Sister Hillie walked as quickly as was still proper  through the corridors separating her from her nephew. Glass paned doors, bulletin boards, carts with medical supplies, bedpans, and half eaten food we passed with haste and nary a glance as she strode purposefully and somehow with ill ease towards her destination. Father Daniel had left an uncharacteristically cryptic message for her, the gist of which was that Pelle needed her and was waiting in the chapel.<br/><br/>Her sweet nephew, always a delicate boy, now an equally  delicate young man, the present for his eighteenth birthday wrapped in her closet, to be gifted in less than a week's time, seemed in some sort of distress she was told, but the good father had hung up without going into detail.  Her white orthopedic shoes trod silently  but swiftly over the old linoleum flooring, around the next corner it would change to an older parquet, as she headed past administrative offices to the small chapel on the side.<br/><br/>Chest heaving, Sister Maria Hildegard, blessed herself with holy water at the entrance of the chapel, and looked through the gloom to spy her nephew sitting with a bowed head  on a pew, his bony shoulders sagging as if pressed down by a heavy weight.  The chapel seemed colder and gloomier than it should have, as though the sunlight streaming through the stained glass window couldn't penetrate the heavy air inside.<br/><br/>She shivered a little and pulled the thin cardigan closer around her shoulders as she walked down the aisle towards her Pelle.<br/><br/>Was it her imagination that the shadows seemed drawn closer around him? What a silly thought. She had had a long night, not leaving the bedside of Michael Lofnick, the 57 year old parishioner dying of melanoma even though the stench of his rotting skin soaked into her pores as she sat by him, reading passages from a book about saints.  No one else would sit by the man, citing urgent business elsewhere, when in truth it was his hideous aspect and smell of the grave that drove them away, the two rooms to either side  being kept vacant so as not to distress the other terminal patients.<br/><br/>"Pelle, my sweet boy!" she whispered in the hallowed space, "Father Daniel told me you were looking for me?" She kissed a clammy cold forehead and genuflected before sliding into the pew next to her nephew.