Harmon's presence slammed back into his body, and he felt as if the avalanche was plowing him under all over again. He hadn't truly been aware of how light and ethereal he had felt, until he was confronted with the pain of the flesh again. The creeping coldness, the grinding sharpness in his broken ankle, all conspired to knock his breath out before he could properly draw it.
He gasped, turning his head back and forth to see if anything about his situation had changed since he had been gone. Unfortunately, nothing had. He thought for a moment about what an observer might have seen while he was -- well, he guessed "away" was the most benign way to describe the state he had just been in. Had he continued to breathe, and had his eyes been closed or open?
Instinctively, he wanted to push those thoughts away, to take his mind off his body. He feared he would start to become afraid if he didn't. He had been in situations similar to (though not nearly as bad as) this before, had nursed enough friends through injuries to understand the way the mind reacted to massive pain. It begins to fear that even if the body doesn't die outright, it will never quite the same again, forever scarred, one step closer to the dark descent that ultimately waits for us all. The brain begins to turn against the body, to separate itself. I'm not this crude matter, it testifies, I'm so much more! It is the mind's way of not losing its sense of control over the world, to not go stark raving mad when faced with a prison of wood, pain and snow.
But Harmon had seen friends slip away while steadfastly denying that there was anything wrong with them that a stiff drink and a smoke wouldn't fix. It turned out to be crucial to stay aware of that mind/body connection, and to embrace it. the most important thing to understand that the mind and body are inextricable, that they need each other in equal amounts. Harmon knew he must suppress this desperate, clawing attempt by the brain to retreat.
After all, hadn't the importance of this just been proven to him? He had wandered through Kerren's mind and actually done something -- blocked what felt like a foreign, invading force -- that brought her body and mind back together. He now had to maintain himself the same way. Perhaps the reason he had been afraid to use his powers in this way until now was an intuitive understanding of this. The relationship between brain and body wasn't a one-way street, with the body being only the vessel for the brain's wants and needs.
So he clung to his consciousness, resisted the urge to leave again. He had done all he could, more than he thought was possible, actually. Now it was time for him to wait until the trail he had left with Kerren to be followed, and he could be rescued. To that end, he picked up the walkie from underneath his hand (he apparently had let go in his own absence and dropped it the few inches to the surface of the snow) and began clicking the Send button again, hoping that someone was still listening on the other end.
They had agreed that he was going to check in every five minutes, but he couldn't say with any certainty how long it had been since his last transmission. In any event, he had a different message to send this time. He thought for a moment, and then selected his Morse letters: "D-i-d K t-e-l-l y-o-u w-h-e-r-e I a-m?"
He repeated the message three times, to ensure that someone picking it up even halfway through would get the full text string, and then waited. In the interest of not letting his mind drift away again, and not wanting to turn full attention to the pain he was in, he tried to focus on external sensory input. He thought he could start by checking the level of moonlight he had available. The little green power light on the walkie, weak as it was, provided most of his illumination, so he covered it to see if he were any closer to daylight than before.
There wasn't much external illumination. The moonlight coming through the vertical branches over him was still feeble and filtered through several inches of white powder, but he took a moment to notice that its source hadn't seemed to shift at all. Given the number of times he had communicated with the outside world, there should have been some change in the light quality, even if his mental voyage to Kerren had been instantaneous. That was strange.
There was some other bit of sensory info coming in, and at first he couldn't pin it down. All he knew was that something was making him uneasy, through his effort of remaining calm. Something wasn't right, and by the time he realized what it was, there was no time for him to stay still and experience it.
Rhythmic vibrations far off in the snow were coalescing into something he recognized: footsteps. Up until that moment, Harmon had been thinking that he would welcome nothing more than the feel of feet plodding along somewhere nearby. He had already planned to call out and direct whoever it was to his hiding place, but now he felt differently. There was something diabolical in them, the way they moved. He couldn't even tell how many legs were involved, or how they would have to be constructed to fall into that particular pattern.
The bottom line was there was something walking around nearby, and whatever kind of something it was seemed to be on the hunt. A short flurry of motion, then silence as it stopped and listened. If he were sure it were an animal, Harmon would guess that it was taking the time to smell the wind, hoping for a scent of something edible. But this thing, whatever it was, didn't give him the impression that it was merely sniffing around. It was looking and listening. Harmon was determined not to give it anything to react to. He let his breath slide in and out of his lungs as slowly as he could, not even trying to let it hitch when pain randomly flared in his ankle.
More than he ever had before, Harmon wanted to become part of the background, unnoticeable to whatever was out there and looking for him (while he had not consciously admitted it to himself, he knew that was exactly what it was doing). Moments before, he had been struggling to stay mentally present, and now every instinct was telling him to fade away. Perhaps leaving his body again would prove to be the best way to hide. It was a tempting experiment, but he resisted it as much as he had the strength to.
The footsteps were drawing closer, and increasing clarity did no good in figuring out exactly what was causing them. Harmon knew the footfalls of just about every creature one could encounter out in the forest, but this matched his idea of none of them. His mind conjured impossibilities as he tried to interpret the sounds: a giant crab scuttling along on hoofed feet, a bear running at full gallop but only covering a few inches with each step, maybe even something even bigger running and leaping from tree to tree, taking the time to tap out misleading rhythms on each trunk before jumping to the next.
He was suddenly very glad that he had covered up the walkie's power light to check the moon's position. He suspected that whatever it was out there would have been able to notice the difference between a fallen snow-covered tree with a tiny light under it from a fallen snow-covered tree without one. He kept his thumb in place, and with his other hand slipped a gloved hand underneath and dialed down the volume until the power switched off with a slight click. He couldn't see the LED light wink out, but he knew it had, and hoped he couldn't be detected by illumination or noise.
