Some of what is met in fog, under ground and at the edge of the lamps has no shape the country can agree on. It is not a beast, because it fails the shepherd’s questions; not the dead, because nobody buried it; not a spirit, because nothing has ever been agreed with it. Here these things are called horrors, for want of a word the country will use, and the country deals with them by not being there.
“Eleven in thirty years and four accounts from people who were out in one. The four do not agree. I copied all four into the book word for word, which has been criticised. A book of four disagreeing accounts is worth more than one account I have tidied.”
One no and it is something else
The upland shepherd asks three questions of anything that troubles a flock: does it breed true, does it keep to its own ground, can it be turned from the lambing. Three yeses and it is a beast, however unpleasant, and is handled with dogs, lamps and a bounty. One no and it is something else, and the something else is not handled at all: the graziers move the flock and wait, in seasons rather than weeks.
Monstrosities fail the test and still have bodies. They are big, or wrongly made, or man-shaped where no man should be, and a bounty man can bring a head in to prove it. A horror is the far end of the something else. It is what the country describes and cannot draw: accounts of a beast agree on what it looked like and differ on what frightened the teller, and accounts of a horror differ on the one thing accounts of a beast always agree on.
How the country knows one
By Hob Larkin’s test, a story arriving in one shape has been told and a story arriving in eleven shapes has been seen. Every account of a horror arrives in its own shape, which by that test means somebody saw something; what nobody can say is what. What the accounts share is never the thing itself. It is the cold, or the sound going, or the air being wrong, or a light that should not be followed, and above all what the district does about it.
What the district does is the surest evidence there is. A village that walls a hole within the week at its own cost, renews the wall without being asked and keeps a lamp on it through the winter has said more than any witness. So has a dale in which eleven parishes and eleven holms, which agree on nothing else, perform the same four acts in the same order within the hour and never explain them.
The two the record holds
In the northern march a fog comes up the dales against the wind perhaps once in three years, and every settlement in its road comes in, shuts its doors, rings every bell and lights every lamp until it has passed. One warden has kept a book of it for thirty years: eleven nights, four people who were out in one and came in, and four accounts that do not agree. One of the four saw a shape at a distance that did not resolve. Three people who did not come in were never found.
On the chalk coast of Kent a fall in 4566 opened a dry hole that went further than a lantern showed. The nearest village walled it within the week and told nobody. Nobody has been inside it in two hundred years but the three parties who renewed the wall, and the free trade, which uses every other cavern on that shore, will not put a cask in it. Two separate accounts say only that the air in it is wrong, in almost the same words.
For a company
Nobody is paid to kill a horror, because nobody has ever found the edge of one. The commissions are to go where one has been, to bring somebody in, or to establish what is behind a wall, and the country’s rules for all of them are the same. Caught in it, stop, sit and wait, holding the rope or the next man’s belt until full light. Do not walk, call or ring, and follow nothing: not a light, not a voice, not a voice you are certain you know.
Before agreeing to open, clear or enter anything, a company should be able to answer the three questions Wye asks of its own ground: where is the edge of it, what has it actually done, and what does it cost to leave it exactly as it is. Most bands cannot answer the first. Where a district has already built a wall, lit a lamp or rung its bells, it has answered the third, and a company paid by somebody who will not be living beside it afterwards should think twice.