Dream d3342-s: The Keeper Does Not Look

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road into Alderbarrow ended at a gate of old iron and dressed stone, and the keeper stood in a gap where the stone had been repaired twice, maybe three times, in different centuries. Lano trotted to the end of her own shadow and stopped. Her ears went flat.

The keeper nodded. Not at me, not at the pack, not at the notebook inside the pack. A nod the way a door closing is a nod: the motion is the record.

I did not reach for the notebook. I had carried it two days without knowing who it was for. I still did not know. I stepped through.

The surveyor was already inside, writing on a piece of board near a wall that leaned south by a degree or two more than it had this morning. She wrote quickly. The relay clerk stood at a distance with his hands at his sides, watching a length of exposed cable that ran along the base of the wall and disappeared into the ground at a place where the ground had settled.

Then the ground said something.

Not loud. A tone below the range of the word loud. The cable moved. The wall moved with it, and where the wall met an older structure, a section of dressed stone pulled away from its mortar and dropped, not far, half a metre, onto the cobbles below. Dust. A sound that continued after the stone was still.

Lano barked once. Flat and short. She pressed against my leg and did not move from that position.

The surveyor looked up from her board. The relay clerk walked to the edge of the fallen stone and crouched over it without touching it. The keeper turned, slowly, and looked at the section that had come down, and his expression did not carry surprise, only a kind of recognition. He had been recognising things at this gate for a long time.

The building attached to the old structure listed. Not collapsing, not falling, listing, the way a boat lists, slow and unstopped. A second run of cable went taut against its anchor, then the anchor pulled from the mortar and the cable lay free on the cobbles.

I held the notebook inside the pack. Nothing in the gesture meant I was protecting it. I was standing.

The surveyor made a mark and underlined it. The clerk took out a small book of his own and wrote two lines. Nobody looked at the notebook in my pack. Nobody was going to look at it tonight.

The keeper turned back to the gate. The gate was still there.

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