Whitelodge 6.1 & 6.2

-6.1-

Sheryl didn't want to go back up the stairs. While Dale appeared to have his arm around her shoulders, supporting her, in truth he was pushing her along. She didn't like it, but silently thanked him for not making her fear obvious to the others in the lobby. It wasn't that she was afraid of returning to the place of Kerren's injury and all the fear that followed; she just didn't want to leave her wife alone with strangers. If Kelly hadn't been so comforting to her on their trip down to the lobby, she might not have been convinced to leave Kerren's side at all.

The hall was decidedly less menacing, now that she knew what to expect. She knew that the irregularities in the floor weren't dangerous, and similiarly knew what she was going to see when she turned the corner. She had already glimpsed the jumbled pile of hotel pieces that comprised the hallway a little past their room.

All along the way, Dale was murmuring supportive things to her, "We'll just take it slow, check to see if we can get you and your wife some warmer clothes, okay? Then we'll find a way to get word out that we're up here. In fact, it's probably likely that lots of people know about this already, and are working to get up here to make sure we're okay..."

She resisted telling him to shut up, but only because the silence that would then fall was too much to think about. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that without Dale's formidable, calm presence, she would never have been able to retrace any of the steps she had taken this night, no matter how important they were. And right now, trying to find something better for her and Kerren to wear was the most important thing. This made her try to picture the state their room had been in when Bruce had made his dramatic entrance... had the closet door been accessible, with all the piled snow? It might be possible that all their clothes were still there, undisturbed by the disaster that had occurred around them. Sheryl thought that, if she could just get to those relics of the time before the avalanche, maybe some of the strength she used to have would be imparted to her when she put them on again.

Even though she had seen it before, she was shocked when they turned the hallway's corner and saw the utter devastation that had happened so close to the place where she and Kerren had been lying. Then, quickly on the heels of that was the fact that Bruce said his room had been on the far side of it. But how was that even possible?

Dale seemed interested in that question as well, swinging his flashlight all over the torn timbers, fractured beams, bits of light fixtures and other recognizable things from the lodge, all jumbled and distorted into an impenetrable wall. It took her several moments to realize that she was standing outside the broken door to her room, the one that Bruce had carried Kerren out through. The darkness on the other side of the portal seemed to be reaching for her, but she was strangely unafraid of it.

While Dale continued to study the curious debris, she walked through the door into sheer darkness. It had only been a few minutes, but she felt as if she were walking back through time, into some important, traumatically defining moment of her life. Even the smell of the room, which was pretty much the only thing she could sense without light, was already imprinted on her brain.

She stood there a full ten seconds before the light found her, throwing her shadow forward and across the bed Kerren had been pinned under. She could see the large lamp shard where she had left it, tossing it onto the bed after she had set her wife free and Bruce had pulled her out from underneath it. Sheryl had followed, leaving the implement behind, and it was still there, waiting for her.

"Sheryl?" Dale called, coming up beside her, swinging his illumination from side to side. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she said, surprising herself with how steady her voice sounded. "The closet's over here."

She stepped a few paces forward, coming to the sliding closet doors just on the near side of the corner where their bed had wedged itself. She could hear water from a broken pipe spraying somewhere behind the bathroom door. She hoped that the closet was free of water damage. She slid the doors apart and gave Dale a moment to swing the light inside.

As he did, she was glad to find that the contents were relatively unharmed. Having just arrived that afternoon, the women had taken the time to hang up the clothes they had intended to use most during their weekend stay -- their thick coats, ski suits, and a range of semi-formal evening wear for when they would dine in the restaurant -- so the central half of it was filled. There seemed to be some tangles of extra hangers above the rod, but Sheryl thought little of it until she pushed the clothes apart.

The face was directly behind the coats as she pushed them aside. It was lined and striated, as if the dark wood at the back of the closet had decided to take on vague human form. It had no eyes but there were hollows for them, as if the wall were pliable and soft, and someone behind it was leaning forward against it. After the initial shock, Sheryl could have convinced herself that it was a sculpture, or some kind of happenstance formation of the closet's back wall being bowed out by the collision of mountain and building... but then it moved.

Without a change of expression, it tilted its head to the side, and the clacking sounds revealed what she had assumed to be tangled collections of hangers on either side of it to really be spiky wooden antlers, attached to either side of its forehead like a stag's. The vaguely-shaped face tipped one way, then the other, as if to disentangle them from the wire clothing supports, and that was when Sheryl screamed.

She threw the coats back together, as if hurriedly shutting a curtain, and jumped back from the closet. "What?!" Dale interjected, and swung the light away from the closet and onto Sheryl. She looked at him, eyes wide, and realized that while he had kept the light focused on what she was doing, he had been looking elsewhere.

"You didn't see that?" she asked, not liking the amount of panic that had leaked into her voice.

"No, what was it?" Dale asked again, and when she pointed into the closet, he shifted the light back into its depths. The clothes were back in place, swinging lightly on the crossbar, but the sound that might have been that of antlers freeing themselves had already changed to hangers still swinging from the force of Sheryl's throwing them back into place.

