Parish burial book, Maudlin Cross, 27 September: nine graves in the lower yard found open from within, the soil heaped outward, no spade marks on the lip of any. The vicar has underlined the word outward twice. I reach the village on the 30th and find the Living Dead already at work on the churchyard wall, testing it stone by stone with flat gray palms. They are the color of candle tallow and the height of a doorframe, longer in the shin than any farmhand, and they place each foot as though the leg had to be talked into it.
Late September is their quick season. Warm afternoons make them restless and almost purposeful, and they walk the field boundaries from dusk until the rooks settle. On 2 October I measured one's stride across a plowed headland by laying a six-foot hay rake handle end to end beside the track: forty-one inches, the heel dragging a groove an inch deep. That groove is how they are followed. It runs straight, with a smear of gray grave clay on every fence rail at chest height. They eat nothing. Turnip tops turn up chewed to pulp and dropped in a ring, never swallowed.
The rains of the third week slow them. By the 24th the stride is twenty-eight inches by the same handle, and each puddle stops one for several minutes while its head tilts. In November the cold takes the rest. I measured fourteen inches on the 11th, and on the 29th nothing, because the one I was watching above Wissun Hollow had stopped mid-step in a pasture with frost grown thick on its shoulders and one arm still half raised. Wissun Hollow buries its dead with the boots on the wrong feet, so that the risen will turn in circles. Joss Harrow, who runs sheep above the hollow, lifts his pasture gate off its hinges each evening and leans it against the wall, saying a thing that cannot find the latch will stand and wait.
The one I watched wears a black wool burial coat gone green at the seams. Its boots are wrong-footed as the custom requires, the toes splayed outward in a V. The left eye is clouded white. The right is black and does not follow the lantern when I swing it. Every night I tracked it, it walked straight from the wall to the pasture gate without a single turn. Who laced those boots, and why has the custom failed on this one alone?
- Classification
- Reanimated corpse
- Habitat
- Churchyards, plowed headlands, pasture walls
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft tall, stride 14 to 41 in.
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Parish churchyards and cold pastures
- Binomial
- Mortivagus lentus
- Diet
- Nothing; chews turnip tops unswallowed
- Temperament
- Dogged, dull, slow to turn