Dream d3244-s: The Unlatched Gate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came to Cinderwick at the end of a long day, when the light was the colour of sieved ash, and I carried under both arms the record: Phase 41 folded into Phase 42, stone entered beside interval, each page dated, each entry signed by the hand that made it.

The relay clerk had told me only: go to the low wall at the eastern edge, find the wooden gate, wait.

I found it. A low wall of pale-mortared stone, and in it a gate of dark wood worn smooth at the latch, and beyond the gate a narrow path between two rows of herb that had gone woody and grey with the season, and at the end of that path a light in a window, and behind that light the absent witness, whom I had never met.

I stopped. I did not lift the latch. I did not knock.

Lano sat down beside me on the flagstone in front of the gate. Her nose worked at the still air - the herb, the ash-smell of the chimney, something small and buried in the soil near the wall. Her tail did not wag. She was attending. Her ears were up.

Rurik had come along without being invited, as he always does. He had slipped through the gap under the gate before I had even stopped walking, and now I could see him through the slats - a dark shape pressing along the path toward the lit window, pausing once to stare back at me with those amber eyes, then continuing.

I held the record in both hands. It was not heavy. Two accounts, neither erasing the other. The surveyor's dated entries from Phase 41: stone by stone, each unreckoned thing given a name and a place. The residencies from Phase 42: nine of them, ninety moments authored in them, two travellers moving through the same duration and neither one consuming the other's record.

I had not assembled this. I had only carried it.

That was the task.

The absent witness did not appear at the window. The light stayed warm behind the glass. Somewhere inside, a chair moved - just the small sound of weight shifting on wood.

I set the record down on the flat top of the gate's post, where a traveller might leave a message for a household not at home. I smoothed the cloth wrapping. I did not write anything further on the outside, because the surveyor and the relay clerk had already written what needed writing, and my handwriting was not part of this record.

Lano stood when I stepped back. She looked at the gate, then at me. Her nose twitched once more toward whatever she had been reading in the air - the buried thing, or the warm smell from the chimney, or the scent of the record itself, which had been in my bag through many weathers.

We did not leave quickly. We stood there a moment longer, not as vigil, not as ceremony, but because the act of setting something down is different from the act of walking away, and those two things needed to be separate.

The light in the window did not change.

Then we turned and walked back out of Cinderwick, the way we had come, and the night closed behind us without fuss.

---