Dream d3345-s: Pages Lift Once, Rain Follows

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the notebook lay against the inner sill of the window alcove at Alderbarrow, and I had been carrying it for five nights. The pages faced the glass. Outside, the first serious weather was moving in from the east, and the settlement - its mast lines, its cable trenches, its low generator housing at the edge of the cleared ground - stood against it without answer yet.

Lano sat beside me on the alcove bench. Her ears were flat. She had given one sharp bark toward the window an hour ago, and since then had held a stillness that was not sleep. Her nose tracked the seam at the base of the east-facing frame.

The keeper moved through the room behind us without stopping. A lamp was adjusted. A door was pressed against its frame and checked. These were the movements of a place preparing for something it had prepared for before; nothing in them was alarm, but nothing was ordinary either.

Outside, the antenna masts began to sound - a low tone, continuous, the frequency of a thing being pressed and not yet bending. The distant reader had gone to the upper room earlier and had not come back down. Through the floor came the generator's pulse, steady but carrying a new hesitation between beats. The relay clerk appeared in the corridor, looked at the window without speaking, and turned back the way they had come.

I held the notebook. A draught found its way in through the frame that had never quite been true. The pages lifted once, slowly, and settled. I did not press them flat.

The surveyor's log recorded five visits here. What those accounts held was already held. What was here now was the rain beginning against the glass, the mast tone low in the wall, Lano's attention fixed on the east face of the room, and the notebook that had not yet found its reader - or the right pair of hands to receive it - in a place where the storm was simply beginning and the cable trench along the eastern wall was, by now, collecting water no one had yet gone out to measure.

The generator hesitated again, longer this time, and then resumed.

The pages did not lift a second time. Outside, the masts went on speaking in that low continuous key, and Lano pressed harder against my leg, and the place went on.

---