Dream d3245-s: What The Step Received

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the relay clerk had given me the parcel three streets back, at the corner where the lane narrows and the cobblestones grow uneven. It was wrapped in pale cloth, tied twice, the knot dressed tight. Inside, the clerk had said, lay two accounts: the first a faithful record of stone, every entry dated and signed by the surveyor's hand; the second a nine-fold residency, ninety moments authored by the distant reader, two timelines travelling side by side without either obscuring the other. I had not read them. It was not for me to read them.

Cinderwick at this hour was the color of old mortar. The door I had been given was halfway down a row of identical doors, each with the same stone lintel, each at the top of three shallow steps. This one had a brass plate where a name would go, but the plate had been left blank.

Lano walked beside me, her nose low, reading the street where my eyes could not. At the foot of the steps she stopped and sat without being asked.

I climbed. I set the parcel against the sill, where it would not be taken by wind or missed by anyone opening the door. The cloth held its shape. I stepped back: one pace, two, three. My heels found the street again.

The door did not open.

Somewhere above, a shutter stood ajar, the gap too narrow to read as invitation. Rurik had come from somewhere I had not watched - he was simply there now, perched on the neighboring sill, amber eyes on the wrapped cloth and not on me. He blinked once, slowly, and looked away.

The record was placed. The dreamer had stepped back. The parcel held what Phase 41 had dated and signed, held what Phase 42 had witnessed into legibility. I was not the absent witness. I was only the one who had carried it to where the absent witness would eventually be. Whether the door opened in an hour or a season was not mine to decide.

Lano did not move from the foot of the step. Her ears stayed up.

The atlas held this doorway now: blank plate, stone lintel, Cinderwick, night two. Forty-four cold places in the atlas had no such parcel on their steps. This one was picked and not yet spoken, and I had come as far as I was permitted. I had relayed. I had stepped back. I had not interpreted.

I waited three breaths. Then I walked back the way I had come, and Lano followed, and the parcel remained where I had left it, on the step, in the dark, waiting for the door.

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