“Ashes to Ashes”
Antonio Roman Campos
FICTION
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been… about eleven years… since my last confession.” I could not see the face of the time-worn priest through the dark wicker of the screen, but I distinctly heard an inhalation of air in response to the lengthy duration of time. It was the only sound in the vast, empty vaults of St. Louis Cathedral that shadowy night in July. Neither man nor beast seemed to stir beneath the oppressive humidity of the old French Quarter of New Orleans.
“After so long, what has brought you back to the fold, my son?” The priest seemed to whisper, his voice friendly, but distant in the murky moonlight. “What urgent confession has brought you here at such an hour?”
“I… I do not know if I really require a confession,” I panicked, my mind feeling jumbled and irrational. “But I had hoped that we might just talk. I… I am very scared, father, and very confused. I am sorry for waking you up like this…”
“It is all right, my son,” the priest assured with a yawn. “I was quite the night owl… in my youth at least. Now, what is it you would like to talk about?”
Still, I hesitated, “Father… do you believe that spirits—that people, I mean—can truly rise from the dead?” The air in the room suddenly felt more still and more torturously hot. “I mean, I know about Jesus and Lazarus coming back from the dead, but they were both holy men. What about the bad ones, father? What about those unfortunate, tortured souls? What about…”
“Did you pull me out of bed to tell me that you have been conversing with some kind of an evil spirit? A zombie, perhaps, or a vampire?” The priest seemed dismayed and slightly irritated. It was true that I had hammered upon the rectory door in the middle of the night. “Perhaps, my son,” he yawned again, “you have been having a bit too much libation on Bourbon Street. Maybe things would seem clearer in the morning…”
“No, father,” I hesitated, “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t drink, father, or use hard drugs. Perhaps you would understand things better if I started at the beginning…”
I could hear the priest adjusting his seat in the darkness, “Yes, perhaps that would be best, my son.” His voice was calm, but I could sense growing impatience.
“Father,” I sighed, at last coming to the point, “it all started about one year ago, when I returned home from the army. I had just completed a second tour in Afghanistan, and I finally came back to New Orleans to live permanently. I had inherited my great aunt’s home out by Lake Pontchartrain—an old, white, clapboard “shotgun” house with antebellum columns at the front. I loved my great aunt, father, and I used to stay with her as a boy, but she had been ailing for several years before she passed, and I was very grateful to receive her home. I thought that it would be the perfect place to start a family…”
“You are married?” The priest questioned, thinking it pertinent.
“No, father,” I began, “at least, not yet. Actually, father, I wonder if that was part of the problem. The house was so immense, you see, for a solitary person. It had that one long line of rooms, stretching from the front of the house to the back door, and you could peer all the way down the length of the home when the doors were open. It was eerie to have such a large space to oneself, and yet the place never seemed quite empty…”
If the priest noticed that I kept to the past tense when discussing the old shotgun property, he did not comment on the fact.
“As I have said, father, the house was quite aged—it was built at the end of the nineteenth century, when all of the land around it was cotton fields and swamplands. The place was in bad need of repairs, and an old, black oak tree, dripping with Spanish moss, threatened to crash through the front room at any time. The tree was half-dead, father, and a disease of some kind was rotting away at its core. Naturally, it needed to be removed…”
“Naturally,” whispered the priest in agreement.
“I called out a contractor, who marked the tree for cutting,” I hesitated, “but, that evening I received a little note on my doorstep—it was neither signed nor addressed; it was not even in an envelope. The note warned me not to remove the tree; in fact, it said that the tree was cursed. I thought that it was just some conservationist busybody with a green thumb, or maybe someone from the historical society. I didn’t care. It was my tree on my property now, and it had to go. The contractor came the next morning to chop down the old oak tree, and I saved some money by digging out the stump myself.”
The priest had a touch of asthma, and I could hear him breathing in the still, heavy air. I could not decide if his raspy breaths were comforting or discomforting in the wavering glow of the moonlight.
“Beneath the stump, father, jumbled in the roots of the old, dead tree, I found it,” I shivered, “a small, black box with a cast-iron lid, rusted and cracked by the elements. I was surprised by the discovery, obviously, and I hoped that it might contain something valuable, so I took the box into my house and used a knife to pry it open. The box had been sealed tight, and when I finally broke the seal, the contents of the box spewed all over my front room and dissipated throughout the house—ashes, father, were what the box contained, and charred, black fragments of bone. I did my best to clean everything up, father, and I threw out the remains; I didn’t want to have anything to do with them, and I didn’t want to hassle with the historical society about the old chest. Only later did I realize I had disturbed some kind of cast-iron coffin—I had thought that all of the bodies around here were buried above ground…”
The priest’s breathing grew raspier, but he did not utter a word.
