The Hole in the Coffin. Part 1.

In the old villages it was not the living witch people feared most. A living one you could walk around by the tenth path, never look her in the eye, never take food from her hands. The danger began when the witch died. An ordinary corpse you lay in the coffin and pray over. But a witch - first they seal her mouth with wax, pour poppy seed under her hands, and ask the oldest woman: "Shall we bore the hole?"

That old woman was called Melania. She lived at the edge of the village, where beyond the gardens the black alders and the wet earth began. People feared her, but they went to her all the same: with a sick child, with a cow that had suddenly stopped giving milk, with crying in the night. Not every man and not every woman paid her in money. But everyone was left owing her. When Melania lay dying, the house grew so quiet you could hear the hardened wax cracking in the bowl.

The village women knew what to do. They sealed the witch's lips with a thick layer of wax, so she would not call the living by their names. Into the coffin itself they poured full handfuls of poppy seed, so she would count the grains till morning and not rise. And then they sent for the carpenter. He was told to make a small hole in the lid. They said: so the soul would have a way out, and the voice would not come back into the bones.

The carpenter was young, his hands not yet used to wood. He was nervous, he hurried, for the sun was already setting behind the cemetery hill. The tool slipped, and the hole came out a finger wide. One of the women waved her hand - the soul wouldn't care either way. But the old sexton crossed himself in silence and turned away, for he knew: for what now lives in the earth, extra room is a door.

They carried the coffin to the edge of the graveyard, where the nettles tangle with wild hops. When the men were lowering it on ropes into the deep pit, the sexton swore that an icy draught was pulling from that hole in the lid. Though the day was warm, and the leaves on the birches did not so much as stir. They filled the grave in quickly, as if afraid that someone in the pit would start breathing up at them from below.

On the very first night after the burial, the graveyard watchman heard a quiet whisper by the fresh grave. "One... two... three..." He took fright, but thought the old woman was counting the poppy seed in her coffin, as was only proper. Such things are better left unheard, but his legs would not carry him away. And then something changed. The voice stopped counting seeds. It began counting debts. "Oksana for the milk... Maryna for the child...

Semen for another man's death..." When his legs began to obey him again, he ran. And in the morning people saw small hardened drops of wax by the grave. Those drops were not random. A thin pale thread stretched toward the village, as if someone had crawled along the ground in the night, leaving a hardened trail behind. It led to the house of the woman whose name the watchman had heard first. On her threshold a thick drop of wax had set.

The mistress of the house said she had woken before dawn to a whisper under the window. Someone was quietly repeating her name. The next night the wax appeared on the doorposts of other yards. Everyone who had ever carried a sick infant to the old woman, or asked her to turn away a drought, heard the whisper under the window. It was not angry. Worse: it was familiar, almost gentle, like the voice of someone who has come to repay a kindness.

One man wiped the wax from his threshold with a rag, but in the night the drops came through from inside the house, on the boards under the cradle. The village could bear it no longer. The men took spades and dug up the grave. The coffin lay level, the lid unmoved. When they raised the lid, the first thing everyone saw was the poppy seed. It lay almost untouched, in an even layer, as if the old woman had never so much as begun to count it.

And then someone pointed at the lid. The hole seemed wider. The edges of the wood were caked with wax, and on Melania's lips there was no wax left at all. Then everyone understood. She was not rising from the coffin. She had no need to. The wax they had sealed her mouth with had not held the voice in. It had become the voice itself.

It had seeped through to the hole in the lid, learned to whisper, and learned to reach toward the houses where her name was still remembered. From that time on, no one in the village bored a hole in a coffin at random, for not every hole lets a soul out. Some leave the dead a road back.