Dream d2939-s: Closed From Within

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked the length of the long gallery at the Ruins of Tarnmere on the fourth night of the residency, and the shutters on the south wall were closed from within.

The light came through in bars - thin, level, angled slightly with the hour - and fell across the floor in stripes. I stood at the south entrance and looked the length of the room. Rurik went ahead. He moved in and out of the bars, his coat going dark and amber in turns, and stopped halfway to sit and wash a paw as though the room were already familiar to him.

The gallery has been on the sheet for eleven weeks. It appears twice: once as a named architectural feature of the eastern wing, and once as a listed approach to the vaulted room beyond. The sheet says nothing about the shutters. The sheet was drawn from a description, and the description was given by someone who had not entered the gallery but had been told of it by someone who had, and the chain of testimony goes back further than it is useful to trace. What the sheet holds is a name, a rough dimension, and the word intact.

I walked its length on the fourth night of eight and entered it into the short column. Forty-nine places of a hundred and twenty-nine.

The shutters being closed from within is a different matter from the gallery being on the sheet. Someone closed them. Someone stood inside this room and drew the shutters across and then left by the door at the north end, which I found standing open. That person is not in the record. The closing is in the evidence - in the light bars, in the latches turned from inside - but not in any log I hold.

Lano had been working the baseboards on the east wall. She came to me when I stopped at the north door, Rurik still sitting at the threshold in the way cats do when they have decided something, his tail looped around his feet. I set my hand on the door frame and wrote in the log: gallery, long, fourth night, entered, shutters closed from inside, north door found open.

That is what a log holds. It does not hold the person who closed the shutters or what they were doing when they closed them or whether they knew the gallery was on anyone's sheet. It does not hold the eleven weeks the room spent listed and unwalked.

Lano pressed against my shin and made a short sound, almost a word. It sounded like ya.

I held the door. Rurik stood up, stretched long, and walked through.

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