"Kerren, where are you?" Sheryl asked, blindly feeling for the edge of the bed. She had seen her go over, but her mind hadn't yet pieced together that Kerren could be pinned under the bedframe, against the wall, or both.
The screaming didn't stop. Sheryl probably hadn't even been heard. Ahead of her, felt by her hands but unseen, there were huge splinters spattered across the sheets. She feared that the convex corner of the wall, against which the bed had come to rest, had been turned into a dangerous stellation of wooden spikes between her and her wife. She inched forward as fearlessly as she dared, but couldn't shake the thought of a nasty, invisible spike drifting ever closer to her eyeball or her nostril as she moved.
In a way, she was thankful for the pained, frantic sounds Kerren was making, because it had become her only point of reference in the darkness. God, if Kerren had fallen quiet... But Sheryl couldn't tell if the screams were starting to lose intensity because Kerren was losing the strength to make them, or if she was becoming accustomed to whatever circumstance was causing them. In any event, they seemed to be coming from directly beneath her now, and she still hadn't found the edge of the bed.
"Kerren!" Sheryl called. "Calm down, honey! I'm trying to find you. Are you underneath the bed?"
Sheryl felt a feeble hand thumping against the underside of the bed, punctuated by breathy hitches in the unending wail that Kerren was producing.
"Okay!" Sheryl said, "I feel that! I'm coming closer. Just... baby, can you take a deep breath and say my name?"
The screaming tapered off, although it seemed to take more effort to stop than it would have to continue. "Sh-- Sh-- Sheryl?" Kerren's voice was finally bordering on being recognizable again.
"Right!" Sheryl said. "I'm going to figure out how to get to you... can you move out from under the bed?"
"I..." Kerren began, as if she were endangering herself even more by speaking coherently. "I don't know. I'm afraid to move. My legs hurt so bad..."
"Okay!" Sheryl said, as professionally as she could manage. "Then don't move. Let me come down to you, and we'll figure out what's going on. Maybe I can get to a flashlight or something. But you should just hold still until I can figure it out. All right?"
"All right." Kerren was clearly trying to mimic her wife's tone, as well as the words. Sheryl hoped that meant Kerren was finding something reassuring in it. Then she set about trying to figure out what to do next.
The only time she had been in a darkness so pure was when she had visited a local set of caves in elementary school. When they had reached the deepest part of the tour, the guide had demonstrated to the class what the place looked like to its original explorers by turning the installed lights off for a few seconds. Sheryl had been totally unprepared for the sensation she felt when the utter blackness descended on the class.
Despite the sounds of her classmates taking the opportunity to yell, scream, and pinch each other with abandon, Sheryl had felt the space around her open up, as if the cave walls had been suddenly yanked back away from her at an alarming speed, pulling her breath away with them to fill the sudden, yawning space. On the way back to school, Sheryl had been in a bus seat behind a pair of girls talking conspiratorially about how they had felt at that same moment. Sheryl had been surprised to find that they had felt the exact opposite of what she had; the instant the blackness engulfed them, they had both felt like the cave walls were closing in, had shrunk to fill all but the smallest of margins around their bodies, and that if they were to try moving, they would have found themselves unable to.
At the time, Sheryl hadn't known that a sample size of two girls her age wasn't big enough to extrapolate from. So her mind had been free to wonder... In that cave, had she been feeling the perfect opposite from everyone else? And if so, in what other parts of her life was the same thing happening? She felt a similar sensation years later, when she began to understand that the reason she pored over lingerie catalogs and loitered in swimsuit departments wasn't for the same reason other girls did. Again, her mind had revealed to her that it was wired differently, and it took her a long time before she realized that there were people other than her who felt the same way.
During the time she had been recalling her former encounters with blinding darkness, she had been creeping forward, her ears focused on nothing but the sound of her hands and knees sliding across the sheets, and any others that Kerren might produce from underneath the bed, which is why she physically jumped when a jarring series of loud thumps came from about ten feet in front of her. It startled Kerren, too; from somewhere below, she let loose an additional fraction of the screams she had been producing.
