There was a crackling from the hearth, and I glanced up in time to see the logs resettle. About to return to the page, I saw an ember twitching out of the corner of my eye. It suddenly struck me how sinisterly the damp kindling hissed in the silence that framed my words and the quiet breathing of all my little cousins.
“Keep reading!” Louisa urged, and the rest squirmed in anticipation.
“They are recognizable by their otherworldly features; they often have horns, scales, or feathers, are dwarf-size, and speak in heavily accented tones. Their voices are gravely from disuse, but some claim to have heard them speak in more than one tongue. No one knows what they do with the free time they have between Decembers. But everybody knows that winter is when the cause the most chaos.”
It was dark enough for the children to feel a delicious tingle of fear. The snow continued to fall outside the window; I could discern the wind sculpting the snow and ice into crystallized swirls and flakes that stuck onto the glass like eyeless skulls. After a while, I stopped looking.
In my lap, Yanni leaned back against my arm. “Tell about how they come out, Angie!”
I turned a few pages and came to an excerpt describing the emergence of the kalikatzari.
“‘The time has come!’ The Goblin Chief cried. ‘Open the doors and let us out!’ The little goblins squealed in glee and jumped up and down. Their eyes were red as fire and their claws as black as night. The chief does this every year, in the dead of winter. When the time is right, he leads his followers to the sleeping houses of the world.
The heavy book suddenly slipped from my hands and banged my foot. “I’m sorry.” I pushed the boys off my lap. “I have a sudden awful stomach cramp. Too many cookies…” Tasia bent to pick up the book and handed it back to me, but I didn’t feel like reading anymore. “Come on you guys, someone pick a more cheerful story.”
“But we want to hear about the kalikatzari!” Louisa’s blue eyes pled up at me.
“Yea, yea, the kalikatzari!” Danae and Kosta chorused.
“How about I make us some hot cocoa and we’ll sing some carols,” I said.
Yanni rolled his eyes and plopped back on my lap. “So what do they really look like? Have you ever seen one?”
“Nonsense,” I replied, before realizing that I lost a priceless tactic (Go to bed right now or else the kalikatzari will get you). “But,” I said to save my slip, “doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
Katerina piped up, “How do you know they exist if you’ve never seen one?”
I glanced up again. The wooden grains of the floorboards seemed to writhe and pulsate in the dancing firelight. Clasped within crushed logs, ten coals in the hearth twitched with a life all of their own. I blinked again—and five pairs of fiery eyes stared back between the twigs of their bones. The moment I opened my mouth, something heavy rapped on the door, the flames began to rustle wildly at our feet.
"Angreek87"
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