The demon cannot cross a doorstep that was scrubbed the same morning, and this one weakness has protected more households in Jugmoor than any ditch or charm. Lye, wood ash and a stiff brush are all it takes. The stone must still be wet. A clean step that has dried means nothing to the demon, which will walk over it and take its time with the rest of the house. Householders scrub at first light and leave the bucket of gray water beside the step until noon, since pouring it out early is held to spoil the work. A demon that meets a wet step stands in the lane with its arms folded, studies the shine, and goes off toward the next house.
The horns come first, because they are what people see over a hedge. They sweep forward rather than back, ridged like a ram's, the tips turned slightly inward. I measured them in Jugmoor while the demon slept in a drainage culvert, laying a peeled willow wand along each outer curve, marking the wand with charcoal, and carrying it to the inn to check against a yardstick. The left horn runs thirty-one inches, the right twenty-nine. The shorter one was broken on a lintel the demon misjudged, and it is touchy on the subject.
The skin is brick red and runs hot enough to melt frost in the shape of each foot, which is how the demon is tracked. A line of bare, wet hoofprints across a white field is its signature. Milk turns in the crocks of any house it passes at night. It eats little, mostly the last bite of bargains gone sour, a taste that hangs over a market after a quarrel. Its one true appetite is for pickled onions. Mabyn Corrow, who keeps the last house in Dovescar, loses a jar a month and has stopped hiding them. The lid always comes back, screwed on crooked.
The tail is long and thin and ends in a spade of black hair. When I first saw it at Dovescar the tuft was full and combed. This autumn it was singed to a stub, and the demon carried the tail looped over one forearm like a coat, glaring at anyone who looked. Nobody there will say what happened. The hooves are split and glossy, and it buffs them with a rag. On the step of Corrow's house a scrub brush lies bristles-down in a puddle that has not yet dried, and beside it stands an empty jar with no lid.
- Classification
- Lesser fiend, threshold-bound
- Habitat
- Farm lanes, culverts, market towns
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft tall, horns about 30 in
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Borderlands between farms and the pit
- Binomial
- Daemon limenifugus
- Diet
- Soured bargains, pickled onions
- Temperament
- Vain, patient, easily offended