Sheryl was so stunned at the sudden intrusion into the silence that she couldn't respond. It wasn't until after the first flurry of thumps died away that she realized what was going on, and it was only after consulting her mental geography as to where the bed now was located in the room. Someone was pounding on the hotel room door.
She opened her mouth to respond, but the quiet turned out to merely be a pause between volleys of knocks. Her initial "Hey!" was entirely drowned out. She closed her mouth and waited until silence fell again before calling, "Who's out there?"
-3.2-
Bruce had crawled his way up the hallway, following the sound of Theda's screams. He had quickly found that by keeping on the strip of rug that somehow still ran straight down the center of the hallway, he could stay relatively safe. He could feel the rise and fall of the broken wood underneath, but there didn't seem to be enough damage to push anything sharp up through the thick material. He still clubbed any suspect protuberances he found with the heavy wooden bucket; he didn't want to put his weight down on a section only to have his own weight impale both the rug and himself on anything lurking beneath.
Through it all, Theda's desperate screams had continued. The sound had gotten closer more quickly than he had anticipated; the unrelenting surreality of the scene had somehow convinced him that she would recede as quickly as he moved toward her. But he soon found himself drawing up alongside the source, and his blood ran colder the closer he got. He could more clearly hear the restrained panic in her shrieks, and there was another voice now. He couldn’t tell exactly what it was saying, but the tones seemed to be reassuring, overly calm to balance out the frenzy of the screams. It was asking Theda to identify her as Sheryl. A quick flash of jealousy coursed through him… was she the reason Theda had abandoned him, and the now-empty world they had shared?
The only way he would ever know would be to get through to her. Theda was calming down, speaking with the woman in a more and more conversational tone. He didn’t pay much attention to the content of what was being said; he was turning his head side to side, crudely trying to triangulate her exact location. He found a particularly cruel part of his mind wishing she would start screaming again. The thought that she was being punished for leaving him, as well as the fact that it made her location easier to determine, crashed unbidden into his mind.
He pushed those thoughts aside. He had reached the door, and even though she had fallen silent, he knew it was the right one. There was a bit of shuffling behind this one, and the thought that there might be other people inhabiting the lodge didn’t even enter his mind.
Being a little closer to -- but still around a corner from -- the lobby, there was a fraction more light here. Combined with the way his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, this made things clear enough that he didn’t have to sweep the area with the ice bucket before pulling himself into a kneeling position before the door. He knocked on it with the side of his fist, hard, five times in succession. When he heard nothing in the pause that came after, he slammed another volley against the door. This time, in the quiet that anteceded it, he heard a patient female voice – not Theda’s – say, “Who’s out there?”
"It… it’s Bruce,” he said, positive that Theda would recognize him immediately… He would be the first person she would think to find, now that the walls between his dreams and reality had been forcibly torn down, wouldn’t he? He was going to save her, and she was going to owe him. Big time. He couldn't wait to hear what stories she had to tell him. He didn't know it, but he looked forward to the moment when she would speak to him that way again in much the same way as an addict looks toward the bliss of his next high.
There was a long pause, and the voice that still wasn’t Theda’s came back through the wood. “H—hi, Bruce,” she said. “I’m Sheryl… and Kerren’s here too.” The voice sounded hesitant, as if unsure whether polite introductions so soon after half the world had collapsed were really apropos. But Bruce knew she must be leaving someone out.
“And Theda?” he asked, the sound of her name sounding strange on his lips. He only realized at that moment that had never spoken it aloud, outside of his dreams.
“Sorry?” the woman who called herself Sheryl said, as if confused. She followed quickly with, “She's hurt. Can you get through the door?”
