"Is it under the bed or in the wardrobe?" The boy asks it across a heap of ash slats, and Sabine Orrow, who has fielded the question from customers for twenty years, answers without lifting her plane. "Whichever has more room." She builds beds in Moorspoon, a peat-cutting village of forty chimneys, and her mornings follow a fixed order. Slats first, then rails, then legs, each turned to fourteen inches and not a half inch less. Lower, and the thing underneath is pressed against the slats and sulks all night, and a sulking bogeyman breathes cold onto the mattress. Higher, and a child can see into the dark and starts naming what is there. Fourteen inches lets a child imagine nothing in particular. Sabine learned the figure from her father and has never tested it, only sold it.
At noon she loads a cot onto a handcart and takes the shoulder road to Alpgoose, a sheep farm where the cot is bound for a new daughter. The mother meets her at the gate holding a boot. Most households in the district keep the same habit: before sleep, one boot stands upright beside the bed with its laces pulled out and heaped on the floor. The bogeyman cannot pass a boot with loose laces. It spends the night threading them back, and by dawn it is too tired to bother the bed.
On the way home Sabine stops to tip over a bed returned for a cracked rail. The bogeyman is pressed flat to the underside, gray as felt, knees folded past its ears. It unfolds, ducks beneath her arm without looking at her, and goes into the nearest hedge. I took its print earlier that spring by sliding lampblacked paper under a bed in her shop and measuring the smudge with a dressmaker's tape. The palm is eleven inches across, the fingers longer than the palm. Standing, it would reach seven feet. Folded, it fits a space twenty inches high.
Sabine sweeps shavings at dusk and shuts the shop. Once the house is dark, the bogeyman does the one thing it does every night, with no malice in it. It gathers the single socks from under the beds and lays them out in pairs by color along the baseboard, and the odd ones go in a row by the door. Sabine finds them at sunrise and drops them in a basket by the stove. "Laces out," she tells the boy at the door, "and it won't trouble you."
- Classification
- Folding house-dweller, unclassed
- Habitat
- Under beds, inside wardrobes, attic corners
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft standing, 20 in folded
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Sleeping houses of the peat country
- Binomial
- Umbrasomnus plicatus
- Diet
- Dust, lint, lost socks
- Temperament
- Sullen, patient, fussy about order