Dream d3348-s: What the Gate Knew

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the east lane at Alderbarrow ran between a hedgerow and a low wall, and by the time we reached the gate at its far end, the light had settled into the grey that comes before true dark. Lano moved ahead of me along the lane, her nose low, picking up something from the packed earth that I couldn't name. The relay clerk walked at my shoulder, silent, and the surveyor was a step behind us both.

The keeper was at the gate when we arrived. Not waiting, exactly - more as though the gate and the keeper had been in the same position all afternoon and we had come to them. They didn't straighten when we approached. They had their hand on the top rail, looking past us toward the far end of the lane.

I had the notebook in my coat. I had carried it through all eight nights at Alderbarrow and I carried it still. I hadn't found the moment when it seemed right to offer it, and now, on the last evening, I stood at the gate and felt its weight the way you feel something familiar.

Lano sat down beside my feet and looked up at the keeper. She had her ears forward, attentive the way she gets when she is deciding whether a figure is worth approaching. The keeper's gaze remained on the lane.

The surveyor made a note about the gate's ironwork. The distant reader had stopped a little way back and was attending to something in the hedgerow - a loose strand, a place where the growth had thinned. The relay clerk said something low to the surveyor that I didn't catch.

I kept my hand inside my coat, on the notebook's spine. Nothing in the keeper's posture asked what I had with me. Nothing in the gate - worn at the latch and solid everywhere else - asked either. Alderbarrow was going on the way it had been going on, with us in it briefly.

Lano stood, pressed once against my leg, then moved to investigate the base of the wall. She pressed her nose into a gap between two courses of stone and held very still. Then she moved on.

The keeper shifted their hand on the rail. Not turning, not speaking. The ironwork was cold-looking in the grey light.

I took my hand out of my coat, empty.

We walked back up the east lane the way we had come. The gate stayed closed behind us. I still had the notebook. The keeper had not looked at it, had not known I had it - or had known, and decided nothing about that knowledge. I couldn't tell which, and it didn't seem like the kind of question Alderbarrow was going to answer.

The lane was quiet. Lano walked at my heel, unhurried.

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