Sherry Chandler

Cat with werewolf

To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naif style and there are no flowers to put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that.

Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St. John’s Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch — some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours’ do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, they strip the crone, search her for marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her dead.

Winter and cold weather.

Go and visit Grandmother who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I’ve baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter.

— Angela Carter, “The Werewolf,” from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Penguin,

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