He picked his way along tentatively after that, wondering if he should turn back to find his own slippers. He couldn't quite remember where they had fallen off, but if they hadn't been on Kelly's side of the bed, they were surely buried under feet of snow now. He pressed on.
Manoj had never enjoyed being in enclosed spaces, which was ironic for a game programmer. He had worked in the spatial equivalents of janitor's closets before, but at the time he hadn't minded. When he was in flow, the code seeming to drip like oil from his fingertips without his consciously thinking about it, the closeness of the walls didn't seem to matter. At those moments, he was inside the computer, sharing its thoughts and weaving them into shape.
Here, however, there was nothing to occupy his mind but awareness of the space around him. He had walked down this hallway several times before, but now he had a hard time remembering how wide it was. That uncertainty began to pick at his brain, and he found himself thinking he was going to bump into first one wall on his left, then the other on his right, even though he knew at least one of those impressions had to be wrong.
Finally, light began to grow ahead of him, and a sense of his surroundings started to come back. There was a thumping far ahead, but he couldn't figure out what it was. Someone trying call for help, pounding on the walls to alert someone else they were trapped?
His heart leaped in his chest when the wall to his left suddenly fell away, and he had a sudden sense of vertigo. He had been instantly transported high in the air, a deep, open space opening up right next to him. Before he could lose his balance, he realized that what he was familiar. He was at the top of the lodge's main staircase, looking down over a shadow-representation of the room he and Kelly had first entered on their arrival. He grabbed the bannister at the top of the stairs, and tried to relax.
Down below, there was something clicking, a messy, staticky sound. It took his mind a moment to realize that it was in a measured rhythm, a gridwork of information. His mind locked onto its pulse, and he sighed when he felt that sense of familiarity. Something in this tilted, dark madness had suddenly become a known quantity.
He recognized the code before he had descended three steps toward level ground. It was coming from somewhere near the front desk, which looked worse than most other places he had seen in the lodge so far. A mess of wires hung down from above it, and broken plastic was scattered everywhere. In the utter silence (the pounding from above had stopped, after it had briefly devolved into a short series of crunching sounds), he began to make out some of the letters he was hearing, for that was what they were. R. I. E. D., it spelled out in Morse code. A pause, then a lone W preceded another pause. O. F. Pause. S. E. R. V.
A form glided out from a dark doorway beyond the desk, almost making Manoj jump out of his skin. It was a woman, slowly walking right up to the remains of the desk, and he found he recognized her. She was the woman who had checked them in when they arrived that afternoon. Or at least, it was an anti-world version of her; she was ghostly in the diffused light. They were now facing each other in circumstances that couldn't have been more different than their previous encounter, even though it was occurring in the same place.
She took no similar notice of him, however. She was looking at the desk itself, as if that were the clicking sound's origin. And the closer he got, he realized that it was. But he couldn't make sense of that; the lodge's power had clearly gone out, and the desk itself looked pretty well broken. What could be making that sound?
The woman suddenly looked up at Manoj and rocked back a little, noticing him for the first time. He stopped his descent, not wanting to scare her further. For a long moment they regarded each other, the clicks punctuating the air, getting accustomed the other's presence.
"Service road," Manoj finally said, barely above a whisper.
"What?" the woman asked. He couldn't read her expression in the dim light.
"It's spelling out 'service road'."
"You can tell what he's saying?"
"Sure. It's Morse code. My friends and I used to send secret messages across the classroom to each other that way, using the Caps Lock lights on our keyboards."
"What?"
"Not important," Manoj said. "Who is that?"
"Harmon," Glenda replied, ripping a walkie-talkie -- clearly the source of the sound -- off its Velcro perch behind the lip of the counter. She stretched out her arm toward Manoj, who was still standing on the bottommost stair. "Can you tell me what else he's saying?"
Manoj moved forward cautiously. He had missed a few letters while they had been talking. "Um... " He listened again, realized he was coming around to the beginning of text loop he had already heard. "Buried!" he barked, excited at this fact, and then quieted down when he realized the content was conveying something dire. "West of the service road, is what he's saying. He says he's been buried." His gaze drifted to the front windows of the lobby, realizing that the darkness keeping most of the light out was the same powdery thickness that had invaded his hotel room.
