Gash Wednesday

            It’s Ash Wednesday, and in a Catholic church in a small town, an altar boy accidentally spills the palm ashes traditionally used for the forehead marking, but he knows what to do.  From a secret basement he retrieves another Ash receptacle, assuming that no one will know the difference.  And it works.  That is, it works until the ashes tear apart the members of the congregation before reassembling into an ashy woman, a witch who was burned at the stake centuries ago and who has been held prisoner in the church ever since.

            The witch ashes make a brief speech before swirling out of the decimated church on a mission of particulate vengeance.  She is going to hunt down the ancestors of the cult that burned her and make them pay.  Ironically, most of them are horrible church-goers.  Meanwhile, the altar boy, wracked with guilt, sets out into the woods to find a hermetic exorcist/witch-hunter, long excommunicated by the church, who is hesitant to help out because he has given up dealings with the supernatural.

            After some powerful persuasion, the witch-hunter, the altar-boy, and assorted other townsfolk set out to lure the slashing gashing ashes back to the site of the original burning, where they will hopefully trick her back into the urn.  But they realize that if their ashassination attempt is going to work, they may have to give up a lot for lent this year… maybe even their lives.