Dark Fantasy · Horror · The Plot Calls Anthology · Jul 18, 2025

The Plot Calls #11 : "The Truth Thickens"

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and/or Ai-assisted-content-generation. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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The sun never shone right on the Chapel of the Clear Cross. It was always too bright or too dim. Too dusty in spring, too damp in fall. Nestled on the edge of a withering cornfield in a township too small for maps, the chapel stood like a held breath—half-proud, half-collapsing.

Its preacher, Reverend Elmer Goss, was built the same. He was a man of meat and leather, his voice gravel-flecked and jagged. The old pews still creaked when he walked past. But fewer creaked each Sunday. The pews were half-empty now, filled mostly with tired farmhands and rusted memories. Still, Reverend Goss preached.

“We are not supposed to change,” he boomed from the pulpit, slamming a weathered Bible against the stand. “We are supposed to return. That’s what the good book says. That’s what the Lord wants!”

He spat the words like buckshot. He quoted scripture—out of order, out of context, always loud. But it wasn’t verses that stirred the few remaining parishioners anymore. It was the name.

The president-elect.

Goss said it like it was a prophecy: “He’s gonna fix it. Put it all back like it was. Back before the city bled out into our fields. Before they started changing street names. Before Spanish crept into the schools. Before everything went crooked.”

He looked out at his congregation—old faces too tired to resist, young faces too scared to interrupt.

“Truth is truth,” he snarled. “And truth ain’t democratic.”

He paused, wiping his forehead with a frayed handkerchief. Behind him, the cross on the wall leaned a little more than last week.

“And anyone who tells you different is a liar. Or worse.” He leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “God’s not for everyone. He’s for us. His chosen.”

No one said “Amen.”

When the sermon ended, Reverend Goss stood in silence before the altar, waiting for something—applause, perhaps. But all he heard was wind pressing against the loose boards of the chapel walls. He sighed, stepped down, and made his way to the back exit.

Outside, in the dying church garden, the breeze shifted. The air thickened.

He felt it before he saw it. A whisper with no voice. A pull with no hand.

And there he was.

A pale man in black. Standing idle near the garden’s edge, motionless but not still. Before him, nestled among weeds and cracked paving stones, was a small patch of dark violet-black soil. It shimmered with something like hunger.

“Comfort in nothing,” the figure said, dry and hollow. The men stood motionless. The figure didn’t breathe. It didn’t blink. It stood idle. Then, breaking the silence, the idle figure said, “The One Beneath offers a trade.”

Reverend Goss chuckled. “Son, I’ve wrestled with Satan himself in this very garden. You come here for a debate, or just to scare me?”

The Idle Man did not blink. “Sloth of character. Of intellect. Of compassion. Your being in stagnation—tastes like rain to asphalt. I was you once. Now, I stand idle until those like you—like me—call. The One Beneath allows me to remember my fall as he does his. My memory of preaching against God with his own texts never fades. It remains idle in my mind as I stand idle.”

Goss squinted. “You mocking me with riddles, boy?”

“The Plot calls—The One Beneath hungers,” responded the Idle Man, neither waiting nor expecting.

The preacher stepped forward, instinctively gripping the Bible still in his hand.

“You’re not real,” he muttered. “You’re just… just something I dreamed up. From the fake news. From the noise! You’re a liberal scarin’ me with your lies! Black folk in schools! Mexicans voting illegally! You’re a symptom of the problem!”

The Idle Man stood idle. It was as though it stared at a reflection of something—someone it once was.

Reverend Goss examined the Idle Man. “You ain’t fightin’. You must know I’m right. You must know the word of God. Well, son, your silence means you know the Bible is always right—the Bible I’ve read all my cotton-pickin’ life,” Goss growled.

The Idle Man did not respond. It simply stood. Idle.

Goss continued shouting at himself. “If wetback moon crickets stop speaking better than me and black women know their place—of course I accept the trade. The chosen one rose up to drain the swamp! A swamp only he can fix because he’s like the swamp monster who rose from it!”

The Idle Man did not move.

A long silence. The soil pulsed faintly as if whispering through its glow.

Then, the figure finally spoke. “Your conviction is to your fear. Your sloth of character—sloth of intellect—is not enough to feed The One Beneath. Yet, my master hungers. The portal—the plot—must thicken. Solidify. Only then can The One Beneath usher the end times you seek as an excuse to wipe your sins.” The Idle Man reached into his coat. It withdrew a small, crooked blade.

Goss tried to step back. “No. Wait—I preach truth—!”

