Whitelodge 2.5 & 2.6

-2.5-

Harmon could hear it chasing him. His head was ringing, the vibrations rising up from the base of his spine and threatening to spin his head clean off. His vision was blurring, and he became vaguely aware of a darkening around its periphery as he swept down the mountain. At first he had thought it was a result of his coming closer and closer to passing out from exhaustion, but it held its position when he turned his head. A huge shadow was rising up to blot out the mountain, and it was taking every bit of his will to not stop and turn around, to see its deceptively cloud-like bulk coursing after him.

He had never seen it happen himself, but he had heard stories too many times to underestimate its power and speed. At one point or another, most of his skiing friends had talked about avalanches as if they were normal parts of life (and he supposed for some, they were). He knew that the romance and majesty of them was seductive, and it was very easy to forget that a wall of freezing death was bearing down on you at eighty miles an hour when it was so goddamned beautiful. He had lost too many of those friends who thought they could stop at a distance and take a picture, or just enjoy the devastation from safe ground, completely forgetting that when that cascade of solid ground started turning its cold eye in your direction, it was already moving ten times as fast as you ever could.

He was ready to pass through the tree line on his left, but knew it wouldn’t make him any safer once he did. At least he would feel less exposed than he did now, while he was racing down and away in the open air. A few hundred yards farther upslope, the service road had angled away from him for good, and even that insignificant change had left him feeling more like a squashable bug crawling across an expanse of white tablecloth.

But there was a part of all this that was exhilarating, too. Part of him felt much like he had on his best downhill runs, back in his day, when the wind seemed to sweep away everything in his brain as he sliced through the air, until he was nothing but the avatar of movement, propelling himself forward for no other reason than that was what he had been designed for. At these moments, he was pure instinct and momentum, adrenaline and cold fire and hurtling speed --

A rock cracked against the underside of his left rail. It might have been sitting there for hundreds of years, waiting until this moment to make its presence known. He could feel the shock of the hit reverberate up his leg, immediately steering him slightly off course. The error quickly magnified, and he could tell he was in serious trouble. The grid of town lights below him slowed in its process of rising up to meet him, as he unwillingly traded his downward motion for lateral. His right ankle, never the strong point of his body even in his heyday, was starting to wedge itself against the outside of his boot with the added weight and pressure that his left used to share. The way the rock had kicked him up onto one leg, he wasn't going to be able to get both skis back down safely on the snow without the raised one first coming up a few more degrees, and he didn't know if his supporting ankle could take that.

He slewed even more to the side, thankful that at least he was heading closer to the road. If he fell -- and it was becoming increasingly more apparent that he would, it was just a matter of when -- being far from the road might meant that not being found until well into spring. He felt everything happening in his ankle with fascination. He had broken plenty of bones before, but never had he been able to see it coming with such surprisingly clarity. He distinctly felt the kicked-up leg still angling upward off the snow, felt his right rail sinking ever so slightly into the hardpack as it bore the extra weight, his ankle beginning to tip over, then felt -- but didn't hear -- it snap over the rush of the wind.

He tipped over before the old, familiar pain could even reach his brain. Then he was tumbling end over end across the snow, throwing divots and showers of it up into the air. He was still a good quarter-mile above the point where the tree line would change direction and cut across his downward path. He closed his eyes and wondered if the ice crystals lashing his face were ones his wipeout had thrown up, or the vanguard of the onrushing avalanche, which he could still hear rushing forward, roaring somewhere above him.

At one point in the early seventies, Harmon had tried his hand at surfing. He had been visiting a friend in Hawaii, and since there was no skiing to be had, he had allowed himself to be talked into it. How much different could it be, he rationalized. His friend had instructed him to think of surfing as skiing a living mountain.

This is what came to his mind as the snow refused to let his body come to a halt; it picked him up and carried him even farther downhill. Through the haze of pain both general (from his tumbling) and specific (from his ankle), he only understood this from the change in the world around him. At first the trees spinning around his aching head were merely trunks whipping by, missing him by inches on all sides; then thick lower branches scraped at his face and legs, their needles already shorn of comforting snow by the oncoming rumbling; then lighter branches that reminded him of the switches he had experienced in Catholic school. They lashed with at least as much ferocity.

And then he reached a place where there were no trees at all. He felt the ground underneath lifting him up like a sea of hands, always turning itself over to reveal new unthrusting force underneath, tossing and twisting him in ways his body hadn't attempted in decades.

Up ahead, he saw a thicket of denser tree population, and obliquely wondered if it were even possible that the downrushing waves might allow him to pass above them... what if it never stopped, kept lifting him higher and higher, a wave of snow passing over and above the whole world?

But he wasn't high enough. The branches were back, whipping at him harder than ever. He was passing through the thicket, and all but the hardiest pines were snapping like matchsticks around him. He could hear their trunks detonating far below him as they were torn in half by the ground-hugging lead edge of the thundering white mass.

