By the time Dale had pulled all the insulated clothing from the closet, and verifying with Sheryl a half-dozen times that it was okay for him to take her and Kerren's clothes with the intent of giving them to others -- she no longer believed he was going to be attacked by some horrific kind of wooden, horned wall-monster. She had, however, reached a state of alertness unlike any she had ever experienced. Even when she had been in utter darkness, trying to find Kerren, her nerve endings hadn't tingled like this. That had been in this very room maybe half an hour earlier, but time had seemed to stretch out between now and then.
Every rattle of the closet hangers, every scrape and squeak of Dale's work boots against the planks of the floor, was excruciatingly loud to her. Someone had cranked up the color and brightness of everything in her surroundings, regardless of how tightly focused Dale's flashlight beam was, or how its shining white LEDs tried to bleach everything. She stood there as he finished passing her clothing, her arms full of fluffiness, waiting for the next moment with utter clarity, and then the next, and then the next...
Dale swung his light out of the closet, illuminating the short hallway where the women's bed had been jammed up against the corner that led into the suite's main room. "Probably no point in looking for anything in there, right?" he asked.
"Nope," Sheryl answered. It was strange how she could look at the scene of such personal trauma, and only see an arrangement of objects. She had decided not to say anything to anyone about what she had seen in the closet. It was probably her mind's reaction to such an experience of blind force such as she had been through. Unable to comprehend such a thing as an avalanche happening for no reason, her brain was looking for malevolent forces everywhere, to the point where it could make up a very vivid one out of nothing.
"Ready to head back?" Dale asked, holding out his arms to her. Sheryl momentarily thought he was moving in for a hug, but instead he relieved her of about two-thirds of the burden of fabric he had laid across her arms. She didn't respond either way, just followed him back out into the hall, trying hard to shake the feeling of something watching her as she walked out of the re-darkened room.
On the walk back to the stairs, Dale seemed uncomfortable, and before they had even turned the corner back into the main corridor, he asked too-pointedly, "So what brought you two up here this weekend?"
Sheryl almost didn't speak, but then decided to answer, and was surprised to find it made her feel a little better. "It's our anniversary," she said. "Two years."
"Oh!" Dale replied, pleased. "Congratulations."
"Thanks," Sheryl said. "And how long have you been working here?"
"This is my fifth season," he said. "And probably last."
"Aren't you going to rebuild?" Sheryl asked, realizing too late that it probably wasn't up to the security detail to make such a decision.
Dale shrugged under his burden of clothes. "If you knew Jimmy, the owner, you'd be tempted to say yes. His heart and soul has always been in this, which makes it all the harder that all this has happened while he's on vacation. The only one that I've ever known him to take. Even in the summers, he's usually working on the coming season."
"How strange," Sheryl muttered.
"And you know what's even weirder?" Dale asked, as if he were just remembering it as he spoke. "He asked me, about three weeks ago, if I was going to be around on this specific weekend. At the time, I thought it was just because--"
The silence that passed was the most tangibly uncomfortable between them yet. "Why?" Sheryl asked, wondering if it were only the pin of that word would puncture whatever was keeping Dale's words from continuing.
The big man shrugged, as if realizing that the secret was out. "At the time, I thought he wanted to keep me and Glenda separate, while he wasn't around."
Now Sheryl understood. She nodded. "So he knows about you two?"
Dale chuckled a little. "Hell," he admitted, "even I wasn't all that sure at the time. But clearly, he did."
A smile spread slowly across Sheryl's face. "You know, it usually doesn't take a woman throwing herself into a guy's arms to let him know what's going on."
"I know," Dale said, a sheepish tone creeping into his voice. "But it's complicated with Glenda and me. She's married, has kids... I can't say I'm not attracted to her, but I also don't want to be *that* guy, you know? I mean, I was never really sure how much of her side of it was the uniform, or the fact that I'm technically responsible for everyone's safety." He took on a sullen look as the light from the lobby was growing, bringing the hallway around them into focus. "Not that I'm doing such a great job of that lately."
Sheryl moved close enough to nudge his elbow with hers. "Hey," she said, "I think you're doing the best you can. You're just one guy, and this whole place has been half-knocked down. I think you're going about it right."
He nodded thankfully. "That means a lot." His eyes were searching the hall ahead of them, past the point where the stairs to the lobby intersected it. Sheryl assumed that Glenda had headed that direction when she stormed up the main stairs, or else they would have come across her by this point.
Dale gave the dark hallways one more sweep of his flashlight, and then clicked it off. He hesitated before he stepped into the lobby's gray light. His eyes were still searching for her, but Sheryl could tell by his expression whether he really wanted to see her right now or not. Anyway, there wasn't a sign of the desk clerk, not even a sound to be heard in the quiet. She might have gone into one of the rooms.
