Dream d3396-s: Ink the Place Ignores

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I carried the notebook into the gate room at Larkgate and laid it open on the table, and the pages settled flat without a sound.

The room was not expecting it. The room was not expecting anything. Four walls, a table, a hook where nothing hung. Through the narrow window the courtyard held its arrangement the same way it had before I arrived: a low wall, the dark, the smell of cut stone and something older beneath.

Lano came in behind me and put her nose to the edge of the table, then dropped to the floor. She moved along the base of the far wall, tracing whatever the wall had accumulated. Her paws were quiet on the flags.

I stood in the doorway. The notebook lay open to the middle, pages the color of old cream. I had not placed it open to anything particular. It had opened where it opened.

The keeper came through the far passage and crossed the room without looking at the table. She carried a bundle of cloth pressed to her chest. She passed me at the door with a small downward tilt of her chin, acknowledgment without question, and went out into the courtyard.

The surveyor stood near the window with his clipboard at his side. He looked at the courtyard. He did not look at the notebook. The distant reader had not come in from the passage yet.

The clerk sat on the bench in the corner and wrote in her own ledger, a different size, a different cover. The scratch of her pen was the only moving sound.

Outside, the keeper set her bundle on the low wall. She unfolded part of it and looked at something inside.

Lano sat below the window and watched the courtyard through the gap where the shutter did not close. Her ears were up. Something moved in the far corner of the yard, probably a night bird.

I had carried the notebook this many days. I had held it closed. I had laid it open here and stood back in the doorway, and the room had continued to be what it was. Two visits before this one in the record. I did not know what they had brought or whether they had stood in this same door.

The open pages did not ask for a reader. The room did not ask for an account.

Lano let out a small sound, not quite a bark, and then was quiet.

The keeper came back from the courtyard. She did not look at the table. She crossed to the far passage, her bundle smaller now, and went through.

I remained in the doorway. The notebook lay where I had put it. The room went on.

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