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.
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