Hellsborough Exposed

A district only ever gets one gambrel at a time, in my experience — Malin Bridge's, the Wadsley one before it, Attercliffe's before that, never overlapping any more than gritstrike do, always the same banked-coal orange eyes and the same trick of reading as a long dark coat right up until it starts moving wrong. It doesn't come down for you so much as onto you, off a wall or a stack, riding you into whatever's nearest before it lets go and climbs again — nobody's caught one, nobody's found one dead. The surest sign a valley's three weeks into gambrel season isn't the sightings, though; it's the churchyard filling up after murkfall with lamps and billhooks and neighbours who've decided they'd rather handle it themselves.

Every semagram I utter through The Hinge these days feels less like a tool and more like a habit I can't put down, merging with the murk and scerm until I've started identifying with the ripperthroat itself — a solitary hunter blamed for every slaughtered wooltard from Dungworth to the pudding poke. I tracked this one alone, leaving Shad at home deliberately, since a fellow predator's scent in the area does nothing for my chances of a sighting. One day I hope to do more than identify with the creature — I'd like to live as one.