She just stood there staring at the space where the apparition had been for a moment. Nothing in the closet moved again. She blinked several times, but the LEDs' white light left none of the closet's contents to the imagination, and there was nothing there that shouldn't have been.

"Could you...?" she asked, and pointed. She knew that nothing would be there when Dale moved the clothes around, and she was right. Why should there be? She suddenly felt very tired, all the adrenaline she had accumulated in the last few minutes draining away. Had there really been anything in there?

Dale held the flashlight in his mouth as he began rummaging around in the closet. Sheryl flinched as he separated the clothes at almost the same point she had. There was nothing beyond them now; in fact, she could see the back wall of the closet very clearly. It was the same flat, dark-stained planking that the rest of the walls were.

She'd just have to assume that the weird, animated sculpture she had seen -- she couldn't even cross the mental line that allowed her to believe it was any kind of living thing -- had been the result of fear and mental exhaustion.

Dale held up a pair of fluffy coats, designed more to look good than for their insulating properties. "How about these?"

She nodded numbly and took them. He dove back in, looking for other items that would help their small group stay warm. She kept her eyes on the walls of the closet, completely unsure of what was going to happen next.

-6.2-

Bruce had once written a scene in a book where the protagonist had been forced to explore a dangerous abandoned factory using only night vision goggles. This had been in his pre-Theda days, when his ideas hadn't been nearly as good, but at least he could tell himself that they were his own. He felt that he had really earned them, especially when they turned out half-decently. Now, moving down a completely dark hallway with only one tiny green LED light to guide him, he realized that he had written that distant night-blind scene incorrectly.

What he hadn't conveyed -- and it had been because he had only been guessing what such a suspenseful situation would feel like -- was the way darkness could push in on a person, especially when the light source was just a little weaker than needed. He was experiencing that sensation firsthand now. Out of even the feeble range of the moonlight drifting in through the frozen lobby windows, he began to fully comprehend how darkness was the natural state of things, the primal baseline that privileged humans had forgotten. He and everyone he knew had lived in light almost their entire lives, but now he was returning to the way things had been in the beginning, darkness beyond darkness. He filed these thoughts away, in case he ever wrote another scene like that again (and providing he ever wrote any scenes again, part of his mind told him, a thought which was then itself put away.)

He almost didn't see the large pilaster that had partially fallen across the hallway before he walked into it. It cut the hallway in half at a diagonal, and he paused a moment, studying it. He was suddenly reminded of the heap of debris he had crawled through on his way down the hallway outside his room. At the time, there had seemed to be a narrow path he could crawl through, and he hadn't noticed or heard any cave-ins behind him as he progressed, but once he was out in the open, he hadn't been able to find the way he had come through. The passage behind him had seemed stable and impenetrable. It was ridiculous, but he couldn't shake the idea that maybe he had passed *through* several layers of wreckage to make it out. This pilaster, though, pushed back against his fingers when he put his hand against it. He ducked underneath and continued on his way.

There wasn't much hallway past the obstacle. Bruce held the light out as far away from him as he could get it, the feeble illumination doing little more than giving a general sense of space, only revealing things when it came less than an inch from a surface. He passed the light over the walls at the end of the hall, and found one side to contain a door that was ajar. There was a glass pane in the upper half of this door, and after a few passes he could make out what the block letters stenciled there:

James Gough, Lodge Director.

He pushed through the door into the room beyond. Here, past the door's watery glass, there was a little more light. The windows, which he was sure afforded a wonderful view when cleared of snow, were all but covered; what remained was a thin stripe of diffuse light coming in along where their upper reaches met the ceiling. Bruce swung the light quickly as he moved into the room, trying to patch together a sense of the space out of the tiny radii of light the walkie afforded. From what he could discern, it was an old-fashioned office space, rather small. A desk with shelves on the wall behind it, all of them covered with bric-a-brac, awards, shellacked cross-sections of tree used as bookends. A long bank of cupboards ran under the windows, and it was these that Bruce deemed worth investigating, because they were the only things that looked out of place.

The doors had been recently forcibly opened, and hung askew like broken teeth. He assumed that it was from Glenda's story about trying to hail the outside world from a run-down comm station. He bent, shone the light inside the cupboards. The radio box looked like it might have come out of an old war movie, all tarnished steel and yellowed plastic needle displays. He would have been more surprised if it did work. The shelves on either side of it were bare.

Bruce pulled back, moved over so he could try one of the other cupboards. As much as he wanted them to open easily, and find some kind of first aid kit that could help Theda, he equally wanted to have to break into them as well. It would have helped his sense of frustration, which he noticed had increased since he gained physical proximity to his muse without any ability to communicate.

