I walk the schooner, stroking its wood, afraid that it will erode to dust between my fingers, like touching the fragile membrane of a dream, till it bursts and I awaken to discover myself alone in the water, the Demeter merely the beautiful fantasy of a drowning man.

There is naught but the harsh whisper of my fingers running along the grain, the hollows, the pockmarks in the flesh of my ship.

Are you well?

But one cannot inquire thus of inanimate things, of the corpses on which we travel the world.

One must instead examine each rope, touch the sails, harken unto the precise rhythm of the vessel. Certify that the dark sea does not penetrate the dead wood, that there is no other influx of water than our own anxiety.

I regard the sky above our heads, searching.

Something feels wrong, as though there is something amiss aboard our ship. Things are not as they should be.

Yet, they never are.

And in the sky, there is nothing. Not even strigoi wheeling down in search of live meat. The demonic birds of the night, Vlahutza once told me, mocking the very notion of such things. Mocking his father, who had smeared garlic on his flesh to ward them off, to keep that unimaginable bird-shaped darkness from taking him away.They have no body, his father told him. They should not be able to grip anything. They are night, simply, holes in reality, and they want naught but a little blood. Those who survive their attack bear black wounds that, it is said, ooze only cold.They appear after sunset, in the ocean of darkness, a darkness that spreads with hunger ... which seeks human flesh, and the setting of the sun is but a flood of those birds.

The night, a single strigoi devouring the world.

At times, I wonder whether a concrete fear is better, whether that swath of deadly night lowering upon us is preferable to the ineffable nothing gnawing at our nerves.

To the strange certainty that we have left a door open somewhere, an unwitting invitation to whatever awaits outside, stalking us.

I recall the successive snows of winter, creaking on the roofs, ever promising, whispering to the child I was then of how the wide sky was collapsing upon our house. The neighbor who lost a finger to the gelid cold, the knowledge that to become lost in the snow meant the surety of splintering, of shattering like a glass full of blood.

Before a blizzard, I should look upon the dark earth for what seemed the last time, before the punctillated pattern of white made it something else entirely. Such helplessness in seeing the warm, familiar, kindly autumn world swallowed bit by bit.

On the deck of the Demeter, looking out upon the sea and the non-existent strigoi, I felt everything disappear under a snowfall that no one else perceived. Without yet knowing why, I was certain that, somehow, Winter had embarked with us.