The Red Winter

The girl was surprisingly beautiful in the moonlight.

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“Surprisingly” for two reasons. First: she had a reputation for beauty. In my experience, this would usually mean only that she’d managed to keep all her teeth in the long weeks between puberty and pregnancy. And second: she was two days dead, and I have violated enough graves to know that corpses are not, to common tastes, beautiful.

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I believe her name was Cristina. Her ghost sat opposite me on a crude tombstone, watching me work. Now, the ghost was beautiful, but they often are. This spirit girl’s hair was typical of Piedmontese folk, thick and dark and curly, falling just below her shoulders. Her eyes were large and bewitchingly deep with the gravity of the hereafter. Her shade glowed softly, wearing the same white smock I had just cut away from her corpse.

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“That was expensive,” muttered the girl, looking at the ruins of the dress.

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“I can tell,” I replied. “Aren’t you pleased that it’s not going to rot in the ground?”

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Sarmodel, my indwelling demon, had Projected himself in human form to sit beside her, with the very worst intentions. He appeared as a black-haired boy of about ten years, with a long face and an exquisitely aquiline nose, which I assume was how I looked when we were first joined.

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“Aren’t you pleased, Sebastian, that you can add to your stock of used cerements?” Sarmodel asked me, smiling. “And wasn’t this worth leaving home for?”

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Among many other things, I have need of good cloth in my line of work, and the dress would not be wasted. But Sarmodel’s point was plain; Cristina was a charity case.

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“We weren’t doing anything else,” I replied.