Cold Ashes

A tragic 1984 fire continues to haunt one of the survivors in a manner most unnatural.

***Content Warning: Contains repeated and descriptive references to deadly house fires.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Episode Forty: Cold Ashes.

(Sounds of barn swallows)

NARRATOR

David sips idly from the can of PBR, sitting behind the wheel of his old ’98 Dodge Ram. This far from town and with the truck parked on his own land, he has little fear of trouble from law enforcement, who is usually happy enough to turn a blind eye on drinking behind the wheel so long as he stays off the public roads. The May evening is warm with the newly arrived spring, and yet a faint shiver passes down David’s neck as he gazes into the deepening shadows of the dilapidated, fire-damaged church on the edge of his land.

It should not be there at all, not anymore. After the fire in 1984, which claimed the lives of five teenagers and injured almost a half dozen more, the remains of the August Bible Brethren Church were left to slowly deteriorate in the merciless elements. Four years after the tragedy, David’s father and namesake bought the land and tore down the charred and leaning structure within the first six months of taking the property title. David Sr. had never liked Pastor Hortham, even before the fire which many considered at least partially the minister’s fault, and his dislike of the man had only intensified in the years that followed it.

David doubts very much that his father was alone in those feelings, and yet somehow, no real consequence ever seemed to befall Hortham, who finally left the county in 1991 to take up a new ministry in Texas.

Some claimed it was the sight of the ruined church, which had inexplicably risen again after its amateur demolition, that sent him away.

No one ever was able to provide a satisfactory explanation for why the church came to stand again, when it should hardly have stood before it was torn down, so gutted was it by the blaze. Most baffled of all was David’s father, even though many seemed to believe it was some sort of sick prank on his part. The sheriff came out to take a look, more out of courtesy than real hope of learning anything, but there was no visible sign of any human activity since the demolition in 1988. The elder David had not even bothered to farm over it, only occasionally releasing his small herd of red Angus cattle to graze the returning native grasses around it.

Even so, it became the established explanation that someone had in fact rebuilt it in secret, as unlikely as it seemed. After a few years of tolerating it with increasing agitation and more frequent surly mutterings, David Sr. had finally torn it down a second time in ‘94.

It was up again within a month.

David Senior never tried to destroy it again after that. He did grow a little stranger, though, in the years that followed, seeming always to be in the attitude of listening to something just on the edge of hearing, or waiting for something that he could not name. His first heart attack came in January 1998, and he remained in the hospital until his third and final attack five months later.

The land had become David Jr.’s then, and with it, the dark mystery of the ruined church that should not be.

For him, it was different, though. His father may have despised the pastor, but David had not, at least in 1984. And the girl with whom he had been hopelessly infatuated with at the time, Beatrice Dane, had been a darling of the congregation, bright and kind and dedicated to the church.

Being sixteen and lacking in judgement, he joined the church without a second thought, hoping naively that this might somehow bring him closer to Beatrice. And instead, it had gotten him locked inside that church the night that it burned.

Over dinner, Elaine asks if he is alright, noting that David seems distracted. He smiles at his wife and says that he’s fine, that he’s just a little worried about the fall in calf prices this year.

You went to the church again, she says, seeing through him at once.

Hesitantly, he nods his confession. She sighs wearily, but doesn’t say anything further. They have had slightly varying versions of this conversation many times, and both of them know that another will change very little.

At last, speaking more to himself than to her, David says that he has to try again.

I know, she replies softly, but I wish you wouldn’t.

Later that night, he tosses and turns for hours before he falls asleep, occasionally waking Elaine momentarily before she nods back off. He envies her easy sleep as much as he feels guilty for interrupting it. When he finally does fade into slumber, his dreams are filled with licking tongues of bright and painful heat, and with the ear-splitting screams of his classmates.

He wakes, clammy and sticking to the sheets tangled around his legs, at 3:13 AM. Knowing he will not sleep again, he rises and begins to dress, taking great care not to wake his wife again. He walks stiffly toward the kitchen and starts the coffee machine, then sits and tries to gather his ragged thoughts, tries to clear the soporific fog from his mind. When the coffee is done and he sits sipping it black from a well-worn, sun-yellow mug, an odd notion enters his head, one that strikes him as almost biblical.

Draining the last of the coffee, he looks through the kitchen, finding only a partially full canister of iodized salt. He makes a mental note to run into town and visit the feed store later in the morning, wondering if his mind is beginning to fray at the edges.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It takes some convincing, but after about forty minutes on the phone, David is finally able to convince his old friend Chris Badura to bring out his Kubota excavator and tear down the church. Like David, Chris has lived in the county almost all his life, and is deeply familiar with the story of the August Bible Brethren Church. And like many others in the county, he regards it with a deeply rooted but seldom-acknowledged superstitious fear. Were it not for their friendship, David is not sure he could have talked Chris into it, even with the payment offered for the work.

What he doesn’t tell his friend is what he has planned with the 600 pounds of mineral salt in the back of his pickup. He hasn’t even told Elaine – he is too afraid that he will see his own misgivings reflected and amplified in her eyes.

