A gauth makes a sound like a wet thumb drawn slowly across a pane of glass, and it makes it only when it is deciding. Before that, nothing. Cave swallows stop mid-flight in the entrance of the Furlong Hollow and go quiet, and the quiet is how the valley knows one is home. The creature is a floating sphere of gray-violet flesh, about four feet across, with one large central eye and a crown of ten thin stalks, each ending in a smaller eye. It hangs in the air on no visible support. I first logged one in late autumn, when it drifted at the lip of the Vatmaker's Gap and turned each stalk in turn toward the wind, like a man testing a row of doors. Its temper then was lazy. It watched sleet fall into the cave mouth for eleven days and did nothing else.
Winter brings the change. The gauth pulls deep into the Furlong Hollow and stays there, and the stalks curl inward until the body looks like a fist. Locals call this the knuckling. A woman named Linnet Aldous, who has worked the Hollow's rim for twenty-six years, gathers the frost-cracked rock the creature sheds from its resting ledge. The grit is faintly magnetic and sells to lens grinders in the lowland towns, so her trade exists only because the thing is in residence. She sweeps it into leather sacks and does not look up while she works. Her one rule is never to carry a lit lantern past the second boulder, because the central eye dislikes flame and the stalks do not.
By my return in early spring the knuckling had loosened, and the gauth was visibly more irritable. It had taken to dropping small stones from a height onto a particular stump near the entrance, apparently for no reason beyond the stump. Linnet says it has done this for three springs. It has never missed. When a thaw wind came through, the creature rotated its whole body to face the sound of dripping water and held there for a full afternoon, while every eye but the center one drifted shut. The central eye did not close at any point I observed.
It eats lichen, bats and, when it can get them, the glassy blind fish of the cave pools, which it lifts out of the water by some pressure I could not see and could not measure. What it leaves behind is the grit, and at the stump, a small, exact heap of gravel. On my last morning the heap stood knee high, with one pale stone set on top.
- Classification
- Aberration, floating many-eyed predator
- Habitat
- Cold caves and rocky gap mouths
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 4 ft across, stalks 2 ft long
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Underhill caverns and mountain passes
- Binomial
- Oculomorpha gauthiana
- Diet
- Bats, lichen, blind cave fish
- Temperament
- Lazy, petty, quick to punish