A carrion crawler tastes every carcass before it eats, running the eight tentacles at its head along the body from end to end in case the meat is only resting. It has done this to hens, to deer, and once, in a ditch outside Ridgekettle, to a miller named Maddoc Pike who had lain down there after a wedding. The crawler is a pale green, segmented body about twelve feet long on a double row of short legs, with a blunt head and a mouth that opens sideways. Whatever the tentacles touch alive goes stiff within a breath. Maddoc woke two days later in his own bed, rigid as a plank, with a crescent of slime dried across his waistcoat. The carters who found him had driven the crawler off with a hay fork.
The oldest account is a line scratched into a lintel at Tarnheron, a tin working in the hills, where charcoal burners recorded that the lower gallery was "licked clean by something with hands." For a century afterward crawlers were taken for a mine fungus, because they sit motionless in the dark for days. The next account is a drover's journal, which puts one above ground for the first time, following the cull road down to Ridgekettle, where each autumn's slaughtered sheep drew them out of the quarry. By the end of the drover's life the crawlers had learned the calendar and were arriving a week early.
A trade grew from that. Carcass carters haul culls and winter-killed stock up to the flat stones above the quarry each dusk, and the farms pay them in wool and cheese, because a crawler fed on a stone does not wander into a barn. The carters read the stones in the morning. Bones picked white and a gray film of slime across the rock mean the crawler has come and gone. After a meal it drags its belly back and forth over the stone like a man wiping his boots, and keeps at it long after the stone is clean. Nothing about this is dangerous. The carters sit and watch it with their lunches.
Households keep their own habits. Thresholds are washed with vinegar steeped in juniper berries, which stings the tentacle tips and sends a crawler sliding off toward the next door. A dead animal goes out by the back, never the front, so no scent runs through the house. Anyone stiffened by a touch is left where they lie, wrapped in a blanket with a warm brick on the chest, and talked to until the fingers move. Mirela Hask, senior carter at Ridgekettle, says it plainly as she loads the cart: "Feed it the ox, or it starts sampling the neighbors."
- Classification
- Giant scavenging caterpillar-like aberration
- Habitat
- Quarries, caves, cull-road ditches
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 12 ft long, 2 ft high
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Hill quarries and old mine galleries
- Binomial
- Scolopendra cadaveris
- Diet
- Carrion and anything left stiff
- Temperament
- Methodical, indifferent, persistent