Dream d3295-s: The Board Gone Pale

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the hollow at Dunnebarrow held the same cold it held on the first visit, and on the second, and the third before this one. The heather was pressed flat along the lower rim where something had lain or settled, and the pale stems had not risen again.

The board stood where the keeper had fixed it into the turf bank, a plank of pale wood mounted on two sharpened stakes. When I came to it in the light the last row of days was gone, chalked over in broad white strokes that crossed the tallies beneath. Nothing had been written in their place. The keeper stood to one side watching and did not explain the crossing, and I did not ask.

Lano moved ahead of me into the hollow, her nose low to the heather. She found the place where the previous account had been spoken and stood there for a moment, very still, then moved off toward the turf bank.

The relay clerk sat with the record open on his knee. He had made three entries under Dunnebarrow, each dated, each with the condition noted at the time of that visit. The condition this night was dormant, and he wrote it in his careful hand while the surveyor paced the lower edge of the hollow and checked the measurement against her earlier figure.

There was a smell of wet peat and something else, something faint, like the particular cold of a room closed for several seasons. I noted it in the account without naming it further.

The board. I stood in front of it a second time. The erased days were smooth, the chalk worked in well, no ghost of the tallies showing through. Whatever count had been kept there was finished. The keeper had not begun a new count. The hollow was the same hollow and the dampness coming up from the turf was the same dampness, and the account recorded the sameness as a condition and not a complaint.

Lano came back from the turf bank and pressed against my leg. She looked up once, then turned toward the board, and her ears settled.

I wrote: board cleared, no recount begun. Heather pressed flat, northeast quadrant. Smell as noted. Three visits prior, this the fourth. Condition: dormant.

The keeper said nothing further. The hollow held the light close and gave nothing back to the dark beyond the rim.

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