Lot 142 : My Last House Blessing

Father Cain had performed over a hundred house blessings. He arrived in a waxed Cadillac, wearing black lambskin gloves, carrying a cheap rosary scuffed with sandpaper and a vial of tap water he called holy. He was a fraud, and he knew it. But he told himself the placebo worked — families felt better, and his social media grew. Then he took a job at a Victorian house outside a new subdivision, and the blessing became the last one he would ever perform.

The client was Lacey Stevens, a bubbly young woman whose husband Brian made no secret of his contempt for the whole affair. The problem was familiar: unexplained noises, doors closing on their own, a chill draft. The more significant detail was a black ooze seeping from the foundation, under a rug in the basement, where a rusted padlocked door covered a crawlspace. Father Cain had heard it all before. He planned to perform his usual act, collect his donation, and leave.

But when Brian slammed the basement door and cut the lights as a joke, Father Cain climbed back upstairs to find the kitchen empty. No appliances. No furniture. No color. He walked outside to find his car gone, the driveway gone, the construction site gone — nothing but open fields under an ashen sky. In the distance, two storks moved with mechanical legs, bent their necks backward in unison, and produced a sound like gunfire from their beaks.