Dream d3487-s: Signal Through the Slate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench was cold when I set my hand on it, the surface worn to a brightness by years of hands and slates and the weight of what gets pressed between them. The field behind Slatefield ran out to dark, and the relay clerk had left a lamp at the near post, though the lamp was turned low.

I took the sheet from the fold in my coat - dated, the place named in the margin - and I laid it flat on the bench's face. The wood had a grain that ran crosswise to the sheet. I slid a slate beneath it, drew a second slate from the row along the bench's edge, and pressed it down on top. The sheet disappeared between them. Two slates, a bench, and what lay sandwiched there now belonged to Slatefield in whatever way Slatefield keeps what is left with it.

Lano had been sitting at my foot, her nose working the night air. She went quiet in a particular way - not the quiet of interest, but the quiet of something changed. Her ears went flat. She turned toward the beacon post at the field's far end and barked once, short and clean.

The beacon signal had been humming beneath the night the way it always does, low enough to feel in the chest rather than hear. It stuttered. I stood at the bench and felt it - not a sound exactly, a gap where the sound had been, then the sound again, then nothing, then a burst that lasted a half-beat too long and broke off wrong.

The relay clerk came from behind the post at a walk, not running, but the way a person walks when they are thinking fast. I could see them checking the line at the first junction, then crouching at the second. Lano moved to my side, pressing against my leg, her tail low.

The entry-keeper had come to the doorway of the near building. They stood there, said nothing, watching the clerk at the junction. A keeper I had not spoken with tonight came around the far wall and stopped when the beacon stuttered again - longer this time, the pattern dissolving into something that carried no shape I could read.

The sheet was between the slates. I did not take it back. Slatefield was going on around it: the clerk's hands at the relay fixture, the entry-keeper in the doorway, the keeper at the far wall. Lano pressed closer.

The bench was cold and the slates were cold and the signal broke and held and broke again in the dark, and Slatefield was working at it with the same hands it works at everything, and the sheet lay between two slates and knew nothing of any of it.

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