Short horror fiction: Thorn Cathedral

When a neighbourhood tries to clear up the empty lot between their houses, they learn it would have been best left alone.

Jun 28, 2025

A sign that is hanging from a tree — Photo by S. Laiba Ali on Unsplash

Hey! I’m Mata, and welcome to this week’s horror newsletter. After the last couple of experimental story weeks (found footage and interactive!), today we’ve got a more traditional short story of the suburban supernatural.

Let’s dig in!

Thorn Cathedral

In the surrounding houses, if the land was ever mentioned, it was simply called ‘The Lot’, but everyone preferred to never think of it at all. From overlooking windows, their gaze skimmed across the overgrown scrubland, avoiding lingering on its tangle of spiked bushes and strangling vines. Children dared each other to go onto The Lot, and small holes in the fences allowed passage for the young. If you leaned down and looked through one of these openings, you’d see a leafy passageway, reminiscent of a fairy tale glen, scented with wild berries and shaped perfectly for small crawling bodies.

Then Lisa Treyvon disappeared. Around the schoolyard, whispers said she had been bet that she wouldn’t go in one side of The Lot and come out of the other. She was a tough girl with a short bob haircut, wide shoulders, and a default menacing scowl that teachers laughed nervously about in the privacy of their break room. She wasn’t the kind to shy away from a bet, but she never came out of the other side.

Police were called, whimpering search dogs dragged in, and fences were torn down to reveal dense bramble crushed against The Lot’s boundaries, thick stemmed bushes turned to woody trunks as tough as iron cages. It took chainsaws to make any progress, the distress about possible lost evidence visible on the faces of the forensic squad, but Lisa was not found. The path she’d crawled in through led to a dead end at the heart of The Lot. Drops of dried-brown blood—which DNA tests confirmed were hers—crusted a few thorns, but nothing more. The search expanded through the tangled land, finding no clothing, no body, no cowering child, alive or other. Lisa Treyvon was gone.

The fences went up again, their holes nailed shut by stone-faced fathers and mothers, but every full moon the boards worked their way free, and fairy paths called to the children to play games within, but every child knew about Lisa Treyvon. There were new stories over the years, each passed into childhood lore: Jared Swanson swore he heard a girl’s voice calling to him from inside The Lot; Michaela Leisti took the dare to go in through a hole and was grabbed by small hands before she was halfway inside, needing her friends to drag her free; and Gordon Short crawled all the way in, then rushed backwards out, his pale face riven with scratches. He never spoke again before his family moved across the country. Every schoolyard had these stories whispered in their corners, passing down through the years.

Eventually a committee was formed to find a solution for The Lot. A retired lawyer searched for ownership records, and none were found: no one had ever bought the land, no one had claimed ownership of it in the whole history of the town. The neighbours staked a claim of mutual rights and a puzzled councillor agreed they could take it. The committee went onto the land, burning the jungle of weeds to ash, razing every inch into dark soil. It was raked over, grass seed planted, watered and tended, but no lawn grew on The Lot. A muddy mire formed, leaking black scum onto the sidewalk when it rained, drifting through the gutters to surround the adjacent buildings, leaking into their basements, bringing the scent of woodsmoke and festering mould. The faces at the committee meetings grew thin, skin transparent, veins throbbing with weak heartbeats, deep sleepless circles hung like sodden burgundy silk beneath their eyes. Their breath smelled of cinders. The Lot needs an owner to transform it, they decided, not a group of part-timers, they said, but between the words there hung a congealing conviction the land’s deed had spread its sourness to them. Let someone else take this burden, they thought.

It took years. Buyers visited and left shivering, hugging themselves even on hot days, and the price for the land rights plunged ever lower, until a bright-eyed first-time buyer family, with desperation drifting from their threadbare collars, took on The Lot to build a starter home. They lived in a rental elsewhere. The mother worked long shifts while filth clung to the father’s boots as he trudged across the land. His hired digger broke down when its scoop first broke the dirt, the next digger slid into its own hole, and calamity followed misfortune. The stream of poor luck was endless, and the father’s face slacked into the gaunt pallor of a man three times his age, yet eventually the foundations were set and he began assembling the house’s timber frame.

The neighbours heard him banging nails into the night. Each blow landed out of rhythm with the ones before. Manic blasts of frenetic hammer falls would descend into staccato beats before eerie silence. In the breaking morning, the wooden posts stood in the mist, assembled in a pattern that seemed like walls on the outside, but within they spun and twisted like they he was building a labyrinth. Cross beams and bracing diagonals jutted through the nest at the centre of the construction, making a tangled nest within.

The family’s mother visited and could be heard pleading with the father, but her words were lost in the strange echoing of The Lot’s acoustics. When she left, he stood without moving until everyone averted their eyes and returned to their days, going to work, doing the laundry, paying bills, and cooking meals, all the while torn between relief that The Lot was no longer their problem, and hungry guilt towards the unwitting new owners of that tarnished land.

In the evening, when the crepuscular light brought The Lot's proximity seeping into their minds, the neighbours looked and saw, jaws hanging open, the father had not moved. On his southern side, his sunburnt skin was raw as steak, and his shaded north-facing skin was grey as concrete.

Someone else would check on him. But not them. They wouldn’t be the one. The others were closer, or had easier access, or or or.

No one went to speak with him. Maybe he would not have answered.

Night fell and the hammering recommenced.

See, the neighbours told themselves, everything is fine. He’s fine.

In the morning, the pillars and posts and joints and bars and braces had grown into a twisting five-pronged cathedral. Over garden fences, neighbours whispered wonderings about how he had ever built it alone, all in one night. Other hands must have helped him, they said, but there were no carloads of workers arriving after dark. In their minds floated images of dirty, soil-stained hands, formed with mud and brittle charcoal, but none spoke these mad thoughts aloud. It would not do to descended into the kind of whispering heard among the children.

The father was gone. There was no hammering the next night, or the night after.

On the following dusk, knocks came on their doors. Police officers, proffering an ink-jet printed picture of a much-healthier looking father, asking if anyone had seen him since that one motionless day. No, everyone said, we only heard the hammering.

Flyers appeared, stapled and taped to telegraph poles and lamps.

The rain washed away the posters’ colours. The father’s face faded, dripped, and tore.

In The Lot, brown and red leaves slipped silently from the earth. Tendrils curled around the frame that would never become a house, they buried into the structure’s core, they reached upwards to new heights. Their thorns guarded the edges of The Lot.

Fences were put up again. The locals stopped speaking about The Lot, and the children resumed their darkly muttered tales.

The Lot’s five spires cast their gaze over the neighbouring homes. New growth reinforced old, ensuring the terrible cathedral will never fall. In its shadow drifts the scent of berries, enticing except for the slightest hint of bitterness, something rotten and sweet with decay. No lamplight falls onto The Lot, and on stormy nights the wind through the strange structure calls with the voices of a young girl, and a father, and yet more odd, older cries.

The end.

Short horror fiction: Thorn Cathedral

When a neighbourhood tries to clear up the empty lot between their houses, they learn it would have been best left alone.

Thorn Cathedral

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