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其中一章

Snoligoster

(Rotorcaudus dorsocerus)

In the swamps of Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, the alligators fear the bootleggers, and the bootleggers fear the alligators, and they both fear the snoligoster as they fear no other creature.

       在佛罗里达州、乔治亚州和路易斯安那的沼泽地里，鳄鱼不畏惧走私者，而走私者也不害怕鳄鱼。但他们都害怕斯诺利戈斯特，因为没有其他生物能让他们如此恐惧。

Although many animals will prey on humans—such as the puma, the tick, the Frenchman, and the hodag—only the snoligoster is cruel and vain enough to parade its victims around after slaying them.

       虽然许多动物会捕食人类——比如美洲狮、蜱虫、法国人和霍达格——只有斯诺利戈斯特 残忍而虚荣到 在杀死猎物后炫耀它们。

The snoligoster has no limbs, but it does sport a large, curved horn sprouting from its back. When hunting, the creature seizes its prey in its powerful jaws and flips the poor sap backward, impaling him on the dorsal spike.

      斯诺利戈斯特没有四肢，但它背上长着一根大而弯曲的角。捕食时，这种生物用强有力的颚抓住猎物，将可怜的猎物抛向后方，刺在背部的尖刺上。

The effect is quite delightful to watch, but also tragic and disgusting; nevertheless, if you are at all interested in juggling or acrobatics, dear reader, or in the ball-and-cup game, it is worth your while to seek out and spy on a snoligoster on the hunt. With luck, you will see the creature impale an evil person, and then you won’t have to feel so bad.

After mounting its prey on its horn, the snoligoster speeds through the swamps until it reaches a particularly sunny place, where it swims back and forth in the sunshine, as if displaying the impalee with pride. It does this because what the snoligoster eats is not flesh, but only the shadows of flesh, and only by hoisting that flesh high upon the spike can it bend its long neck to graze upon its victim’s shadow.

Naturally, the creature does not hunt at night; nor does it hunt at noon, when the sun is high and casts no shadows. Morning and evening show the longest shadows, and therefore the most nourishing repast.

      自然这种生物不会在夜间狩猎；也不会在正午艳阳高照没有影子的时侯狩猎。清晨和傍晚的影子最长，因此也是最有营养的餐食时间。

Sometimes the poor victim impaled upon the spike lingers, still alive and in such cases must bear the agony of being transfixed as well as the humiliation of having his shadow consumed.

In one memorable instance, Louisiana governor Huey Pierce Long, during a morning photo op in the bayou, sat on what he had assumed was a moss-covered log. It was not a log.

Moments later, he was tossed through the air and landed on the snoligoster’s horn, which passed right through the region where his heart should have been (he kept his heart in an ivory box in the state capitol). As the snoligoster swam back and forth in the beautiful sunshine, Governor Long begged someone in the crowd to kill him and end his misery, but no one knew how, so instead everyone took pictures and shouted encouragement. The photographs, thanks to the snoligoster’s tasteful sense of lighting, were extremely attractive, and when printed on nickel postcards sold quite well. The late governor is still known in Louisiana as “Huey Pierced Lung,” and everyone has a good laugh.

Not all encounters with the beast end in such a jovial and amusing way, though. I once housed a young snoligoster in a swamp pen in my personal menagerie, cultivated and maintained by Hans, my manservant. Hans disobeyed my direct orders because they interfered with his cartoons, and tended to his maintenance duties—mostly raking and weeding—not at noon but as evening came. Needless to say, Hans’s shadow fell through the chain-link fence, directly in the snoligoster’s path. Hans appeared the next morning with only the ragged stump of a shadow, and it was weeks before a new one, thinner and wispier and a little off-center, grew in. This is the kind of tragedy that can befall one who is careless around a fearsome creature.

Most terrifying is the story of the snoligoster and Lawrence Alaminos, a man afflicted with that strange disease known as “biumbralism.” After fooling around with forbidden experiments in the dark arts, Alaminos had accidentally acquired a second shadow that spread across the ground at right angles to his own.

This shadow craved human blood and would whisper to Alaminos, when it grew long and powerful, that he must serve it in the name of evil. Alaminos sought me out for advice, and, in my tasteful oak-paneled library, where candles projected the mocking, prancing form of Alaminos’s evil shadow on the wall, I told him to seek out the snoligoster, for no other creature had the power to consume shadowstuff.

       这个影子渴望人类的鲜血，并且会在成长到足够强大时对阿拉米诺斯耳语，必须以邪恶的名义服侍它。

Alaminos caught the next bus to Florida. The passing streetlights shining through the Greyhound window set his shadows moving in crazy crisscross designs along the walls.

“At your touch the innocent must burn,” one shadow cackled, in a voice only Alaminos could hear. The other shadow stayed mute. Alaminos brushed the sweat from his brow and offered a silent prayer that he would succeed in his mission or die in the swamps; already he could feel himself growing slightly mad.

      “在你的触碰下，无辜者必将燃烧，”一个影子咯咯地笑着，用只有阿拉米诺斯能听见的声音。另一个影子保持沉默。阿拉米诺斯擦去额头的汗水，默默祈祷自己能完成任务，或者在沼泽中死亡；他已经能感到自己有些疯狂了。

Somewhere in the Okefenokee Swamp, among the mosquitoes thick as fog and leeches large as baguettes, Lawrence Alaminos must have found a snoligoster; he must have contrived to grapple with it and cling to its dorsal horn; he must have screamed as the fearsome creature swam to the sunny glade and tore out his shadow by the roots. He must have laughed with relief as he fled the swamps.

I ran into Alaminos several years later at one of the countess’s parties. The pupils of his eyes were fully dilated, and he could not stop his maniacal grinning. He cast a single shadow, as all decent people do.

“I see you survived the snoligoster,” I said, tipping my hat in congratulations.

       “我看你从那只狡猾的怪兽手中活下来了，”我说，倾帽向他表示祝贺。

Alaminos drew from his sleeve a curved dagger with a skull-head pommel. At that moment I realized what had happened. The snoligoster had eaten the wrong shadow.