The path to Llyn Aderyn runs two miles along a drainage ditch from the last farm gate, and the ditch is the first thing worth noting. Its water is clear and cold until the final bend, where the surface takes on a faint oily skin that holds the shape of a footprint for a full minute after the foot is lifted. The lake itself lies flat and gray under a hard white sky. I counted eleven dead swallows on the shingle, none marked, all dry.
Three people described the creature to me, and none of them agree. Gwenllian Pryor, who keeps geese on the east shore, says it is the size of a hay wagon and olive green, with a long tail that she has seen lift clear of the water to slap once. She says it has three slit-shaped eyes stacked down each side of the head, and that the lowest pair stay open when the rest close. Her geese will not graze within thirty paces of the shingle, and she does not argue with them.
Garmon Ffoulkes, a peat cutter, says it is pale, nearly gray, and smaller than a boat. He says the skin leaks a clear slime that leaves a sheen on the reeds, and that anything touched by it forgets, for an hour or two, which way is home. He once walked a full circle around his own cart. He keeps a wet cloth tied over his mouth when he works the bank. He does not say why. The third account comes from a girl of about twelve at the Eglwys Fach crossroads, who says it never comes up at all. Everything seen on the surface, she says, is the lake looking back. She was not willing to explain, and I could not check it, though I will record that the water at the center showed no ripple in the forty minutes I watched, even when a gust crossed the reeds.
The custom is shared. Nobody washes a tool in the lake, and nobody drinks downstream of the ditch without letting the water stand overnight in a clay pot. If a film forms, the pot is emptied on the road, never on a field. The aboleth eats fish and, I was told, the occasional heron, and it leaves behind a gray jelly in the shallows that hardens into a brittle crust by noon. On my second visit, the oily skin on the ditch began a full bend earlier than before. The geese had moved to the west shore. The exception is the old woman at the lakeside cottage, Nain Eirlys, who drinks straight from the lake each morning and has done so for sixty years. She forgets nothing. She remembers every name in the parish, and recites them to the water.
- Classification
- Aberration, freshwater predator
- Habitat
- Deep cold lakes and flooded caverns
- Danger
- High
- Size
- Roughly 20 ft long, hay-wagon bulk
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Lake bottoms and drowned caves
- Binomial
- Mucosaurus profundis
- Diet
- Fish, waterfowl, wandering livestock
- Temperament
- Patient, scheming, coldly curious