Dream d2696-s: Cold House Below the Signal

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the last rise before the first cold house of the second book, and the sheet was still blank in my hands, and the afternoon was late and copper-colored and the light held at that angle where a place shows what it has been left as.

The house below sat in its own shadow. Good order. The last arrangement held like a posture. One road out, running west.

Lano sat beside my left boot and looked where I looked.

I uncapped the marker and wrote the entry number at the top of the line. Then stopped. Something had reached us that was not quite a sound - a frequency wrong in the way a dial slipping off its interval is wrong, not painful but immediately alerting. I turned. Somewhere behind us, back toward the relay post at the junction, something was garbling.

Lano's ears went flat. She stood up from her sit and faced back the way we had come, and barked once, short and clear, and went quiet and held the posture, nose working.

I put the sheet in the satchel and looked. The relay post's small indicator, the green that meant the continuous record was carrying correctly, was cycling. Green. Not-green. Green with a break in it. The patterns that should have been sequential were scrambling in the interval, and whatever left that post for the station at the fork would carry the corruption into the wider record.

I wrote on the back of a blank entry slip: relay post, junction south of first cold house, signal interrupted, encoding uncertain, onset late afternoon, duration unknown. I dated it. I put the slip in a separate pocket.

The house below was still in its good order. I would go down and complete the entry. But the record leaving this place was already touching something else now, something that had started without announcement, and Lano was still standing at my heel with her ears flat and her eyes on the post, and I did not yet know what I was recording or whether what I wrote from here would arrive anywhere clean.

I started down the rise. Lano came alongside but kept looking back.

---