Scratcher
The first time I saw a scratcher I thought it was somebody's cat, sat on a wall above Loxley Road, tail wrapped neat round its feet. I said something friendly to it, the way you do. It did not look at me. Its whole attention was fixed thirty degrees to my left, on a hedge that, as far as I could tell, contained nothing at all. It held that angle for the better part of an hour. I checked. I had nothing better to do that murkneet, apparently.
That is the thing about scratchers: they do not watch you, they watch whatever you cannot see yet. Grey or tabby-marked, roughly cat-sized -- close enough in shape that most people walk past without a second look. They orient on murk-active entities and hold position until whatever they're watching moves first. They do not hunt. They do not patrol. They pick a spot and a direction, then wait with a patience that has nothing feline about it -- a house cat gets bored, checks its bowl, forgets why it climbed the shelf in the first place. A scratcher does not appear to know what boredom is.
The danger isn't the scratcher. It's what it's pointed at. Corner one -- box it into a doorway, back it against a wall with no way round -- and it will scratch, once, precisely, and go straight back to watching the moment it's clear. That's the whole of its violence. The real risk is following its line of sight without preparing for what's waiting on the other end of it, because a scratcher's attention is a steadier warning than most of what the survey teams hand out on a laminated card.
I have used them as a compass more than once, and I am not the only one. A run of scratchers all facing the same direction, moving individually rather than in any pack, tells you something is worth watching over a wide stretch of ground, which is a different order of alarming to one scratcher on one wall. Nobody I have spoken to has worked out how they choose. Whatever the sense is, it isn't smell and it isn't sound, and it does not appear to be something you can fool.
Field note: if a scratcher's gaze swings onto you mid-watch, that is not a compliment. Something changed, and it noticed before you did. Follow its new line before you do anything else.
| Type | Lurker |
| HP | 3 |
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