There were enough that withstood the onslaught, however, that he began to lose momentum, felt a tightening in his stomach as he was lowered down, seeing trunks filling more and more of his vision. Somehow, he missed them all, was able to keep his eyes open long enough to see the strongest ones start to bend, which seemed to slow the flow of the mountain, and to lower him even closer to the ground.

In Hawaii, the most exciting and frightening part of his surfing experience had come on the third day of practice, when he managed to catch a wave large enough to break over his head. He remembered seeing the spray above him as it blocked out the sun, he spent a glorious moment in a tunnel of pure light, and then he was down, being dragged under and spun by the most powerful force of nature he had ever encountered... until this day. This time, the wave was made of something he couldn't pass through. How different would it feel, he wondered, when the cloud of ice that surrounded him suddenly solidified, filling his lungs and throat?

The air grew thicker around him until he could not see the trees any longer. The sound of crunching branches, limbs, and trunks filled the world. Everything bled into white, then darkness, and then he stopped thinking altogether.

-2.6-

Carlos had been the first to hear the glassware chattering. Benny probably hadn't heard because he was a half-hour deep into his dishwashing meditation, and was playing his music besides. Carlos had been on the other side of the lodge's spacious kitchen, wrapping up the prep for the next day, peeling and dicing. That season's resident chef -- some guy named Rene that neither he nor Benny particularly liked -- had long since gone home, leaving the pair to man the room service phone through the night and get things ready for the next day. If they both kept at it, they could be done and in bed within the hour.

Carlos was rushing to do just this, but had recently been interrupted by an order for hot fudge sundaes, which had just come in under the order deadline. He had delivered them to the giddily smug, bathrobed pair on the second floor, and then rushed back to finish making the next day's stock in the giant pot on the stove.

That was when the dishes had started talking to him. He listened to it for a full ten seconds before he realized what it was, and at first thought it was because some high note in Benny's squealy music had hit a particularly resonant tone. That happened sometimes, and more than anything else it was a testament to the quality of dinnerware at the Deertail. Only the best crystal picked up on tones that finely. But when the music changed and the vibration didn't subside, Carlos started to wonder what was going on. He looked up from his knifework and examined the shelves above him.

It wasn't just the plates, it was the glass in the frames of the cabinet doors, too. He could see the reflection of the overhead lights shimmering that disgusting yellow LED color that Rene insisted on replacing all the bulbs with, because according to him you couldn't tell how food really looked under fluorescents. As far as Carlos was concerned, making it look like everything had been lightly glazed in bile wasn't much better.

"Benny," he called over the noise, "can the music for a second, will ya?"

Benny complied, cutting off his classic rock mid-riff with a well-placed elbow to the boom box's power button. "Que?" he asked, hands dripping hot water into the sink. It was the only Spanish word he knew, even though several times he had asked Carlos to teach him more. Carlos had gotten tired of telling him that he didn't know any more either.

Now that the music was gone, Carlos didn't have to point out why he had asked for silence. Every item in the kitchen that rested atop another was producing a rattling sound, like a spontaneous round of applause coming from every direction.

"What the hell is that?" Benny asked. Carlos turned to answer, and what he saw would stay burned in his mind for the rest of his life. It was an utterly mundane scene, Benny standing there in the apron and hair net he wasn't required to wear but did anyway, his hands glistening with wash water held away from his sides, an amazed look on his face as his eyes roamed around an entire kitchen that seemed to have suddenly acquired an unintelligible, buzzing voice. That horrible sound grew louder and louder, until--

Benny's head turned almost imperceptibly toward the window above the sink, as if something had caught his eye, and an instant later the whole thing exploded inward. For a moment Carlos thought a bone-white tentacle had punched it in, and was now pouring its gleaming length horizontally into the kitchen. It appeared not just content to blast the side of Benny's head with splintered wood and shards of glass, but it also seemed sentient and intent on knocking the man across the room, which is just where his assistant ended up.

Carlos instinctively leapt forward to help, but drew back when he saw the intense speed of the white length that had invaded their familiar workplace. It was growing thicker, too; as it forced its way into the kitchen, it was pulling more and more of the window frame in along with it, until it was nibbling bits of the surrounding wall too. He could still see Benny's legs sticking out from under the pile the white thing was now accumulating on the far side of the floor, and when he realized his co-worker was about to be buried entirely, Carlos ducked into the freezing spray and lunged for them.

His hands came down on the ankles of Benny's high-end work boots the older man always wore on his kitchen shifts, claiming that they were the best to stand for long periods in. As he started to pull on them, Carlos realized the true substance of the white presence that was still filling the room... snow. It was powdery and white, spreading to settle on everything, but Benny had taken the brunt of the first blast that had burst through the window. Carlos worked against the increasing weight of the growing pile, and started to get some traction, slowly inching Benny out from under the mound of whiteness that now covered half the floor and filled most of the air, spreading across the counters like time-lapse films of mold.