As he swung his attention to the next cupboard over, his foot hit something, sent it skittering across the floor. It was a small box, surprisingly light. He turned his light to it, and might have cracked a smile when he saw the traditional red cross on its white surface (although thanks to the green light, the cross shone black). He scooped it up and pried it open, the plastic clasp popping open incredibly loudly in the small, silent office. It seemed to be fully stocked with lots of coiled bandages, strips of adhesive, everything he needed.

He clicked the kit shut and turned to head back into the dark-beyond-dark hallway, but stopped short. As his arm came around, he was shocked to see a second light swing along the wall along with it. He hesitated, raised the light again, and watched its twin slide along the wall he knew was next to him. He had found a mirror of some sort. He was about to ignore the effect and leave the room, but then his curiosity got the better of him. He wondered why a lodge director would outfit his office with a large mirror directly across from his desk. He lifted the light again to investigate.

It wasn't a mirror, it was a painting, one that Mr. Gough had cared enough for to put it under glass. Bruce moved his light around and across its surface, trying to get a sense of what lay on the canvas beyond. His hand moved faster and faster, unable to get enough of the image together in his head to fully comprehend it, but knowing that he needed to. After a few moments, he stepped back and took a deep, shuddering breath.

It was Theda. And not only was the painting an uncanny likeness of the woman lying on the couch fifty feet away, but it was as Bruce had always seen her up until tonight: her bare feet stepping through soft grass, robes billowing as if underwater, hair wreathed in flowers. He even thought that the dark shapes along the vertical edges of the work could be the shadowed sides of his own Sounding Stones.

What *was* this? His mind turned the idea that this artifact existed over and over in his mind and couldn't make sense of it... Was it just dumb luck that, save for minor stylistic differences, and the fact that the artist was clearly an amateur, Bruce was looking at an image plucked out of his own dreams? Not only that, but one that appeared to have taken corporeal form this very night?

He thought about this as he picked his way back up the dark hallway, wanting more than ever to look down at that angelic face again, to make sure that all three versions of her -- his dream-memory, the painting, and the actual woman -- were truly one and the same.

Whitelodge 5.5 & 5.6

-5.5-

The feeling of rising was always the same, but this time the relief that came with it was much more pronounced. Harmon guessed it was because his body was in such pain, making the contrast of being suddenly feather-light and outside the cage of his body that much more exhilarating. He could feel the strange currents he had felt before all around him, flowing like infinite, invisible rivers crisscrossing the world. He grabbed on.

His vision shifted, passed up through the needles of the tree that sheltered his battered body, and then he was encased by whiteness. But he didn't feel the panic of being smothered, trapped by that crushing snow. Instead, he knew he would pass through it as easily as he could pass through air. Then his vantage point was above the ground, in a world that had all of its sharp edges rounded off by fallen flakes, every inch illuminated the same by cool, even moonlight.

Harmon's ability to sense what lay behind the things around him had evolved in the past few years. At first, Harmon had thought it had been a series of dreams brought on by living at a markedly higher altitude. Then he thought it had been some kind of hallucination brought on by living under the stairs, natural gas or wood polish or something creeping into his brain. But after a while, he realized that the rising feeling was part of the talent that Jimmy Gough had officially hired him for; it might even be what really lay behind his ability to read people's intentions. The deeper her had pushed into it, he realized that this was his true power.

And so, by degrees, he had learned to use it. In the movies -- or in his vampire books -- there would always be some mentor, someone who laid out the nature of the powers for the hero, what they could and couldn't do, and the moral code that necessarily overlay them. Unfortunately, Harmon had never found one. There was no manual for handling his out-of-body travel. He had no other choice but to figure it all out on his own.

Now he was skimming across the surface of the snow, heading uphill, hoping the he was working his way back to the lodge, the closest thing he had to a home. One of the drawbacks to this power was that, while he could seemingly go anywhere and access anything, his range of vision was shorter than if he had actually brought his eyeballs with him. The world kind of faded to vagueness a few yards around where he "was". As a result, his mind chose to interpret everything as huge and imposing, as if he were flying through an infinitely-enlarged copy of the real world. When he considered that he was doing all this with thought only, it did make him wonder how much what we think of as visual "seeing" is a physical process.

He was sure that what he was moving through was the world as it existed in real time, though. He had done enough experiments with clocks to prove that. He could travel anywhere with astonishing speed, occupy any space no matter how small, pass through solid objects. But it was all still *him*, somehow. He had trained himself, after hours of lying on that subpar cot under the stairs, to push the boundaries of what was possible, to see just how much he could determine with this new sight. It got harder the farther afield and different from human vision as he got, but he was somehow sure that he would never come up against any hard borders.

Today, however, this power needed to save his life, and he thought he might know how. He had felt something on his recent excursions, a way that he might not just observe, but influence the world outside himself. Right now, that hope was all he had. After perhaps thinking that the topography of the mountain had changed completely, he realized that the wide track in the snow next to him just might be the remnants of the submerged service road. He swung out and over it, trying to keep its twists and turns beneath him.

