Flat (race)

Flat, or Rumtifusel, Cuero, and others

Origin: Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"

Description

Flat as depicted in a 16th Century woodcut

"And there's the Flat. It lies level with the ground, and not much higher. It can wrap you like a blanket...."

I could see, but Mr. Yandro couldn't, as around from behind the corner of the desrick flowed something. It lay out on the ground like a broad, black, short-furred carpet-rug. But it moved, humping and then flattening out, the way a measuring worm moves. It moved pretty fast, right toward Mr. Yandro from behind and to one side.... The crawling carpet brushed its edge against his foot. He looked down at it, and his eyes stuck out all of a sudden, like two door knobs. He knew what it was, and named it at the top of his voice. "The Flat!" Humping against him, it tried to wrap around his foot and leg. He gasped out something I'd never want written down for my last words, and pulled loose and ran, fast and straight, toward the edge of the clearing....

— Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"

The Flat is a low, flat, hairy, fast-moving nocturnal ambush-predator that creeps with uncanny stealth and speed, inchworm-like, through the forests of the Appalachian mountain country, waiting for a chance to grab its pray by the ankles, and wrap it up like a blanket, gnawing the flesh from the bones with dozens of small mouths on the beast's bare, membranous underside.

By some accounts (where it is called a "rumtifusel"), the beast will sometimes camouflage itself as a fur coat left hanging on a branch or draped over a tree stump, conveniently available to be taken and worn by unsuspecting passers-by; when the victim picks the coat up, the Flat envelops and devours them, leaving behind only splinters of bones wrapped tightly in balls of undigested clothing which city scientists often mistake for "owl pellets" of bones and fur regurgitated by owls. Country folk know better, and will avoid investigating the tempting mystery of what seems to be a perfectly good fur coat hanging near a heap of clean-picked human bones.

In other accounts (as the Latin American "cuero"),the beast looks like a sheet of rough hide or leather, or sometimes a hairy multiple-eyed octopus, which can be found sunning itself besides rivers and lakes; armed with claws or hooks around the edges of its body, or at the end of its arms, it will wrap itself around its victim, and roll with the victim into the water to drown and devour its prey; such an attack as described by a witness in Argentina in the 1960s: "[Ramil's] horse rolled and threw him along the shore of the lake .... Ramil fell on top of something that resembled a hide that was lying by the edge of the water, that quickly rolled him up and took him with a rolling motion into the lake...."

Keeper Notes

• See the Discussion tab for fan theories and suggestions.

Associated Mythos Elements

• setting: Folk Mythos
• story: Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"

References

• Fiction: Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"