It takes Chris two weekends to finish the job, and during that time, David finds he cannot even look in the direction of the ruin without a profound sense of anxiety quivering in his stomach. He even offers to pay Chris a little more than originally agreed fee to gather up the scraps and haul them away, feeling again that surge of nausea when he considers having to look upon the bones of the burnt house of prayer.

He waits until Elaine has gone to visit her mother and sister before he drives out to the site, and spends the rest of the afternoon carefully spreading the salt over the filled-in foundations of the missing structure, making sure it is as evenly distributed over the ash and dust as possible. He thinks all the while that he is ruining the land, and that his father’s bones might wriggle up out of their grave if he knew what his son was doing, but it feels somehow right.

Or maybe, maybe it just feels like the last untried desperate idea in his mind.

Returning to the yard as the afternoon gives way to dusk, he turns up the Led Zeppelin song on the radio, trying to drown out the lingering doubts in his mind. Over a dinner of reheated leftover meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and garden peas, Elaine asks if he feels any better.

Sure, he replies, and they both know it is a lie but do not remark upon it.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

He doesn’t look again at the salted foundations, not for three days. Though he tells himself it is because it is finally over with and done, he knows it is the ominous blackness that fills his mind whenever he thinks of inspecting the hated old site, and of what might lurk within that inner dark.

The dreams come again, though, the dreams that are distorted and twisting memories. Every night he walks again beneath the rafters as they burn, as the wood screams with such loud agony that he cannot distinguish it from the cries of the other teenagers as they pound on the double doors of the church entrance, no matter that they already know Pastor Hortham has sealed them inside for the night. A purity party, he called it.

David, his racing and muddled mind catching at last upon a faint new hope, calls out to the others about the other exit, the one in the back of the basement. They do not hear him, of course, deafening by the draconic roar of the conflagration, and so he taps on the shoulder of Kevin Wiestling, a boy with whom he has always shared a mutual dislike. Yet in this moment, as David shouts words into Kevin’s ear, this is forgotten, and it is with unimaginable relief that he sees the other boy nod and begin to relay the message to the others.

Together, all of them following David by unspoken consensus, they descend into the basement, which is for the moment cooler and less smoky. The electric lights have failed, and halfway through they are obliged to feel their way along the walls, already growing warm, until they find the door. David depresses the push bar and feels a bilious panic rising up his throat, thinking that Hortham must have locked this door too when he left. Only when he throws himself in wild desperation against it and feels it shift under his weight does he remember that this door has always stuck a little. Then they are spilling out into the blessedly cool, pure air of the spring night, coughing fitfully, some of them sobbing and screaming, one of the girls retching so hard David thinks she must be tearing something internal.

Then Emma Hargrave begins to shout that Michelle and Arthur are missing, and Kevin Wiestling adds that the two Hortham boys are missing too. David looks back to the burning church and feels suddenly completely frigid, as though his marrow has turned to ice.

We have to go back in, Kevin is yelling at him now, over and over.

I know, I know, David returns.

Yet neither of them moves. The fire blazes before them, seeming to have trebled in size in the few moments since they first emerged. It is a living thing, David thinks as he gazes upon it, a feral beast that feeds with mindless joy.

Later, he will remember hearing the screams of those trapped inside, but in this moment, all he can truly hear is the roar and the screaming hiss of the inferno.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

For the third night in a row, David lies tossing and turning, unable to sleep for fear of what his dreams may dredge up. More than anything, he fears that he will see that awful night of the fire again, only this time the five dead children will emerge from the flames, their charred, hollow sockets and fleshless jaws full of accusation as they drag him down into the depths of the burning basement, or even into hell.

Around 2:37 AM, he rises, careful not to disturb Elaine, then dresses silently and moves toward the kitchen. His stomach is too upset to even contemplate his usual coffee. He paces around the living room, peering uselessly through the windows into the impenetrable darkness. Yet even so, each time he looks in the direction of the former church, an overwhelming spike of terror courses through his body, as though it has realized something that has not yet permeated his brain – as though he senses by instinct that something gazes back at him from the black.

An overpowering need for a cigarette takes him, though he quit almost twelve years ago. He hesitates only a moment before rifling through his wife’s purse on the kitchen table, and once more before fishing out her lighter and half-filled pack of Camels. He was always more of a Marlboro man, but the need for nicotine, for all the attendant sensory comfort of the routine of smoking, will not be denied. He slips one into his mouth and steps outside to light it, sucking down that first drag greedily.

This relief is only momentary, though. Halfway down to the filter, the blackened church looms again in his mind. It is gone, he tells himself, and yet he still feels its dark magnetic pull, its persistent gravity. Almost unconsciously, he descends from the porch and takes a few steps toward the south. David stops and stands there in the night, feeling lost and utterly exposed.

