The linen is warm under the knuckle, like a loaf an hour out of the oven, and it sheds a grit that settles between the teeth of anyone standing downwind. It is wound in strips the width of a hand, forty or fifty layers thick at the chest, stained the brown of strong tea and stiff with resin that crackles when the creature turns. At Tarnwren, the village below the cut tombs, nobody hangs white washing outdoors. The mummy counts all linen as its own. A sheet left on a line overnight turns up at dawn folded square on the tomb step, with the pegs lined up beside it in order of size.
The hands are long, each finger a joint longer than a living hand's, with nails the yellow of old piano keys. They lead. The arm comes up before the head turns, slowly, the palm flat, as if testing a pane of glass. They are tidy hands. Ewan Strake, who keeps goats on the Jarfell side of the ridge, loses a rake about once a month, and the rake is back by morning with its tines combed straight and a thumbprint of resin on the handle. The theft he can forgive, he says. The tidying he cannot.
The feet are wrapped separately and leave a track that is easy to read: flat prints of pale grit, resin flakes the size of lentils scattered between them, and no drag mark, since it lifts its heels. It will not cross wet ground. The wrappings drink water and hang from the knee like soaked laundry, so a ditch, a ford or a lawn after rain turns it back. The lanes at Tarnwren run between shallow trenches kept flooded from April to October, and anyone caught out at dusk is told to stand in one.
The face is the part to look at once. The right eye socket holds a black river stone, polished flat and set a little proud, so the linen lids never quite close over it. The left socket is empty and dry as a cup in a cupboard. A strip runs under the jaw and over the crown to keep the mouth shut, and the mouth is losing the argument. Three summers ago the gap between the upper and lower teeth measured one inch in my notebook. This summer it measures two and a quarter.
- Classification
- Wrapped undead
- Habitat
- Dry tombs and hillside burial cuts
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft 8 in tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Tombs and dry uplands
- Binomial
- Linteatus resinosus
- Diet
- None; hoards linen and resin
- Temperament
- Patient, tidy, territorial