Dream d2992-s: The Missing Second Door

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood in the low room behind the shopfront in Marrowgreen on the fourth night of the residency, holding a lamp over a bare counter, and Lano sat near the doorframe with her nose lifted.

The room was smaller than the far account had it. The far account had described a storage space of some consequence, with deep shelving and a second door to the yard. There was one shelf. There was no second door. I wrote both accounts into the ledger, the old one and the new one, and drew a line under each. Neither was settled.

The counter was bare wood, worn pale at the center where weight had been placed for years. I raised the lamp higher. The ceiling was low enough that I had to tilt my head near the back wall. Lano moved along the perimeter, nose near the floorboards, and stopped at the corner where the plaster had pulled from the lath.

Then the relay keeper appeared at the front opening. She wore her office badge on a cord rather than pinned, and she held a message strip in both hands with the look of someone who had read it three times and was reading it a fourth. The beacon signal was distorting, she said. She laid the strip on the counter under the lamp so we could both see it. The pattern of marks that should have been regular was not regular. Segments were scrambled in a way that looked like interference but matched no interference she had recorded. One relay station up the road had sent a garbled transmission. A second station, further on, had reported the same and then gone quiet.

Lano's ears went flat. She pressed against my leg and gave one short bark, then was still, watching the doorway behind the relay keeper.

I copied the strip into the residency ledger as accurately as I could manage. Near-account of the distortion, night four, Marrowgreen. I wrote what the strip showed and what it withheld. I did not write what it meant, because that was not yet known to anyone in the room. The relay keeper folded the strip back into her coat. She said she was going to the upper station to read what could be read there, and that if the upper station was also silent she would send a rider to the junction before morning. She left without waiting for anything from me, which was correct; there was nothing from me to wait for.

The room was still. I stayed on, raising the lamp to each corner, writing down what the counter was made of, what had stained it, how many hooks remained in the far wall. The room gave those things up. A storage space of some consequence with deep shelving and a second door to the yard was what the record called it. One shelf, a worn counter, a missing second door, and a ceiling that required bending near the back: that was the room. I wrote that the record was off by the measurements I could take without instruments, which was most of them.

Lano settled near the base of the counter with her chin on her paws. Her tail moved once. Outside, something in the lines made a sound that was not wind, and then did not make it again.

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