In the pantry at Lisping Mill, a hand is pressed into the flour crock, and the hand is wrong. Four fingers, each with a knuckle too many, and a thumb set low on the palm like a spare. Beside the crock a stripe of shelf has been wiped clean of dust where a row of spoons stood until Tuesday. The latch on the loft hatch is lifted, not forced. Nothing else is missing.
The mill argues about this every time. Wenna Crake, who keeps the miller's books, holds that meazels take only what has been put away, and that the spoons were taken because they lived in a drawer under linen. Wilmot Tarn, who owns the next barn over, says they take whatever shines and the spoons were simply handy. They went at it in the yard for an hour while I knelt at the crock. I laid a pair of draftsman's dividers across the print, then set the dividers against my own forearm to carry the figure away: eleven and a half inches from thumb tip to little finger, a hand longer than mine. The flour was barely dented. Whatever made it weighs less than a sack of oats.
The meazel itself is a gray, hairless, ladder-thin person who lives in the dead space between roof and ceiling. It comes down when a household sleeps and does not look at the sleepers. It rarely eats anything but dry crumbs. It takes small objects, and it takes them with great patience, one a night. I settle the argument in Wenna's favor, with a note for Wilmot. In his barn a tray of mirror shards sat on a beam for a month untouched. Two miles on, at Fig Alms, a sack of plain turnip seed hidden under a bed went missing while the glass ornaments on the sill stayed put. A meazel wants what someone has taken trouble to hide.
Fig Alms has its habit, and it works. Every house sets its oldest, most dented spoon on the windowsill at dusk. The meazel takes that one and leaves the drawers alone, and each morning the sill is bare and the household's good things are still where they were put. Some also scatter dried peas across the loft floor, so that a footstep crackles and the thief goes back up and waits. Eight years ago the same dividers gave me ten inches on a print in the Fig Alms bakery. The bakers say the old one went off to a different roof and a younger one grew into the space. Nobody has seen either. Wenna walked me to the gate at Lisping Mill and nodded at the pantry window. "Put the dented one out and go to bed."
- Classification
- Gaunt humanoid loft thief
- Habitat
- Attics, haylofts and roof spaces
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- about 5 ft tall, 11.5 in. handspan
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Farm country and mill villages
- Binomial
- Gracilis furtivus
- Diet
- Dry crumbs, seed, stored grain
- Temperament
- Patient, secretive, quietly acquisitive