The zombie walks toward lit windows and stops at them, forehead against the glass, until the light goes out or the sky pales. At Bergsvall one has come down off Vindsetmyr bog on nine nights running, peat-brown to the knees, to stand at the window of the Haugen dairy. It leaves a clouded oval on the pane. The household wipes it away each morning and finds it again by dusk.
Solveig Haugen's day begins with that pane. She cleans it with vinegar and a rag, then goes through to the cheese room and turns forty rounds of goat cheese on their spruce boards, scalds the churns, and carries whey out to the pigs. At noon she mends the latch of the north shutter. Every window in Bergsvall is shuttered after dark except one, and each house chooses that one with care: a back room nobody sleeps in, facing the bog, with a rush lamp dipped in mutton fat. The lit room is the whole defense. A zombie that has a window to stand at does not look for another.
Her afternoon goes to the wet work of the place. She cuts rennet, salts the rinds, and walks the yard fence checking for brown water. The thing drips as it travels, and the drops dry to a gray crust that is easy to follow back toward the bog. Solveig reads it the way other farmers read hoofprints. I measured the smudge on the Haugen pane with a carpenter's folding rule held against the sill. It sits 63 inches up, higher than any grown person in the village can reach without a step. The people of Bergsvall say it is the same zombie every autumn. I have no means of confirming that.
At dusk Solveig closes eleven shutters, lights the rush in the whey room, and tells the dark outside the glass good evening, as she does every night. The zombie arrives after the second watch. The lamp shows a long gray face tilted a little too far to the left, a jaw hanging slack, one eye clear and one the color of skimmed milk. It does not blink when the cat springs onto the sill on the inside. Solveig eats her supper with her back to the window and the cheese knife in its block. The lamp burns until the wick drowns in fat, and the zombie stays until then. Why it wants a window and never a door, and what it expects to see in a lit room it has never once tried to enter, nobody in Bergsvall has answered.
- Classification
- Reanimated dead, slow-walking
- Habitat
- Peat bogs, farm lanes, lit windows
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 6 ft tall, stooped
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Northern bog country
- Binomial
- Tardicorpus viduus
- Diet
- None observed
- Temperament
- Patient, fixed on light