A shade is the shadow a dead person leaves behind, and it keeps the person's height to the inch. The one in the Rask bakery at Mjelstad is five feet eight, matching the pencil marks Arvid Rask made on the pantry doorpost every spring until the spring before he died. It lies flat on whatever floor, wall or tabletop is nearest, in the outline of a man with his arms at his sides. Each stays near the place its person used most, and a woman who sat at one window all her life leaves her shade at that window. It ignores the hour. At noon it points toward the sun, where a living shadow points away.
Three people who live beside shades describe them three ways, and the descriptions do not agree. Sunniva Rask, Arvid's widow, scatters a scoop of oat husks over him every noon and steps across without looking down. Husks break the outline, and a broken shade stays in pieces until dusk. She calls him warm and harmless. The flour sacks she moved out of his doorway eleven winters ago are still stacked in the other room.
A road mender at Brekkevik, the quarry village across the fjord, says the opposite. Shades are cold. Frost fills their outline in July, and the cobbles by the fish sheds, where one lies, ring under his shovel like pond ice. I tried the shovel myself on a June afternoon. The blade rang and my wrist ached for an hour. He also says they travel, a few yards a week, always along a wall, and that the Brekkevik shade has crept forty yards from the harbor office since spring. It belongs to the late harbor clerk, dead six years, who now lies four inches over the hedge on his neighbor's side, the same four inches they quarreled about for twenty years. The neighbor has measured it with a folding rule.
A girl of eleven, the road mender's niece, says shades are neither warm nor cold but dry. On a dewy morning, she says, the grass holds a dry outline of a person who is not there, and that is how you find one before you step in it. As far as I can check, she is right about the dew. She also says they are waiting to be picked up, which I cannot check. The three accounts differ on temperature and travel. They agree on length. I measured the Mjelstad shade at noon, at four and at seven, and it was five feet eight each time. My own shadow ran from just under six feet to nearly twenty-two.
- Classification
- Detached shadow of the dead
- Habitat
- Houses, walls and quiet doorways
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- Exactly the height of its former person
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Doorways of the living
- Binomial
- Umbra residua
- Diet
- Nothing; it only takes up floor
- Temperament
- Still, territorial and petty