This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/TwistedUrbanTales on 2026-08-12 05:24:54+00:00.

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"Do you know the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?"

I looked up. A small girl stood in front of me with a Bible held against her chest with both hands.

I was fourteen at the time. She was eleven, and I knew her face from the third row on Sunday mornings. Could've sworn she saw me several times too, but I guessed she didn't recognize me.

I'd been running laps of the park down the road from our house, and had stopped at the bench to get my breath back. The sky was the color of dishwater that afternoon, and there was nobody else out.

We looked at each other for a few seconds before I took my headphones off and sighed. Not rudely. Just enough that she'd know I'd been asked before.

"Yes," I said.

She smiled. "Really? You know about Him?"

"I go to your church, Rebecca. I'm John."

That seemed to encourage her. She opened the Bible and started reading, and I recognized it before she was halfway through the sentence.

"And God said, Let there…"

"Be light. And there was light."

She blinked. Then she turned a few pages, and tried again.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son…"

"That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life," I said without any particular effort, because that was the point.

She stared a while longer, then flicked forward.

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh…"

"Me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake."

I got the whole thing out in one breath and then dropped my water bottle on the bench beside me like a mic. Her jaw actually fell open.

"You know the whole thing?"

I shrugged, a lie in the shape of modesty as I stifled a grin. I was top of my year in religious studies and most other subjects besides. I knew the books in order, the genealogies, the minor prophets nobody could name. The teacher had a habit of looking anywhere but at me when she asked the class a question.

Rebecca sat down next to me and put the Bible flat across her knees.

"I've prayed for months that I'd learn it faster," she said. "I don't."

"Well," I said, "prayer isn't really a study method."

Her face fell, and I remember being pleased with the line.

"You can pray, obviously," I added. "But if you want to remember something you have to learn it properly. Flashcards, repetition, notes. You read it, you say it back with the page shut, and then you do it again tomorrow, and the day after that, until it's not something you're remembering any more, it's just something you know."

She looked at the Bible on her knees for a long moment.

"Would you help me?"

"Sure."

We met at that bench nearly every afternoon for most of a year. Sometimes we just recited, but other times we acted the stories out. She was hopeless at it in a way that made her laugh at herself, which I think was most of the appeal. I corrected her constantly, and she never took it badly - she just went again. I think she liked that I never made her feel slow when she forgot.

And she forgot everything.

We would do a passage on Monday and she'd have it perfectly. On Wednesday it would be gone down to the first line. I put it down to her being eleven.

She came to ours for dinner in the spring. My mom made enough food for a feast, which she always did, and said grace over it. Mom told her about the spare key under the second flowerpot on the way out. Rebecca came back four or five times after that. It was, for a few months, the most ordinary thing in the world.

We were working through Genesis when it started to go wrong.

The first thing was small enough that I laughed. We were on Genesis 22, and she got to the part where Isaac asks his father Abraham where the animal is. Then on a Tuesday, halfway through the same chapter, she'd said, "Sorry, Isaac, I've lost it again."

I frowned.

"John," I said.

She blinked.

"Oops," she finally said, and we both laughed it off.

Then two weeks later she walked up to me at the bench with the Bible against her chest.

"Do you know the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?"

I thought she was joking at first, so I grinned. She just looked at me with an expression you make at a stranger who seems to know you.

My smile faded.

"Rebecca... I'm John."

Nothing for a second or two. Then she smiled, and said, "Oh, John".

I woke up in the dark maybe three weeks after that.

At first, I thought I heard a noise from downstairs. Then it came again, much closer, and my eyes adjusted enough to make out someone standing between me and my bedroom door.

"Rebecca?"

She didn't answer me. She started walking, slowly, and she was talking as she came. The words arrived half second before I understood what they were.

"And Abraham stretched forth his hand…"

My eyes shot open as I recognized the verse - and recalled what came after. I sat up and scrambled back against the headboard.

"…and took the knife to slay his son."

She was holding one of the knives from our kitchen in a fist.

"Rebecca. Rebecca, listen to me…"

"I have to," she said. She wasn't shouting. She sounded apologetic and polite, the way you sound when you've been asked to do something in front of people.

"I have to. It says."

"That's not what it means. The whole story is that He stops it-"

She suddenly brought the knife down with all the strength she had, and it went into the headboard right next to my face. I yelled for my parents as she used both hands on it, trying to work it loose. I could hear my dad shouting somewhere behind the wall and my mom on the stairs. Neither of them were going to be fast enough.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

"ABRAHAM," I shouted at her. "Abraham!"

She stopped.

Then she looked up, and something came over her face that was almost relief.

"Here am I."

And then she waited. I understood in that half-second that I'd have to say the next line.

"Lay not thine hand upon the lad," I said breathlessly. "N-neither do thou any thing unto him."

She let go of the knife.

Then my dad burst through the door and got hold of her. She didn't struggle at all. She was crying by the time my mother reached us, saying sorry, saying she didn't want to, and I sat on the bed with a split headboard next to my ear.

I found out later that she had a a brain condition. Her own immune system had been attacking her brain for months. It affects memory, behavior and judgement. It also causes seizures and psychosis, and by the time anyone caught it, Rebecca had been living with it for a year.

She went to hospital, and stayed there a long time. Our church prayed for her every Sunday, and nobody at that church ever once said a word to me about what she'd done.

I didn't see her again for eleven years.

She found me on Facebook last spring and we met for coffee, and seemed was fine. She had a job in a school office, and she was funny in a dry way she hadn't been as a child.

She apologized about ten minutes in, like she'd been holding it since the car park.

"I remember the knife," she said. "I remember being in your room. I actually believed I was Abraham."

I told her it was an illness and not to worry about it.

Then she asked if I still went to church, and I said not really.

"I know pretty much all of it and none of it does anything for me. You couldn't hold two verses and you meant every word."

She thought about that for a while.

"I used to be terrified of forgetting Him," she said. "That was the whole reason I came up to you in the park. I thought if I could just get it in me, properly, then it couldn't go. Thank you for helping me remember, John."

I drove home feeling better than I had in years.

That same night, I got into bed about eleven. My phone went off on the pillow beside me, and I glanced at it.

I'm sorry Isaac.

I blinked.

I was still looking at it when I heard the sound at the window. My heart began to race. I looked out, but there was nothing.

Then, as her face came into view on the other side of the glass, I realized she had been crouching below it.

BANG!

Crack.

A couple more times, then she came in straight through the glass.

I got out of the bedroom and down half the hall before she had hold of me. I want to say I fought her off, but she was twenty-two, holding a huge knife, and absolutely not holding back.

"Abraham," I yelled as I grabbed her hand. "ABRAHAM!"

"Here… am I," she replied, straining against me.

"Lay not thine hand upon the lad!"

But this time, she didn't stop.

I hadn't looked at a Bible for years at this point, but the next verse came to me the way it always did without being asked for.

"Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked! And behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns! And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the STEAD OF HIS SON!"

She went absolutely still.

Then she got up off me. She stood in my hallway with the knife down at her side and her head slightly tilted. She spoke calmly.

"God will provide himself a lamb."

Then she wandered out of my front door into the dark, presumably to go and find one.

They found about forty minutes later, three streets away. She's back in hospital now.

I went to see her in June. She was flat and slow on the medication. Her hair was thinner.

She had asked me for God, and I gave her flashcards and repetition. Now she can hold text, running with nothing behind it. Her Genesis 22 stops at the knife and always will. There aren't...

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