Carlos drew encouragement from watching Benny's form become more visible as he pulled him out from under the snow. First the man's pants became visible, then his belt -- his apron must be rucked up somewhere underneath -- then a little bit of pale, middle-aged belly before the bottom of Benny's shirt became visible...

When Carlos had his co-worker out from under the snow almost to the level of Benny's chest, he noticed some color on the white mound, right on the spot where he imagined Benny's head was. A vague pinkness grew there, and then suddenly blossomed into a patch of bright warning red. At the same time, the mound began to gather and collapse, as the redness of Benny's warm blood began to melt the snow he was lying under.

Carlos, panic suddenly grabbing his throat like a pale hand, began to pull harder. He could see that the apron had flipped up and over Benny's face, and was scared beyond belief to think what was left underneath, even as he knew he had no choice but to find out. The expensive, sickly overhead lights stuttered twice, then failed altogether.

Whitelodge 2.3 & 2.4

Dale’s arms were around her before her eyes could adjust to the darkness. There was still gray-blue, diffuse light coming in through the huge front windows, but all it did was outline the window-ward edges of everything in harsh, dim lines. The lobby that she spent nearly all her working hours in, which she knew down to the knot in every board in the walls, had suddenly become a kind of shadow-world inversion of itself, all the more alien and forbidding for taking on the form of things that were so familiar. Then everything shifted in some fundamental way that she couldn’t quite place; she suddenly felt as if she had been displaced several inches to the right, and the world was belatedly making a poor attempt to keep up with her.

Now Dale’s bulk was pushing her back from the desk, and they were toppling back through the doorway to the office together, and she didn't have to look at that forbidding tableau anymore. She worried about being crushed under him, because he had a good hundred pounds on her, but he hit the doorframe on the way down and didn’t follow her all the way to the floor. A rush of air that took the form of a grunt lurched out of him, and he slumped down next to her legs. She reached for him instinctively -– and then the brittle, ripping sound came.

Her eyes flew up to the spot she had just vacated behind the desk, and saw a huge, flat form like a black bird come swooping down. It was the overhead television screen, swinging like a scythe from the wires that the tremor had pulled out of the wall along with it. Glenda marveled at the way it came down so neatly, perfectly arcing through the spot where her face had recently been.

After two long swings back and forth, the wires gave out and the screen crashed down onto the desk itself, a flat thump and a spidery ice-crack sound coming out of it before it slid off onto the floor. It landed squarely on the carpet pad that Glenda had put down to keep her feet from getting too sore during long shifts. All this had happened before she could place her hand on Dale. For a moment, she wasn’t even sure where she was touching him, but then he groaned and turned a little, and she realized she had instinctively found his elbow.

The vibration she had seen in the grandfather clock’s second hand was everywhere now, as if the building itself had become a tuning fork. There were also vast cracking and splintering sounds coming from out in the lobby, as if the whole place were being slowly ground between gargantuan teeth. But she felt strangely safe with her hand on Dale’s arm. She didn’t hear any sounds of destruction coming from the small warren of offices behind her, so she knew he had gotten her away from the immediate threat, and now she was going to be okay.

All of a sudden, she realized how quickly he must have moved. She had been blinded by the darkness for only two or three seconds; he would have had to run down to the end of the counter, dash through the gap between it at the wall, and make the return trip in order to tackle her like he had. She wouldn't have guessed that he could move that fast, especially in the dark, but apparently something had motivated him to. She distantly wondered if it was the fact that it was she who was in danger. Would he have moved that quickly for the first shift desk manager?

Dale's breathing was heavy and harsh, but she didn’t feel like she could ask him if he was all right yet. The rumbling made the idea of speaking aloud silly; it felt like any lesser vibrations in the air would just be swallowed up. This whole thing felt enough like a dream to make her not want to risk opening her mouth and having nothing come out -– a staple of her nightmares since she had been a girl.

Dale put his hand over hers, and it felt like it completely dwarfed her fingers. She couldn’t help but break into a smile, there in the dark.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and the quality of his voice suddenly made her concerned for his state than her own.

"I think so," she said, found less breath in her lungs that she thought there should be. "You?"

"Yeah," he said, shifting around so he could sit next to her. She almost giggled at the ludicrousness of it; she had never considered the idea that the spot directly behind her work station could be sat in, much less with Dale right there on the floor next to her. "What the hell, man?" he mused, probably to himself more than her.

She answered anyway. "Some kind of earthquake?" She'd never been in one before, but if she had to imagine what one was like, it would have been almost exactly like what they had just gone through.

"Maybe," he mused, still sounding pained. "I should go check it out." He started to stand up, but she didn't want him to go just yet. She tightened her grip on his hand.

"Hold on," she said for real reason.

"You hear something?" he asked.

