Dream d3272-s: The Gate Remembers Open

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gate at Rowanbrook was open when I came through in the morning. I know this because the hinges face east and the sun had moved across the iron, leaving its shadow behind the post rather than ahead of it. Now the gate is latched from the inside, and the latch is not a mechanism I can reach from here.

Lano stands at my heel, her ears flat against her skull. A warning bark, short and definitive - not at the gate but past it, at something the air is carrying. The wind has changed.

The keeper is somewhere inside the wall. I can hear the movement of someone setting things down, footsteps on gravel. The keeper does not come to the gate.

The surveyor has her notebook pressed to her chest, protecting it. The relay clerk has already found the overhang at the garden wall's corner and stands there with the record box. Rain is beginning - not yet heavy, a preliminary rain that feels its way down, finding the spaces between collar and neck, between boot and trouser hem.

I put my hand on the gate's rail. Cold iron, already slick. Beyond it I can see the lamp at the main path junction still burning, amber in the grey. I can see the antenna mast at the corner of the outbuilding, and I watch it move. Not a small movement. The stays have given on one side, or the fitting at the top has shifted; the mast leans slightly into the wind and corrects, leans again.

Lano makes a low sound. Not a bark. Something beneath it.

The generator, which I have heard as a constant undertone since arriving at Rowanbrook two nights ago, stutters. The lamp at the junction dims, brightens, holds. The keeper's footsteps stop.

I do not call out. The record of this place has been handed elsewhere, read in whatever condition it arrived, and no answer will come back through. What I have is the gate in front of me, latched from inside, and the wind moving through the rowanberry clusters on the far wall, and the surveyor waiting at my shoulder, and the clerk with the box held against her ribs.

The mast moves again. This time it does not fully correct.

Lano sits down on the wet path, facing the gate, her tail still. She has decided something about this moment that she will not explain. The rain finds its weight.

The lamp holds. The gate does not open.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art a human figure at a garden gate, A gate that stood open on the outward journey is now latched from inside., muted moss and umber, lamplight amber accents, 8-bit style