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.
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