Parish book of Ellwand Cross, entry 212: "Three ewes, one gatepost and the pump handle gone gray in the night. No frost." Entry 231, same hand: "Again." The clerk records nothing further that year, and the silence tells as much as anything the parishioners volunteer. Dunmore Teague runs sheep on the common above Ellwand Cross. He says she is tall and slow, seen only when fog lies in the ditches, and that she crossed a drystone wall without touching it. Her feet were cracked like a dry riverbed. She left no prints in the mud, only a ring of dead grass where she had stood.
Dorrit Lamb keeps the mill at Bushel Reach and met her at noon, in full sun, beside the race. Dorrit says she was small and stooped, that her teeth knocked together with a sound like a loom shuttle, and that the water under her stopped moving. She was weeping, and the tears were black. Dilys Orme, who is eleven, says she is neither tall nor small but exactly as high as whoever is looking, and that she studies your boots rather than your face.
Set side by side, the three accounts agree on less than their tellers think and on more than they admit. All describe a cold that gets into the teeth, a gray that does not wash out, and a woman too thin to stand. I saw her once, at forty yards, on the common. She wore a sheet of gray wool, sodden to the hem. Her left eye was clouded white, and a black track ran from it down the cheek to the jaw. She looked at the pump, not at me. On 3 November I measured the ring she had left with a surveyor's chain: sixty-one feet across, the grass dead to the root, the edge so clean a plank would lie along it.
She feeds on warmth, not flesh. Ewes inside the ring are found stiff and unmarked, and posts and fleeces afterward grow a gray fur that smells of cellars. Farmers on both commons bring their stock in when the ditches fog. Nobody there will say her name outdoors between the first hay cutting and the last. They say "the Damp Aunt" and spit to the left. At the edge of the ring on the Bushel Reach side stands a pair of boots, filled to the tops with rainwater, the laces still dry.
- Classification
- Primordial mist spirit, blight-bringer
- Habitat
- Fogged common land and millraces
- Danger
- High
- Size
- about 6 ft, stooped
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Fog-bound pastureland
- Binomial
- Mortifera achlyos
- Diet
- Warmth drawn from living things
- Temperament
- Weeping, fixed, indifferent