The slight depression in the snow, magnified by the steep angle of the moon's light, snaked back and forth, and Harmon began to wonder what would happen if his body succumbed to the cold while he was away like this. Was he actually outside of his body, or just projecting his vision? He couldn't help but think again of the vampires he read of incessantly... the way they could change shape and fly away when threatened. Maybe he wasn't flying anywhere at all.

The road swung up around a final curve, and then he was weaving among small hills that must have been what was left of the parking lot. He could tell from the shapes that whatever cars there were -- not many, since most people completed their Deertail isolation from the outside world by getting a taxi up to the Lodge -- had been tossed around and now lay on their sides and tops under their thick blankets of snow.

It took a bit of searching to find the lodge after that. Aside from his sense of scale being entirely thrown off by his disembodied traveling, it was all but unrecognizable in its new configuration. The more he explored, the more surprised that it had structurally held up at all. Whole sections of the back half were gone; he was almost sure that the entire lower half of the side of the building facing the mountain had been punched in by the white onslaught, and it was the snow itself that was propping the rest of it up. Most of the crooked north wing was reduced to rubble and timbers, as well. Not only that, but the downrushing wave had crested over the lodge entirely in several places, flowing over it like a wave. The front windows of the lobby had only narrowly escaped being totally covered by the avalanche that had overspilled the roof and piled up in front. The offices looked all but blocked in.

The lobby, though! There was some kind radiance coming from it, one that for a moment tricked him into thinking that the power was still on, or that something had caught fire. As he moved from outside to in, from blinding moonlight to equally blinding dimness, a spot of wonderful warmth and radiance was revealed to him. It was coming from the woman lying across the couch, her body laid as straight as it could be, the faintest of smiles on her lips.

By her light, he could see that there was another woman nearby, messing with what appeared to be a length of wood that had broken off of something, but Harmon couldn't spare attention for anything but the orange-yellow luminosity coming from the supine woman. Her hair was shining golden strands sweeping away from her across a terrain of pillows, and he was secretly thankful that he didn't have to be washed in the beautiful, terrible illumination that would have come forth if her eyes had been open.

It was the woman he had tried to talk to in the restaurant earlier that evening. It had been Sarah after all! It seemed impossible, but then he reminded himself that he was currently a disembodied presence seeing these things and thinking these thoughts. At the moment, he was hardly qualified to say what was possible and what wasn't.

So assuming this wasn't all a hallucination he was having as the last of his body heat bled away into the snow... what was Sarah doing here, after all these years? She hadn't aged, hadn't changed in any way he could see (and he was fully aware that he could duck under her clothes and check for certain birthmarks, but there was that ill-defined moral code to think of. He was pretty sure that would violate it). It was like she had been dropped back into his life after forty years of suspended animation, and now he was just waiting for her to wake up.

Harmon waited for a few moments, hovering, deciding what to do. He had originally come here looking for ways to direct his rescue party to his body's location, but he was now as distracted as he could be. There was one barrier he hadn't crossed yet in his exploration of his new powers, and now would be the perfect time to do it. But should he? This woman -- Sarah! -- was injured, had apparently not come through the cataclysm unscathed. If he were to do what he was considering, he didn't know what he would find. Was she as damaged inside as she was out?

The woman working next to the couch was what clinched it for him. She was still twisting and turning that length of wood, trying to find a way to break it in half. But she kept stopping, kept looking down at Sarah, as if she were checking to see if the unconscious woman was moving, or making some kind of sound. Or maybe there was something in that face that she couldn't keep looking at for long. He doubted that, in the corporeal world, Sarah was glowing the way Harmon was seeing her, but there was something about her that was subtly drawing attention anyway.

He couldn't pass by and not try. He couldn't picture anything else happening after this moment. So he tried it. He closed his eyes and held his breath -- knowing full well that he needed to do neither of these things -- and slipped into the sleeping woman's mind, as easily as sliding under the placid surface of a still pond.

-5.6-

After the fire touched Benny's head, Carlos suddenly found himself suddenly trying to wrangle a raw pile of nerves and muscles. It had taken several minutes of Benny thrashing around in the snow, aware that he had been hurt, but unable to figure out how or why, until Carlos could get him to calm down. He eventually managed to get his co-worker settled on the damp floor, pulling him over to sit up against some of the cabinets that had been left intact, his arms trying to keep Benny's arm from continuing to pinwheel, although they were losing intensity with every second. After Benny had relaxed somewhat, his breath heavy and petulant, his head hung forward in exhaustion, Carlos had the time to inspect exactly what the flame had done. As he did, Benny didn't seem to be entirely awake, or entirely asleep either.

He checked the wound on his friend's scalp. The flames had mostly done what he had hoped; the edges of the gash had blackened and curled back a little, stopping the worst of the bleeding. He wanted to go get more clean towels and finish the job, but first he had to make sure Benny wasn't going to get up and run away once he let him go. So they sat side by side against the cabinet, one of the cold brass drawer knobs digging into their backs, and took a moment to relax.

