Harmon had never tried slipping into someone's consciousness before. He talked himself into it by rationalizing that this was Sarah, not just anyone. She would understand.
He almost jumped right back out of her when he realized that, despite all outward appearances, this was *not* Sarah. And once the shock of this wore off, he wondered why he would ever have thought she was in the first place. Yes, she was a dead ringer for his former flame, but her presence here, unchanged after all this time, hadn't made any sense. From inside, however, it was clear to him.
This was a woman named Kerren. And he wasn't sure if it was because she was the first consciousness he had ever experienced in this way, but he found her to be an unbelievably intricate web of instincts, experiences, learned behaviors, attractions and repulsions, delusions and convictions. If he had been able to bring his eyes with him, he would have wept at the gorgeous complexity of her mind. Was everyone like this on the inside, he wondered? Was everyone -- even him, a broken relic -- carrying around this vast, messy, wondrous tangle of life everywhere they went? And how could any of them for one second ever forget about the miracle of it?
But for all the marvels Kerren's mind held, it still wasn't the one he had hoped for. A part of him that had known it all along became acutely aware that Sarah did not exist anymore, at least not in this way, this literally incredible webwork of sparking filaments, each one a crossroad, a distinction between one thing and another, the sum total of which were thoughts that the body turned into action. With this realization, his virtual tears changed character, from awe to grieving.
For a long time -- and within Kerren's mind, it seemed like days that Harmon somehow knew in the real world were only seconds -- he explored the fringes of her being, swooping through the vast, still unused places out on the edges of her thoughts, where they was still so much room to grow in the coming years. He sometimes felt as if his own mind were temporally stuffed to the gills, and wished he could conduct these experiments inside his own head. Maybe he could; he'd have time later to find out.
Or would he? He recalled that at this moment his body was lying under a layer of snow beneath a fallen tree in a vast forest of fallen, covered trees. If he didn't find a way to tell someone where he was soon, that body would die, and he wasn't at all sure what was going to happen to what he was experiencing if it did.
Before he turned to this problem, however, there was one more thing he had to check out. It was this feeling he had since he had arrived, a feeling of not being alone in this space. He was almost tempted to say it was Kerren herself, but she didn't seem to be fully present at the moment. Perhaps she was injured in the avalanche, but Harmon had the unexplainable sense that she wasn't home. She'd be back, eventually; there had been no real damage to her brain, and everything was clearly still intact. No, there was something else going on, some subroutine somewhere that was foreign to the overall design. He turned around, trying to determine exactly what it was.
Far back in Kerren's mind, past layers and layers of neurons and bridging axons, there was a door. It wasn't shaped like a door -- in fact, it wasn't shaped like much of anything -- but Harmon could tell that's what it was. And it was ajar. A slow, tiny trickle of perceptions and ideas were emanating from it, as if someone had lit a fire on the other side and was fanning vaporous thoughts through the slim opening. Of course, none of these visual metaphors were really playing out in front of Harmon's spectral eyes; they were just his mind's way of literalizing something that couldn't be comprehended in any other context.
The only thing Harmon knew for sure that it wasn't him. His own presence seemed entirely different that this slow, quiet encroachment from the other side of the door. The strongest sense he received from this gap in Kerren's mind took the form of a word -- *other*. There was something that was leaking into Kerren's mind from *somewhere else*. He had no idea what it was, or where it was coming from, or what that meant for the woman whose mind he was occupying, but it was alien.
He moved toward the gap cautiously, as if it were inherently important for him not to draw attention to himself. The closer he drew to it, and he passed through the dark filaments of thought that were wafting in, he began to receive pictures. They were vague, fuzzy like a bad TV broadcast from his youth, but there were a few flashes that were unmistakable: a stone, tall with a glowing rune carved in the side, its color a lovely, pale orange... a tall, black leafless tree that turned suddenly, as if it were reacting to something nearby... feet hovering inches above lush green grass.
Taken by themselves, these images might have entranced him, because they were all suffused with a sense of serenity, like glimpses from someone's vacation photos. In themselves, they were completely benign and quite lovely. But there was an intent behind them, and it didn't seem entirely... wholesome. It was something that shouldn't be in Kerren's mind.
Without realizing he was doing it, or even *how* he was doing it, Harmon's presence reached for the door. Even though he was repulsed at the idea of touching it, even in this bodiless way, he somehow did, felt its weird coolness, and he pushed it shut. There was a sense at the last moment that whatever was easing its way through realized that it was being cut off, and began to react, but it was too late. Harmon shut the door and -- again, he didn't know how -- fixed it so that it couldn't be reopened. At least, not easily.
As soon as the door-that-was-not-a-door was firmly shut and sealed, Kerren's mind sprang to blazing life, as if he had broken a spell. And while Harmon had been stupefied by the beauty of his surroundings before, as the woman regained consciousness her brain sprang to burning, blazing life like a city as big as a world having all its power switches thrown. Harmon's identity was almost washed away with the sheer voltage of it. He couldn't stay, he knew, but there was a message he had come to deliver, and he had to pass it along before he retreated from the engulfing enormity of one human brain.
He latched onto one neuron on the way back out of Kerren's head, one that seemed to be particularly active, and imparted one of his own thoughts to it. Again, he had no idea how he was doing it. It might have been something primordial, instinctual. He didn't care how it was being done, just that it was.
He was forcibly thrown from Kerren's mind by her consciousness, as casually and thoughtlessly as a waking dog shaking off a flea. As was he pulled back into the macroscopic world, feeling his strength ebbing from him and pulling him back toward his body, he tried to keep a part of himself, a long thin thread of his consciousness, with her.
