"And not on a bench, Shepchikha lay on the floor," the woman picked up, standing in the doorway, her cheek propped on her hand.
Dorosh looked at her, then at the floor, then at her again, and after a pause said:
"When I pull your underwear off in front of everybody, it won't be so nice."
This warning had its effect. The old woman fell silent and did not interrupt anymore.
Dorosh went on.
"And in a cradle that hung in the middle of the hut lay their one-year-old baby-I don't know whether of male or female sex. Shepchikha lay there, and then she heard a dog scratching outside the door and howling so loud you just wanted to flee the house. She got frightened-for women are such foolish folk that you could stick your tongue out at her behind the door at night and she'd have her heart in her mouth. 'Anyhow,' she thinks, 'why don't I go and hit the cursed dog in the snout, maybe it'll stop howling.' And taking her poker, she went to open the door. As soon as it was slightly open, the dog darted between her legs and went straight for the baby's cradle. Shepchikha saw that it was no longer a dog but the young miss. And if it had been the young miss looking the way she knew her, it would have been nothing; but there was this one thing and circumstance: that she was all blue and her eyes were burning like coals. She grabbed the baby, bit its throat, and began drinking its blood. Shepchikha only cried out, 'Ah, evil thing!' and fled. But she saw that the front doors were locked. She ran to the attic. The foolish woman sat there trembling, and then she saw that the young miss was coming to the attic. She fell on the foolish woman and started biting her. It was morning before Sheptun got his wife out of there, blue and bitten all over. And the next day the foolish woman died. That's what arrangements and temptations can happen! Though she's the master's progeny, all the same a witch is a witch."
After this story, Dorosh looked around smugly and poked his forefinger into his pipe, preparing to fill it with tobacco. The material about the witch became inexhaustible. Each in turn hastened to tell something. The witch drove right up to the door of one man's house in the form of a haystack; she stole another's hat or pipe; cut off the braids of many village girls; drank several buckets of blood from others.
At last the whole company came to their senses and saw that they had been talking too much, because it was already quite dark outside. They all began trudging off to sleep, putting themselves either in the kitchen, or in the sheds, or in the middle of the yard.
"Well, now, Mr. Khoma, it's time we went to the deceased," said the gray-haired Cossack, turning to the philosopher, and the four of them, Spirid and Dorosh included, went to the church, swinging their knouts at the dogs, of which there were a great many and which angrily bit at their sticks.
The philosopher, though he had fortified himself with a good mug of vodka, secretly felt timorousness creeping over him as they drew near the lighted church. The tales and strange stories he had heard helped to affect his imagination still more. The darkness under the paling and trees began to thin; the place was becoming more bare. They finally stepped past the decrepit church fence into the small yard, beyond which there were no trees and nothing opened out but empty fields and meadows swallowed by the darkness of night. Together with Khoma, the three Cossacks climbed the steep steps of the porch and went into the church. Here they left the philosopher, having wished him a successful performance of his duty, and locked the door on him as the master had ordered.
The philosopher remained alone. First he yawned, then stretched himself, then blew on both hands, and finally looked around. In the middle stood the black coffin. Candles flickered before dark icons. Their light illumined only the iconostasis 8 and, faintly, the middle of the church. The far corners of the vestibule were shrouded in darkness. The tall, ancient iconostasis showed a profound decrepitude; its openwork, covered in gold, now gleamed only in sparks. The gilding had fallen off in some places, and was quite blackened in others; the faces of the saints, completely darkened, looked somehow gloomy. The philosopher glanced around once more.
"Why," he said, "what's frightening about it? No man can get in here, and against the dead and visitors from the other world I've got such prayers that, once I've read them, they'll never lay a finger on me. Nothing to it," he said with a wave of the hand, "let's read!"
Going up to the choir, he saw several bundles of candles.
"That's good," thought the philosopher, "I must light up the whole church so that it's bright as day. Ah, too bad I can't smoke my pipe in God's church!"
And he began sticking wax candles to all the ledges, lecterns, and icons, not stinting in the least, and soon the whole church was filled with light. Only the darkness above seemed to become deeper, and the dark images looked more gloomily from the old carved frames on which gold gleamed here and there. He went up to the coffin, timidly looked into the dead girl's face, and could not help shutting his eyes with a slight start.
Such terrible, dazzling beauty!
He turned and wanted to step away; but with strange curiosity, with the strange, self-contradictory feeling that will not leave a man especially in a time of fear, he could not refrain from glancing at her as he went, and then, with the same feeling of trepidation, glancing once more. Indeed, the deceased girl's sharp beauty seemed frightful. Perhaps she even would not have struck him with such panic terror if she had been slightly ugly. But there was in her features nothing dull, lusterless, dead. The face was alive, and it seemed to the philosopher that she was looking at him through closed eyes. It even seemed to him that a tear rolled from under her right eyelash, and when it stopped on her cheek, he made out clearly that it was a drop of blood.
He hastily went over to the choir, opened the book and, to cheer himself up, began reading in his loudest voice. His voice struck the wooden walls of the church, long silent and deaf. Solitary, without echo, it poured in a low bass into the utterly dead silence and seemed a little wild even to the reader himself.
"What's there to be afraid of?" he thought to himself meanwhile. "She won't get up from her coffin, because she'll be afraid of God's word. Let her lie there! And what kind of Cossack am I if I'm scared? So I drank a bit-that's why it seems so frightening. If I could take some snuff-ah, fine tobacco! Nice tobacco! Good tobacco!"
And yet, as he turned each page, he kept glancing sidelong at the coffin, and an involuntary feeling seemed to whisper to him: "Look, look, she's going to get up, she's going to rise, she's going to peek out of the coffin!"
But there was a deathly silence. The coffin stood motionless. The candles poured out a whole flood of light. Terrible is a lit-up church at night, with a dead body and not a living soul!
Raising his voice, he began singing in various voices, trying to stifle the remnants of his fear. Yet he turned his eyes to the coffin every other moment, as if asking the inadvertent question: "What if she rises, what if she gets up?"
But the coffin did not stir. If only there was a sound, some living being, even the chirp of a cricket in the corner! There was just the slight sizzle of some remote candle and the faint spatter of wax dripping on the floor.
"Well, what if she gets up?…"
She raised her head…
He gazed wildly and rubbed his eyes. But she was indeed no longer lying but sitting up in the coffin. He turned his eyes away, then again looked with horror at the coffin. She's standing up… she's walking through the church with her eyes closed, constandy spreading her arms as if wishing to catch someone.
She was walking straight toward him. In fear he drew a circle around himself. With an effort he began reading prayers and reciting the incantations that had been taught him by one monk who had seen witches and unclean spirits all his life.