But at the far end of the corridor, where the stairs descended into his father’s shop below, darkness gathered thick like dust in the corner.

He couldn’t see.

Back into his room he went, fingers shaking at the matchbox, eager to make a little light, to throw back the curtain of darkness and see what hid beneath.

There was nothing, of course, nothing and no one to see: not in the hallway, not on the stairs, not even in his father’s butcher shop below.

But somehow he didn’t believe his eyes.

In the stillness, the candlelight flickered and danced on the cool, clean blades of his father’s knives.

He began to feel it before he even turned back to the staircase: the lurking certainty that he would find no rest until he did something.

But what? What could he do?

Tears began to sting his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, as much to himself as to anyone else. “I’m sorry.”

But this was not to be enough.

The flame of Issur’s candle flickered, guttered with sudden movement as he turned to climb back up the stairs. In the narrow passage of the staircase, jumping shadows leapt up on all sides, and he was there, Avimelekh, as clear as could be, looming up on his rearing black stallion, his black coat filling the stairway, his dark eyes shining behind his bushy beard, and Issur cried out and stumbled back, and he fell and dropped his candle to the floor, and it died out in a narrow plume of smoke.

Shadows.

Only shadows.

This couldn’t continue. He had to do something.

And so Issur climbed to his feet, went outside, and began to harness the poor, weary Frumkin donkey once more.

It took him nearly two hours to make his way back to the place where it had happened, and by the time Issur arrived, the chill of the night had soaked into his bones.

This was it: the place was unmistakable.

But the body was gone.

It wasn’t clear what had happened. Everything was covered over in the creeping obscurity of fresh-fallen snow. The wide pool of blood was rosy and faint, the ruts and footprints thickened, filling in. Issur could see where Avimelekh had lain, that his body had been moved, turned, lifted.

But what had been done with him, he could not say.

Once more, Issur’s eyes began to brim with tears. He didn’t know precisely how he’d thought to accomplish it, but on his long journey into the forest, he’d come to hope that he might give the man a proper burial.

He certainly couldn’t do that now.

With a sigh, Issur hopped down from the cart and set about turning the donkey back toward Tupik.

What else was there to do?