The Black Church: A Short Story

A week alone in Iceland's most isolated church. A grief too heavy to carry. An ancient darkness stirring beneath.

Pastor David Thornwell has lost his wife, his faith, and any reason to keep preaching. When he's offered a week-long silent retreat at the Black Church of Búðir — a tar-blackened chapel on Iceland's remote Snæfellsnes Peninsula — he accepts, hoping the vast silence of winter will either restore his shattered belief or give him permission to let go entirely.

But the Black Church holds secrets older than Christianity.

Strange journals left by previous caretakers describe lights that pool where they shouldn't, voices beneath the foundations, and an archaeological dig that was abandoned without explanation. Claw marks scar the heavy wooden door. And as the aurora borealis blazes across consecutive nights, David begins to understand that this church was not built to celebrate God's presence — but to keep vigil against something far more ancient.

With the ground cracking beneath the altar and shadows advancing across the frozen lava field, David must make an impossible choice: surrender to the vast indifference of deep time, or ring the bell — not as an act of faith, but as a single, defiant act of human will.

Set against the real landscape of Iceland's Snæfellsnes Peninsula — the inspiration for Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth — The Black Church is a story of grief, geological terror, and the thin line between worship and containment.

For readers who love the atmospheric dread of M.R. James, the cosmic scope of H.P. Lovecraft, and the emotional weight of literary horror.
First published as part of The Buried and the Drowned: A Short Story Collection by J.F. Penn