The desk attendant's free hand rose to her mouth instinctively, not quite blocking the gasp from escaping her mouth. "Oh, God," she moaned from behind it once it was in place. "We've got to get him out!" Then her eyes turned toward the front of the building as well, and he imagined he could see her face paling as she realized the magnitude of what she was saying.
Manoj didn't feel he had anything to add to her revelation, so he kept listening to the clicking code, to see if the message changed or was augmented in any way. It wasn't, just the same repeating phrase, benign until you thought about it... "Buried w of serv road."
"Is he an employee?" was all he could think of to ask.
The desk attendant's wide, horrified eyes swiveled back to him. "No," she said as if her mouth were numb from cold already, "sort of a permanent resident. I've got to get Dale." Still holding the walkie-talkie out in front of her, she began to walk around the end of the desk. Manoj had since crossed about half the distance from the bottom of the stairs to the desk, and as she passed, the attendant pressed the rattling object into his hand. "Excuse me," she said.
Without actually looking at him, she passed by and headed up the first few steps of the creaky wooden staircase. The sound unnerved Manoj; he remembered how solid it had felt when he walked up it earlier in the day, as if it had been carved whole, out of the trunk of one titanic tree. Now he wasn't entirely sure if it would collapse under her.
"Dale?" the woman was calling up the stairs. The sound seemed sacrilegiously loud in the hushed space, and didn't echo as much as it seemed like it should have. She waited only a few seconds before calling again: "Dale!!"
For just a moment, Manoj felt like he should turn down the walkie's volume so she didn't miss whatever response might come, but then realized that there was likely a dying human being trying to communicate on the other end and stayed his hand. A man's voice came floating down the hall, far away but deep and strong. "Kind of got a situation here, Glenda! Hang on."
"Harmon's calling in!" she belted, as if volume could convey importance in this situation. "He's in trouble!"
Another few seconds, and the voice repeated, considerably more strained, "Hang on a second, honey..."
Glenda, whose name Manoj now knew, actually stepped backward as if she had been slapped by this response, her heel almost faltering as she forgot she was on the stairs. When she turned around toward Manoj and started back down the stairs, she had the strangest look on her face, a combination of a smile and utter puzzlement. It was one that Manoj had seen before. It was the look of a gamer who has solved a tricky puzzle, but wasn't entirely sure how they had done it.
She came back down the stairs slowly, mildly stunned, and then started heading back to the check-in desk. Then she changed direction and started moving toward the front doors, picking up speed as she went. Manoj had no idea what she had in mind, but found his feet following her. She pushed on the inner pair of front doors, and almost walked right into them when they didn't give with the same ease that she was used to. She pushed harder, even leaned her shoulder against the heavy-polished grain, but they wouldn't give. Manoj was relieved; he hadn't had to time to think about what he would have done if she had gotten through, and then had tried to break through the outer doors, which were currently managing to hold back the metric tons of snow piled against them.
He reached her as Glenda began pounding on the door, growls of frustration coming from deep within her throat. He was just about to step forward, to warn her about the tension the glass must be under if the door were twisted enough to be unopenable, but then she hit the frame with just a little more force than it could handle, and the huge panel in the center of it shattered. Glenda's frustrated growls turned to a yelp as bits of shattered glass fell down around her feet. Manoj jumped back at least three feet, thinking of the bare state of his feet.
Once she had let out that one surprised bark, Glenda turned from the door and stumbled toward the long, plush couch against the wall opposite the lobby desk. She threw herself down on it, hammered one fist against the cushion next to her head, then buried her face and lay still.
Manoj stood there, not knowing what to do, and looked up the stairs to the second floor, willing someone to come help. There were at least two people up there who were better equipped than he to deal with the situation: Kelly and that Dale person, whoever he was.
The only thing he felt adequately able to deal with was the Morse code still snapping away in his hand. The walkie hadn't stopped sending its message, but Manoj knew something about it that no one else listening would. It was too subtle to be noticed yet, but his own expertise made it plain to his ear.
The clicks were starting to slow down.
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