The gelatinous cube sweeps. Each morning it travels its passage from end to end, taking up dust, moth wings, bootlaces and flaked mortar, and leaving a floor clean enough to eat from. In the old lead adit under Whitlock Scarp, six hundred yards of timbered tunnel, it has kept this round since before the oldest man in the valley was born. When I arrived, a shepherd's crook hung in its upper third, tilted, as a spoon hangs in set jelly, and a fringe of barley husks rode along its base.
Vesna Hallam has peeled the adit for thirty years. The cube leaves a skin where it passes, a sheet thin as onion paper and clear enough to read through. She lifts it with a horn spatula, stretches it on an alder frame, and sells the dried sheets to lantern makers in Ingram Hollow, who prefer them to glass because frost does not crack them. Peeling is a trade that exists nowhere else on the scarp. The first sheet of each spring she cuts into strips and lays at the adit mouth, unsold. "Somebody has to pay for the floor," she says.
Virgil Tench hauls ore carts in the lower workings and has a different habit. Before each shift he rolls a pebble ahead of him down the rails. A pebble that clicks tells him the stone is bare and the cube is elsewhere. A pebble that dies without a sound has landed on skin, and he goes back up. He carries no bread underground, and no one whistles in the adit, which he blames for a morning in his father's time when the cube came up the grade faster than a man walks. Vida Marrow, ten, gives the third account. She dropped her hat from the loading ramp, and the cube took it. For six days the hat rode inside, brim up, perfectly dry. On the seventh it lay on the ramp, washed clean of every stain. She wears it now with the brim folded.
Set side by side, the accounts agree on routine and differ on cause. I measured the cube from the third timber with a ten-foot ash pole, laid along its top edge while Vida held the far end: seven feet eight inches. When I first came, eight years ago, the same pole read a full eight, and the cube touched both walls. Now a hand passes easily between its left face and the rock. Vesna blames a dry summer. Virgil blames the whistling. Leaving by the lower path, I noticed the slope below the adit mouth: a pale stripe of bare stone through the moss, as wide as the cube, running straight down to the creek.
- Classification
- Aberration, translucent ooze
- Habitat
- Mine adits, cellars, dry cisterns
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 8 ft on each side
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Abandoned tunnels and underground passages
- Binomial
- Quadratum limpidum
- Diet
- Debris, refuse, small animals
- Temperament
- Patient, routine-bound, indifferent