The cellar centipede of the lowlands sleeps on the slate shelves of cheese vaults, and the naturalist laid a folding carpenter's rule along one and read six feet one inch from antennae to tail. Calipers across the body gave a thickness of one thumb. The plates are clear as window glass, so a swallowed rat shows inside as a smudge of ink for most of a night.
People in Vespers Low, a village whose name is a clerk's mistranslation of a word meaning "the low vaults" and which the villagers have kept out of spite, tell when one has taken a cellar by the rats. A cellar with a centipede has none. Rinds sit on the shelves unnibbled, and the floor drains run quiet. Sometimes there is a husk in a corner, a whole shed skin with every leg intact, pale as a blown eggshell. Cheesewrights treat the husk as a lease notice. They do not take it away.
The rules that follow from this are all about noise. Lanterns are carried with the shutters closed to a slit and are never set on stone, because a clatter draws the animal up from its coil in seconds, front third lifted, antennae flared toward the sound. The creature is nocturnal, patient and territorial, and it holds a cellar the way a landlord holds a deed. Pruett Oake, who has aged wheels in the same vault for thirty winters, says only that he walks the stairs in felt and that he has never once been bitten. The trade of floor-padder exists because of this. Padders lay sawdust and wool felt over cellar flagstones and re-lay them each autumn, and a padded vault is priced higher than a bare one.
What people get wrong is the light. Every grandmother in the district says the centipede hates it, and children are sent down with candles. The creature does not care about light, which is why acid-green fungus can glow from a cellar wall at its shoulder without troubling it. It is the sound of a dropped lamp that it answers. One of its plates, the fourth from the head, is often cracked and mended with a seam of opaque yellow, and the villagers read the scar as a sign of age. The naturalist saw it on three animals in three separate cellars and thinks it is simply how they grow, a seam left where one plate splits as the next forms. The exception is the water. In the flooded pit at Ravine Quarry, a name taken from a mapmaker's guess at a word that means "drowned," the centipede hunts eels in black water and takes no notice of noise. The naturalist dropped a lantern off the rim there on purpose and watched the animal's long coral-tipped legs ripple along the surface without a pause.
- Classification
- Giant translucent myriapod
- Habitat
- Cold limestone cellars and flooded quarries
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- Six feet long, thumb-thick
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Limestone cellars of the lowlands
- Binomial
- Scolopendra vitrea
- Diet
- Rats, eels, turnip grubs
- Temperament
- Territorial, sound-sensitive, patient