"No," she said after a slight pause. She hoped that maybe he would take her cue, that what she really wanted was for him to stay here with her a little longer, just so she could keep smelling his cologne and feeling his body heat, so that she wouldn't have to be the one in charge of this mess for a few seconds more.

He did give her about ten more seconds before he said, "I've got to get up, Glenda. If this was bad through the whole lodge, I've got to make sure everyone's okay."

She sighed a little, knowing that she had to give him up for the greater good, at least for now. "Yeah," she said, releasing his hand from hers. "Go make sure everyone's safe."

He got up, following his calling. Secure the area. Save those who need saving. Deal with all the Stuff You Have to Deal With. She felt guilty that she couldn't take as much pride and drive from those thoughts as he did.

He picked up his flashlight from where it had rolled up against the wall beside them, got to his feet, and looked around. Glenda didn't look at the way the beam played around the lobby, checking for damage or danger, but the way its light threw his strong silhouette into relief. She sat there on the floor behind the desk and watched him, observing as he did his job.

-2.4-

Later on, he would marvel at the fact that they had actually finished having sex, even when it seemed like the world was literally crashing down around them. As a blast of artic air accompanied by blowing snow and pieces of ice rained down on them, their bodies kept moving. She had been close again when it happened; he knew her body well enough to know the signs, and they had all been flashing at him in tandem, just moments to go. He was right there with her, too, and despite the noise and pressure drop it was pure animal instinct to keep going. In that moment, the seeming implosion of their room was just more sensory input.

Their bodies rocked, began the process of slowing down, and then Kelly breathlessly whispered, “Noj, what the fuck just happened?”

Somehow his head found its way out of the tangle of terrycloth and flesh that they were mutually buried in, and he felt fully just how cold the room had suddenly become. It had nothing to do with how warm he had been inside the bathrobe-cocoon with Kelly; it was as cold as if they had suddenly found themselves outside. And as he looked around the room, that estimation wasn’t too far off. The patio doors no longer existed, and appeared to have been replaced a long, white landslide that extended halfway across the room and fanned out near the bottom, until it covered nearly the whole floor in inches of whiteness. A haze of pulverized snow hung in the air, instantly melting on his overheated face as it began to settle. The place where the doors had been were full of this heavy whiteness; the only reason he could still see was because one corner of the window on the other wall was only partially blanked out by the same white mass.

“I don’t -–“ he began, but then he found that he knew exactly what had happened. There was only one way that much snow could become piled in their room that quickly. And considering that their room was on the second floor, it was a big one.

Kelly’s head came up out of the pile of cloth and bedclothes, craned around like his. “Wow,” she breathed. “Are we good, or what?”

He laughed a little in spite of the disorienting situation, and rolled off Kelly. He couldn't help but note that she didn't close up her bathrobe before sitting up and surveying the damage. Manoj started to dismount on the side of the bed furthest from the patio doors, but she put out an arm to stop him. "Watch out, baby," she said. "All that broken glass is down there somewhere."

"Good point," he murmured, and looked over the edge of the bed. His slippers were sitting exactly where they had been, perpendicular to the bed and parallel to each other, as if they hadn't noticed anything was amiss. He swung his feet into them and then stood. He realized that the jumble of long shapes against the far wall was the combined mass of the door frames, twisted beyond recognition. They must have caught against the footboard and flipped over on their way across the room, he mused. So it was a good thing that he had been focused on pushing Kelly through the headboard at the time, or he might have found himself missing both his feet.

He squinted down at the snow piled around him, trying to pick out any jagged shapes that might be sticking out of it, but didn't see any. "I think it's okay. It was probably safety glass."

"It's still sharp, though," she said, putting out her arm to him again. "Watch out."

He tenderly stepped around the foot of the bed, found himself facing down the huge, angled slope of snow that had invaded their space. He frowned at it, surprised that it seemed so neatly shaped, as if it had been extruded through the space the previously-existing doors had created. He mused that, if this had been a movie, it would have been the fornicating couple that bought it at the moment of disaster. But here they were, seemingly unscathed. He turned back to Kelly, and despite the cold he was disappointed to see that she had fully re-encased her body in terrycloth.

"Our luggage is under there, isn't it?" she asked. And she was right. Every other piece of clothing they owned was separated from them by a chest-deep pile of snow that might very well have jagged chunks of sliding-door glass churned through it. So they were stuck with just their bathrobes for now. Well, at least they weren't going to need to divide up the sheets in order to cover themselves. If this had happened before the sundaes, that's what they would be doing.

"It's some kind of snowslide, isn't it?" she asked. "An avalanche?"

"Yeah, I guess," he said. He had known the word, of course, but for some reason his mind couldn't put together his idea of such a phenomenon with what had just happened. He couldn't stop looking at the room, his disbelieving head slowly swiveling back and forth like a security camera, trying to collect as much data as he could.

"Should we go out into the hall?" Kelly asked. "See if there's anyone else out there?"

