"It never touched the wet. I was rinsing a pail at the trough, and it crossed the whole yard with the dew lying untroubled under its feet." Bryn Garrow, a drover, says this in the taproom at Eryllan, in the flat voice of a man who has told it too many times. The vampire he describes is tall and narrow, coated to the shins, gray at the lips. It does not hurry. Nothing in the parish has ever given it a reason to.
I found its sign at dusk on the moor road above Jeddrach, a line of dry footprints through grass already beaded with evening dew. Each print is a clean oval where the wet has drawn back from the heel. The parish tracks it this way and avoids it the same way: dry prints in wet grass mean turn the cart around. I measured the nearest print with pocket calipers, eleven inches heel to toe, then laid a peeled hazel switch cut to a yard end over end between two prints and got a stride of fifty-one inches. The line ran to a drystone sheepfold. It stood against the far wall, motionless as a gatepost, and a ewe walked up to it as to a person carrying a bucket. It bent. The ewe did not lift her head. When it straightened it looked at me across twenty yards of dim grass for about as long as it takes to read a short letter, and its eyes did not move once, not even to blink. Then it went over the wall without using its hands, and the moor was only a moor. By daylight the ewe was alive and dull, and would not stand until noon. The wool at her throat was dry, though everything else on her had gone dark with dew.
Every house in Eryllan sets its boots on the step at dusk with the toes pointing out, so that anything waiting for an invitation finds the household already gone. Bryn Garrow sets his out every evening and will not say whether he believes in it. My notes from eight years ago give a stride of fifty-three inches, and the prints stop at the churchyard wall. This autumn the stride is two inches shorter and the line runs on past the lychgate to the well in the square.
I left Eryllan on the lower road the next evening, as the doorsteps filled up with boots, toes to the lane. On the last step stood a small pair, set apart from the rest, the mud on them still wet.
- Classification
- Undead, blood-drinking revenant
- Habitat
- Churchyards, crypts, empty farmhouses
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6 ft 2 in, narrow as a gatepost
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Border parishes and moorland graveyards
- Binomial
- Sanguivorus pallescens
- Diet
- Blood, taken in small sips
- Temperament
- Patient, courteous, utterly cold