Vasek Horodnik sinks wells around Ilovec Bog, and he reads ground the way a baker reads dough. Wet earth over water is cold and smells faintly of iron. The patches that mark a mouther are warm to the back of the hand, slick as rendered fat, and have no seep under them however deep he drives his probe rod. Mud like that is not fed by a spring. It is made. The creature softens a ring of ground about six paces across, so that anything crossing it sinks to the knee before it understands. Vasek will not bore within a hundred paces of a warm patch, whatever the landowner offers.
The body comes next, counted piece by piece. A mouther is a low heap about five feet across, the color of a skinned knuckle, with no front and no back. Its surface is a slow boil of mouths, forty or fifty in view at once, and no two have the same teeth: a child's small even row, a horse's flat slabs, a man's with a gold crown on one molar. They open out of step and slide across the hide, closing over the places they left. At Fradovice, where the bog road ends, the old women say each mouth belongs to something the creature has already swallowed. That is hearsay, and it is recorded here as hearsay.
Among the mouths sit perhaps two dozen eyes, acid yellow and lidless, each rolling on its own. When several settle on one watcher, the ground seems to tilt and the legs go loose. Fradovice calls this the turning. Vasek keeps his gaze on the mud beside the creature and never on the creature. An iron wheel rim is sunk in its left flank, rust orange, with skin grown over half of it. A hay cart went into the bog before Vasek's father dug his first well, and the rim has stayed where it lodged. Nothing else on the animal is that color.
The sound carries farthest and is noticed last: a wet, steady murmur of half syllables, a cough, a laugh that stops short. I hold that the creature never sleeps, though I have never outwaited it. In every house at Fradovice a walnut shell of beeswax sits on the lintel, and each person warms a plug in the mouth and presses it into both ears before going out toward the bog. The wax is renewed every spring from the hives along the fence. The instruction given to every child and carter is to walk on the birch roots and not the grass, to keep the ears stopped, and to never answer.
- Classification
- Amorphous aberration
- Habitat
- Peat bogs and soft mudflats
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 5 ft across, waist high
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Marsh and mudflat borderlands
- Binomial
- Ossipara balbutiens
- Diet
- Anything that sinks into its mud
- Temperament
- Ravenous, babbling, relentless