Geranium flowers repel flies, mosquitoes, evil spirits, and visitors from beyond the grave. The planters of the geraniums are old and shabby. The geraniums themselves are red like blood and thick, as if they personally ate a couple of deadies. But the house's windows are tightly shut, and the geraniums don't have to do much.

A portrait of a prominent moustached man squints tiredly from the wall towards the dim dawn. Gothic Hare clucks his tongue. Still, death changes people a lot....

From the back of the house comes a demanding meow and the shuffling of old shoes. The door with white curtains opens and a tidy old woman lets the disturber out. She stares, unamazed, at an ominous figure in a black cape in the scant shade of the winter-withered lilacs.

‘And I wonder why Matheus is mewing so early in the morning,’ she mutters to herself and spits three times over her shoulder. ’What can I do for you?’

The old woman smiles affably. Her dentures gleam predatory in the faint dawn light. She smells of frankincense and plum jam.

‘We have an urgent matter from your husband,’ Gothic Hare announces in solemn fashion, squinting at the dawn as well.

‘My husband is long dead. ’

‘The dead can have urgent matters too,’ Hare remarks. ‘But first we need to take shelter from the light of day. It harms the Heralds of the Night.’

His black ears fold into a long, mournful arrow pointing up into the sky.

‘We?' the old woman casts a suspicious glance down the path to the house.

A white coffin lid protrudes from the conifer thicket.

'You brought my husband with you, too.’

From beneath the coffin lid, there is fussing and puffing. The lid disappears into the evergreens. The distinctive clatter of the coffin closing can be heard. The old woman claps her hands in delight.

‘That's right, it’s Wim! Even in his lifetime he liked to take a nap when he wasn't supposed to.’

‘No, no, no,’ intervenes Gothic Hare. ‘The deadies are forbidden to leave the cemetery. This is Deadly Root.’

Rooty rolls out from behind a lushly sprawling juniper tree and looks at them from a safe distance. The old woman joyfully claps her hands together again.

‘What a wonderful rutabaga! If you boil it, grate it, and mix it with sour cream...’

At the word sour cream, there's another meow.

‘We'll wait out the day at our place,’ decides Gothic Hare.

He hastens to leave his shelter under the bald lilacs. ‘Wait for us at twilight,’ he calls back to the old woman.

He slips into the narrow space of the coffin with agility and hears the hammingas once again slam the lid shut. That's it. No one will bother them until dark.

‘Rooty, doesn't anything seem strange to you?’ Gothic Hare asks while he listens with caution to the sounds outside.

The world left to the ravages of sunlight is surprisingly quiet. But the solemn sense of imminent death, which makes it so good to fall asleep, is in no hurry to replace his vague suspicions.

‘It's a good thing we're in a coffin,’ remarks Root. ’I think it's the safest place in the world right now.’

In response, a familiar shuffling sound is heard from outside. However, it soon subsides and the two fall into a deep, black sleep. Hare dreams that he and Root are sailing. The coffin sways, rolls in the waves and finally stands still, like a boat washed ashore....

As the sunset dies and the world plunges back into the comforting embrace of Darkness, the hammingas open the lid smelling of dry, puritanical birch. For a while, Gothic Hare and Root both blink displeased at the yellow electric light.

‘That’s not right,’ Hare sits right in the coffin.

Something large, dark, and furry looms in front of him. It is an old pointed hat of black felt wool, crowning a standing lamp on a carved foot instead of a lampshade. The light breaks through the gaps in the hat and falls heavily on the floor as a large round coin. It is just enough to illuminate the spacious old kitchen leaving mournful shadows in the corners. There is the smell of smoke. Wood snaps unfriendly crackles from the smoky fireplace. The copper kettle hanging over the fire gurgles in unkindly.

‘Awake?’ comes a cheery voice. ’Just in time for dinner.’

At a big old table with a pile of crockery sit three old ladies. They look as alike as sisters. Even their hats are the same, made of black felt wool to match the lampshade.

‘What did I tell you?’ says the recent acquaintance of Hare to her friends in triumph. ‘There is a rutabaga there too, a good ripe rutabaga! Bring it here!’

The familiar tapping sounds. The coffin begins to shake, making Gothic Hare's ears quiver. And it's not fear. It's the hammingas rolling over, like black pebbles in the waves. The coffin moves briskly toward the table until dry, wrinkled hand grasp Root out of it.