He flew back across snow and debris, watching all his laborious progress unwinding in moments. He wasn't at all sure he had succeeded in keeping his strange connection with the woman until he heard Kerren uttering a few raspy words, her voice barely able to register surprise at the sudden knowledge she was imparting to the man and woman looming over her.
"Harmon. I know where he is."
-6.6-
The combined forms of Benny and Carlos staggered across the wooden boards of the former restaurant/bar, past the stairway that protruded from the upper floor. The whole thing had been slewed to the side from the force of the avalanche, which was just barely being held back by the sturdy stonework that formed the back wall of the large room. The stairs had almost been folded up in the deluge; they reminded Carlos of when he had been a kid and peeked between the pages of pop-up books, seeing how the various elements collapsed in an orderly, predetermined fashion.
It wasn't until they had staggered out to the middle of the floor, feeling the freezing sky above them pressing down, that Carlos began to get nervous. With the roof torn off the room like this, he was all too aware that if there were a second donwrushing of snow, there would be nothing keeping it from finally overflowing the back wall and filling the room, at best slamming them up against the downhill wall, at worst drowning them in whiteness where they stood.
"Come on," he said to Benny, nodding in the direction of the main door. They had to go around the collapsing stairway, and then hope that the double doors on the far side weren't blocked by debris. If they were clear, it was a straight shot down the hall and into the lobby. Carlos wasn't sure why, but that seemed to be the place they should head for. If he had to say why, he would have said that it was the largest part of the lodge that faced away from the avalanche, so therefore it should be less damaged.
Carlos began pulling his friend that direction, but he felt some resistance. When he turned to Benny, the man was looking the other direction, a dazed, dreamy expression on his face. "What?" Carlos asked him. "What is it?"
Benny had already taken special notice of the fireplace, commenting something about how its stones were still standing. It continued to command his attention. Not only that, but a smile was trying to make itself evident on the injured man's face. It was a totally incongruous sight, such a joyful expression on the face of a man so beaten, cut, and scorched.
"We need it," he said.
"What, buddy?" Carlos repeated. "What do you see?"
Benny was already pulling from him, turning away from their intended exit toward the dark bulk of the fireplace. Carlos wasn't exactly surprised; in this formerly familiar world where everything had now been broken or ripped away, that stony tower was the only thing that looked like it had any real substance. He decided that he would at least find out what Benny was heading for. There didn't seem to be any immediate danger, but then again he could have said the same thing up until two seconds before the kitchen window exploded in Benny's face.
His injured friend steered Carlos across the warped/cracked/loose floorboards of the restaurant, toward the seemingly immovable fireplace. Every now and then, little rivulets of snow would shower down around the sides of it, spilling over the length of wall that the fireplace hadn't allowed to be knocked down. That hearth had always reminded Carlos of the one in his grandparents' house, with its rounded river stones stacked and mortared together with little technical know-how but lots of emotional investment, and he was aware this might be the reason that he was allowing Benny to investigate it more closely.
Lines of light gleamed there now, above the fireplace's mouth, and Carlos realized what had entranced Benny. It was as if the moon itself were shining down on the stones and forming lines of light there, inscribing a message for them alone to see. They both knew exactly what it was, but at the very same time, Carlos could see how its presence felt fantastical.
The logo of the Deertail was a stoic, serifed depiction of the letters "DL" underneath a stylized swoop that could either be a flame, the peak of the mountain that had towered solidly above the lodge until very recently, or possibly a depiction of the literal tail of a deer as it bounded away into the woods. This swoop connected the "D" and the "L", and gave the logo a triangular, traditional vs. modern feel to it. This fixture had been cast in bronze, two feet to a side, and screwed into the stones above the fireplace's mantel. Its polished surface was now catching bits of moonlight, and the pair of exhausted men felt their faces begin to glow as they drew up to it, unable to look away.
The metal logo had come loose during all the vibrations, and hung a little askew. It sure would have annoyed Jimmy Gough to no end to see it that way, the bottoms of the letters pointing upward at an angle, instead of mirroring the level of the floor. He would have ordered a crew to fix it immediately, but now Carlos couldn't say for sure if there would ever be anyone coming to correct it.
Benny's free hand, the one that wasn't wrapped more tightly than ever around Carlos's shoulders, was reaching for the logo. The metalwork wasn't too high off the ground for him to reach, and the fact that he had a difficult time reaching it said more about how much he was leaning on Carlos. But still the bloodied, trembling hand rose up through the freezing air and traced the lines of the cold metal, as if it were experiencing some treasure that it hadn't been sure really existed until now.
Carlos intended to let Benny do as he liked for a moment, and then urge him through the door that led to the (hopefully intact) lobby. Just as he was about to enact this plan, Benny's hand grasped the inner curve of the metal D with sudden ferocity and yanked on it. With a surprisingly weak grinding sound, the logo came away from of the wall, leaving only little downspills of powdered mortar behind. Carlos could see how the metal had been anchored to the places between the stones, the holes that the bolts left behind positioned just so. Now Benny was cradling the thing against his chest. It seemed larger than ever with its new proximity.
"We need this," Benny said, as if stating a known fact.
"Sure, Benny," Carlos said. "But now let's get somewhere safe."
As they turned away from the fireplace, Carlos was secretly glad that Benny had taken down the piece of metal. After this horrific experience was over, it might be the only memento of the Deertail Lodge that would survive.
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