The latch on Stanka Orlec's kitchen door in Jastrebin is cold enough in August to lift skin from a damp thumb. She opens it with her sleeve pulled down over her fingers and does not look at the far corner until the kettle is on the stove. The air tastes of a coin held in the mouth, flat and faintly sweet, and the back teeth begin to ache.
The night I sat up with her, the order held as she says it always does. The lamp flame leaned toward the corner and went blue at its base. The milk in the pail on the sill soured without a sound. Frost grew across the inside of the window, ferns first, then a flat white sheet, while on the dry boards a dark patch spread in the shape of a body's weight. Then the figure was simply there, where the woodbox meets the wall, and not entirely: the frost ferns on the window showed through its coat, and below the knees the coat thinned to mist before it reached the boards. It is taller than the doorframe allows, so the head tips forward under the beam. A gray wool mourning coat hangs to the shins. The hem drips, and the floor beneath it stays dry. The face is long, slack and sorrowful, pale as fog by moonlight, and the eyes are dark hollows with a cold glimmer at the bottom of each. The left one sits a finger's width lower than the right.
It does not approach. It faces the stove for about an hour, the way a man faces a fire he used to sit beside, and Stanka peels beets with her back to it. Nobody in Jastrebin says the name of the mill's last owner while the figure is in the house. They call it the lodger. A saucer of salted water on the sill that skins over with ice means it is in, and no one lends salt after dark, because the saucers need all of it. Whether it sees Stanka or only the kitchen as it stood when the man was alive, I cannot tell, and nobody has found a means of asking. Toward the end of the hour the lamp stands upright again, the frost pulls back to the corners of the glass, and the taste leaves the mouth. By morning a damp print lies on the boards, a heel and a long flat sole.
At Radovec the schoolhouse ghost breaks every rule above. The air around it is warm and smells of yeast, the slates stay dry, the stove draws well, and the children say its name aloud and hang their wet mittens from the sleeve of its coat. It is the only one I have met that leaves a room warmer than it found it.
- Classification
- Bound dead, household haunt
- Habitat
- Kitchens, mills, old schoolhouses
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- about 7.5 ft, stooped under beams
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Borderland of the living and dead
- Binomial
- Umbra lodgeria frigida
- Diet
- Lamp heat, stove warmth, fresh milk
- Temperament
- Fixed, indifferent, watchful