This was how Harmon, his body heat bleeding away into the surrounding snow faster than he realized, and being actively searched for by something he would not have asked for as a search party, missed the important message that was being sent to him from the Whitetail Lodge.
-7.6-
Benny's strength was starting to fade. Carlos had let himself believe that the ease with which he had gotten his co-worker across the restaurant floor would continue, but now it seemed that the adrenaline that had fueled their crossing was running out. He felt pulled down on that side, and it was more than just the weight of the metal logo that Benny had yanked free from above the fireplace mantel. But their destination wasn't far now, and Carlos dug deep to get them there.
Only one of the double doors that led from the lobby into the restaurant could open, and it was clear why; the frame of the doorway had been skewed a little by the same force that had sheared off the large room's roof, wedging the heavy door up against the jamb. Surprisingly, the heavy stained-glass panels that decorated both doors were intact, without a single piece broken or knocked out. Carlos continued to propel Benny and himself forward, longing to feel the familiar smoothness of those panels under his palm.
He hoped that the hallway beyond would be similarly unharmed. It would make his heart soar to walk back into a place that was as he remembered it, after walking through such an altered landscape. The hallway, designed to ferry paying customers from the hominess of the lobby into the rustic stone-and-wood elegance of the bar/restaurant, had always struck him as a fine balance of the two styles. Paneled in dark wood, the walls alternated between framed oil paintings of Deertail Mountain and the surrounding forests, and ornate wall sconces holding flame-shaped incandescent bulbs. Its relatively low ceiling made it feel like a hidden passage, connecting the two largest rooms in the Lodge. Either way you went down it, you always got a sense space opening up once you reached the other end, of expansiveness. Carlos didn't realize how much he missed that feeling until the possibility that the hall might have been damaged.
Carlos shifted, taking as much of Benny's weight as he could afford onto his supporting arm so that his free one could reach out and push open the least-askew door. It gave under his hand, easily swinging just as it always had. The darkness beyond took a few seconds to resolve, and when it did he realized that he had been holding his breath. He let it flow out in relief.
"Looks like our luck is holding out," he murmured to his friend, who was slowly becoming more like the rag-doll he had pulled out of a pile of pink slush with every passing second.
"Smurr," Benny said, his head slumping forward. Carlos realized he had maybe fifteen seconds before Benny would return to his unconscious state, and although he hadn't had to lug his friend too far without any help, his own strength was on the ebb, too. The last half hour had taken so much out of him, he feared that if he stopped to think about it, he himself would just fall down on the spot.
He slowly guided Benny through the canted doorway -- there was no reason to risk bumping into either side and causing the pair of them any more pain than they had already endured -- and into the dark hall beyond. It was a surprising relief to leave the open air behind; Carlos had been starting to get the feeling that they had been being watched. None of the hallway's lighting sconces were lit, but he hadn't been expecting any of the building's power to be on anyway.
As the pair shuffled further into the gloom, he realized there was a vague glow from the far end of the hall, dim light from the lobby filtering around the corner to them, thanks more to the nature of the polished wood along the walls than anything else. The strangest thing was the cold air that seem to be infiltrating the hallway. It was almost as chilled as the opened restaurant had been.
Carlos' feet began to speed up, eager to get the both of them into the familiar comfort of the lobby before either of them collapsed from sheer exhaustion, a moment which was going to be within the next ten seconds. Benny exhaled another unintelligible "Murnn," and fell silent, unable to hold his head up any longer. They were so close, just two steps away from turning the corner and stumbling into the building's main room, victorious...
The silence when they turned the corner hit Carlos almost as hard as the cold wind that was coming in through the place where one of the huge plate glass windows used to be. He stopped in his tracks. A few flakes of snow blew far enough into the dark lobby to graze his cheeks as they sailed by.
As feeble as the moon's illumination was, it took a few moments for his eyes to adjust from the lightless tunnel they had just emerged from. Secretly, Carlos had harbored the idea that there would be someone there to greet them, but he was wrong. There was no one. This was not to say that there wasn't evidence of people having been there recently, however.
The first sign that something was amiss was the clothes. There was a substantial scattering of them across the floor next to the main staircase. The hallway from the restaurant came out near its base, so Carlos and Benny (if he were still able to see anything, that was) were looking right at the door that led to the area under the stairs where that skier guy basically lived. Carlos often wondered how many people were freaked out by the grizzled old man coming out from what looked like a glorified janitor closet as they walked out of the restaurant after breakfast, but he supposed that was why he wasn't Lodge Director.
The unceremoniously-dumped clothes looked similar, as if the contents of some woman's closet had been thrown from the landing directly above them. There was more disarray here, too. Aside from the commanding vision of the shattered window, which stretched all the way from the far corner of the lobby to the double set of doors that led in from the parking lot, most of the furniture had been moved from its usual places. The chairs had been shuffled, one of them had been knocked over completely, and the long couch had been pushed farther down along the wall. Carlos, diverting necessary energy from keeping Benny upright, tried to imagine what sequence of events could have occurred to lead to this new arrangement.
It was while he was trying to decipher the drag-tracks of the chair legs in the rug that he saw the blood. There was a large pool of it near the foot of the stairs, and he suspected that in a few seconds his eyes would adjust enough to see a wide splash of it on the polished wood of the wall. Leading away from the large, slowly coagulating pool that must have been where its previous owner fell, the blood formed a trail that led across the rug -- passing underneath one of the repositioned chairs and wove in a drunken line to the huge, broken window, where it passed out into the night. The small pool where the bleeding person must have paused before vaulting over the window's low sill reminded him of the pink pile of snow he had pulled Benny out from under.
Something terrible had happened here, but now the room's only occupant was the cold mountain wind.
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