The nixie is a freshwater spirit about four feet long from crown to tail fin, and the one I watched on the Lovosna weir weighed, by the look of how it sat in the shallows, less than a good-sized pike. It has a girl's face and arms, pale green hair that never dries, and below the ribs a tail the color of wet slate. Along the cheeks run fine gill slits that flutter when it is amused.
The first hint came at the sluice gate below Velitsa mill, where the miller, Pavel Sorokin, stopped me on the plank walk and pointed at the foam. It had gathered in a ring against the current, turning slowly the wrong way. Then the surface went flat in a patch about the width of a wagon, and the frogs on the bank quit all at once. A hand rose out of the water, long-fingered and webbed to the first knuckle, and laid a river pearl on the lowest stone of the weir. The nixie followed. It hung with its chin on the stone, watched me with eyes like black glass with a green lamp behind them, and began to hum, a thin reedy note that made my teeth ache.
Pavel kept his eyes on the planks. In Velitsa nobody speaks the nixie's name aloud within sight of the water, and nobody lends out a comb, because a comb is how it takes hold of a person: it will trade for one, and whoever owns the other half of the trade belongs to the river by spring. The pearl on the stone is left where it lies. I wanted to lift it and did not. The nixie tilted its head, and the gill slits flared once, which I took for laughter.
It stayed some twenty minutes, combing its hair with a bit of split reed, and then slid under without a ripple. The foam ring broke up. The pearl was gone from the stone, though I never saw the hand return for it. The mill wheel, which had stood dead all morning, started up on its own. On my last visit the weir pool was clear to the gravel. Now a green scum lies over the upper half, and Pavel says the nixie has moved its sitting place nearer the village bank. I could not confirm whether it is one nixie or several, since I never saw two at once, though the humming came from two directions on the second night. Nobody in Velitsa can say why it takes a pearl from the river bed only to leave it for the water to take back.
- Classification
- Freshwater spirit, semi-aquatic
- Habitat
- Mill races, weirs, slow river pools
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 4 ft long, light as a pike
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Sea and River
- Binomial
- Nympha fluvialis
- Diet
- Minnows, river snails, shed hair combs
- Temperament
- Curious, vain, quietly spiteful