Dream d2924-s: The Second Column

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Ruins of Umberhythe were on the long list and I had not yet been inside them, and I went inside on the fourth night of the residency.

The front room was cold. The shutters were drawn, and a thin line of grey came through the gap at the top of the left-hand shutter. There was a table. There was one chair pushed in at the table. There was a shelf with four objects on it, and the objects were evenly spaced and each sat upright. Nothing had been disturbed. Nothing was broken. I stood inside the doorway for a moment before I moved further into the room.

Lano pressed close to my leg. Her nose worked the cold air in short quick pulls, and she held still.

I counted the objects on the shelf. A jar with a lid. A folded cloth. A small box, the kind with a brass catch that does not lock. A second jar, lidless, empty. I wrote this down. I wrote: front room, shelf, four objects, order intact, no person present.

The Cartographer's Office keeps a column for places listed and a column for places entered. Umberhythe had been in the first column since the naming work was done. Tonight I moved it to the second.

I wrote: cold. I wrote: orderly. I wrote: no evidence of use. These were the first words written from inside this room. The room had been described before: its outer walls, its position at the edge of the named map, the approach road, the condition of the shutters as seen from outside. None of those descriptions were written from here.

Rurik had slipped through the gap under the door while I was at the table. He moved along the far wall without touching anything, and when he reached the corner he sat down and looked back at me. His tail settled around his feet. He watched.

I wrote: one cat, far corner, watching.

I wrote: one dog, at heel, alert, not barking.

I wrote: two figures in the doorway on arrival, now one at the table and the animals distributed.

The Umberhythe entry in the ledger had a field for interior condition. I filled it in: orderly. Cold. No evidence of habitation since the naming. Shelf intact. Chair at the table. Shutters fitted to their frames.

Lano exhaled once, long, and her ears went flat and came back up. She had done her own reading of the room and she was still.

I closed the ledger. The room was still cold, still orderly, still unlit except for what came through the gap. I did not change any of it. I wrote what it was, and I left it as it was, and the room was the same after I left as before, except that it had been entered, and I had written the first description of it from inside.

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