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.
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