The rope comes up warm. Lowrie Tarn feels it before he sees the trap, a heat in the hemp like a kettle handle, and he stops hauling with the first wicker funnel still under the surface of the Bridmas Fen drain. Cold water numbs his fingers by seven every October morning. This water gives the feeling back. He lands the trap. Nine eels, thick as wrists, lie packed head to tail in the mesh, all facing one way, as if someone had sorted them. A green film coats the wicker, soft as the inside of a cheek, and it peels off his glove in a single sheet. Ten yards out, a ridged back breaks the surface, hung with weed like wet hair, and goes under without a ripple. Lowrie keeps hauling.
The rest of the morning is sluice work. He scrapes slime off the boards with a paint scraper, then rinses his hands in a bucket of cold tea steeped with bog myrtle, the way every house on the fen does before bed and after any dealing with the water. A saucer of vinegar sits on each windowsill. Nobody remembers who started it. The creature itself eats drowned alder, duck eggs and whatever eels it catches on its own, and it leaves a trough of flattened reed, shoulder wide, from open water to wherever it beds down. Warm pockets in the drain mark where it has lain. Lowrie follows the trough to the Gallow ditch, finds the reeds still wet, and turns back.
At noon he walks to Swintide Flats for lamp oil. Ludmila Crake, who keeps the chandlery, will sell a man one boot only if he shows her the other. Nobody on the fen lends a boot, and nobody says the creature's name on the causeway; it is the Tenant, or it is nothing. The Tenant takes left boots, one a season, from wherever they are set down, and a borrowed boot is owed for twice.
Back at the drain by dusk, he finds that the left boot he set on the sluice post an hour ago is gone. Something stands up in the reeds, taller than the reeds, the boot dangling from one long hand, its jaw hanging wider than a jaw should. It regards him for as long as it takes tea to cool in a bucket. Then the water takes it back. Lowrie starts for home in one boot, saying to the black drain behind him, "Dry socks tomorrow."
- Classification
- Bog-dwelling aquatic humanoid
- Habitat
- Peat fens, slow drains, reed beds
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 8 ft tall when it stands
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Fen and drain country
- Binomial
- Paludonax limosus
- Diet
- Drowned wood, eels, duck eggs
- Temperament
- Territorial, oddly curious about footwear