The air goes cold on the back of the hand first, a damp chill like a wet slate laid against the knuckles. Then the tongue picks up a taste of old pennies and wet chalk, and the observer knows the specter has come into the room. It arrives at the upper landing of the drover's inn at Foelgwyn, where it has been seen on the same stair for as long as the ledgers run.
The specter is a tall, narrow figure, the shade of a woman in a long wool coat that ends in tatters above the floor. Its face is a smooth oval of ash-gray, with two eyes the green of lit copper. Across its left cheek runs a crack, fine as a hair on a plate, and a slow thread of pale light leaks from it. In full sun it is easier to see than at night. Daylight through the stair window turns it the color of dishwater and throws a faint shadow of the window mullions across its chest. It does not walk. It drifts a hand's width above the boards, and the dust below it lies in a clean ring.
I watched it cross the landing at noon with a kettle steaming in the room behind. It stopped at the third door, lifted one long hand toward the latch, and held it there. Frost spread across the brass in feathered lines. The drover's daughter, Kerensa Llewys, stood beside me and did not breathe until it passed. Locals follow one rule about it: no one says its name aloud under the inn roof, and no one lends a coat to a guest who arrives wet. The specter takes notice of borrowed wool. Kerensa told me that a lodger once did it anyway, and woke to find the sleeves rimed white to the elbow.
The practical detail is the frost. Wherever it lingers, a rind of ice forms on metal, so the keepers of Foelgwyn check their hinges at first light and rub off the rime with a dry cloth. A latch that stays furred past breakfast means the specter has been standing there a long while. When I came to the inn years ago, the third door stood open. Now it is nailed shut, and the nails are already rusted green. Out past the stable at Sarnddu, the miners have taken to hanging their work coats inside out. On the sill outside the shut door lies a single gray glove, palm up, filled with a little frost.
- Classification
- Haunting spirit, residual shade
- Habitat
- Stairs, landings, shuttered inn rooms
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 6.5 ft tall, hovering a hand above floor
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Spirits and Hauntings
- Binomial
- Umbra cinerea lacrimae
- Diet
- Body warmth drawn from nearby metal
- Temperament
- Patient, watchful, rarely hostile