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.
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