A ghoul ticks. The sound is small, dry and even, like a beetle in a bedpost, and it comes from the jaw rather than the throat: teeth meeting edge to edge as the animal measures how deep a lid lies. Around Fair Warning, a hill village whose name is a clerk's mistranslation of an old word for a burial ground, people judge its nearness by what other things stop doing. Sparrows quit quarreling in the yew. The dog under the cart stops scratching. Then the ticking starts, faint, and it seems to come from under the nearest floor, which is often the case.
The ghoul itself is gray and long-fingered, six feet if it would unfold, which it seldom does. It goes on all fours, on pads of horn that make no sound on turf. One eye is milky and the other a sour yellow, and neither moves much. It eats the buried first, then mice, then whatever dies in the ditch, and it sifts the soil through its fingers as it digs, so a robbed grave shows a tidy cone of fine earth beside it with not one clod in the pile.
At Agreeable Hill, where surveyors rendered an old phrase for 'heap of the grave' as something pleasant and the parish kept the joke, nobody speaks a burial's name aloud for nine days after the funeral. The ghoul learns names by listening at the turf, and a name said near fresh ground draws it. Every household also tips a scoop of pea gravel along its back path after a funeral, because the horn pads that are silent on grass crunch on stone. Flint-laying is a trade worked for the ghoul's sake alone. Cullen Marrick has packed graves at Agreeable Hill since he was fourteen, setting a course of knapped flint, edges up, above each lid. A ghoul cuts its palms on it once and goes to the next plot without flint, which is why a churchyard is laid with flint all at once or not at all.
What the villagers get wrong is the quiet. They take silence for departure and stop spreading gravel. Marrick, who has opened more than a few burrows, says a ghoul goes quiet when it is full, and sleeps in its tunnel for a week with its jaw shut, which is the worst week for the nearest cellar. They also trust iron coffin nails, which a ghoul chews like rind. The longest burrow Marrick has followed ran thirty-one feet, from the yew to a root cellar in Fair Warning.
- Classification
- Undead grave scavenger
- Habitat
- Churchyards, barrows, old cellars
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft if unfolded, usually crouched
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Burial hills and churchyards
- Binomial
- Necrophaga tickans
- Diet
- Buried dead, carrion, mice
- Temperament
- Patient, furtive, stubborn