The cart road from the coast ends at a plank causeway over Hollin Marsh, the causeway ends at a stile, and past the stile the ground climbs through juniper to Jarnvik, a village of slate roofs stacked so close that the eaves nearly touch. I arrive in a wind that carries grit. Every sill in Jarnvik holds a saucer of salted water, set out before the lamps are lit, and the saucers are the first thing the village shows me. By morning each has a skin of pale sand floating on it and a clean rim where something has bent to drink.
The Sandman stands about four and a half feet, and stoops under any lintel. Its body is a wedge, broad at the shoulders and tapering to a base that drifts instead of standing. The color is toasted wheat, flecked with amber and bone white. The arms hang nearly to the floor, and the hands are wide as dinner plates, with fingers that fray into falling grains, so that a trail of it follows every reach. The face is smooth and heavy-lidded. Two green eyes give off their own cold light, and the mouth holds a faint smile that looks pleased with itself. A gray sailcloth cloak covers the torso. Its hem is patched with a square of pale blue linen, and a single green glass bead is stitched into the edge of the hood.
Over the left shoulder hangs a sailcloth sack that swells as the night goes on and leaks a thin line of golden-tan sand. The Sandman eats salt water and the restless part of sleepers' dreams, which it takes from children who toss. Whether the sack holds those dreams or only sand, I cannot confirm. I watched from a cupboard for three nights and never saw it opened, and Ulf Haraldsen, who has slept under the Jarnvik eaves for seventy years, says he has not seen it either. His household keeps cots with the head turned from the window and a damp rag drawn along the sill at dusk. They do this for the saucer's sake, he says, because a Sandman that finds a gritty sill grows fussy and stays longer.
One habit has no menace in it. Before dawn the creature shakes its cloak over the sill, three firm snaps, as a person beats a doormat, then sweeps the spilled grains into a heap with the flat of one hand and leaves. The same routine is reported from Nesvold, on the far side of Corrow Gap, where the lime kiln burns orange on the horizon all night and the sills collect more sand than anywhere else I visited. On the Nesvold sill where I set my ruler, the morning drift measured three-eighths of an inch.
- Classification
- Dream spirit of loose sand
- Habitat
- Bedroom windowsills and village eaves
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 4.5 ft, stooped in doorways
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Hollin Marsh and Corrow Gap
- Binomial
- Somnarius arenifer
- Diet
- Salt water and sleepers' restless dreams
- Temperament
- Fussy, patient, quietly proud