BESLAN, Russia - Alla Gadieyeva fears the dark. She cannot sleep most nights, she rarely leaves her apartment, and she cannot remember what she was told moments earlier. But she can't forget the three days of hell she experienced last month at Beslan's School No. 1.

"Physically, I'm better. In terms of morale, this won't pass anytime soon," the 24-year mother of three says.

Gadieyeva, her 7-year-old son and her 54-year-old mother were among the more than 1,200 people who were at School No. 1 on Sept. 1 to celebrate the first day of the new school year. Instead, they were taken hostage by heavily armed terrorists, herded into the gymnasium and endured threats, taunts, thirst and terror for three days until it all ended in explosions, gunfire and the death of nearly 340 people.

The town of Beslan - and the entire republic of North Ossetia - is now marking the end of the traditional 40-day mourning period for the dead. Women are beginning to exchange their black head scarves for dark-colored ones. Men are preparing to shave off the beards they grew for the 40 days. Survivors like Gadieyeva are trying to purge themselves of horrific memories.

"I never was afraid of the dark before. Now, not for the sake of anything do I go out after dark," Gadieyeva says in her small, two-room apartment. "I rarely leave. When I go to the market, I'll stand in front of a row of vegetables, fruits. I don't see anything."

On Tuesday, in the charred carcass of the gymnasium, schoolchildren lit thin prayer candles and people propped up small religious icons and photographs among the flowers and stuffed animals. At the town cemetery, red-eyed men somberly poured drops of water or beer - offerings for the dead - on freshly dug graves adorned with flowers, bricks and wooden marking posts. The sounds of a chorus of Orthodox Christian priests offering prayers and blessings mixed with the wails of Ossetian women pounding the dirt graves, and yelling in Ossetian or in Russian: "How can this be?! How can this be?!"

During the three-day ordeal, Gadieyeva says, her son Zaur became so traumatized that he would flinch whenever someone touched him, or even brushed by him. As with most of the other children, his only spells of sleep were the times he fell unconscious from thirst and exhaustion.

Inside the sweltering gymnasium, the fighters taunted her and others who begged for water for their children. They threatened to kill anyone who had a cell phone. They shot men who refused to help them string explosives in the gymnasium. Children whimpered in fear, and all around there was screaming and crying.

Now, Gadieyeva says, Zaur is terrified when he sees men with thick, bushy beards. He wakes up at night sometimes screaming: "There are tanks! They're shooting at us! They're shooting us! Don't touch me!"

Her mother, Irina, is still recovering from the shrapnel that lodged in her knee as the explosives strung around the gymnasium detonated on the final day of the seizure.

Gadieyeva has only scorn for authorities who she says allowed the militants to enter the town unnoticed and take over the school.

"They should all be shot. From (North Ossetian President Alexander) Dzasokhov all the way to the school principal. They did nothing. Absolutely nothing," she says.

Fears are rising in the region that the Ossetians' grief may become outbursts of violence against the Ingush, a rival ethnic group whose members were among the fighters who seized School No. 1. Some fear a repeat of the 10-day war fought between the Ossetians and the Ingush in the fall of 1992. Gadieyeva says she cannot blame those seeking retribution.

"I think there will be something. Just imagine if you saw your child shot in the back. What do you expect people to do?" she says.