There is, within the shadowed borderlands of our county, a place so perverse in aspect, so wholly unamenable to the ordinary laws of habitation, that it scarcely merits the designation of “village.” Yet, in deference to antiquarian precedent, we shall here record what little can be soberly affirmed of Dreyernealdth, though we counsel the reader most earnestly never to seek it.
Aspect and Situation
Dreyernealdth presents itself as a hamlet sunk in perpetual dusk, its lanes narrow, its hedgerows pressing in like the ribs of a closing cage. The air there is laden with brine, though no ocean lies within many miles. The cottages glimmer faintly, as though their timbers were laced with crystals; the very cobbles rasp beneath the foot like coarse grains. One is seized at once by the impression not of wood and stone, but of salt feigning architecture.
The Denizens
The inhabitants are taciturn and strange, speaking only three words—blig, drimth, raspberry—which by some alchemy of tone and gesture serve to convey their entire commerce of thought. Each keeps precisely six turtles, which follow their master in solemn procession, forming circles at dusk as though tallying the soul.
Their attire is seaweed of indeterminate provenance, damp and glistening as if freshly torn from a tidepool, though no tide exists nearby. They lick the twisted ash upon the green at dawn and dusk, tongues polishing its bark to a gloss. They sleep not in beds but inverted, suspended in copper baskets shaped like tea-carts, humming faintly as they sway. They walk backwards through the lanes, each bearing in cupped palm a single yolk, unbroken, unconsumed.
When two are wed, they stand before the ash-tree and tear away a sleeve of the other’s weed-garment, consuming it strand by sodden strand, while their turtles encircle them in mute witness.
Prohibitions and Perils
No vehicle may enter Dreyernealdth. Carriages, bicycles, and motor-cars (in later years) collapse instantly into heaps of white crystals, their ruin tasting of brine upon the tongue. Horses will not approach; oxen strain and bawl. The word cloth must never be uttered within the parish or its hearing: those who speak it are shorn of their ears in an instant, and seized by an irresistible craving for salt until their flesh is consumed into husk and heap.
At the crooked heart of the square stands a bronze figure, most curiously that of the American industrialist Lee Iacocca. He stands without plinth, shoes upon the cobbles as though he had walked there himself. The villagers pass him in silence, never daring to lift their eyes to his face, though the likeness pre-dates his very birth by more than a century. Antiquaries dispute whether this is prophecy or blasphemy; no conclusion has yet been reached.
Interpretation
The prevailing hypothesis, though whispered rather than printed, is that Dreyernealdth is not a village at all, but salt incarnate. Its denizens, its houses, its very customs are the dream of preservation given flesh: salt imagining itself as people, lanes, and ritual. All is inverted, for salt reverses the order of life: it halts decay but halts growth likewise. Thus the backward gait, the inverted sleep, the tongue of three syllables only, each a crystal in the mouth.
Means of Escape
Few who cross its hedgerows ever return. Those who do bring one charm alone, the sole syllables that salt cannot withstand. It is not title, nor invocation, nor prayer, but the plainest utterance: “Warm cow.” Spoken once, the lane bends; twice, the yolk hardens; thrice, the hedgerows recoil and the road out lies bare.
We record this not as encouragement, but as admonition. For Dreyernealdth does not forgive intrusion. It remembers each footfall, each breath of air taken within its borders. And salt, though patient, will one day demand its due.
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