Manoj frowned. In spite of the fact that clearly something sort of horrible had happened, some fiercely stubborn part of him acknowledged that he didn't want to let go of this first weekend alone with Kelly. Not yet. "Maybe we should just stay put. Isn't that what they say you should do in an emergency?"

Kelly was up off the bed in an instant, heading for the door. "I'm cold, though. let me just stick my head out and see." Manoj reached for her arm, but she was already out of reach. She had to tug on the door a few times -- Manoj could see even in the dim light that it was just the slightest bit askew -- but then it burst open with a loud squawk of protesting wood. He cursed himself for not being the first one to act.

When he came up behind her, she was standing halfway out in the hall, one arm still hooked around the vaguely-canted jamb. She was pointing down the hall, toward where the stairway from the lobby joined their hall. Things looked almost normal from where they stood, although he knew that was probably because all the lights were off, their minds filling in the shapes as they remembered them from before, as they wanted them to still be. Past the end of her finger, a vague, jittery light was growing brighter about halfway down, started to coalesce. As it swept around jumpily, it revealed the reality of the hallway, which became more and more full of corners and angles that shouldn't have been there.

The beam finally gathered itself together into a tight beam, and the shape of a man propelled itself up into the hallway. He swung his flashlight up and down the hall. It stung the couple's eyes at it found and stayed on them.

"You folks all right down there?" he said, loudly enough to be heard clearly in the strange stillness.

Kelly was quick to answer, "Yes. What just happened?", only to be eclipsed by a different man's voice, farther away than the flashlight bearer's, calling "We need help down here!" Its tone didn't convey panic, but there definitely was a sense of urgency to it.

The man behind the flashlight turned away, and in silhouette Manoj could now comprehend his shape fully; he was a tall, broad man, exactly the kind that his mind's eye expected to see when Kelly was finally stolen away from him. The guy was in some kind of official uniform as well, although he couldn't make out the kind. His insecurity shields went up immediately.

Kelly was away and trotting down the hall toward the human beacon before Manoj could even think to stop her. Her bathrobe was swinging loosely around her body, slippered feet -- when had she managed to put those on? -- barely slowed by the shifted terrain under the hall rug. As she receded from Manoj, the flashlight man turned toward the calling voice, taking off at almost the same speed the other way down the hall. Manoj sighed, and followed them.

Whitelodge 2.1 & 2.2

-2.1-

Sheryl took a step back, hit with a sudden sense of vertigo. The moon had been rising a few moments ago, and now had sunk below the horizon again, so the first thing her mind interpreted this to mean was that the entire landscape was tipping backward. Her hand instinctively reached out and grabbed the patio door handle. It was the only thing that kept her from falling back onto the thin but ornate rug that covered the wooden floor.

She kept looking up at where the moon had been, irrationally thinking that if she kept watching, the world would right itself. Things that made no sense had a responsibility to correct themselves, didn’t they? But it wasn’t happening. And the next thing her mind told her was that the whole top of the mountain above her was starting to turn over, preparing to throw its entire bulk down on the puny matchstick lodge below, and that she and Kerren were about to be crushed. No fanfare, no explanations, just this one, final, brutal event. And darkness.

Through the hand that rested on the cold metal of the door handle, she started to feel a vibration, starting slowly, but building with frightening speed. It was not rhythmic, but instead was the physical equivalent of static. She yanked her hand away. She didn’t want to feel it, that manifestation of chaotic motion. It felt utterly wrong. She turned back to the room, which looked blessedly stable in spite of the weird, churning motion of the world outside, and dashed over to the bed. She hopped up on it, because she had opted for the side closest to the window. Kerren was always doing that these days, she thought obliquely, ceding the more preferable option to Sheryl in every instance. Which side of the best, what restaurant do you feel like tonight, you pick the movie... Did Kerren realize she was doing that, or was it some innate sense of penance that she was still paying?

Kerren was surprisingly hard to wake, snuffling and snorting before realizing that Sheryl was shaking her bare shoulder. “Hmm? Hmm?” she kept asking, her brow furrowing, as if wanting an explanation before she decided if she was going to open her eyes or not.

“Kerren!” Sheryl whispered harshly. “Something’s happening! Wake up!”

Kerren’s eyebrows raised, although her eyes still didn’t open. “Whass?” she slurred. Then, surprisingly clearly: "She's here?"

Sheryl had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t know, but you’ve got to wake up!” Sheryl hissed.

Instead of jerking awake, Kerren curved her back and stretched like a cat, as if she had all the time in the world. Sheryl knew there was no point in trying to impress upon her wife the urgency of the situation; at any other time she would have enjoyed looking at this feline stretch as Kerren rose up out of sleep. But there was madness going on just outside their window, and Sheryl needed to not be the only one seeing it.

“Okay,” Kerren said, smacking her dry lips a little, her eyes opening and coming into focus, “what is it that’s so--?”

