Dream d3702-s: No News from the Interior

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road to Ospreygreen bent once before the gate, and I arrived at the bend while daylight still lay flat across the slate rooftops. The door ahead was shut. I could see the worn iron of its handle from where I stood, the bag heavy against my hip, and no one came out to meet the arriving hour.

Two workers moved along the far wall, carrying something between them - a length of timber, or a roll of something pale. I could not tell which. They did not turn. Their work continued at its own depth, unhurried, and the muted ochre of the stonework absorbed the last of the afternoon light without giving anything back.

Lano had stopped at the bend and sat with her nose lifted, reading some passage in the air that I could not follow. Her ears were forward. Whatever she attended to was not the closed door; it was something further in, or behind, or simply present in the way that only she could measure.

I set the bag down on the packed earth and waited. The handle of the door did not move. A thin line of shadow had begun to cross the threshold from within - or what I took for shadow, which might have been the edge of something else altogether, a surface, a hem, a margin.

I called out. Not loudly. A traveller's greeting, the kind that expects no particular reply, only acknowledgement of the approach. The two workers at the far wall did not pause. The door did not shift. There was the sound of something being set down - wood on stone, or stone on stone - but it came from a direction I could not locate precisely.

Lano rose and trotted forward three steps, then stopped again and looked back at me. Her tail gave one slow arc.

The ochre wall held its warmth longer than the air around it. I picked up the bag. The notebook stayed where it was, inside, the eight sheets in their order. I was still on the approach; that was the only fact I could verify from where I stood.

The door remained shut. The work inside remained its own.

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