Despite all Carlos had accomplished, he was now more nervous than he had been before. He had checked off just about everything on his mental list, and the road forward was less clear than it had been since the kitchen had imploded with that horrific whiteness. He had time now to think about things other than what was right in front of him, and in doing that felt the world unfolding like an origami model, the angles that used to underpin its sane structure now turning into a blank, featureless open plain. He had too many choices now, too many possible courses of action.

At least he could pretend, until he caught his breath, that he and Benny were just taking a break, hunkering down on the kitchen floor. At times like this, they often would step out the back door to sit on the bench there, feeling the cool breeze contrast against the sweaty confines of the kitchen, but now he doubted if that bench even existed anymore.

"Carlos?" Benny said suddenly, his voice incredibly loud against the distant hush of the hissing gas from the stove. It had only recently stopped sputtering, indignant against what purpose it had recently been used for.

For a moment, Carlos wasn't sure whether he should answer, but he eventually responded, "Yeah, Benny?"

"Don't... don't burn me again," he said. Benny's head was slumped forward, his voice sounding annoyed, as if Carlos had used such drastic measures merely to wake him up from a particularly satisfying sleep.

"Well, stop bleeding so much then," Carlos answered.

Benny's right hand rose between them, and the fingers touched his own forehead -- just a little below where the gruesome slash began -- before swinging out in a limp salute. "You got it."

Carlos actually laughed aloud at that, surprising himself. He placed his own hand on his friend's shoulder. For a moment, the illusion that they were just sitting together was complete. But they couldn't linger, had to get moving.

Carlos looked toward the hallway that ended in a swinging door that led into the restaurant/bar. No one had come through it since the avalanche. They hadn't even heard any voices, so that wasn't a good sign. If there was no one out there to come help them, that meant they were going to have to marshal their forces and go out there under their combined power.

"Think you can get up, buddy?" Carlos said, nudging his friend.

Benny's head, followed belatedly by his eyes, rotated up until he was looking at Carlos, then past him to look up toward the refrigerator lights. The way his gaze went right past him made Carlos shiver, harder than he had at any moment since the kitchen had been half-destroyed and brought below freezing.

"Maybe," Benny said, his lower lip hanging slack off his teeth. It was like the cut on his scalp had loosened the skin over the rest of his skull. "Let's not go into the light, though."

Carlos couldn't even laugh at Benny's joke this time, if that's even what it was. Suddenly comparing the tiny bulb inside the fridge to a near-death experience was too much, too cruel. "No, not this time," Carlos answered.

He lifted his arm and put it around Benny's shoulders again, trying to duplicate the way he had pried them up off the floor earlier. This time, however, Benny was somewhat aware of what was going on, and he could assist more. In half the time, they were up and on their feet. As much as he tried to avoid it, Carlos couldn't avoid turning Benny toward the spot where he had been blindsided by the avalanche. If the injured man had any reaction to the heap of bloody slush and towels there, next to a steaming pot of soup sitting nearby, he kept it internal.

"Down the hall, Benny," Carlos said, nodding past the refrigerators and into the dark area beyond. "We've got to head up through the restaurant."

"Is that where the rest of them are?" Benny asked, making a supreme effort to keep his body weight positioned over his feet and his head atop his neck.

"I don't know," Carlos answered, "but we've got to find out. Ready?"

The creature with two of everything began to stumble forward. It took every ounce of combined strength for them to leave the somewhat stable safety of the half-demolished kitchen and stagger down the service hallway toward the dining room, Carlos trying to make sure that if they were going to bump into the wall, it would be on his side. Even before they reached the door's dark smoothness, Carlos could tell he wasn't going to like what was beyond it. On every other approach, back when the world was whole, he could always make out the flickering light from the wide fireplace beyond, accompanied by the sounds of china and crystal and conversation that was the sound that all chefs secretly live for. Now, there was nothing. He could see the door's faint outline, but it was limned only in cool, steady moonlight.

This time, it was Benny that drew Carlos along, seemingly oblivious to (or perhaps just more accepting of) the unending strangeness they had been thrown into. Even though his head still hung down loosely, Benny's hand raised automatically and pressed flat against the semicircle on the right side of the door. A changed world revealed itself as Benny's hand swung the door open easily on its long hinge.

The restaurant/bar stuck out from the side of the two-story design of the rest of the lodge, providing its diners a full panorama of the mountain as it sloped downhill on two sides. Now that view was augmented by a total view upwards as well; the peaked roof, formerly full of sturdy wooden rafters, had been completely torn away, leaving the dining floor fully open to the night sky.

The walls, strangely enough, were still standing for the most part. The restaurant now appeared as if it were a notch carved in the side of the mountain, because the icy torrent that had slid down and blown in the kitchen window had found its match in the restaurant's uphill wall, fortified by the huge stones of the oversized fireplace that blazed warmly through every dining service the Deertail had ever seen. Towering over them, the new face of the mountain hovered just over the upper edge of that wall. The thickness of chimney still stood defiantly, its full height totally exposed now that the roof no longer existed. It looked like the prow beam of a ship breaking through a frozen wave. Below, tables, chairs and stools were mostly arranged around the elliptical bar as they had been before, which made Carlos imagine the roof had been removed as cleanly as a magician yanking a tablecloth out from under the place settings of a banquet table.

