The Temple (Oates short story)

The story is about a woman who constantly hears a mysterious sound that at first sounds like an animal stranded within an area outside but the stronger the noise gets the more the woman realizes it is something else. The noise is horrid to hear according to Oates, "How like baby's cry, terribly distressing to hear! and the scratching which came in spasmodic, desperate flurries, was yet more distressing, evoking an obscure horror." The more she hears this wretched noise, the more anxious she becomes to find the source. She finally sends herself on a mission, gathering her gardening tools and setting out to find where the noises are coming from.

The more she digs, the closer she gets to the source, until she finds the source of the noise; a child's skull.

She removes the years of dust from the skull, not much is left of it. There is no hair to uncover and there are some teeth missing. She begins to dig deeper where she found the skull and finds numerous pieces of bone, which lead her to believe that they are missing pieces of the child's skull. She brings the skull and the rest of the bones into her house where she wraps them in a velvet cloth and promises the skeleton that she will always be here for it, she will never leave it. She lays the skeleton near her bed in human form. In the last paragraph of the story, after discussing how the skeleton is laid out, Oates writes:

In this way the woman's bedroom became a secret temple. On the velvet cloth the skull and bones, unnamed, would be discovered after the woman's death, but that was a long way off.

• Lit Gothic
• The Temple By Joyce Carol Oates
• American Gothic Tales, edited By Joyce Carol Oates