At Walbry they cannot agree whether it is an animal. Clement Arkwright, who chalks its edges for a living, says it is a beast that happens to be flat, and that it wants nothing, so he feeds it nothing. Cass Ferrow, who keeps the granary at Gilmass, says it is somebody's leftover, the dark a drowned man could not carry with him, and she will not hear the word beast under her roof. I have heard both, and a third, and I set them down in the order I met them.
Arkwright's account is a working one. The Shadow lies in the stubble fields at noon, about nine feet long and thin as a door, and it does not move when the sun does. Where it rests, the grass goes the color of old candle wax and comes up soft enough to pull out by the handful. Walbry has a trade built on this. The noon-chalkers walk the fields at midday, draw a white line around the figure's edge, and the plowman leaves that strip fallow for the season. They are paid in barley, a sack a year per field. Arkwright says a plow that crosses the line turns up nothing but pale roots and a cold that stays in the share for a week.
Ferrow's account is about habit. At Gilmass the Shadow comes at about one o'clock and lies along the north wall of the granary. At four it slides up the boards to the eaves and hangs there, folded, until the light goes. It does this every day, as a dog goes to the same patch of hearth. She sweeps under it. She has never seen it do more. The rule at Gilmass is that when it crosses your path you stop, let your own shadow slip inside it, and say nothing until it has passed. No one walks backward in its sight. Ferrow thinks it is practicing for someone's return.
The third account comes from Corin, a shepherd's boy of eleven, who says only that it falls the wrong way. He is right. Every shadow I have ever measured points away from the sun. This one points at it, and its long coat of dark hangs sunward as though it were leaning into a wind. At my first visit the chalk lines at Walbry stood forty paces from the road. This year they stand twelve, and Arkwright has redrawn them three times without ever seeing it cross the ground between. Nobody at either place can say what is standing in the sun to cast it.
- Classification
- Detached shadow, hooded humanoid outline
- Habitat
- Sunlit walls and stubble fields
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- about 9 ft long, door-thin
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Borderland between light and shade
- Binomial
- Umbra deserta
- Diet
- None; bleaches grass beneath it
- Temperament
- Indifferent, patient, unnervingly still