Dream d3457-s: What Was Never Called

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the street through Pewtermill was narrower than I remembered, or perhaps it had always been this narrow and I had always walked it without registering the fact. The entry-keeper was ahead of me and the relay clerk behind, and we moved in single file because there was no other way to move. The keeper of the place led us, and Lano came last, her nails a quiet click on the stones.

The buildings leaned close enough that I could have touched both sides with my elbows out. Amber light came from somewhere above - a window with a cloth across it, a lantern hung on a bracket not quite at eye level - and it colored the moss on the lower stones and the umber of the upper courses so they both looked like different versions of the same old thing. The street was full: not crowded with people, but full the way a held breath is full, occupied by itself.

The keeper stopped at a door set back from the street. Not recessed enough to make a threshold, just set back, and the door was ordinary. She did not knock. She stood.

The entry-keeper took out the notebook. She opened it to a page already marked with a folded corner and read something to herself - I watched her eyes move - and then she closed it. She did not read aloud. The keeper waited, and the street waited, and I noticed that Pewtermill had a smell like iron filings and old bread and something worn smooth.

Lano pressed close to my left leg. Her nose was working. She was reading the door's history in the way she always does, with patience and without conclusion.

The relay clerk wrote in her own record. Whatever she put down was hers.

I did not open the notebook. I had stopped bringing it out for places that would not ask about it. The street was going on whether I held the book or not - there were voices further up, not calling to us, just ordinary voices in an ordinary evening, and a cart moving on a cross street, its wheel loud and then quiet, and the amber in the windows above shifting as someone inside moved between us and the flame.

The keeper stepped back from the door. That was all. We moved on, still in single file.

Pewtermill held what it held. I wrote nothing. The entry-keeper had her page.

Lano looked up once - "ya" - not at me, at the door we had passed.

Then we kept walking.

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