A poltergeist throws only what is already cracked. A hairline in a saucer, a chipped rim, a jug mended with glue and hope: it finds them in the dark of the cupboard and sends them across the room, and by morning the household has a heap of shards and a dresser of sound plates. In Nollimas, a village of forty chimneys on the Fiker road, people argue about whether this is the best thing about it or the worst. Sabert Mundy, the cooper, calls it free housekeeping. His sister-in-law calls it a thief that cannot tell a ruined bowl from a loved one.
The argument comes up every winter at the well, and I have been asked to settle it twice. Sabert's side holds that nothing sound has ever been touched. The other side holds that a bowl riveted by a dead grandmother is sound by any measure that matters. Having sorted through the shard heaps of nine kitchens, I find that both are right and neither is speaking to the point. The poltergeist reads the flaw and nothing else. It does not know whose grandmother. It works from a patch of floor beside the dresser, cold enough to ache through a boot sole, and it throws north, so the shards land in a fan four feet long with the heaviest pieces farthest out. A kitchen that keeps nothing cracked that it values has nothing to fear.
The remedy in Nollimas is the cull shelf, a plank by the door where each house sets out its chipped cups and split bowls so the poltergeist spends itself on those. Every house has one. A petty exception holds in all of them: it will not touch a chipped chamber pot, and Sabert's has sat on the plank through six winters, unbothered and increasingly resented. On my earlier trip the Mundy shelf held five pieces. Two years later it held thirty, and the fan of shards ran six feet. The neighbors had begun rapping their own crockery against the well curb to fill their shelves, and the poltergeist, given more to work with, throws harder. Sabert says he did not start it. His sister-in-law says she saw him with a spoon.
Fiker End, two miles on, keeps a different count. Widow Sibyl Harl owns a washbasin glazed blue and flawless, and by her tally it has crossed her kitchen eleven times. It has never cracked. I have run a thumbnail around its rim and found nothing. Each morning it is back on its hook, dry, hung a little crooked.
- Classification
- Domestic spirit, noisy kind
- Habitat
- Kitchens, pantries, crockery cupboards
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- No body; hurls up to 10 lb
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Hearth and pantry
- Binomial
- Strepitus fractarius
- Diet
- Household quarrels and flawed crockery
- Temperament
- Petty, restless, oddly selective