Corpse eaters do not make bad ground; they arrive at it. Clearing them is the commonest paid supernatural work in the realm, and the wisest companies know it is only half the job.
“Wee calle hem gooles in the bokes and grave-dogges in the feeld, and the name doth nat matere. What matereth is that they were nat ther the yeer before, and thou shalt aske thyself what is newe in thy ground and nat what is newe in thy wode.”
Living things that eat the dead
The manuals say ghouls. Nobody in the country does. In the parishes they are corpse eaters, grave dogs and a few things less printable. On what they are, everyone agrees: living things that eat the dead. They are not dead themselves, they were never people, they do not rise, and they cannot be suppressed, and that plain fact decides how the realm deals with them.
Where they come from is another matter. The chapter teaches that they are blighted, cursed out of the sins of the apocalyptic age, and a company will hear that from anyone it asks. What can be established is thinner. They have been here since the ruin generations and there are young ones, yet nobody has recorded one being born, and nobody has found a dead one that was not killed. Cambridge has twice asked for a body and twice been refused on the ground that the question is improper.
Sized wrongly
Nearly every death they cause comes from a man misjudging them. They stand about the height of a child of eight or nine and are strong out of all proportion to it: a grown man cannot hold one down, and two will have a door off its hinges. Some are near enough human in shape to pass for a child at fifty yards in bad light, which has killed people who went to help. Others are nothing of the kind, and one band will hold both sorts.
They work at night and dig. They prefer new graves and ground already opened, and they are not clever. They foul whatever they enter, so that ground they have been in must be reconsecrated by a chapter, and the chapter then holds a record that the ground was fouled.
Light, and what lies beneath
They cannot bear hard light. They will come to the edge of firelight and ignore a tallow candle, but a hard white beam or a burning glass turns them. Light does not kill them or hold them for long; it settles which way they go, and in a culvert with one way out that is the whole fight. Companies that never mean to go anywhere foul still pay two pounds ten for a season’s sealed lamp.
A country parish meets a working party of four to nine. A city standing on culverts, cellar runs and drowned service ways has something else beneath it, and every account of London’s lower ways uses the word swarm. On the Wye scarp the Chalk Hounds have been present since the earliest Kentish records, and there corpse eaters are a standing condition rather than an event. Where a landing loses foreshore graves, the county remedy is lanterns, a great many of them, all night, because everyone agrees these things will not stay in a lit place.
For a company
A clearance pays a pound, sometimes thirty shillings, and six people can do it in two or three nights. The danger is real but ordinary, the work is honest, and many bands have done nothing else. It is also half a commission. The ground went wrong first and the corpse eaters followed, often a season before any other sign, which is why country priests are taught to be glad of them. They are the one symptom a parish can see, count and shoot. A company that clears them and leaves has earned its pound. A company that then asks what changed in the burial ground last year is worth four times the fee, and will not be thanked for asking.