There is no moon. There are no street lamps. There are dolmens. That is what you need to know. It doesn’t matter that Jeremiah has been clearing brambles on the common all week and that today he found a massive boulder, smooth and flattish. Underneath was a crack where his questing spade went straight down, but that is irrelevant. What matters is the weight of the night, so dense you want to bat it away, and the way the dolmens squat in the landscape, invisible at the dark of the moon, though you can feel them there, always, like a breath on the back of your neck.
Because it is dark, you need a torch if you want to go anywhere, especially up on the Common, and there are reasons to be on the Common at night. Underage drinking. Bat counting. Coming home after a day hacking brambles.
You can see the glow of a torch from 200 metres away. Behind it, the dark is blacker. That is how light is, and how shadows are. Sometimes they move like living things. Don’t go thinking that the shadow following the torch is a toothed horror born of graves and silence. Don’t wonder what Jeremiah might have disturbed. After all, it cannot matter. There was only earth and rock, and if there were anything else, bones, say, or a knife of polished stone, sharp as glass, which is unlikely, then they have been there, quiet, for millennia and nothing is likely to happen now that Jeremiah has them in his bag, if he has.
So, watch the light of the torch as it passes below the hill with the dolmen and do not worry at all about the patch of night that follows it, blotting out the stars.
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