Sabeth Orrin's sheets are damp by noon. They have been damp by noon every day for the twenty-two years she has run the wash house at Bogkettle, a village built where a crack in the hillside lets out a breath of hot air. She pins them out two days ahead of when she needs them and plans for a third. Her yard sits in the lee of that crack, and nothing dries there on the schedule an almanac would promise. Nobody in Bogkettle says "drying weather." They say "airing weather," because the mephit is thought to take the first phrase as a boast.
She lights the copper before the roosters are up and hauls forty buckets from the spring. By mid-morning the water is at a simmer and the mephit has arrived. It is about the size of a loaf of bread, a pale, lumpy body of vapor on two thin legs that trail off into nothing, with a face like a pinched knot. Its eyes are two points the color of banked coal. It settles on the lid of the copper, and the lid chatters against the rim. That is all it does. It takes the warmest seat in the room, the way a cat would, and rattles the lid until the water goes off the boil. Sabeth does not look up. She has a petty quarrel with it all the same. It will only sit on a copper she has scoured, and it sulks off to the rafters if there is grease on the metal, so it is the nearest thing to an inspector the wash house has ever had.
The rest of the day is wringing, carrying and cursing at the lines. Wherever the mephit has been, it leaves a white crust of mineral scale on anything cold: nail heads, the sash of the north window, the underside of the lid. She chips it off on Sundays with the handle of a spoon and sweeps the flakes onto the path, where they set harder than gravel. At dusk she takes down the last sheets, still not dry, and finds the mephit on the north window again, beaded into water. It runs down the glass in one long drop to the sill and is gone. Sabeth says it is the same one every year, that it spends the summers on the Cragladle ridge among the quarry cottages and walks back on the first south wind. I have seen mephits on the Cragladle ridge. That proves nothing, and I have no way to test her claim.
Everyone in Bogkettle gives newcomers the same instruction: lift the lid away from your face, and wait for the second hiss before you reach in.
- Classification
- Minor air-and-fire elemental
- Habitat
- Hot vents, wash houses, kettle rooms
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- the size of a loaf of bread
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Border of fire and water
- Binomial
- Vaporulus caldarius
- Diet
- Heat from kettles and coals
- Temperament
- Sulky, territorial, rarely hostile