“That was when the dreams started, father. Night after night, I began to hear noises—to see things. I told you that I could see everything in my house all at once, and I started to believe that I could witness a dark figure in the nighttime, moving in my direction. I cannot say ‘walking,’ father, because it did not seem to walk—it trudged, it slunk, it crawled. It would begin at the front door, nearest to the spot where the oak tree had stood, and then it would move toward me, room after room and doorway after doorway, toward my bed in the rear of the house. And then, the figure would suddenly combust! It would burst into flames and be gone!”
Startled, the priest coughed loudly at my exclamation. He seemed to be having some slight trouble breathing; the air, indeed, was very heavy in the old cathedral, and thick with some faint odor.
“This happened to me several times, father,” I explained, “and I was growing more and more scared. I even thought about going to a friend’s house, but what reason could I give? I am a veteran, father, and I have seen strange and terrible things before! And this, this thing, it was nonsense. It was disgusting and absurd. And then, one night, it was no longer a dream. I woke up around midnight, and I smelled real smoke. My kitchen, my bedroom, my entire house was on fire, and I could feel the flames all around me, burning everything. Everything! And I could hear the fire engine arriving outside, and the calls of the paramedics and firefighters! But nearer at hand, among the flames, I could see him—an old, Black man, clothed in rags, unbothered by the smoke and fire. A noose was tied about his neck, father, and there were deep gashes on his hands and face. I had never seen him before in my life, but he stared at me with some peculiar mixture of disinterest and menace. I know it is hard to believe, father, and the paramedics thought that I had been hallucinating when they rescued me, and I related the story. But there were rope marks on my wrists and neck—in addition to my burns—and I could not otherwise account for them. My aunt’s old house was totally ruined, father, and the firemen said that it had been the hottest inferno they had ever witnessed in a domestic blaze. Actually, the police had to question me if I had any illegal accelerants stored inside. Of course, I did not.”
Yet again, the priest did not answer me, and I really began to question if he was still alert. I was too focused on my story now to notice that the air had grown yet heavier in the church, and the odor was growing stronger too—somebody must have been barbequing meat in a nearby restaurant on Jackson Square.
“An insurance adjuster came by my house to review the damages, father, and he asked me if I knew about the history of the property,” I fanned myself with a missal that had been mislaid inside the confessional; I barely noticed how it was becoming more and more stuffy. “He told me that something horrible had happened at the house almost a hundred years ago, around the time my great aunt was born. A poor vagabond—a Black man—had been caught trying to break into the home. Rather than calling the police, the neighbors decided to ‘try’ the man themselves, and, finding him guilty, they lynched him. They hanged him father, my ancestors and their neighbors; they lacerated his hands and face when he tried to fight back, and then they burned the body so that nobody could know.” I began to cough, “They hanged the poor man on that live oak tree, and then they buried his burned remains among its roots. His name,” I struggled, “was Balthasar Jones.”
No sooner had I said the name than a bright light illuminated the darkness of the church, causing me to flinch. The fire that had spontaneously ignited allowed me to see the billows of smoke that had strangely filled the space, boiling and swirling like water in a cauldron. I swept aside the partition to see the elderly priest slumped against the wall of the confessional, gasping for air and clutching at his heart. A dark figure could be seen now, emerging from the flames at the center of the revered cathedral. The tortured man had great gashes on his hands and on his face; the swinging noose strangled about his neck. His skin was not a natural shade but blackened like charcoal and smoldering embers.
Invigorated by the strange and terrible apparition, the priest convulsed in his confessional and widened his eyes, “Cursed…” he sputtered, suggesting some line of scripture, “…unto the third and fourth generations… we are all doomed to become but ashes and dust, yet there is still time yet… for forgiveness…”
The fire was spreading throughout the cathedral now, as a cloud of smoke blotted out the moonlight, yet, like the burning bush of old, nothing seemed to be consumed by the flames. I could feel their oppressive heat upon my skin; taste the burning flesh in my mouth. No, the fires could not harm the holy church, but the inferno could certainly consume me!
“Balthasar Jones!” I exclaimed as I fell to me knees, and the burned husk of a man contorted his hollow eyes to view me. “Balthasar, I know that it was my family—my ancestors—who did this to you. Please! Please forgive them,” I begged, collapsing toward the flames.
“Balthasar, forgive me!”
The ashen figure extended its hand in my direction, but was this smoldering benediction a symbol of salvation… or damnation unto the Fires of Hell?
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