Sheryl actually saw Kerren’s eyes widen as the shadow fell across them. Even though the moon had been eclipsed, there had still been some light coming in, ambience from the blanket of snow that lay over everything. But now even that was being sucked away, and Sheryl’s back was turned to whatever was causing it. Then there was a horrific locomotive sound, a crashing, and the bed skewed a few feet sideways, almost tossing her off.

Kerren, closer to the edge, was thrown off ahead of it, awkwardly twisting up in the sheet because Sheryl’s weight was still holding her part of it down. Sheryl couldn't hear Kerren thud against the floor an instant after she dropped out of sight over the edge, for all sound was drowned out by that awful static, which now was exploding the very air around her. She had seen footage of houses in earthquakes, and was familiar with how furniture would rush back and forth during them, first one way, then the other as the seismic waves passed. This wasn’t like that. This was just one-way pressure, a long, relentless push away from the window. Away from the mountain.

The darkness in the room had become almost total, and Sheryl couldn’t even pinpoint where the remaining feeble illumination was coming from. It wasn’t until she turned her head and fell over that she realized that what she could still see of their room was only an afterimage, a retinal imprint of the last instant there had been light. It remained in front of her, just as it had been, while her body went sprawling toward the edge of the bed. She managed to grab onto the sheet and keep herself from following Sheryl past the edge.

That pressure was still in the air, and she could feel the entire room continuing to shift in fits and starts, as if threatening to be blown away by whatever was bearing down on them. She could hear wooden beams in the walls, big ones, cracking, pausing, and cracking again as torque was piled on torque. It had to end soon, it just had to. Whatever this force was, as strong as it was, it couldn’t continue. But it kept going. She felt the bed sliding across the floor even further, even though it was meeting with some sort of resistance as it did.

The strangest part of the whole experience was the sheer immediacy of it. There was room for nothing in Sheryl’s mind save for the torrents of sensory input that were threatening to crush her mind. She had forgotten about Kerren almost as soon as her wife had disappeared from view, never mind that the heavy wooden bed was now sliding over the area she had fallen into. Even when Sheryl realized that they were being pushed toward the narrow hallway that led past the room’s bathroom and toward the door into the hall, she couldn’t project far enough into the future to think that she should brace herself for when the bed jammed itself diagonally against it.

So when the bulk of the bed hit the corner of that hallway, cracking both its own frame and the wall's wood beams at the corner in equal measure, Sheryl was thrown forward, and it was only because she had been on the far end of the bed that she wasn't thrown past the edge just as Kerren had been. Instead, she was thrown roughly down onto the covers, bounced slightly, and came to rest. The oncoming rush of pressure and static continued for a few seconds more, and then stopped.

For just a moment, she sighed, relieved. It was over, and she was still alive. There was no future, and the past was done. She survived, and that was all that mattered. At least, until she recognized that something was hurting her ears. She had been sensing it for several seconds, but it took reorienting herself mentally before she could parse what the sound actually was. And when she did, cognitive thought snapped back into the front of her mind, superseding the reptilian survival mode she had been in. Determining its source, her mind suddenly filled with a nuanced list of everything she still had to fear, and everything had to do next.

Because Kerren was screaming from somewhere under the broken bed.

-2.2-

Bruce, ice bucket under his arm, stumbled out into the hallway. The way he lurched around was an amazing simulation of being drunk, which he had been on the verge of anyway. All that was missing was the righteous rage that his blurred mind always had for the world around him, fully knowing that he was impaired, but frustrated that the laws of nature wouldn’t respectfully conspire to keep him solidly upright. It felt even more like an abyss was opening beneath his feet than usual, because he *knew* this time was different. The world was going wrong, and he was still sober enough to know it.

He watched as the upright rectangle of the receding hallway turned, at first imperceptibly and then more and more pronouncedly, into a parallelogram. It was remarkably similar to slipping into a dream, which was something he had been paying a lot of attention to lately, in his fruitless pursuit of Theda. As a child, he had always marveled at how the mind, no matter how alert, couldn’t determine or recall the instant that it crossed from the waking state into slumber. He had even tried experiments, playing random spoken words in his headphones, and then the next morning trying to pinpoint exactly where he stopped recalling hearing it, but he could never really find the moment it occurred. He ended up positing that waking and sleeping were parts of a continuum, and that had made it easier for him to learn how to access the places he needed to in order to meet his dream-muse.

He was feeling a similar sense of dislocation right now. There was a deep rumbling under his feet that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, as he watched the beams and walls start to skew out of true. Had it finally happened? he wondered. Were his waking and dreaming lives merging into one? He could vividly picture the entire lodge twisting and turning itself into a new shape, like a puzzle box, as his consciousnesses appeared to collide with each other.

The lights went out, as if refusing to show him what was happening next, or offer any kind of resolution.

