Muscular Black Ghoul

Heavier than the rest and dark of hide, broad as a smith, this corpse eater holds the lower rooms of a ruin and rises through the floor; on its account a clearing party goes in only by day.

The starved look is not universal among corpse eaters. Those who strip house ruins in the march, and the parties sent to wall up a cavity in the quarry belt, know a heavier kind: low and black, thick of neck and shoulder, with a mastiff's jaw. Cellars and undercrofts are its keeping, and it enters by the floor, never by the door. Two of the common sort, say the manuals, will have a door off its hinges; one of the black, say the clearing men, will manage that unaided and take the frame along with it. And so a stripping party goes in while it is day and goes in numbers, its light behind it and its labour ahead, and is away before the daylight is.

Before anybody enters a house ruin the march has read it, and the black kind is one of the reasons it troubles to. No such ruin is without an owner, be it heir or lord, parish or Crown, and the Harrowgate priory can mostly name which; a company may purchase the right to strip it, as three parties have done for the stone. Where a district is worked, the neighbours will have carried off timber, good stone, iron and glass from any ruin inside a generation, openly and without shame. A ruin, then, of whatever age, whose roof timbers lie yet where they came down, is telling a company plainly that men in want of timber came to it, considered, and went away. The clearing men have a sign of their own to add, and it is the dust on the cellar steps. Should that dust be turned, and no one in the parish confess to the descent, prepare to fight before you prepare to carry; and send for oil before ever you send for a cart.

Clear the black kind and you have done what every corpse-eater clearance does: removed a sign of the trouble while its cause stays where it was. Ask the quarry belt, and keep asking, what lies behind a hole it has walled up, and at last, without pleasure, it will say corpse eaters, for set beside the other answers it might give, that one is the least alarming. Whether the black kind is unalarming the march takes leave to doubt. Living it certainly is, and of very great strength; it is found alone, or else leading the others; and those clearance accounts that name it run well past the single pound the vestry began by offering.

As witnesses describe it

As the witnesses tell it, the thing is massive and hunched, its hide dark and ridged, its neck thick, its jaws heavy, its wide mouth crowded with teeth, and its clawed hands swollen far past the measure of the rest. It carries itself close to the ground. They see it shouldering through the doorway of a ruined hall amid torn hangings and broken furniture, while through the tall windows at its back the moon shows.