Dream d3397-s: The Oiled Hinge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the doorway at Larkgate held a light I had not been asked to tend. I stood just inside, the notebook against my chest, and Lano sat at my heel with her nose lifted toward something I could not place.

The place was dormant in the way that places can be - not empty, not closed, only set aside. Three times someone had come and recorded a visit. The walls held that much. I did not add to it.

The keeper came in from the yard. She did not look at me first. She went to the far hinge on the old door, set a small jar on the sill - oil in it - and worked the brush around the pin without hurrying. The hinge moved. She worked it twice more.

Lano's tail moved once at the keeper's approach and then was still.

I set the notebook on the low shelf beside the doorway, the way you set a thing down when you are not sure where it is going but you are sure it has arrived somewhere. The keeper's eyes moved over it - not a reading, not an assessment, only the eyes noting a shape among other shapes. She capped the jar.

The shelf already held a cup with a cracked handle, a folded cloth, a length of cord. The notebook rested there with those. Lano went to sniff the foot of the shelf and came back.

The keeper went out through the door she had just oiled. The hinge made no sound at all.

I stood in the doorway light and listened to Larkgate. There were the keeper's boots on the far side. There was whatever Lano was tracking with her ears - something in the yard, small and intermittent. There was the way the notebook was not being read.

The surveyor's sheet named this place three times over, beside the eighty-one spoken and the seventy-three still unentered. I was not here for any of those visits. I was here now, and the notebook was on the shelf, and the last hinge had been oiled, and Lano left the yard sounds alone and came to sit in the doorway light beside me.

The account of Larkgate did not need me to speak it. It was already going on.

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