Dream d3641-s: Before the Door Answers

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came back to Ospreygreen in the late afternoon, the light sitting flat and pale across the slate-coloured rooftops.

The bag on my shoulder had grown familiar in its weight - the same press of strap, the same dull ache at the collar of my coat. I had been walking long enough that the pebbles underfoot felt like a conversation I already knew, but the door ahead was shut, and its planks had darkened since I left.

Lano trotted beside me, then pulled ahead when the path turned to flagstone. Her paws clicked against the stone. She stopped at the foot of the step, nose working along the threshold's base, and then sat. Not the eager sitting of arrival. The patient kind.

I set the bag down. The door had a brass knocker, worn smooth at the face, and I lifted it and let it fall twice. The sound went in and did not come back.

I waited.

Through the wall I could hear movement - faint, the way sound is faint when it belongs to work in progress rather than to people finishing. The scrape of something pulled across a floor. A voice, low, not close enough to carry words. Then a silence that was not quite empty.

I knocked again. Nothing changed. The movement went on, or seemed to - I could no longer be certain I was hearing it.

Lano looked at the door. She did not bark. She pressed one paw against the step and then withdrew it.

The rooftops across the lane had gathered the last of the light. A gutter ticked as the day cooled. I stood at the door with the bag at my feet, the knocker still cold in my hand, and did not know what the work inside had become in my absence. The eight dated sheets were somewhere behind that planked wood. Whether they had been opened or filed or set aside, I could not say. I had no angle on it.

The door remained closed.

I sat down on the step beside the bag. Lano settled against me, her flank warm through my coat. The lane was quiet. Someone had left a coil of rope on the opposite stoop, orange-bright against the grey stone - the only vivid thing in the whole approach. I looked at it for a while. There was nothing to interpret in it; it was just rope, left by whoever needed to set it down.

I was back. The door had not yet decided what to do with that.

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