The drovers' almanac sold at Rundlet Cross calls the lamia a water snake with a woman's face painted on the front. The parish register, in a later hand, calls her a widow from the fen farms who stayed out past dark and did not come back as herself. Both are wrong in the same direction, since both want one animal. From the ribs up she is a woman, long in the arm and narrow in the shoulder. Below that she is a snake as thick as a rain barrel and some eighteen feet long, the color of old pond water, with no seam where the two halves join.
Greta Hobb, who keeps geese on the edge of Pottle Fen, says the lamia borrows the voice of whoever you miss most and has never once guessed a stranger's. I crossed the causeway with her one evening in October, after the reeds had gone brown and stiff. The geese went first. Forty birds on the bank stopped talking at once and tucked their heads under their wings. Greta shifted the sack of feed on her shoulder and walked faster. Then a woman called from the reeds to our left in a warm, ordinary voice, using a name I had not heard in years. I stopped. Greta took my sleeve and said nothing.
The water along the bank sank in a line, as if something heavy were drawing it off. A trough opened in the mud, smooth and two feet across, running toward us with no footprints on either side. The upper half rose out of the reeds without hurry. She wore the rags of a gray wool shawl, sodden and knotted at the breast. Her mouth was closed and perfectly still. One eye sat a finger's width lower than the other, and the voice kept calling, though it did not come from her mouth. Greta towed me down the causeway by the sleeve and I went. Behind us the geese stayed silent until full dark.
By morning the trough had dried to a crust, and a calf was gone from the pen at the Rundlet end of the fen, the gate still latched. In the reeds lay a shed skin, dry as paper and long as a hay wagon. Greta sifted coal ash and crushed juniper along every sill in her house, as the fen farms do after a calling, because grit scrapes a belly and the coil will not cross it. Nobody on the fen says their own name aloud on the causeway after sundown, not even to a dog. Cross Pottle Fen before dark. Carry no light. Answer nothing that calls you, whoever it sounds like.
- Classification
- Serpent-bodied fen predator
- Habitat
- Flooded fens and reed causeways
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 18 ft long, thick as a barrel
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Fens and flooded marshland
- Binomial
- Serpentoma vocatrix
- Diet
- Calves, geese, stray travelers
- Temperament
- Patient, mimicking, unhurried