That made the situation clear to Bruce. Theda wasn’t unwilling to respond, but unable. His resolve swelled inside him, and he suddenly felt as brave as he ever had. This was his chance to turn the tables, to be her savior in the physical world when she couldn’t be his in the mental. The one bright spot of the door provided by the feeble light was the crescent of the sculpted brass doorknob. He reached up gingerly, wanting to see if it would turn, even though he knew the women inside the room had most likely locked the door before retiring. It turned only an eighth of an inch or so before stopping. “The door’s locked,” he said. “Can you reach it?”
“I don’t think so,” Sheryl called back. “The bed’s wedged in the little hallway to the door somehow, and it’s completely black. I don’t know what’s going on between here and there.”
Bruce nodded to himself, sizing up the door itself now. It was a good point; for all they knew, there might be no floor at all between the door and where the women were. After thinking a moment, he said, “Hold on, I’m gonna try to…” He raised the ice bucket and swung it back, aiming for the doorknob. He hoped that this rustic lodge was about to prove its authenticity by providing ice buckets that were sturdier than the lockplates of its doors.
Two screams erupted from the other side of the door the first time the bucket hit the doorknob. When neither collided object seemed affected, Bruce realized he didn’t have the leverage he needed to see which one would break first. He took a second to brace himself against the doorframe, and stood as best he could. He hadn’t been able to tell from his crawl down the carpet runner, but there really was a cant to the hallway floor. He recalibrated, swung his arm in a bigger arc and gave it a downward trajectory. The ice bucket came down on the doorknob from above this time, and while the effect was just as negligible, it sounded better and felt more satisfying as the shock traveled up his arm. And there were no screams from within the room.
After a few more hits (and the beginnings of cracking, barely-holding-together sounds from the ice bucket), Bruce realized that he was going to need even more force. He braced himself sideways against the door jamb, raised his foot, and hoped that the padded sole of his hotel slipper would be enough to protect his foot from whatever was going to happen next. For Theda, he would have risked it in bare feet. The pain of the first hit went straight to his hip, sharply reminding him of his age, and general paucity of activity in the second half of his life. But he kept at it, the kicks picking up pace so that he wouldn’t have time to consider how each made him feel before he landed another.
It took at least a dozen kicks before he felt anything other than metal solid as bedrock beneath his sole, and by then his ankle was burning, furious with him for this gross misappropriation of what little strength it had. First he heard the knob rattling a little in its lockplate, then heard it rattling a lot. Then it was wobbling, and finally, just when his foot started feeling like there was a blowtorch being applied to his instep, the knob fell off, letting out a surprisingly quiet thump as it hit a bunched-up section of the carpet runner and rolled a few inches.
Bruce bent down to where the knob had been, probed with his fingers to see if the mechanism had been dislocated. It had, a little bit. But he still couldn’t get it to move much, and now there wasn’t even the knob to grab onto. “Hey in there,” he called, surprisingly loudly now that the thudding kicks had ceased. “I’m not sure if this is helping… can you get to the door and see if it’s unlocked now?”
There was a long pause, deep within the room beyond the door. “Um, I don’t think so,” a voice said. “There’s seriously no light in here. I’m not going to leave my wife here alone.”
Bruce’s brow furrowed, confused by their lack of concern for the injured person in the room with them. “What about Theda? Is she going to be okay?”
Another pause, even longer this time. The two women who had announced themselves seemed to be having some kind of whispered conversation. Bruce strained to hear, until the one who called herself Sheryl called back, “She can’t get to the door either. Is there anyone else who can help?” Bruce stared at the door a moment longer, then turned his head toward where he knew the lobby was. It had seemed so far away when he had fallen to the floor in the hallway, but in his efforts to find where Theda was, he found that he had made it most of the way to the bend in the corridor that led toward the main stairs. And now there was some sort of movement down there. He squinted his eyes in the dimness, until he found that there were shadows subtly shifting around. A light source was moving around somewhere outside of his field of vision, maybe a flashlight or lantern swinging around. “Hold on in there, ladies,” Bruce said, still looking toward the light. “I’m going to get help. Sit tight.”
“Okay,” came the voice from inside the room, although it did not sound very sure.
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