The sexton at Kovrelle re-sods the same four graves every October, and every October the turf has already been rolled back and patted flat by somebody else. It is treated as a chore, like clearing leaves from a gutter. The parish budgets for extra grass seed. The somebody is a ghoul, a gaunt gray scavenger that lives in clay-heavy burial ground, and in this district it is a minor expense more than a terror.
Mosk Haverin builds coffin lids in the lane behind the churchyard, and the ghouls keep him employed. His lids are oak, double-pegged, and cut a finger thicker than any other lid in the valley. I sat out a late-October watch with him. The first hint was the sexton's terrier, which sat down at the lych-gate and refused to go farther. The second was a fresh mound steaming faintly in air cold enough to show breath, as if something beneath it were warm. Mosk nodded at it and unscrewed a flask.
It came up beside the yew, head first, in no hurry. A ghoul is long where a person is wide. It would stand seven feet if it ever straightened, but it never does, and it travels folded over its knuckles. The skin is the gray of wet slate, stretched thin over the ribs and the hinge of the jaw. The eyes are pale as peeled eggs and do not blink. Every finger has an extra joint, which is why its prints in clay look like the tracks of a heron with opinions. It tilted its head toward our lantern, sniffed, and sneezed, a small damp sound. Then it went to work on the next grave over, as though we had made a poor argument.
The household remedy is pickled-onion brine. Families pour the liquid over a new grave at dusk, a habit said to begin in Corrimbar, the marsh town to the east, where every kitchen keeps a crock for it. It works the way pepper works on a dog: the ghoul moves on to unbrined ground. Mosk claims a ghoul remembers every name read aloud at a funeral and can recite them in order. I have no means of testing that. What I can report is the morning after. The lid lay on the grass with its pegs set out in a row by size. The grave had been closed again, a hair crooked. The shroud was retied at the throat in a knot no one in Kovrelle uses. Nobody there can say who taught it that knot, or why it bothers.
- Classification
- Undead scavenger of burial ground
- Habitat
- Clay churchyards and old graveyards
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft if straightened, usually stooped
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Graveyards of the living world
- Binomial
- Tumulophagus longidigitus
- Diet
- The recently buried
- Temperament
- Patient, fussy, wary of lantern light