Sheryl nudged Dale again. "Come on," she said. "Let's get these down to my wife and our friends." She put a playful up-spin on the word "friends" to make it sound like she wasn't saying it seriously, but she really was.
"I just can't believe she still cares about me," Dale muttered, still looking down the hall. "Even though she knows..." He trailed off, then realized where he was and stopped himself from finishing his sentence. He looked back at Sheryl, as if surprised that he had been speaking aloud, and she raised her eyebrows at him.
"I just can't believe it, that's all," he said.
Sheryl nodded. "She seems great. Good in a crisis, stands her ground. My kind of woman."
This made Dale chuckle, and Sheryl found the sound, originating from even deeper in his throat than his speaking voice, pleasing to her ear. Hell, if she swung that way, she'd probably find him attractive too. "We've got people to warm," she said finally. She started forward, heading for the top of the stairs, but was halted by a horrified, desperate sound.
"Dale!" a female voice called from far down the opposing hall. Without waiting for a response, it came again quickly. "DALE!!!", this time with a panicked edge to it.
Dale had dropped his share of the coats and was tearing down the hall, fumbling with his flashlight to get it re-lit even as he was plunging into the darkness, before the second call had died away. Sheryl stood frozen at the top of the stairs, unsure if she should continue and get back to Kerren or to help Dale assist Glenda, who was clearly the source of the distress call.
She watched Dale run, boots clomping down the hall, the way he was unwilling to stop for anything in order to get to her. It told Sheryl all she needed to know about how he truly felt about her. Despite the danger, it made her smile a little.
-7.2-
For a long moment, Bruce just stared at Kerren's opened eyes, desperately trying to recall if Theda's were that color. He couldn't remember, and didn't know if it was because he hadn't seen her in so long, or whether he had just never paid attention. His dreamscape had so much other sensory input to provide, after all.
Neither Kelly nor he moved for a long moment, wondering what was going to happen next. The voice Kerren had spoken with had come breathily, and if her slightly-parted lips had moved to form the words, it had been so subtle as to not be noticed with the sudden opening of her eyes. Those orbs were motionless, which was strangely unsettling because it almost never happened in the living. But she was breathing, slow and steady as she had been ever since he pulled her out from under her bed. So they sat and waited.
"Dale!"
They heard someone -- Glenda, presumably, calling from the upper hallway. The sound passed through cleanly, affecting nothing in the lobby. Another call, this one more frantic, passed quickly on the heels of the first...
"DALE!!!"
Thundering steps came after this, work boots clomping on thinly-carpeted flooring. None of the three people in the lobby turned their heads toward the sound, but they knew if they did, they would see the deep-blue shape of the security guard rushing past the top of the stairs, on his way from one wing of the lodge to the other. That one action seemed to manage the problem, and he thought nothing else of it.
Shortly after came another form, one that none of them saw, this one considerably shorter and lumbering under a pile of clothes, draped inexpertly across both arms. The figure began to descend the stairs, swaying a bit under the added weight. "Little help," it tentatively asked after a few wobbly steps.
Kelly and Bruce looked at each other at the same time. Bruce waited for her to get up to assist; after all, he had been the one who had helped Kerren before. Kelly had already helped Sheryl once. It was the established order of things. But the way there was something about the way the blonde was looking at him: did he imagine it, or was she sizing him up in some way?
"Do we tell her?" Kelly whispered to him. She nodded to Kerren, who was still looking up at the faraway ceiling rafters with vacant eyes. "Before she gets down here, I mean."
Bruce, cursing himself for his paranoia, nodded. "I'll tell her," he said. Before Kelly could voice an opinion one way or the other, Bruce stood and walked toward the bottom of the stairs, hopping up them two at a time to get to Sheryl before she slipped or dropped her load. "Let me help," he said.
"Thanks," Sheryl said as she felt the clothing being taken from her. Bruce ended up taking more than half, and then they started descending again, side by side.
"Now, Sheryl," Bruce said, in a tone that he tried hard not to allow to sound condescending, "we've tried to stabilize your wife's legs. Kelly down there has proven herself quite able in these matters... see how she's splinted her legs? But the side effect has been that she's... well, she's come around a little bit."
Without any other kind of outward reaction, Sheryl was off down the stairs, tossing her burden of clothing over the bannister to keep it out from under her feet. She came down the stairs fast, forgetting to hold onto anything and mostly sliding down the last few. She was running over to Kerren's side, barely missing Kelly as she slid into Bruce's former spot.
