Dream d2949-s: Oil in the Unasked Hours

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came into the lamp-yard just before the city settled into proper dark, and the Lamplighter was already at her work. She had a wide tin of oil and a cloth and she moved between the posts with a steadiness that comes from months of the same route, the same order, the same measurements done by hand and never written anywhere I had seen in the record.

I have the City of Ashstead listed. It appears twenty-three times in the sheet, referenced by its ward designations and its market outputs and its count of occupied buildings. I had never walked into it until four nights ago. Tonight is the sixth.

Lano came in close beside me. The yard smelled of rendered oil and warm iron and something else underneath, a kind of electrical edge that was not from the lamps. Rurik had come through a gap in the low wall and was sitting on a stack of empty crates near the south post, watching the Lamplighter's hands.

I opened my notebook at the lamp-yard entry. The sheet called it: functional, maintained, eight posts, keeper registered. The sheet was not wrong. But it named nothing about the way the oil moved from the tin, the way she tilted each lamp just so before she set the wick, the way she did not look up when we came in.

I was writing the yard into the second column, the short one, when the signal came.

The receivers are housed in the old weighing hall on the east side of the yard. I had noted them on the second night: three dish sets, a reel of printed tape, a clock. They have been running since before I arrived. The Lamplighter told me on the fourth night, without being asked anything else, that they had never printed anything she could not account for.

The tape started moving.

Lano's ears went flat before I heard it. She stood very still between my feet, then barked once, short and high, and pressed herself against my leg. Rurik's tail stopped. He turned his head toward the weighing hall and held it there.

The Lamplighter did not stop filling the lamp. But her hand slowed. She said: that is not the western pattern. She said it to the lamp, not to me.

I tore the tape off at the break and read it. The pattern was not in any index I carry. I have three: the regional beacon register, the coastal relay log, and the archive copy from the Survey Office. I checked all three while Lano stayed flat-eared and close. The pattern matched nothing in any of them.

The Lamplighter finished the lamp she was on. She moved to the next post. She said: the last time the tape printed something I did not recognise, it was a test from the college. But the college runs tests on Wednesdays.

Today is not Wednesday.

I wrote the pattern into the notebook. I wrote: origin unclear. Pattern unrecognised. Not from any indexed source. Received at the lamp-yard of Ashstead, sixth night of residency. No action taken yet.

The receiver ran for eleven more minutes and then went quiet. The tape showed nothing after the break.

Lano settled slowly. Her ears came up partway, not all the way. She stayed close.

The Lamplighter capped her oil tin and said: I would tell the Duty Inspector tonight, if I were you. But I am only the lamplighter.

I wrote that down too. Exactly as she said it.

I did not know whether to go to the Inspector now or wait for the morning. I stood in the lamp-yard with the printed tape folded in my pocket and the lamps burning steadily above me and nothing resolved. Lano sat down beside my boot and waited, which is what she does when I have not decided yet.

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