Zuggtmoy takes hold of whatever stops moving. A mill wheel left idle over a feast day, a sleeper who does not stir, a wagon parked through a wet week: she settles on each the way mold settles on bread. At Whisson Carr in March, a hay wain that had stood in a yard since autumn wore a skirt of bracket fungus from axle to bed, orange on top and bone white beneath. In the middle of it stood a woman's shape nine feet tall, swaying a little, as if testing the planks.
In early spring she is slow and wet. She is long and narrow, wrapped in shelf fungus layered like roof slates, with a face that has a brow, a straight nose and a jaw gone soft as a puffball. Her hair is gray frill that drips. Her eyes are jaundice yellow and follow nothing. She stays within a few yards of where she rose. Each afternoon she turns her whole upper body toward the dampest wall, slowly, the way a person shifts on a hard bench, and holds there for an hour. Nothing comes of it. She has done it every day I have watched.
The village pays for her. Whisson Carr keeps three rollers, whose whole trade is to turn every cask, quern and cartwheel in a yard once between dusk and dawn and to scrub the gray bloom from the iron with a stiff broom. Eleven households share them. Tobiah Marl, the eldest roller, says she is only ever rude to things that have stopped. At Ivesmas Bottom, upriver, a sleeper is woken at midnight and made to walk the length of the room before lying down again, so that no one in the house lies motionless for a whole night. In July the heat dries her to a brittle crust and she drifts into cellars and wells, trailing yellow-green dust. Farmers track her by its smell, which is sweet, like bread yeast, and by the gray bloom on their ironwork.
With the October rains she fruits, and the caps on her shoulders open to the size of dinner plates. She is tallest now, close to ten feet, and she moves at a walking pace, which she does at no other season. She marks her route with rings of pale caps in the grass, one ring for each night's stop. The ring on the Ivesmas threshing floor measured forty-one feet across on the last day of October.
- Classification
- Demon lord, fungal fiend
- Habitat
- Damp cellars, granaries, rotting woodland
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- 9 ft tall, near 10 ft in autumn
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Abyss, rotting layers; surfaces in damp places
- Binomial
- Cryptomyra stagnans
- Diet
- Dead wood, damp grain, anything stilled
- Temperament
- Patient, possessive, unhurried