The Nevrazice almanac for 3 November 1871 gives the Lubenka Hollow patch one line: "Forty-one gourds counted, forty carted. One stays. Do not count again." The count is still forty-one on the last night of October and forty by morning on the first. The one that stays is the head. It is a gourd the size of a washtub, ribbed deep, orange at the crown and gone to old brass in the grooves, with a skin pitted like a hammered pan. Two slits are cut for eyes, one set a thumb higher than the other, and a tallow-yellow glow sits behind them. The mouth is a single slash that runs ear to ear, if it had ears.
The body is the cheap part. Vine-gray hide is stretched over joints that bend a little too far, with forearms that hang to the knee and fingers as long as a trowel and hard as dried root. It wears a flour sack split at the neck and a belt of braided stem. On the frost of 9 November I pinned a surveyor's chain at one print and walked it to the next: nine feet four inches heel to heel, the toes driven deeper than the heels. Whatever made them was not strolling.
It leaves seeds. They are wet, warm for about an hour, and pale as fingernail parings, dropped in a line across the field and over the fence rails, with the sour-sweet smell of squash gone soft. Torn tendrils lie in the furrows behind it. Trackers follow the seeds from a field's width back, and the line always ends at a door, with the seeds cold by the time anyone arrives. Farmers rake the rest under before light, since a seed left on the road sprouts by evening. Wiktor Draga, who keeps the last farm before the patch, says it only walks when somebody has asked for it, and that nobody under his roof has.
In Nevrazice a grudge is not spoken aloud past the last fence post on the Hollow road. People hold it behind their teeth until the lamps of the market square are in sight, and children are taught to hum the angry part. Gourds from the north rows are never carved. They are split and fed to the pigs after the first frost. The patch is said to keep every grievance voiced inside its rows, including ones from before the village had a name, and to sort them by age. That is told plainly in Nevrazice and cannot be checked. At the gate a woman shelling beans waves visitors on with a single sentence. "Say it at home, with the door shut."
- Classification
- Vine-born avenging revenant
- Habitat
- Overgrown pumpkin patches, fallow fields
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 9 ft stride, about 8 ft tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Harvest fields and farm lanes
- Binomial
- Cucurbita vindicta
- Diet
- Unknown; leaves split seeds behind
- Temperament
- Patient, silent, single-minded