Dream d3292-s: Mouth of the Mound

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the slab stood on its edge in the dark, a single upright stone framing nothing I could see clearly from where I stopped. Dunnebarrow had been quiet the night before when I first came, and it was quiet again now, the low grasses damp against my boots, Lano moving ahead of me with her nose close to the ground.

The keeper stood to one side of the slab, not in front of it. A lantern sat on the turf at their feet, throwing amber up the grey stone face. The stone was old in the way that resists description: not worn smooth, not crumbling, simply present the way rock near water becomes present, its grain slow and its edges decided.

The clerk held the account from the last sending. They read it without reading it aloud, turning it in their hands the way a person turns a tool to check the weight. The surveyor had walked the perimeter of the mound earlier in the evening and had said nothing since returning.

I put my hand on the slab. The stone was cold the way cold is when it has been cold for a long time. There was moss on the lower third of the face, a dark continuous stripe of it, damp under my fingers.

Lano sat at the base of the slab and looked into the dark beyond it. Her ears were up. She did not bark. She pressed one paw lightly against the stone's foot and then withdrew it, and after a moment settled her chin on her forepaws and went still.

The keeper did not speak. The lantern flame moved in a wind I couldn't feel on my face.

The surveyor made a mark in their book: not the moss, just the position of the slab relative to the mound's opening. I listened to the scratch of pencil in the silence.

The place went on the way places go on: the slab upright, the dark behind it, the keeper to one side, the dog watching, the flame moving in nothing.

The distant reader would get this account in the morning. The mound kept whatever it had always kept.

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