A demon moves into the room where an argument was left unfinished and stays until someone finishes it. At Brond, one has kept the back kitchen of the Kray farm since the thaw. Ansel Kray and his brother never settled whose turn it was to rehang the pasture gate. The gate has lain in the grass for eleven years, and the demon has spent most of the last one on the woodbox, picking lint from a coat of singed grain sacking.
Brond knows it is near by small failures. Sentences stop short of their ends, and a man asking for the salt stands holding the word "pass" with nothing to follow it. The stove draws backward. Dogs sit facing the corner with their ears politely forward. The heel of every loaf goes missing, and nothing else of the bread, so the women of Rutt Lane bake a spare heel and set it out. Thumbprints appear on the whitewash at the height of a tall man's shoulder, brown as toast. Lye does not shift them. Vinegar does.
What Brond does about it is plain. Someone finishes the argument aloud, in the kitchen, with a neighbor sitting by as witness, and the loser says the last word clearly. Nothing else has worked. Nobody in a haunted house says "never mind" or "forget it," because a dropped sentence counts as a gift and the demon keeps gifts. Every morning at the pump on Rutt Lane it takes one ladle of water, drinks it, rinses the ladle and hangs it back on its nail. Nobody has seen it do otherwise. Nobody uses that ladle before noon.
Brond gets two things wrong. It holds that an iron nail over the lintel bars the door. The demon hangs its coat on the nail. It also holds that the quarrel draws the demon, so children are hushed whenever grown voices rise, but the demon has no stake in who wins. It wants the ending. It will sit through a whole shouting match with its hands folded, waiting for the last dish to come round, and when the last word is spoken it leaves within the hour and takes that word with it. The loser cannot say it again that year. Ansel Kray has already chosen his word. He has not yet said it. The ladle hangs on its nail at the Rutt Lane pump, the bowl still wet.
- Classification
- Infernal spirit, lesser household order
- Habitat
- Farm kitchens and unfinished quarrels
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft 4 in, stooped under beams
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Farm kitchens of Brond and Rutt Lane
- Binomial
- Cacodaemon focarius
- Diet
- Bread heels, dropped sentences, last words
- Temperament
- Patient, vain, faintly aggrieved