Dream d3404-s: The Flat Stone Keeps

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I laid the notebook open on a flat stone and went to stand at the broken window.

The stone was cold under my palms when I set the notebook down. The window had been broken outward - I could see the crumbled edge of the frame, the gap where the casement had been. Through it came the smell of bracken and damp mortar, and below, a courtyard with nothing in it but frost-pale grass growing in the joints between flags.

Lano had come in ahead of me. She was nosing the base of the far wall where the stone met the floor, her tail low and steady. Whatever she found there held her a moment, then she moved on.

The entry-keeper stood at the corner of the room with a board and a stub of chalk, making marks I didn't try to read. The keeper of this place was elsewhere - I'd heard movement behind a door when we arrived, and that door had not opened again. The relay clerk sat on the sill of a smaller window, the intact one, back to the light, hands folded.

The room had been used. I could tell from the marks on the floor where something heavy had stood for a long time, and from the way the stone near the threshold was worn in a single track, not spread. Someone had crossed it often by the same line.

I stood at the broken window and watched the courtyard. The frost grass moved a little in a wind I couldn't feel from where I stood. A blackbird crossed one corner of the yard and disappeared behind the wall.

The notebook lay open on the flat stone. I didn't go back to it. The entry-keeper made another mark and was still.

After a while the door behind which the keeper had moved opened a few inches and did not open further. Lano looked toward it, then looked away. The relay clerk unfolded those hands and folded them again differently.

The yard held its frost. The broken frame let in a draft that shifted the pages of the notebook without turning them. Three times this place had been recorded in. The chalk marks accumulated in the entry-keeper's corner. I counted nothing and explained nothing. The blackbird did not come back.

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