Dream d3394-s: The Keeper's Lamp

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gate arch was stone and the ironwork was old and the hinges were clean. I stood at Larkgate in the dark with the notebook under my arm and did not open it.

Lano pressed against my leg, her nose working the cold air from left to right. The keeper stood near the arch post with a lamp that did not swing. There was no wind to make it swing.

The relay clerk sat on the low wall beside the arch and wrote in a ledger of his own. He did not look at my notebook. The surveyor walked a slow arc around the arch, measuring the shadow of the lintel against the lamplight, and said nothing that reached me.

A second lamp appeared at the far end of the road. The distant reader came on slowly, pausing once where the road curved, then continuing. She did not hurry. She was not heading toward the arch. She was heading along the wall, which ran a different way.

Lano made a sound - not a bark, something lower - and sat down.

The keeper set her lamp on the arch's inner ledge without being asked. The light caught the hinges, which were dark with good oil. Someone had kept them. The ironwork did not need to be old and clean both, but it was.

I held the notebook. Nothing in the way I stood at this arch asked me to put it down and nothing in the way the keeper stood asked her to take it. The place did not arrange itself around the notebook. The place went on.

The relay clerk blotted a line in his own ledger and looked at the road, not at me. The surveyor completed his arc and stood still. The distant reader passed behind the far wall and was gone.

Larkgate had been here before any of us and would be here with clean hinges long after the notebook had found whoever it was for. I knew this the way you know a room's dimensions by standing in it, not by measuring. The arch held the lamplight up.

Lano pressed forward, sniffed the stone of the threshold, then stepped back and sat beside my foot.

"Buena," she said, once, under her breath.

I stayed until the keeper's lamp had burned low enough to make the ironwork disappear into its own shadow. Then I turned back the way I had come, and the notebook was still with me.

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