Here, laid out in the snow, was a square wooden table and a sturdy wooden chair. On the table was a bowl of barley gruel in which Bluma could make out the individual grains, and it was only once she laid her hand on the back of the chair that she realized the entire arrangement had been carved from a single block of gray stone.

Up until that moment, Bluma had been convinced she could smell the aroma of the warm porridge.

And there were other such markers: a top hat of obsidian lying as if abandoned on its side in the snow, an open book with letters so delicately hewn that they were scarcely distinguishable from real ink on the stone page.

The moon above bled forth cold, clear light like an open wound in the sky.

Farther and farther Bluma went. Her fingers and toes began to grow chill, her legs and feet to ache. She searched and searched and searched and searched, but she could not find any hint of home.

There seemed to be no end to the dead, no wall or fence or boundary to hold them in.

They seemed to go on forever.

It was when she stopped, just for a moment, just to stretch her back and roll her shoulders, that she felt it there, cool and heavy against her thigh, and she knew immediately, somewhere in the moldy basement of her mind, that it had made its impossible way back to her.

What she didn’t know was why.

But as soon as she put her hand into her apron pocket, she found out.

“Ah!” she cried, pulling her fingers out as quickly as she could.

Ahhhhhhhhh, replied the echoing vastness of the graveyard.

Tiny droplets of blood budded from Bluma’s fingertips.

The spoon had come back because it was hungry.

The spoon had come back because it wanted another taste.

Chapter Five: Rules of Acquisition

Everyone knows: you must never stray from the path in a cemetery once darkness has fallen.

But there is no particular wisdom to straying from the path in a midnight forest, either.

The crow flew far overhead now, so far that, between the gloom and the treetops, Yehuda Leib could scarcely keep track of it. When the trees thinned enough to allow him a peering vantage through the pine-needle canopy, more often than not he recognized the bird above by the darkness it produced in blocking out the stars.

On they went, and on and on, Yehuda Leib struggling to see, struggling to make his way forward. The cold did not matter, nor did the dark: the crow flew on.

The snow grew thicker, and the night in between.