Ashes at the Altar
The church was condemned. Officially. Unofficially, it was forgotten—wrapped in overgrowth, its windows pocked with time, not bullets, though from the inside you couldn't tell the difference. It was beautiful in the way rot always is: quietly consuming, patient, certain.
Devin came back after seventeen years. Not because he missed it—he hadn’t missed anything. He came because the dreams wouldn’t stop. The peeling paint. The basement door. The sound of nails scratching wood beneath the altar. His therapist said unresolved trauma. His gut said otherwise.
The front door was swollen from rain, but it yielded. Like old wounds do, eventually.
Inside, the air was thick with age and insulation decay. Dust motes turned in shafts of light like falling embers. The altar was still there. Crooked. Smaller than he remembered. Childhood always distorts scale. And beneath it? The trapdoor he wasn’t supposed to know about. The one Pastor Haines had closed so quickly that day seventeen years ago—the day Devin had screamed about the man in the cellar who wasn't a man at all.
He stepped forward. The trapdoor didn’t protest. No creak. No groan. Just silence and stairs that disappeared into dark.
He lit his phone. The beam flickered. Batteries were never ready when you needed them. Still, it caught the shape of the basement: stone, broken pews, coils of discarded cables and hymnals. And in the center—a chair. A single wooden chair. Facing the corner.
Devin’s mouth went dry. His body remembered what his mind had buried.
He didn’t hear the door close behind him. But he heard the breath. Ragged. Familiar. Coming from the shadowed figure sitting in the chair.
“I knew you’d come back,” it said. Not a whisper. Not a voice. Something between the two.
Devin stepped back. His heel scraped stone. The figure didn't move.
“You said you’d tell. And you did.”
Memories clicked into place like teeth in a trap: blood on vestments. Screams swallowed by pipe organ chords. Pastor Haines smiling with hands red and eyes bright.
“I was nine,” Devin whispered. “I didn’t understand.”
The figure turned its head. “You knew enough to bury me.”
Devin blinked. There was no one in the chair.
He staggered back, phone shaking in his hand. The light caught something in the wall. A rectangle. A child's drawing. Crayon. Smudged. A stick figure under the altar, smiling.
Then he heard it again. Scraping. Underfoot. Like nails on wood.
He turned to run—but the steps were gone. In their place, bricks.
And a voice, just behind his ear: “We forgive those who trespass against us. But we never forget.”
Silence returned. The kind that waits.