"It cools the milk before it curdles," says Gwenllian Pugh, who was skimming a pan in her dairy at Kilbrannoch when she said it. She did not look up. In her telling the wraith is not a thing that arrives. It is a thing that has already been in the room, and the milk is how you find out.
The wraith is a tall, thin figure of gray vapor that holds its shape in still air and loses it in wind. It keeps to the sheep walks and drovers' tracks above Kilbrannoch and to the drowned fields near Carreg Dulas, where it stands at the edge of a field wall for hours at a time. Its face is a long hollow with two paler hollows in it. It makes no sound. Where it passes, frost grows on the inside of windows in August, and metal left out overnight is too cold to hold with a bare hand until noon.
The locals have three habits against it. Every household keeps a shallow dish of lamp oil on the sill, lit at dusk, because the wraith will not cross a flame it did not see lit. Nobody says a dead person's name aloud on the high tracks, and nobody lends a coat to a traveler heading uphill, since a coat that has been worn near a wraith is slow to warm again. The oldest trade in the valley is the sill-keeper's. Sill-keepers walk the farms at dusk with a can of oil and a taper, tending other people's dishes for a share of the cheese. Gethin Rhys, who has done it for forty years, trims each wick short so the flame stands straight and does not gutter.
What the locals get wrong is the reason. They believe the wraith hunts warmth, and so they bank their hearths high and sleep with the doors shut. I have watched one stand beside a roaring fire for an entire evening without shifting, and it never turned toward the heat. It faced the wall where a family had hung a row of wedding portraits. Gethin says the oil dish is wasted effort if the wraith has no wish to come in. He lights it anyway. I cannot say whether the wraith remembers who it was, though the farmers swear that it does, and that each one walks the track that led to its own front door. On the sill at Kilbrannoch, beside the oil dish, stands a small clay cup of milk that nobody drinks. By morning a skin of ice covers it.
- Classification
- Incorporeal undead, vapor-bodied
- Habitat
- Moor tracks, field walls, drowned pasture
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- Seven feet tall, narrow as a gatepost
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Cold uplands of the western hills
- Binomial
- Umbrapallens cinereus
- Diet
- Body heat from sleepers and livestock
- Temperament
- Patient, silent, unresponsive