Dream d3414-s: Stone at the Open Door

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the passage was cold enough to notice but not cold enough to stop me. Behind the counting room the walls pressed in and the ceiling stayed low and the only light came through the door I had not closed. Lano moved ahead of me in the dark, her white coat catching what little came through from the other side, and I followed the sound of her paws on the stone floor.

The notebook was in my coat. I had stopped trying to find who ought to read it.

From further back I could hear the entry-keeper moving through her part of the room, the scrape of a chair being straightened, a drawer that did not quite close. The relay clerk's voice reached through the wall in a flat line, giving numbers without pausing. Neither of them came into the passage.

A keeper of the place stood near the far end with his back to the door, doing something with a bundle of cord he had cut. He worked in near darkness without hurrying. Lano stopped a few feet from him, her nose low, and he did not acknowledge her but he did not startle either. He untied a knot he had made wrong and began again.

Yarrowcrossing was warm for a place that had so much stone in it. It had always been warm. I had come in four times and had not understood it the first three. The warmth was not from a fire I could find. It was already in the walls.

I sat down against the passage wall and rested my back against the cold stone and felt the contrast: the stone taking heat from me and the air around me holding whatever heat the place had been accumulating for years before I arrived. Lano circled once and settled beside my knee, her chin down on her forepaws.

The notebook was not worth more here than it was anywhere. I did not take it out. There was nothing for it to explain to this passage and nothing in the passage that needed to explain itself to me.

The keeper tied off his cord and moved deeper into the dark. His footsteps went quiet before I would have expected. Lano's ears lifted once and then settled. The door behind me stayed where it was: open.

I counted nothing. The account would hold its own row. I was one of the four who had come and the place went on without waiting to see if there would be a fifth.

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