Terrifically animated by the light of the flames, the rag and bone army deliberated. The clean skeletons, the oldest, waved limbs as long as a praying mantis’s through the falling snow. They disliked the pious murmurs inside, and the tang of incense. The fortress had to be destroyed, and everyone inside had to be sacrificed, all before the cock crowed. The accumulating snow, damp and crystalline, retreated in front of the creaky feet whose petrified toenails poked through ancient leather. The church door was nailed together with iron and had on its thick, cracked fur the marks of flintlocks and harquebuses, bloodstains, and carved Cyrillic letters, blasphemies poorly scratched in by some priest from long ago. The corpse of Baba Liubiţa, buried just a week ago, writhing with white, fat worms, moved toward the door and touched it with purple fingers. She shook her eyeless head and moved away. They would have to set it on fire, because the thick planks were as sturdy as a castle wall. The fiends came together and blew a venomous green flame from their lipless muzzles, their black tongues hanging like dogs’. The flame thrust at an ageless piece of wood, but only a few splinters caught fire and burned out almost instantly. They blew again, but the tarred oak did not light. The skeletons realized they could not triumph by themselves. They gathered, like the base of a fountain, around a circle of fire in the snow that the oldest one had lit with a torch. Their black, vacant eye sockets watched the earth inside the circle turn translucent, like deep, green water, and this water reddened, then turned more auburn, brown, black like tar, descending into the earth’s depths, where a few points and lights seemed to move. Hundreds of flitting spots, the color of crabs, appeared in the dark, crawling up the chain of light. Soon, leathery bat wings, pointed tails, hooked beaks, hunched chests, horns like a bull’s or goat’s or sheep’s or ram’s or horned viper’s or dragon’s emerged from a swamp that screamed like a woman giving birth or a man having his balls pulled off. They moved faster and faster, they swarmed like beetles, scaling the beams of light with claws and suckers, they spouted out of scaly hips, they chortled through toothy mouths in their bellies, they belched through wall-eyed, twisted faces wedged between their ass cheeks. They were demons. They sprang from the enchanted circle like the fabled coming of evil, filling the sky with wings and howls, filling the earth with squirts of venom and sperm, and filling the divine being with horror. Cricket-demons swarmed onto the church’s roof, they slid their saw-tails through the tiles and dropped long eggs inside, which burst into poisonous spiders with a hundred legs each. But the priest in his gold-threaded robes turned them to stone, dousing them with holy water. Demons tunneled through the earth and sprang up among the kneeling people, but the incense from the censer poured into their large nostrils and exploded their serpent-heads into a thousand splinters. Bat-demons grabbed up rocks, swooped over the roof and let them go. As soon as the angelic vibration of prayer reached them, however, the stones stopped in the air and opened like enormous buds, spreading fleshy petals, strangely beautiful, until the sky over the church was filled with multicolored flowers. Insane with rage, demons scuttled onto the walls, they scurried over the roof, scratching and scraping with their claws, until no part of the holy place could be seen under the wormy swarm, the demented tangle, the furious ravel of wings and antennae.