"Do you see this, Benny?" Carlos asked under his breath, not really expecting an answer.

His companion began to make a coughing sound. Carlos didn't realize for several seconds that Benny was actually laughing. "The stones... they still stand!" the injured man exhorted, as if he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. Carlos was surprised he could see the chimney at all, the way he could hardly hold his head up.

"Yep, they sure are, buddy," Carlos said. "But that's about all." He looked deep into the mouth of the fireplace, and realized that, even though minor falls of snow were still coming down on either side of the stonework, a few embers still smoldered in its interior. The fact that some bit of warmth still existed in this blasted, frigid world gave him more hope than anything he had experienced yet.

"Not to worry," Benny said. "She's being tested, but she's going to make everything all right."

Carlos had no idea what he was talking about. Much later, he would wonder what part of Benny's brain had been jostled, and in just what way, to make him aware of something he -- none of them, actually -- could possibly have known at that point.

Whitelodge 5.3 & 5.4

-5.3-

Glenda wished she had brought some kind of light with her, but she wasn't about to go back down the stairs and face Dale again. It was noticeably warmer up on the second floor, but that wasn't why her cheeks were burning. She made it almost halfway down the hall before she remembered what she was supposed to be doing, and stopped. She stood still in the middle of the dark hall, clenching and unclenching her fists and trying to slow her breathing.

The most infuriating thing about the way Dale was acting was that it objectively made sense. Rationally, she knew that he was doing his job, working outward from a secure central point, verifying the safety of everyone around him in the most efficient way possible. And once areas were cleared, and people gotten to safety -- like poor Kerren was, laid out on the couch -- he was off on the next rescue mission. It wasn't just his job, it was the way his mind worked. It was why he was the person you most wanted in a crisis exactly like this one.

At the same time, things that he should have had an emotional reaction to were just bouncing off him. Not only was Harmon -- who was closer to them than any other lodge guest -- out there in the cold, freezing to death as they listened, but she had *kissed* him, for God's sake. They had never done that before... not that they hadn't had opportunities. There were a few times when they had just been talking, and she had been thinking, if we both leaned forward right now, we'd be kissing, and why is he smiling at me that way? Is he thinking about it too? Is that what he wants to happen?

She took several long, deep breaths. She reminded herself that what really attracted her to Dale was his steadfastness. If he were to suddenly throw himself impulsively into doomed heroics, or if he had forsaken everyone else and swept her off into a vacant room to succumb to their passion, he would also have ceased to be the person she thought he was. That idea seemed to be the only thing that made her heart stop racing so hard and angry. She had made it known to him how she felt, and the only reason his refusal to respond immediately stung so much was that it had been such a long buildup to that sudden realization inside her own heart. There would be time later for him to tell her what he felt in return (if anything, a cruel part of her piped in).

One thing she was sure about, though, was she preferred if she didn't have to be around him much until that time came. Fortunately, she had taken on another job, and now she had to pull herself together enough to--

Something tapped her lightly on the shoulder. She gasped and wheeled around, for the second time being startled by a white, headless apparition in the mostly-dark.

"Where do you want to start?" it was saying, and as it did quickly resolved back into human form. It was that Manoj guy, cinching his bathrobe as tightly around him as possible. She had almost immediately forgotten that they had been put on a search team together, and she hadn't heard him because his feet were still bare.

She shook her head, trying to bring herself back into the moment. "Right," she said. Her gaze went up and down the halls. "We should start knocking on doors, I guess." She was startled by how quickly her wildly varied thoughts about Dale dissipated as soon as she focused on how there might be other people in the lodge, who might be hurt, or worse. She tried to call up in her mind the display she would have seen on her work computer, if she were standing in front of it, and it hadn't been smashed by the falling flatscreen. How many of the rooms were occupied, and which rooms were they in? But too much had happened in the last few minutes. Her mind was drawing a blank. "I honestly don't know which rooms are occupied."

Manoj was picking his way back toward the main staircase, intending to start at the end of the hall and work his way down to her. He rapped on the door next to the landing. "Hello?" he called. He paused with his knuckles raised to rap again, listening. There seemed to be a faint sound from within, and Glenda's heart jumped at the sound... until she realized that it was Dale and Sheryl, coming up the stairs just beyond where Manoj was standing. She sighed as the pair reached the top and turned away, down the northern wing. She couldn't tell whether Dale looked her way as they turned toward the other side of the lodge, and then couldn't decide whether she really wanted him to or not. Dale had his arm around Sheryl's shoulders in a consoling way. It had clearly been his tactic to pry her away from her girlfriend's side. His show of consideration made Glenda feel a little silly for all the things she had been thinking. What was it about him that made her feel like she was back in high school again, obsessing over and picking apart what he might be thinking or feeling?

