One winter, just for baptism, Uliana Petrovna, the mother of Martha's aunt, died. No one knows what kind of evil spirits beckoned her into the courtyard, and so she died at the gate. And then the winter was windy and snowy, the frost reached minus thirty. Martha was already bowing to everyone in the village, but it was hard to find the diggers. My daughter ran around the whole village, still found good men, dug a hole. Ulyana Petrovna was buried with all the honors, priests and mourners. Mother was laid to rest, and they dedicated nine and forty days. And there you look, and March arrived in time with business.
The snow is melting, and the earth is visible here. Everything changes in the world, but from night to night Aunt Martha has the same dream. As if her mother was standing in the river outside the village, her feet were soaked up to her knees, she pulled her hands to her daughter and whispered something inaudibly. Every day Martha woke up wet, as if she had just bathed in the river, she even tasted mud in her mouth.
So my aunt's life itself turned into a nightmare. She was afraid of falling asleep more than anything else. Within a few days the strong and healthy Martha became so thin and pale that she herself began to resemble the deceased. She was all sunken, her cheeks sunken, she walked whiter than snow. There were even rumors in the village that the old Ulyana Petrovna was pulling her daughter along.
Martha and her fellow villagers traveled to many churches throughout the area. And the house was consecrated, and the courtyard was consecrated, but more than once. Only nothing helped, the aunt got worse and worse. And the dream has changed a little. Only bones remained from the legs, the eyes festered and even more fell, the hair turned gray and hung in rags. And only from almost empty eye sockets tears rolled one after another.
Martha was no longer afraid. Every evening she went to bed indifferently, plunged into the world of her nightmare, and in the morning, even paler after meeting a ghost in the water, she went to work.
It is not even necessary to guess how the story of Martha's aunt would have ended, but only once did the son come to the chairman of the collective farm there. The guy has seen a lot in his life, went through the war in Afghanistan, where he himself buried comrades in arms and avenged their souls with bullets. After the war, he graduated from seminary and took on the cassock of a priest. When he heard about the story of Martha's aunt, he immediately realized that it was necessary to act. I found three strong men in the village, but they opened Ulyana's grave. Her coffin, almost rotten, was half in the water. Martha's mother was reburied according to all traditions, and no one bothered the ghost in the water anymore.