The Kludde: The Flemish Shape-Shifter Marked by Two Blue Flames
The night bogey of Flanders — of the field roads of Brabant and the willow-lined canals of the Scheldt country — presents the student of monsters with a unique problem of description, because the Kludde's defining trait is that it has no shape of its own at all . The old Flemish collectors, gathering the tales from farmers and cart-drivers in the nineteenth century, could only inventory its repertoire. The Kludde comes as a great black dog, dragging a chain that rattles on the cobbles. It comes as a black cat that swells; as a monstrous frog squatting in the path; as a bat that blots the moon; as a raven-black bird shrieking from the pollard willows. It comes — this is the shape the tellers reserved their particular shudder for — as a tree : a thin, sickly sapling at the roadside that, as the traveler watches, grows — shoots upward, thickens, towers, until its crown is above the church spire and the traveler is running; or as an old snapped willow that is somehow, when glanced at...