"I don't hear anything," Manoj said.

"We usually don't book that room anyway," Glenda said, some of her job sense coming back. "Most folks want to be far away from people tromping up and down the stairs all the time."

Manoj nodded, as if this made sense, and started sidling along the wall, heading for the next room along the hall. Glenda wanted to run immediately to the far end of the hall, to check the pull-down attic access door, but realized that she had to at least try to be more like Dale. She shrugged to herself and moved toward the opposite wall, ready to knock on the door just as Manoj was hitting his second one.

Her rapping knuckles loosely rattled the door in its frame, and she could feel cold air blowing out from under it, onto her toes. She wished she had access to the locker room down on the first floor, where her sneakers were safely jammed into her tiny cubby. But Jimmy had very specific ideas about how the Deertail staff was supposed to dress and act, and they didn't include anything less than a one-inch heeled dress shoe... come to think of it, they also didn't include passionate displays of affection between the married staff and the security team.

This thought made her chuckle a little to herself, and it was probably why she didn't think much about it when she tested the doorknob, and found it turning. There was a harsh grating somewhere deep in the lock, but it wasn't keeping her from pushing the door open and looking out into what lay beyond.

The moonlight almost blinded her, and the cold wind blowing down off the mountain froze her lungs instantly. After spending so long inside the darkened halls of the lodge, it was like suddenly standing in a spotlight, a performer suddenly thrown onto the stage without knowing any of her choreography or lines. She must have made some kind of strangled sound.

The room -- which was usually so much like the others, and which she had walked into numerous times before -- stopped existing after the first five feet of floor. Beyond it was a white monochrome wasteland, sloping down from her right, where the next rooms down the hall had been similarly punched down by the standing wave of snow, to her left, where the debris of splintered and shattered wood, dotted here and there with the Native American motif that was repeated in the curtains and rugs throughout the Lodge, lay in heaps and piles below her, dusted and shot through with veins of white.

Her mind could barely comprehend it. There would be no need to search any more rooms on this side of the hall, because they no longer existed. They had been swiped away, as if from a hastily wiped chalkboard. In their place was snow, a pile seemingly as tall and sturdy as the mountain itself, as if the lodge-building project had gone to a certain point and then been abandoned. Above it all, the moon hung like a rolling, crazy eye. She stared up at it, horrified that at any moment it could swivel in the sky until she saw its iris, glaring down at her with stark malevolence.

A hand was on her shoulder, pulling her back again. "Glenda!" Manoj was calling. "Stop!"

Her mind returned to her, and she realized she had taken several steps into the room, toward that jagged end that hadn't been there before. The young man was leaning in through the doorway, his hand surprisingly strong and holding her back. She looked at him, saw the way the moonlight lit his skin, and backed up toward him. The walkie, still in the hand that hadn't stopped her from walking off the edge to her doom, was clicking from inside his pocket. It made sense that he should hang onto it, since he was the one who would be quickest to tell if its message changed.

"Sorry," she breathed. "I just..."

He didn't seem interested in an explanation. "I can't believe it... This whole section of the wing is just... gone."

"Mm-hm," she said, suddenly realizing how miraculous the solidity of the floor beneath her feet was.

"What if..." Manoj said, and then swallowed hard. "What if Kelly and I had been in a room where that pile is now?"

Glenda didn't answer, even as she acknowledged -- if only to herself -- that she was the one who had chosen their room, and thus apparently saved them from certain death. But one thought chilled her more than the frigid air from that relocated mountain could... had she put anyone else in these rooms? And where were they now, if she did?

-5.4-

The lobby was intensely quiet after everyone left, leaving Kelly with a famous author and an unconscious lady. She tried to recall how it had sounded when she and Manoj had been checked in earlier that day, by Glenda. It had been empty and hushed then, but there wasn't this current, pervasive sense of intrusive silence. What was different, she wondered? Was there some kind of innate living vibration in the building that had been stilled by the shock of the avalanche? Maybe it was caused by the snow that had been piled on the windows, damping any outside sound or wavering of the glass in the wind.

Or maybe her unease was being caused by something else entirely. The author, Bruce Casey, hadn't left Kerren's side since the group had dispersed. He was still crouched down beside her, adjusting little things. It wasn't anything overtly creepy: tucking her hair back behind her ears, sliding a pillow slightly this way or that under her head or along her arm. He had also cleared away the edge of a throw blanket that had been lying across the back of the couch and was hanging a little too close to her injured legs. But he kept backing up and looking at her, as if he were a photographer manipulating a model to create a perfect pose. It was almost endearing, the care he was taking attending to her. Almost, but not quite.

Kelly observed him from over by the fractured front desk, where she was trying to determine if any of the boards could be pulled free and used to stabilize Kerren's clearly broken legs. She had taken care of one of her teammates before, putting her limited sports medicine background to use. Ironically, it hadn't even been during a match; on the way back from an away game, the small car that had carried management, which had following the team bus, had gotten mildly t-boned at an intersection late at night. They had been close to the middle of nowhere, and while the rest of the team tried to summon the nearest ambulance with their phones, Kelly had set the assistant coach's leg with a lacrosse stick and several miles of gauze bandage.