But his feet stuck. His limbs wouldn’t answer. The ground rippled beneath him. He was standing in the plot. Sinking.

The Idle Man knelt. They locked eyes. “Like you, I once wore garments I didn’t believe in—spreading lies to soothe my self-made fear and well-fed ignorance. I also yearned to leave it to Beaver so that he could make things great again. I called the plot. I called The One Beneath. You cast your ballot, now behold—your vote.”

A sound like a gasp with no breath escaped Goss’s throat.

The knife whispered across flesh. A warm rush followed.

Goss collapsed onto the soil. The Bible—something he read emotionally yet never comprehended—landed beside him. It was creased, marked, scuffed—used, yet never quite read. Never quite understood beyond excuses to be right, excuses that justified avoiding knowledge: excuses born from willful distortions of simple lessons.

Reverend Goss’s neighbors were those who looked like him, sounded like him, and despised those who didn’t. He used the word of God to preach a sermon of self-comfort and individual sloth of morality, intellect, and awareness.

Yet, the reverend himself was aware of his sloth. He wasn’t willfully idle to it. He used it to funnel his anger, his fear, and his perspective. He was fighting a battle with himself that he pushed onto anyone who would listen.

The reverend just wanted to shout that he was scared—shout that he was angry because he was afraid; afraid to learn, afraid to grow, afraid that he might see a person and understand all people are people. There would be no ‘one’ left to hate if every ‘one’ was human.

That would mean no one was ever 3/5s. No back was ever wet. No citizen could ever truly be illegal. The governance of land was superseded by the fact that land existed in the first place. No rule of law surpassed the law of truth—the truth that no man, no law, no government made the land they divided.

Maybe power—regardless of the form—and its pursuit was a tactic for the corrupt to have outlet for their internal shortcomings. Shortcomings that expressed themselves as cravings for external objects and internal lack. Shortcomings that manifested as an envious, lustful gluttony that vaingloriously sought to have more and more in its insatiable greed—free to wrathfully punish those who wouldn’t yield what was craved for, never self-reflecting through a willful, self-imposed sloth of character, intellect, and being that rewarded itself with fleeting unfulfilling pleasures: more land, its own pictures, soldiers marching on its birthday.

Corruption that only further corrupted. Corruption that made the world cold as it forgot concepts like hope and truth existed beyond social media and propaganda perpetuated by balding men in fortified bunkers with no addresses—just facades of concrete buildings painted white over landmasses with pentagrams aligning what appeared to be memorials.

Buildings that house the buildings of pointless titles for meaningless men whose only power was scaring weaker men to protect them for perceived access, perceived privilege, and perceived power by association.

Corruption that made the world sicker, more silent, more still—and more compliant and accepting of corruption being the way of the world.

What better way to crush potential resistance than to normalize the belief that there was no point—through control of propaganda that preached all things at once to break individual thought, will, and hope?

Farcebooks, NetworkedNarcissists, InstatGrats, TiskTocks, all merged with three-letter agencies. Man’s own soil. A soil on Earth that Reverend Goss pushed new generations to, corralling them like hogs to be shaped and molded by algorithms owned by pale-faced nepotists with no goal beyond controlling, consuming, and breeding as though they earned the right to pass their genes simply by existing.

The Idle Man did not look at the body. This Idle Man remembered its human reflection. Goss was a mirror image that couldn’t take its place and allow it to return to its life.

Instead, the Idle Man turned to the plot, now gleaming with faint light.

“Like mine once, his sermon was never the word of God, was it?” this Idle Man asked the One Beneath the soil.

The plot glowed gently in reply.

“Sloth of being—an old dog who assumes fairness is a new trick—as I once did. His soul was his blood. His blood feeds the soil.”

A faint rumble echoed through the ground.

The plot dimmed. Something screeched, inaudible. Hungry. Unsatisfied.

“It wasn’t enough,” the Idle Man responded flatly.

The plot pulsed.

“His blood tastes of deceit? He didn’t want heaven? He wanted a rapture from who he was… and used religion—God—to hide his refusal to grow?” the Idle Man asked.

The soil swallowed what remained of Reverend Elmer Goss, and then stilled.

The cross in the chapel cracked down its center.

A wind blew across the cornfield, and not a single stalk bent.

And far below, in the hollow that was neither heaven nor hell, the One Beneath stirred.

The Idle Man stood. He turned—not left, not right, but in a direction unnamed, where roads don’t go.

As he vanished, he whispered, “Still hungry. Still searching. The Plot Calls. The Plot Thickens.”