"Does it ever hurry?" a girl asked me at the gate of a barley field outside Maenor Cray, in the first week of September. I said I had not seen it hurry. She said her grandmother claimed it only walks, and that the barley leans away from it. The barley does lean, a few stalks at a time, as a gray figure comes down the headland at the pace of someone carrying a load. In dry weather it is easy to watch. It stands about seven feet, long in the limb, robed in wool, with bone showing at the wrists and the face. The skull has a hairline crack running from the left brow to the crown. The scythe rides in the right hand, blade down, and it is never lifted in September. At each field's edge the figure stops and waits for the cutting to end, then moves to the next.
October brings fog, and the habits change. The figure leaves the headlands for the hedgerows and then the lanes, and it comes into yards. Its hem is stiff with white frost on mornings when the grass has none. The blade drags on gravel with a dry rasp, and what it leaves behind is the best sign: a clean crescent of cut grass about four feet across on a lawn or verge, the stems sliced on a slant. Cerys Dunmor, who keeps sheep above Rhosgarrow, walks the long way around any crescent and tells her dogs to do the same. Nobody in either village will sell or lend a whetstone between the end of harvest and Candlemas. I was refused one at a shop in Maenor Cray, politely, as if I had asked for a favor from the dead.
When the ground freezes, the walking stops. On the last night of October the figure stands in the road and faces doors, one after another, the skull turning slowly on the neck. Pinpoints of green light sit in the sockets and do not blink. It stays longest at doors with a lit pumpkin on the step, an hour or more, and the blade comes up level with the hip while it looks. Then it lowers the scythe and goes on. I have recorded no harm from these visits, only the standing.
November rain drives it to the churchyard yews at Rhosgarrow. It stands under the widest one for days, and the water runs off the robe without darkening it. Moss gathers on the wool across the shoulders. By the second week of December the yew is empty and the lanes are quiet. The locals give their instruction flatly: leave the last row of every field standing, and keep the whetstone in the house.
- Classification
- Undead harvester, skeletal humanoid
- Habitat
- Field margins, lanes, churchyard yews
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 7 ft, long and stooped
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Autumn farmland and parish lanes
- Binomial
- Messorius cinereus
- Diet
- None observed; cuts only grass
- Temperament
- Patient, silent, unhurried