The griddle is cold enough at five in the morning to pull skin off a wet thumb. Joss Marrick lifts it from her breastbone before she opens her eyes. Every household at Rudge Tarn sleeps under one, a span of black iron laid flat on the chest at bedtime, because the incubus comes for the weight of a sleeper's breath and, finding the place taken, settles on the shins instead. There it can do nothing but be heavy. This morning it is still there when she sits up: a long gray figure folded at the foot of the bed, knees higher than its shoulders, head tilted toward the wall. It does not turn. The shutter bangs in the wind, and the shape is only the quilt again.
Her trade is mattresses, and the day goes on as days do. She cards horsehair until nine and sews ticking until noon. Shepherds from Nuttall Crag come down for repairs, paying in cheese and complaining about the price in the same breath. Every returned mattress gets the flat of her palm before anything else. Feather ticking springs back from a sleeper, but where an incubus has sat the dent stays, and it stays cold, like a stone left in a stream. She has found six this year. What the crag families mind most is not the weight but the blanket. The spare one at the foot of the bed is always folded into exact thirds and set on the windowsill, corners squared. One shepherd's wife says she would rather be robbed.
Joss says it is the same one that sat on her grandmother, since the dents always fall on the left side of the bed. I have no way to check this, and I have never seen two together. At two in the afternoon, while she tacks a seam in the loft, I see it a second time. Noon sun comes through the shutter slats in white bars across the floorboards, and at the far end, among the unstuffed ticks, something tall stands with its arms hanging past its knees. The bars cross its chest and chin. Its eyes sit in the dark band between them, and they are not moving. Joss does not look up from her needle. "Only pricing the stock," she says. The sun slides a plank to the right, and where the figure stood there is a bale of horsehair with a gray blanket folded over it.
The griddle hangs by the door on a nail, soot on its underside, and in the middle a round patch the size of a palm where the soot will not take.
- Classification
- Night-sitting fiend
- Habitat
- Bedchambers, lofts, shuttered rooms
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 9 ft unfolded, 4 ft folded
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Sleeping households of upland farms
- Binomial
- Somnus ponderosus
- Diet
- The slow breath of sleepers
- Temperament
- Patient, tidy, unblinking