Hans Trapp

Hans Trapp is a Hostile (Monster) of winter lanes and shuttered farms — a gaunt, hunchbacked figure wrapped in matted rags, half-man, half-shadow. Smell: the bitter smoke of peat and singed wool, undercut by the damp rot of leafmold. Sound: a dry rasp of breath, the clack of birch rods and a sack that never rests, sometimes the distant tin of a single bell. Temperature: an unnatural, seizing cold that fogs breath, frosts windowpanes and leaves the skin numb to touch. Field notes compare him to a living weather: he arrives with wind and the hush that follows a struck bell.