“Quicker, quicker into the ring! They will bear us away if we don’t mark ourselves in.”
Trirodov called quietly:
“Come here, come here, quiet boy, draw a circle around us with your nocturnal little stick.”
They no sooner had succeeded in marking themselves in with the magic line than the dead began to pass down the Navii path. The throng of the dead, submitting to some evil malediction, walked towards the town. The spectres walked in the nocturnal silence and the traces they left behind them were light, curious, and hardly distinguishable. Whispered conversations were heard—lifeless words. The dead walked at random, without any defined order. At the beginning the voices merged into a general drone, and only afterwards, by straining one’s ears, it was possible to distinguish separate words and whole phrases.
“Be good yourself, that’s the chief thing.”
“For mercy’s sake—what perversion, what immorality!”
“Plenty of food and plenty of clothes—what more can one want?”
“I haven’t sinned much.”
“That’s what they deserve. Kisses are not for them.”
In the beginning all the dead fused into one dark, grey mass. But gradually, if one looked intently one could distinguish the separate corpses.