Fueled by pure creative desire, his mind's eye saw his Sounding Stones bursting up through the floor and walls, their pressure wrecking the mortal structure around him. They had finally come to him, he thought, which surely meant she would follow, apologizing for abandoning him, saying that she would do anything to make it up to him. She would give up the secret to the source of all the ideas she had been feeding him for the last few years, and he would spend the next months in a manic state, astounding everyone around him with his new explosion of productivity...

Somehow, he had ended up on the floor, bits of ice from the bucket spilled across him, starting to melt through his shirt. Boards in the dark walls were splitting and popping, sending chips of wood raining down on him, but there were no stones. Just more wood underneath, wreckage upon wreckage. Pieces of it were scratching and cutting him as they flew, and he began to wonder if this were really happening after all.

He thought that maybe he should just let go. Let the darkness claim him. If he had lost Theda, lost her forever, then what was the point of continuing the search? The Stones weren't her power, after all. If the last few dreams had proved anything, it was that the Stones -- an extension of himself, he suspected -- were just a cheap background for her. Just as he, Bruce, meant nothing without her, they meant nothing in and of themselves.

There was still a little light remaining, though... He could see it far ahead as his eyes adjusted. It made little sense because of the new shape the hallway had bent itself into, but there was definitely illumination there. His mental map of the building told him that it was most likely coming from the lobby, around a corner and down the hall. And from somewhere between him and that light, he could hear a woman screaming. It was close but muffled, somewhere on the other side of a wall.

Recognition flooded his system with chill. It was Theda. He knew it must be, because he had heard her scream before. In his most recent dream -- the last time he had seen her -- he had known something was wrong even before his dream-eyes had fallen across the scene. The Sounding Stones had been gray against the sky, the colors usually glowing in their depths muted with the flat gray light of the clouds that were billowing up from all sides, converging on where he stood inside the ring.

She had come out from behind one of them, her eyes wild like a roped horse, trying to look up and around in all directions at once. He reached out for her, tried to hold her arm, or at least touch the gauzy robes that floated around her like a tattered shroud. But, as always, he was not allowed to touch her. No matter where he reached, she was always just beyond his fingertips.

"What is it?" he had asked her. "What's going on?"

She didn't take her eyes off the swirling, boiling sky, but addressed him. "I don't know," she had said. "It's never been like this. It must be--" As she spoke, her gaze had finally swiveled down to him, and when she did, a look had crossed her face that he had never seen before. The way she looked at him had always, up until this moment, given him a feeling of confidence, and for just a few fleeting moments would make him feel like the kind of man who deserved the gifts she was presenting to him. This look, though, had been entirely different.

She was looking at something above and behind him, and her eyes were so wide, the stormlight so pervasive in this shadowy world, that he thought he could see in them something looming behind him, something pointed and sharp among this landscape of gentle, natural curves. He spun around to catch a glimpse of it, but could see nothing behind him but more storm clouds, rushing down toward them, their speed unnervingly rapid.

When he turned back to her, his mouth opening to ask her what she saw, he found her to be looking directly at him. The same fear was in her expression, and when he had opened his mouth to ask her what she had seen and where it had gone, she screamed. The very same scream he was hearing now. Then she turned and soared off into the forest that ringed the circle of Sounding Stones, shrieking in terror all the way. He had seen his arm extending, reaching after her, but he was just as unable to catch her as always.

And now, months later, he was hearing her again, in the real world for the first time. She was somewhere ahead of him, behind a canted, splitting wall, and in dire need of help. The sound of her screams pierced his skull just as he knew the massive splinters surrounding him could have, had he fallen down in a slightly different place. The fact that he hadn't was all the sign he needed that he was supposed to find her, to crawl through the wreckage of both worlds if necessary, and save her.

He swung the ice bucket from side to side in front of him, making sure the path was free of large debris, and began to find safe places toward which to pull himself.

Whitelodge 1.5

The trouble started in his pins, three hours ago. He could always tell an upcoming event’s degree of severity depending on how badly they ached. When it was as mild as a nearby argument, it was more like an insinuation than a real, tactile sensation. If particularly bad wind shear was about to bear down on the lodge, Harmon might actually feel the pins in his spine gently jangling his bones like windchimes, loud enough to make him start to wonder if anyone else could hear them. This time, though… this time his backbone was actually wobbling, as if his head were one of those plates spinning on the top of a long stick, like he had seen on the Ed Sullivan Show as a boy.

He had received the pins -- pure titanium, or so the doctors had told him -- courtesy of Murphy General, fifteen years ago, after Harmon had clipped the particularly springy edge of one tree's bough and skidded sidelong into another’s trunk. That had been in his off-trail days, and had been the event that ended them, even though he still liked to careen down the more informal of the paths, back away from the tourist slopes. When he did, he could at least momentarily convince himself that he was still young, blazing trails and nailing tails, as his cruder friends used to say. Well, there hadn't been much opportunity for the latter in a long time, but he could at least pretend to still do the first part. At the moment, however, he was just trying to keep his head from vibrating off his shoulders as he bent to make sure his skis were firmly attached to his boots.

