The following is a reading from The Bloody Chamber, a short story by Angela Carter entitled, The Werewolf.

It is a northern country. They have cold weather. They have cold h hearts. Cold, tempest, wild beasts in the forest.

It is a hard life. The houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the

virgin behind a guttering candle. The leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string

of drying mushrooms, a bed, a stool, a table, harsh, brief, poor lives. To these upland woodsmen,

the devil is as real as you are high.

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 a knave 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 bears come lumbering from the margins

of the forest to snatch away.

At midnight, especially on Valdurgisnacht, 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?

Reese 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 cheese is ripen when her

neighbors 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 to death.

Winter and cold weather.

Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick.

...