Dream d3296-s: The Pale Beneath

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came back to Dunnebarrow at the hour when the ground holds its cold against the air and neither wants to move first. The marker stone stood at its same lean, the same lichen at the base, the same iron smell when you press close. Lano circled it once before I reached it, her nose low, tail reading something I could not.

The clerk was already at the flat face with a board across the knees. A lamp in the grass threw amber against the stone. Where the last account had been chalked, the line had been chalked over in white, thickly, until only the pale shape of the erasure remained. The text beneath was gone. The chalk did not explain itself.

The clerk copied the blank line exactly. The stylus moved along the white space as though tracing words. The register would record an empty field, and the clerk made no note beside it.

The surveyor stood back with the rod in hand and did not speak. The measurements here had not changed.

I put my hand to the stone. The chalk was dry, cool, faintly gritty. It had been applied in daylight, probably, and had set and stopped smelling of anything. This was not a morning's work. It had been here at least a day.

Lano settled at my side, her flank against my leg, ears forward, watching the stone as though something behind it might shift. "Mira," she said, once, into the quiet.

This was the sixth night. I had stood at this stone before and the stone had shown me different things each time. Tonight it showed me a record of removal, which is still a kind of record. The chalked-over line sat in the register now, copied blank as it is. What the distant reader would find when the account reached them was the shape of what had been taken away.

The keeper did not come out from the barrow mouth. The night stayed still. I left the stone without touching the chalk again, and Lano trotted ahead down the path, tail up, not looking back.

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