The slime takes whatever sweet thing is left uncovered, and it takes it slowly. In a cellar below a chandler's shop in Tarnovice, a spoonful of spilled sugar once drew a slime the whole length of the floor, over the iron drain grate and across two flagstones, and the shopkeeper found it the next morning with its peak raised toward the empty spoon as if it were waiting to be asked for more.
The earliest record is a tax ledger from Kremenka, a quarry town, where a clerk lists a drowned pit as "unusable, occupied by green paste" and lowers the assessment by a third. A century later the cellars of Tarnovice appear in a parish complaint about spoiled lard. By the time a cooper named Radomir Vesk wrote down what he had watched in his own cellar over one winter, the slime had stopped being treated as a flood or a fungus. Radomir measured one at roughly two feet across and a foot high, though its skirt of ooze spread three times wider than its body whenever it went after food. He noted that it is translucent leaf green with a darker bottle-green core, that it keeps no face, and that a pale lump near the top makes it look pleased with itself. Whatever it swallows stays visible. The one he watched carried a pewter spoon, a wooden child's top, and a ring of rusted nails around its base. It also held a turnip in a clear pocket near its edge, which it had taken in and then refused to digest.
The slime eats scraps, lard, leaf litter and paste, and prefers sugar to all of them. It is never idle, and nothing seems to hurry it. It leaves a glazed film on stone that dries to a faint green sheen, and that sheen is how cellar people track it. A damp, dull trail ending at a drain means the slime has gone down. A bright trail ending at a flour sack means it is still in the room. Hard sunlight from a high window will pass straight through the body and throw a green patch on the wall, which makes it easy to find at midday and nearly invisible at night.
In Tarnovice nobody sells sugar after dark to a household known to have a slime, and nobody lends a spoon to a neighbor whose cellar floor is wet. A spoon that has been left in a cellar overnight is presumed lost. Households keep a saucer of sour milk by the cellar door, because the slime will stop to investigate sourness and lose interest in the rest of the house. The saucer is set out by the first hard frost and is washed in the spring. Anyone going down the steps is told the same thing: carry nothing sweet, leave the lamp on the stair, and step over the skirt rather than through it.
- Classification
- Amorphous ooze
- Habitat
- Cellars, drains, flooded quarries
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- Roughly 2 ft across, 1 ft high
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Damp underground places
- Binomial
- Gelatina viridis
- Diet
- Scraps, lard, leaf litter, paste
- Temperament
- Patient, sugar-seeking, unbothered