They danced and shuddered with idiot splendor, their dead-white faces split by mortuary grins and welded into grisly rictuses. They tore at themselves with knotted fingers, their blood steaming into the snow in mindless sacrificial offerings to the sepulchral gods of boneyards. Their voices screeched and shrilled into the night, echoing off the barren, idiot face of the dead moon above. Others, a great many others, lay chalk-white in beds, pining away as death leeched the life from their very veins. They died in numbers. But they did not stay dead. 2 It was a night of howling black wind and breath turned to frost, so they stayed close to the fire. Katya would not allow them to leave it. She told them that in warmth and light there was safety. Against what? But those were the things Katya did not like to talk about so she cleaned the kitchen, sweeping and mopping the flagstone floor, knowing that evil spirits lived in dirty places and she would allow no such spirits here.
