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.
No comments:
Post a Comment