Hopefully, she would be able to put that same knowledge to use now, although clearly Kerren's condition was several orders of magnitude worse that her previous patient's. Kelly carefully reached out and wobbled a few of the boards that had lined the top of the counter -- or at least they had until the huge TV screen lying on the floor beyond had smashed across it. Now there were huge chunks of it that were visibly askew, and with luck a few not-too-splintery strips could be pulled away from it.

She realized it might give her an excuse to get the celebrity away from the unconscious woman, as well. "Mr. Casey?" Kelly called to him, then "Bruce?" when he didn't hear her.

His head snapped up abruptly, but his tone was placid. "Yes?"

Kelly tried not to think too much about whom she was talking to. "I think I can get some of these boards loose, but we need something to bind them to her legs. Is there anything over there we can use? It can be any long piece of cloth..."

She left Bruce to the task of finding the items for her, and she breathed a little in relief when he finally got up from his perch next to Kerren and started moving about, looking for something usable. He lifted the small blanket, tested it to see if it could be torn into strips, but it was woven too thick. Kelly turned her attention back to the counter. She carefully put her hands on the loose top, experimentally rocked it back and forth. It moved, but it was all of one piece, and she didn't see any evident way of breaking it down further.

She started skirting the huge chunk of wood, noting that the whole bottom part of it seemed to have been shaped from one titanic piece of wood, which meant it wouldn't be of much help to her. But the lower section on what had been Glenda's side looked promising, especially the large separations between boards that the flatscreen must have caused when it came down...

By the time she got around to the other side, making sure to step lightly because all she had to protect her feet from broken shards of plastic was her hotel slippers, it was clear that Bruce was frustrated by the task he had been given. He had given up on the blanket and moved onto the pillows, trying to tear them along their seams to make squares of fabric, but to no avail. Kelly guessed that most of the decor in the lodge had been made locally, and wasn't cheap in cost or design. She took a moment to give the appearance of being totally focused on what she was doing, and then said, "Bruce, how about looking in some of these offices back here?" She threw a casual thumb back over her shoulder.

The author looked up from increasingly-desperate ransacking and saw the doorway she was pointing to. His brow furrowed at the prospect of moving away from the lady on the couch. "Dark back there, isn't it? How will I even see what I'm looking for?"

Kelly's hands scrambled around, looking for anything that might make some light. She eventually saw the row of walkie-talkies still hung under the lip of the counter, and grabbed one, feeling the Velcro give as she pulled it free. She thumbed the power switch, and was delighted to see a single green LED come on over the main speaker. She swung it around in Bruce's direction. "Here!" she chirped, and then tried to gauge how well he was hiding his disappointment.

After taking one more look down at Kerren's resting form, he crossed the lobby to Kelly, snatched the little piece of electronics out of her hand. He walked past without meeting her gaze, and turned the tiny light out in front of him as he stalked into the dark corridor behind the desk. Kelly made a face at his back, and then returned to her task.

There were several long, thin sections along the front of the counter that might work, if she could loosen them enough. The falling television had forced them a little outward and down, and she took hold of one, working it back and forth while it creaked in protest. She tried to ignore the muttered cursing from behind her.

Suddenly, one whole length sprang loose, a section about five feet long. She grinned in the dark; if she could break this in half, it would be usable for both legs. Not only that, but it had been held in place with glue and dowels; no nails that would have to be removed. She turned around to voice her excitement, but hesitated when she saw Bruce's silhouette, moving down the hallway surrounded by faint green light, which only barely illuminated along column that had fallen across the hall and partially blocked it. He stood there for just a moment, seeming to study it. His hand came up, and he slowly reached out until he touched it. His intent didn't seem to be testing its stability, or trying to move it out of the way... he just seemed to want to find out if he could touch it.

Kelly's brow furrowed, but before she could say or do anything she realized that Bruce's sudden quiet allowed her to hear a different noise, this one coming from the couch on the other side of the lobby. It was low, just a vibration that was only a step above a whisper, so faint she was surprised it could carry all the way over to her. Taking the length of newly-liberated wood with her, she walked out from behind the counter and crossed the floor to the couch. She was glad the boards made no sound under her slippered feet.

Kelly knelt next to where Kerren lay on the couch, laying the long piece of wood along the front of the couch. She lingered there, hoping to hear the sound again. And after a few seconds of silence, it came. It was clear, unambiguous, and Kerren's mouth barely moved, as if someone else were speaking through her.

"The stones," she said, as if turning a thought over, idly speaking to herself. "Protect them." And then less clearly, fading out on Kerren's breath, came something that sounded like “the horns."

Kelly waited to see if there was more, some kind of clarifying afterthought, but that was it. She looked back into the dark hallway, but the green light wasn't there anymore. She stood, and began looking for something to brace the wood against, so she could break it into something useful.