The storm brought them up from the bottom of the lake, bloated and skeletal alike as if it had been keeping the town's dead for such an occasion as a storm of the century. The waters lined each body up neatly along its perimeter, eyes open to stare up at the sky and all hands arranged to point towards the church by the shore.
The town had always suspected something odd was going on behind doors that only opened for a congregation of people who never entered or left in any visible way, they were simply seen when the vicar opened the shutters to shed sunlight upon his sermons.
Now the lake itself was declaring him a suspect, of what the town couldn't say but seeing long lost loved ones accusatory fingers spurred them into gruesome action. The doors were broken down revealing a congregation made up of straw dolls and a terrified vicar who said that the lake wouldn't let him leave.
And so the town settled it by drowning the poor man in the very waters that had held him prisoner for seventeen years. They weighed him down with stones from the broken remains of his church and dropped him down the lake's centre, praying everything would clear up again.
The next morning the only body there was the vicer's, his eyes open to the sky and finger pointing to the town.
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