Molling Marsh

A fen village of some ninety souls, Molling Marsh lay four miles from the drove road; it had a ferry and a chapel of ease, but no officer of any sort lived there. When it was settled is not recorded. In September 4586 its bells stopped being answered, and what followed has become the most closely studied event of its sort in the realm and the one least understood.

The hundred sent a parish officer on the second day; he came out that evening, could say nothing of use and refused to go back. A company of six was then hired for three pounds, which was all the hundred had. Four returned. One of the missing was later found by the ferry with everything below the waist taken and nothing above it touched; the other never turned up. The four who came back agreed about the sequence of events and about nothing more. On the third day the militia entered through fog and shot at whatever came for them. The stuff that ran on the grass was black, did not dry, and had vanished by morning. For two hours they kept the lane, then pulled back without loss, since the thing in the fog never followed. The village was brought out on the fifth day: eleven living, and seventy-nine who were neither alive nor at rest.

The Black Lantern's Sarrum house attended for nine nights, against an ordinary one to four, the longest attendance that house has ever entered, at a cost far beyond the hundred's purse. Its book records a vampire attack, but the word came from the first officer's report, from the drained bodies being found first, and from a form that will not let a suppression close until some kind is named. Thirty-three years later another hand added in the margin that he did not believe it, the only such note in that book. No grave was disturbed, the Concord searched its roll twice and found no lapsed pact, and nobody was ever accused. Marshal Odo Pike, there on the fourth day, gave evidence twice that he did not know what attacked the village, and watched the clerk write the first report's word each time. Four similar events have since been entered in four counties under four different names, and nobody has read them side by side.

The ground has never been resettled. From the drove road a traveller sees reeds, the ferry and the chapel among empty houses; drovers are said not to stop on that stretch after dark. Do not go in for curiosity. The one commission Molling offers, comparing those entries with the Sarrum book, has never been funded, because it needs four houses to admit their books may be wrong.