The windowsill is cold under the palm, but only along its outer inch, and in August that is wrong. Frost on the glass, a pillow gone clammy as a cellar wall, a water jug skinned over with ice: this is how the vampire is found at Oxgang and at Maund Hollow, the two parishes where it works. It feeds on sleepers, a few swallows at a time, never enough to wake the house. Beyond that, three people have described it to me, and they do not agree. A carter on the Maund road says it is tall, taller than a hedge, and pale as candle tallow. He has twice seen it standing in a gap in the hawthorn with its hands folded. It smells of nothing, he says, which is how he tells it from a drunk.
A widow at Oxgang says it is small and wears a dead man's coat with the cuffs turned back. It does not bite at first. It breathes on the wrist until the skin goes blue-white, and only then does it drink. She is certain it remembers every house it has fed in and goes back to those before trying a new one. Whether it keeps such a memory is beyond anything I can verify. The third account is the shortest. Sorley Vane, who burns lime at Oxgang, sleeps on the warm kiln wall every night of the year and calls the creature the borrower.
The carter's creature and the widow's would not know each other on the road. Both leave the same cold. Nobody in either parish will sell or lend a warming pan, and nobody will say a sleeper's name aloud once the lamps are out. A pan carries the heat of a bed from one house to the next, and the vampire, which has none of its own, goes where heat has been. Tracking it is dull work: frost on the inside of a bedroom pane, a ring of rime on the floorboards beneath a window, a clean patch in the dust where a cold hand rested. Garlic is hung, mostly by newcomers. Old households bank the hearth and keep the pan out of sight.
On a nail beside the carter's back door at Maund Hollow hangs a copper warming pan, lid shut, a skin of frost across its belly in the middle of August.
- Classification
- Undead blood-drinker
- Habitat
- Farm parishes, bedrooms, hedgerow gaps
- Danger
- High
- Size
- About 6 ft, spare and narrow
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Sleeping houses and hedgerows
- Binomial
- Hemovorax algidus
- Diet
- Blood taken from sleepers
- Temperament
- Patient, cold, soft-footed