Dream d2938-s: The Hall No Sheet Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the door at Tarnmere was already ajar when we arrived, and I stopped on the step to note that fact before I pushed it further. The Surveyor's sheet for the Ruins of Tarnmere ends at the outer wall. I had read it many times in the archive room at Veleth Crossing. Eleven entries: roof grade, orientation, estimated date of dereliction, water ingress at the north facade, the state of the casement windows on the upper storey, a note about the iron gate hinge. Nothing inside. Nothing inside because no one had gone inside and written it.

I raised the lantern before I crossed the threshold. This was the tally I had been keeping all week: the long column and the short one. The long column had 129 names. The short one, as of this moment, had 48. I was about to add one.

The entrance hall was smaller than I had imagined from the exterior dimensions. A flagstone floor. One of the flags was cracked along its length and the crack had been filled at some point with something pale, plaster or lime, which had since dried and pulled away at the near end so the gap was open again. I wrote that down. I did not write that it was sad or that it was evidence of care or that the person who had done the filling was gone. I wrote the crack, its direction, the fill material, the state of the fill.

Lano had come in ahead of me and stood near the far wall with her nose down, reading the floor in the way she reads floors, slow and thorough. Rurik came through after me and sat immediately in the doorway behind us, the one we had just come through, and did not move from it. His amber eyes caught the lantern and held it.

The far wall had a board mounted on it. The board had held things at some point, hooks or brackets. I could see the holes in the wood. Nothing hung there now. I wrote: board, mounted, far wall, north-facing, previous fixtures removed or lost.

There was a smell. Dust and something under the dust: stone and old wood and the faint mineral smell of standing water somewhere behind the plaster. I noted the smell because smell is data. I did not describe it as melancholy. It was not melancholy. It was a smell. The Surveyor's sheet had not mentioned it because the Surveyor had not been inside.

Lano left the far wall and came back to me and pressed her flank against my leg and stayed there while I went on writing. The hall was eight paces by six. One door leading further in, closed. One window, shuttered, the shutter latch intact. The flagstone floor. The board. The crack and its fill.

I wrote across the top of the new page: Tarnmere, Interior. First account. Night 3.

The long column was unchanged. The short one had 49.

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