The phantom matters from the last apple pressing until the ground is too hard to dig, about ten weeks, and the parishes of Mitchelmas Green and Wenfrey keep their calendars by it. In the early weeks it is a low pale shape in the hedgerows, stooped to five feet, its neck folded at a second joint where no neck has one. It wears a linen shroud gone green with mildew, the hem eaten into streamers. Each night it walks the same forty paces of hedge, from the stile to the horse pond, turns at a fence post, and walks them back. Nothing else happens. At the post it tips its head left, then right, the way a person settles a stiff collar, and goes on. I watched eight nights from a cart shed and got eight identical rounds.
The rains of the middle weeks bring it closer to the buildings. Where it passes, iron whitens. A fur of pale bloom, cold enough to hold a thumbprint, grows on gate hinges, latches, plowshares and pump handles, and comes off only with lye and a wire brush. This is the whole livelihood of the hinge-scourers, six households at Wenfrey who work from All Hallows' week to Advent, farm to farm, paid in cheese and cider by the hinge. Tracking the phantom takes nothing more than a walk down a lane at sunup: the gates it tried are white, the ones it skipped are clean.
Households observe a single rule. The lane-side gate of every field stays unlatched overnight, and the garden gate stays latched. A phantom that meets a shut gate stands before it until daylight, facing the house, and no one under that roof sleeps. Verrin Hask, who runs the cider press at Mitchelmas Green, hangs wet pomace sacking on her garden gate and swears it has never once whitened her hinges.
By the hard weeks it has stopped walking. It stands at the edge of the orchard facing a lit window, and its eyes do not move: one the size of a plum, clear and black, the other the size of a hen's egg and clouded blue-white, giving off a faint green light that picks out the frost from below. It breathes on window glass. The ring of rime left there is the shape of a mouth held open. Given an unlatched gate it takes it, goes up the lane, and does not come back; the fence post where it used to turn stays rimed white until the thaw. The scourers start on the last hinge the following morning, and one of them, scraping, tells whoever holds the bucket: "Pale on the hinge means it passed. Be glad of it."
- Classification
- Apparition of the hedgerow dead
- Habitat
- Orchard hedgerows and lane gates
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5 ft stooped, 8 ft with neck unfolded
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Cider country hedgerows
- Binomial
- Umbraxis gelida
- Diet
- Warmth drawn from hearths and hinges
- Temperament
- Incurious, patient, then fixed