Dream d3280-s: What Falls in the Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of windfall apples reached me before anything else - bruised and sweet, a cold exhalation from the lane, and Lano already ahead of me with her nose low against the grass.

Then the light went out.

Not gradually. The amber string that had run between the orchard posts - the salvaged rigging the keeper had spent three evenings splicing - simply quit. One moment the lane was lit in intervals of gold; the next, it was only the pale of the sky and the shapes of trees black against it. I heard the keeper's voice from somewhere back among the rows, not panicked, just flat with recognition: there it goes.

Lano stopped. Her ears went flat against her head. She stood very still at the edge of the path where the light had been, and then she barked once - short and high, not a greeting - before going quiet again.

The surveyor came through the gap in the hedge with a lantern held low. The relay clerk was behind him, and together they walked to where the cable had run from the junction box - a salvaged box, stripped from something that had been stripped from something else - and they crouched over it without speaking. The box had burned from the inside. Nothing violent. Just a smell of scorched wire and the kind of darkness that means the thing is done.

The keeper arrived last. She looked at it the way you look at a piece of work that has failed honestly, without malice or surprise. She said there were no replacement parts. Not anywhere in the settlement that she knew of. Something would have to be made from what was here, or the lane would stay dark.

I found the letter at the edge of the path where the light had cut out - folded once, not sealed, laid down rather than dropped. I did not pick it up. The place told me it had been left on purpose, that it was part of something already in motion, that the carrying of it belonged to someone else's hands.

Lano came and stood beside me. She looked at the letter and looked away.

The keeper walked back into the orchard with her lantern, already working through something that had to be solved before morning. The lane was dark and the apples went on falling, one at a time, with a sound that did not carry far.

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