of lead and glass. Their joints bent along soldered seams. Their borrowed faces shone from within. They formed two rows leading from the front door to the altar, like attendants awaiting a procession.

The door began opening inward.

I drove my glass cutter through the red eye.

The pane resisted like an animal's tooth. The cutter wheel scored a white curve across its pupil. Below us, the thing in the river screamed without sound. Cracks raced through the green figure's face, then through every window in the chapel.

The glass bodies turned toward me.

Kade shouted that the shadows had released him. He climbed the scaffold carrying the cedar box. Together we packed the red eye in black wax and covered it with the old instruction sheet.

That closed one view, but the west windows were blazing now. The thing beneath the street could see through every colored fragment.

We could not board them fast enough.

So we turned the light.

Saint Orison's altar had a tarnished brass reredos large enough to reflect the sunset. We tore it from the wall and dragged it into the nave. When we tilted the metal toward the windows, their colored shadows reversed direction.

The light struck the glass figures from inside.

All thirty-two were thrown backward into their panels. Lead bodies shattered against lead outlines. Borrowed faces broke into bright pieces. The front door slammed. Beneath the chapel, the river rushed west again.

By sunset, every figure faced the altar.

All except the one with the silver branch.

Its broken face pointed sideways, one clear hole aimed at me.

The developer demolished Saint Orison's the next morning. We begged him to preserve the windows in place, but our photographs showed only ordinary religious glass. He accused us of damaging the panels and had them divided among buyers before the week ended.

Pieces went to restaurants, private homes, a hotel lobby, and a children's hospital. I tried to track them, but the sales list changed whenever I opened it.

Kade no longer casts a shadow in red light. He refuses to cross bridges over buried water.

I kept the cedar box sealed in my workshop.

Last night, sunset shone through the black wax.

A red eye appeared on my wall. It faced west at first. Then it turned toward me.

This morning, colored footprints crossed my floor and stopped beneath every window in the building.

The river under the city is knocking again, and now it knows how many windows lead outside.