Dream d3269-s: Before the Wick Catches

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came off the river first, before I could see it, a seep of damp through my coat while I stood at the head of the steps. Quillbridge, the ninth night of ten. Lano pressed against my shin and I could feel the vibration of her breathing in the muscle there. She did not bark. The steps descended in stages toward the water, each one darker than the last, moss thickened and slick at the joints.

The surveyor had gone up into the town after the seventh step, saying the angle of the far bank needed checking before the light failed. The relay clerk waited at the top where the railing ended, her ledger closed for the evening, the last account already carried. Seven visits this place has taken. Seven spoken records in the sheet.

I sat down on the fourth step. The river moved below without urgency. Lano settled beside me, her nose turned toward the far bank, reading whatever the current carried. A boat had been moored to the downstream post at last visit; the post remained. The post had acquired a rope of green weed along its waterline.

The keeper came out to stand at the door above, the door that opens to the side gallery, which is different from the main entry. He said nothing. He had a lamp unlit in one hand and a box of matches in the other. He did not strike a match. He waited.

The place was dormant in the way that places go dormant: still serviceable, still remembering its use, not yet returned to it. The jetty boards had not rotted. The iron ring where a ferry rope once threaded was bright where hands had worn it and rust-ringed where they hadn't.

Then in the building above the steps, not the keeper's level but one floor further, a window lit amber. The distant reader, or someone who had the use of her lamp. I did not know which. The keeper on the gallery below it set down his unlit lamp and his matches, and folded his arms, looking at the same window I was looking at.

Lano lifted her chin.

"Quilla," she said, so quietly it could have been the current.

The lamp above held. The keeper did not move to extinguish anything.

I stayed on the fourth step until the amber in the window steadied from a flame deciding to a flame that had decided. Then I stood, and Lano stood with me, and we listened to the river going on below without us.

---