Around the fireplace

(…) at night in the Black Month it is different. We have the logs burning in the great chimney – faring and fitful in th e beginning of the evening, with black spaces where the fire has not caught – but in the later part, glowing with scarlet and golden cinders in a thick warm blanket of grey ash under the burning wood. (…)

But when she tells, she will raise her hands, or throw back her head, or shake her shawl, and long tattered shadows race across the ceiling into the dark of the unseen half of the room, or huge faces with gaping mouths and monstrous nosesand chins- our own, transfigured by the flames into witches and spectres.

Possession: A romance

by A.S. Byatt