Sheryl grabbed her wife's hand, lifted it and held it vertically. "Kerren? Honey?" she spoke down into those empty eyes, the fear rising in her voice as her wife's unresponsiveness continued. "Why isn't she moving? Is she awake?"
Kelly's hand moved comfortingly up and down Sheryl's back. "We don't know. She just opened her eyes." Unsure of whether to tell her the rest, she looked up at Bruce, who was sure to take his time getting his share of the clothes down the stairs. He paused in his journey long enough to give her a go-ahead nod.
Kelly took a breath, braced her palm against Sheryl's back, and then said, "She said something a minute ago."
Sheryl's head whipped away from searching her wife's features, locked eyes with Kelly. "She did? What did she say?"
Kelly didn't answer right away, even though she could tell that the suspense was excruciating for the dark-haired woman. "That she knew where Harmon was."
Sheryl's face fell. She had most likely been hoping for a valiant declaration of love, some eloquent defiance against the darkness that had failed to claim them. Bruce dropped the clothes heavily onto the chair on which Kelly had broken the wood for the splints. "Can you talk to her, Sheryl?" he asked. "Maybe get her to say something else?"
Bruce had to admit that hearing that voice coming from the body of the woman he still half-thought of as Theda had him on edge, too. He doubted it was a coincidence that a woman who logically shouldn't be in this world, and had a portrait the shouldn't exist hanging nearby, would claim to have information she shouldn't logically have. If Theda really was in there somewhere, he wanted her drawn out. Maybe Sheryl was the key to that.
Kerren's wife bent down over her, clasping the barely-conscious woman's hand in both of her own. "Can you hear me, Kerren?" She spoke as calmly as she could, trying to coax out more reaction, like luring a scared animal from a cave. The results were scattershot, no matter how well intentioned, Sheryl only pushing out fragments of sentences: "It's me, honey... I'm so glad you're not... that you're, well, not okay, but... Can you look at me? Or blink if you can't quite move yet... How about squeezing my hand? Are you there?" Bruce was momentarily confused when he saw a dark spot appear on Kerren's sleeve, and only then realized that a tear had dropped from the point of Sheryl's chin.
Kelly was still bracing Sheryl's back with her hand, but Bruce thought she might need more support than that. He moved over to the couch, hoping to come around and set down on the other side of the kneeling women. As the vague outline of his shadow passed over Kerren's face, however, she moved. It wasn't much, just the flicking of her eyes in his direction, but it was the biggest reaction they had gotten from her since her awakening.
Sheryl reacted quickly, not quite making the connection between her wife's movement and that of the author. "Kerren?" she said, her voice suddenly hopeful. "Are you with me?"
Kerren's eyes stopped trying to track Bruce, and shifted to Sheryl. "My legs hurt," she whispered.
Sheryl let out a relieved bark of a laugh, and clasped the bundle of upraised hands to her chest. "I know, baby. I know," she breathed. "We've been working on that. Just keep as still as you can, okay?"
"Okay," Kerren answered. The fear and confusion wasn't quite gone from her eyes yet. "Are we in the lobby?"
"That's right," Sheryl replied, intensely happy that someone was finally asking her questions she had the answers to.
Bruce was just about to jump in and ask a few questions himself, when Kelly did it for him. Her hand, which was already flat against Sheryl's back, slid up to the base of her neck. "Sheryl..." she began, her voice tentative but determined, "... can I ask her about Harmon?"
Before Sheryl could answer, Kerren spoke without looking away from her wife. "I know that name," she said. "I think he's the one who let me come back. He somehow... feels like a Harmon."
Kelly took this as permission to speak to the injured woman directly. "Kerren, you said you knew where he was."
Kerren's eyebrows furrowed. She thought for a second, and then answered slowly, "I think I do. He's here, and not here. Still in my head a little, but also out there." She lifted her free hand and pointed it back over her head, clearly gesturing toward the front windows of the lobby.
"Could you find him?" Kelly asked. "If we went out there?"
"I... think so," Kerren answered. "As long as he stays with me. There's still a connection... but it's so thin..."
Bruce had been standing there, mesmerized, all through this exchange. She didn't sound much like Theda, not like she had when she had first spoken. It could have been his own thoughts projecting his desire to find her onto that fragment of speech, but now that she was really talking, the difference was evident. Still, it was so clearly her face...
There would be time, he realized. It hadn't quite worked out before, but now that Kerren was conscious again, it was more important than ever. Just as she claimed to know where Harmon was without logically being able to, she knew something about Theda. He just knew it. He just had to get her alone, and then he'd extract the information he needed out of her. He was prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to do so.
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