The stones around a nothic's pit are turned face down. Every flat slab within forty paces has been flipped, and the undersides are pale and pitted, scraped clean of lichen as though someone wanted to read the backs of them. Shepherds at Santa Cesaria Cross learn this sign early. A field of upended stones means the thing is near, and the flock goes round.
Three people gave me three accounts, and they do not agree. Rodric Hale, who quarries lime above the cross, says the creature counts. He found his cut blocks restacked one night, the smallest on top, though he had left them in a different order. Marta Oland, who keeps goats on the eastern slope, says it only looks. She watched one for an hour at noon, crouched over a dead ewe's skull, rotating it by one finger-length and staring into the eye socket, then rotating it again. A boy named Pell, eleven, told me it speaks. He heard his own mother's voice from the pit mouth, saying the name of a cousin who had died before he was born. His mother, asked, said she had never spoken that name aloud in the boy's hearing.
The nothic is a lean, hairless thing, yellow-gray and knotted, with one large eye of green-gold set off center in a face like a peeled root. Its fingers are too long and bend at a second knuckle. It walks on all fours with the eye held low and tilted. At Mabsent Hollow, a dry sinkhole two miles from the cross, one has lived in the same limestone cleft for at least three generations of goatherds, or else a succession of them has. Its routine is plain. Each morning it climbs to the lip of the pit, sits with its back to the sun, and picks the grit from between its teeth with a splinter of bone. It does this for a quarter hour, finishes, and goes back down. Nobody has ever found it doing anything else at that hour.
The locals keep one rule: nothing with a reflecting surface is carried past the flipped stones. Mirrors, polished plates and still water in an open bucket all stay at the cross. Goats that wander in come out with a fixed, inward look and will not graze for two days. Tracking is simple. Follow the overturned slabs inward and the diameter narrows to the pit. I could not confirm whether the voice Pell heard was the nothic's or his own memory. One exception stands against all of this. Old Ansa Ferreiro's dog, a brindle bitch, walked into the pit in my presence, stayed ten minutes, and came out unchanged. The nothic did not look at her once.
- Classification
- Aberration, one-eyed scavenger
- Habitat
- Limestone pits and sinkholes
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5 ft long, crouched
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Dry highland scrubland
- Binomial
- Oculus scrutator
- Diet
- Carrion, bone marrow, small livestock
- Temperament
- Watchful, secretive, covetous of knowledge