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‘I'm not here!’ squeaks the latter, and pretends that he is not yet awake.

‘Rutabaga soup with hare meat,’ says another old woman pensively, eyeing Hare in an appraising manner. ‘The last time we ate was when my husband was still alive, God rest his soul.’

‘And the last Christmas then?’

All three oldies wrinkle their foreheads, recalling something.

‘A goose. It was a goose.’

‘It was a duck. Duck in sour cream sauce.’

‘I'm telling you, goose. In wine sauce.’

‘Duck. Sour cream.’

‘Sorry to interfere,’ interrupts Hare, climbing out of the saving embrace of the coffin, ‘but you may not use us for soup.’

‘We may not?’

The old women jointly adjust their glasses. Three pairs of faded eyes, behind shiny spectacles, stare at him with appetite.

‘Indeed. We are here on important cemetery matters. You need to start grieving and visiting the cemetery.’

‘Grieving is tedious enough,” remarks one of the old women. ‘And all the grievers will sooner or later end up under the same wheatgrass and ivy. Only the cemetery will remain.’

‘It won't,’ replies Gothic Hare, ‘if there are too few mourners. And if there's no cemetery, what will we have left? The cemetery is where it all begins and the cemetery is where it all ends!’

A belly rumble follows in the silence. The old women look over at each other.

‘So it's pumpkin again?’

One of them stands up. Root deftly rolls off her dry, cold palms onto the table. He continues to pretend he will never wake up again. No one makes soup out of rotten vegetables. Right? The meaty crunch of a pumpkin being cut open is heard next.

‘Gothic Hare,’ Hare introduces himself somewhere above him. ‘The messenger of the Night and the dead. And this is Root. Deadly, by the way.’

‘March, April and June. The widows. When you're as lonely as we are,’ March says in an apologetic tone, ‘you forget about manners.’

‘You wouldn't be so lonely if you visited the cemetery. At least once in a while,‘ replies Hare. ‘You see, the dead are not able to get away from you anymore.’

‘Ah, Wim bored me to the point of liver cramps even when he was alive,’ the old woman waves off.

She places deep white plates on the table.

‘Rooty, doesn't anything seem strange to you?’ asks Gothic Hare again.

‘Where shall I start?’ mutters Root from the table, where he is towering tomb-like next to the chopping board. The board is littered with pumpkin slices.

‘And May?’ Gothic Hare tries to grasp a hazy vague suspicion in the vegetable broth-scented air.

A cat bowl filled with sour cream appears on the table.

‘What about May?’

‘Well, there must still be May? Between April and June????’

‘May,’ the old women look at each other in thought, ‘was there a May?

‘There was no May this year.’

‘Nor was there last year. It rained buckets all month.’

‘The year before that...’

‘I don't mean the month!’ huffs Gothic Hare, impatient.

‘Ah May! May's been dead a long time.’

‘Are you sure?’ the indistinct suspicions begin to take on a strangely frightening shape. The shape of the lonely Empty Grave with a single engraved word that the deadies whisper about at night.

‘Just like the fact that the roof leaked,' the old women tighten their lips.

‘I tell you, it was pouring buckets all month,’ one of them whispers insistently.

‘Do you have any idea where she might have gone?’

‘Who, May? Where can she go from the cemetery? Lord rest her soul,' say the widows in unison and lower their eyes in modesty.

‘That's a good question,’ mutters Gothic Hare.

He suddenly realises what else seems strange to him.

‘Why do our hammingas - the gravestone ghosts and our wheels together - obey you?’ he asks. ’Besides, during the day they are stony like it belongs. The coffin can't be moved.’

From the widow's hands spices and spells pour abundantly into the pan.

‘Ah, ghosts and cats are one recipe. Caress, sour cream, and a little bit of black magic.’

‘A bit?’

‘Just a little,’ the contents of the pan gurgles in agreement.

It gives off steam and smells of all the graveyard herbs at once.

There's a thud in the kitchen. It's the ghost of Empty Grave's tombstone trying to escape.

One of the widows leaps up agilely from the table and pulls a large copper ladle from the boiling brew....

The hammingas have more work to do tonight. They struggle to roll the coffin back to the cemetery. There is one less of them, and on the birch lid sit three old women in identical pointy hats, smelling of red overfed geraniums....