He felt bad about not warning Dale, and knew the regret would grow sharper later on. The big guy had always done right by him, had understood and respected Harmon’s established relationship with the manager. But what, exactly, would Harmon have said by way of explanation? That the pins in his spine told him that something bad – gigantically, unfathomably bad – was coming? And that he had no idea exactly what it was? No, Dale would have followed protocol, because that was what it was valuable to have Dale around for, and the security head could have done nothing until he knew precisely the nature of the threat, what procedure to follow. So Harmon had decided that the only person he could save was himself.

People could call it cowardly and selfish if that suited them, but those two gals he tried to talk to in the restaurant had clinched it. That pale-skinned one, the one that didn't get immediately belligerent with him, reminded him so much of of Sara that he couldn't help it. It wasn't just the shape of her face, it was something in her eyes; he'd noticed it as they sat across the bar from him earlier in the evening. It was like looking at an old picture, but one that was moving, and talking, and laughing. He couldn't help but try to tell her, and yet she had turned him away.

It was the story of his life now. He was too old to be useful, in the eyes of everyone around him. He wasn’t able to trick himself into thinking that anyone he talked to in the bar thought he was more than just an addled old pro trying to hang onto his last scraps of glory and youth.

In his spare time at the lodge, Harmon liked to read vampire novels. It wasn’t because of the nubile virgins succumbing to the ancient man who came to them in the middle of the night, although he knew that’s what everyone who caught him with one would think. No, Harmon consumed the stories compulsively for something else entirely, the singular idea hidden behind the words that made the vampire the saddest monster there was. They were immortal, timeless, just as Harmon secretly felt he was too.

The best vampire novels addressed this; how the true curse of being a vampire is not the forced bloodletting, but the reality of staying eternally alive. Creatures like him had no choice but to stick around, to see all their mortal friends and loved ones wither and die, the world around them evolving into something new, alien and incomprehensible while they stayed the same. That’s what Harmon felt every day, whenever he wandered into the bar – as he inevitably did, despite his best intentions – and started unspooling his tales of daring and adventure to the kids (and even when they were in their forties, Harmon thought of them as kids).

That was how you thought when you were as incredibly ancient as he. Ancient enough to see the world he had grown up in, and everyone in it, fall away like autumn leaves. Only he was left hanging onto the branch, tenaciously clinging in the breeze. Until tonight, that was. Tonight, he was letting himself blow away, and it hurt.

The night wind bit his cheeks as he started down, that familiar continuous slap that he had once lived for. He didn’t know exactly what he was running from, but he felt as if he was deserting everyone left back in the lodge. Just walking out forever, with his dinner still warm on the table. He tried to tell himself that the wetness of his cheeks was because of the wind. It was far from the first time in his life he'd had to convince himself of this.

When his pins started singing to him -- and right now they were fixing to turn into a full-blown choir -- he wondered if colliding with that tree all those years ago had done something more than physical to him. What he mused to himself in his weakest moments was horrifying; that maybe it had knocked his soul right out of his body. Perhaps his ineffable essence had kept right on cruising down the mountain and was lightyears away over the hills now, leaving his aging body behind to stagnate in a fog of easy downhill runs and liquor hazes before the lodge’s stone fireplace. No matter how the snow bunnies oohed and ahhed, he never really felt like those stories were really his anymore. They seemed like someone else's victories.

Right now, though, on this midnight run, he was starting to feel the old thrill, remembering how the mountain had always provided for him. She was alive tonight, just as alive as he felt, for the first time in a long time. Maybe that was why he hadn’t told Dale (or anyone at all) of his premonition. Some part of him, long ossified, knew that it was being shaken into wakefulness, and didn't want to spoil the adventure by calling in the cavalry. This knowledge made the air's bite harder, the crunching of snow under his skis crisper. And always that premonitory feeling behind it all, like a gigantic predatory bird circling high above.

He had started out racing down the auxiliary slope that ran alongside the service road into town, which appeared as a warm blanket of lights spreading out before him as he lowered himself down to its level. But now he veered away from it, heading instead for the tree line. It was time to go back into the woods, if for no other reason that his pins were making his muscles tense, prepping him for the moment when unknown talons would sink into the back of his neck and yank him off the ground.

He skirted the edge, not quite daring to enter yet. Gravity was such a tease; she kept pulling him downhill, ever closer to her deep, hidden heart, only to throw the entire world in his way every time. He came close enough to a bough -- stuck out like a swiping hand -- to remind him of his long-ago injury. He swerved away from the edge of the forest, then swept back just as quickly. She wasn't going to deny him, not on this night. Not when he had some unnamed doom pressing down on his back, and a ringing in his bones that was sounding more and more like an alarm clock, waking up an old, sleeping hero.

He didn’t know it, but he was going downhill faster than he had in more than two dozen years.