A vargouille has no body, so it has no hands, and every latch it has ever lifted it lifted with its teeth. The result is a creature that cannot enter a house quietly. It is a single human head, bald and the yellow-gray of old tallow, about the size of a feed sack. Leathery wings spread from the temples where ears should sit, a yard across, and thin pink tendrils hang from the scalp and grip like fingers. The mouth is a third too wide. It sleeps upside down from a rafter, hooked by its hair, and it drools in its sleep.
The first hint at Nunley Scarp is the dairy. Cream set out at evening is curds by morning, though the night was cold, because a vargouille in the thatch has been breathing out a low whine that milk does not like. Then comes scratching in the eaves, like someone sucking a tooth. Every house on the Scarp hangs a scoured tin pan under the gable, tilted east, so that the sun throws a white coin of light into the loft at dawn. The pans are kept by burnishers, a trade found nowhere else on Burrage Fell. They walk the lanes each dusk with a rag and a bag of hearth ash, and householders pay them in eggs.
On the night I watch, the cooper Anselm Crake has let his pan go dull for a week. The head comes down through the loft hatch at the second hour, lowered on its tendrils like a bucket on a rope, and hangs a foot above his hired man's bed. It shrieks. The sound is not loud so much as total. The hired man's jaw locks open, his hands stay where they are, and downstairs the cream turns in its crock. The head presses its mouth to his cheek, a long wet pressing, then climbs its own hair back to the rafter to sulk. Nothing else happens until the east window grays.
Dawn does the rest. The pan catches the first sun and the white coin lands squarely on the vargouille, which folds its wings over its face and goes out through the vent, shrieking thinly, trailing smoke. The hired man is carried to a shuttered room with a lamp. By the second evening his ears have begun to lift from the sides of his head. Crake spends that morning complaining about something else entirely: the drool, which has left a long pale stain across the lid of his linen chest, shaped like a thumb.
- Classification
- Winged fiend, a flying head
- Habitat
- Attics, thatched eaves, high barn lofts
- Danger
- High
- Size
- Head the size of a feed sack, 3 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Infernal, roosting in village rooftops
- Binomial
- Caput stridens
- Diet
- Blood of sleepers, curdled milk
- Temperament
- Sulky, hungry, shrinks from sunlight