The cigarette burns down to the filter, and he throws it to the ground, crushes out its dying light under the toe of his right boot. Then he gazes up into the velvet black sky, feeling that he is slowly being swallowed by something vast and nameless.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When dawn comes, he is already standing where the August Bible Brethren Church once reared so darkly. And the first grey light of the day reveals that the salted foundations are no longer bare, but instead bear black fruit, like mold slowly growing over the aged, cracked concrete.

No, he whispers, and yet it is not a surprise, not really. It is only the confirmation of the doom he has long been expecting, one that has dogged him for the better part of four decades now.

He walks back toward the house, neglecting the morning chores. Every few steps, without intending it, he finds himself glancing back over his shoulders, feeling certain that something is following him home. When he steps through the front door, Elaine looks up from her toast and asks him if he is alright. David offers a partial lie, claiming that he is feeling sick, then goes back to the bedroom to lie down, brushing off her concerned inquiries. He does not sleep, only lies down with the blinds drawn, staring up into the artificial twilight of the quiet bedroom. For hours he lies there, feeling like his bones have turned to lead, like his insides have gone putrid and liquescent and pooled thickly in his belly. From time to time, the old, internalized shame about idleness surfaces in his mind, only to be drowned again by the black undertow of hopelessness.

What does it matter if the fields are left to be overgrown with weeds, after all, when he knows what waits for him, what has always awaited him? Maybe it would have been content to slumber still, to torment him only in dreams and thoughts, if he had not surrendered to his fear and rage, but now it has been roused anew, its hunger stirred.

When the last of the sun’s fingers burn orange in the westernmost reaches of the sky, the listless despair is replaced by a restless dread of the coming night, and he rises and paces around the house. Elaine again asks if he is alright, and his reply now is clipped and sour, and though he instantly regrets it, he does not apologize.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The display of the digital clock is black and dead when he wakes, and even if he cared to try, he could not guess the time. In the first moments of consciousness, he is sure the recurrent dream has returned yet again, but then he sees Elaine still asleep beside him, and feels the blasting heat of the spreading flames. Panicking, he shakes his wife awake, and she at once understands the situation and moves into quiet action. Opening the window, she begins to climb out awkwardly, but hesitates when she sees that David is not immediately behind her.

He waves for her to go on, and only reluctantly does she move to obey. Looking back into the growing conflagration, he lingers still, driven by some impulse he doesn’t quite comprehend. Within the leaping bright tongues, five smallish silhouettes move, beckoning him toward them.

Please, he whimpers, just leave me alone.

In answer, they emerge as living fragments of the greater blaze and walk deliberately toward him. David turns to run, but the window his wife escaped through is gone; in its place yawns the dismal stairwell that once led down into the old church basement.

He lets out a single, wavering cry of despair, as he plunges downward into the darkness of the basement, more stygian than ever it was in the long-gone church. And just when he thinks he has run far too long to be in any structure of human dimensions, he perceives the faintest red glow suffusing the darkness ahead, gradually supplanting it, and then a ring wall of embers surrounds him, bursting after a few moments into full flame. Five figures once more step forth, now black and wizened, but with eyes that are blue-white points of fire.

I’m sorry, David breathes raggedly.

They say nothing. The flames rise and close in around him, engulf him. He shrieks with agony that continues far longer than should be possible, after his nerves have burned away to vapor and cinders. And as he screams, he knows that it will never end, that they have made his home their own now, and that he will dwell with them forevermore.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Elaine turns back to the window, disturbed that there is still no sign of her husband’s escape. She is horrified to see that in mere moments, the fire has wholly consumed what was their bedroom, where less than five minutes prior they still lay sleeping. Automatically, she takes a few steps back, calling out to David. The heat hits her face with unbearable intensity, and she feels thick tears in her eyes and cannot say whether they were drawn out by the fire and smoke, or by her distress.

She calls out to him again, straining and hoping against all reason to hear some response, but all sound is lost within the igneous roar. Elaine waits as long as she can, but the heat becomes at last completely intolerable, and she retreats to watch the house disappear into the great bright thing that devours it. Looking upon it, she imagines that beneath the scream of the superheated timber frame, she can hear another, unbroken and filled with the most hellish anguish.

(Sounds of massive fire)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Elaine has visited the site of the old house every day for the past year. That night, that awful night, has never ended in her head – not the waiting outside the window, not the collapse of the house upon itself after being reduced to a mere skeleton, not the hopeless struggle of the volunteer firefighters to drown the resilient embers, not even the discovery of Dave’s blackened bones in the grey dawn when the house was nothing more than a pile of hissing, steaming ash.

She takes a drink of PBR, drumming the fingers of her free hand on the wheel of her husband’s ’98 Dodge pickup. It is an insane thought, she tells herself, and yet she cannot free herself from the strong impression that the house is somehow reassembling itself. Here and there amidst the blackened concrete foundations, charred and broken timbers jut skyward like the fingers of the accusing dead.

Yes, she thinks, drinking more deeply now, those were definitely not there when they found Dave’s paltry remains. And just on the very edge of hearing, she perceives a high and distant note, like the shriek of burning timber, like the cries of a damned soul.

(Eerie music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

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[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]