Whitelodge 8.7 & 8.8

-8.7-

Glenda hadn't seen any of skirmish between Dale and Bruce. As soon as Dale brought his arm down and back up, his broad back was eclipsing what was going on. She heard flesh slapping against flesh, saw Dale's shoulders tense underneath his uniform, and then the pair of men swung around like partners doing some kind of drunken dance.

Dale stumbled, which was something she had never seen him do. His feet seemed always sure, always steady. This idea made her hesitate with its novelty, or else she would have been out of the way when Bruce came out from behind the security guard, extended arm first. Her mind registered something thin and glimmering.

The author was stumbling too, but the way Dale held his arm made the shiny thing in his hand surprisingly steady. It came right at her, and she had only started to think she should probably move out of its path when it reached her. Strangely enough, she only felt a whisper, like a bit of wind blowing through her, as the shine passed just under her left collarbone and disappeared. Bruce's fist came to rest right up against her shirt there, and for a second after he fell to the ground, she just looked at the chunk of sculpted wood -- contoured with depressions for a person to tuck their fingers into -- sticking to her.

The fire feeling came all at once, spreading out as if she had been ignited from the spot where the handle touched her. It drew her breath out of her lungs, erased her sense of time and space. Dale, once he had finished pushing Bruce to the floor, turned to her, and for what felt like the longest time just stood there, looking at her. She looked back at him, incredulous. She simultaneously had no idea what had just happened, and could see every possible consequence of the coming seconds spreading out into the future like the fine fibers of a net.

Then her knees were not doing what they were designed to, failing to hold her up. She tipped backward, but Dale managed to grab her and sit her down on the floor. She landed hard, but not as hard as if he had not been there. He was speaking to her, but the pain was making it hard to hear -- or think -- clearly. There was a lot of yelling around her, and more people were piling on top of the author. She abstractly thought that maybe they were trying to cover him up entirely, so that he might disappear. She hoped he would, although she couldn't exactly articulate why.

He was struggling underneath the people trying to hold him. Dale was with them, but he was distracted; he kept looking over at her, and not doing his best to detain her attacker. She stared back at him, because at that moment seeing his eyes looking at her was the best thing occurring, the only thing that even slightly diverted her attention from the burning metal that seemed to be in her blood now, pumping through her body and down the front of her shirt in equal amounts. She could feel the fabric sticking to her. She hated the feel of it, wanted to pull it away from her skin, but her arms seemed to be suddenly asleep.

Dale kept looking back and forth between her and the man pinned under him, like he was struggling to make some sort of decision. The two people in bathrobes were atop the author along with him, and he was speaking to them. He eventually got off Bruce, and came over to her. He put his hands on her shoulders, and when she looked at him this closely, found she couldn't quite focus on him. He was speaking to her, his voice sounding all watery, asking her questions she couldn't answer about someone called Glenda. She felt that she knew who he was talking about, but couldn't quite place a face to the name. She opened her mouth to tell him this, but didn't think anything was coming out.

Dale turned away from her, and with more urgency than before, spoke to everyone else in the room. Kelly and Manoj struggled to keep Bruce down on the floor, but all of a sudden lost the battle. The author was scrambling along the floor like he was doing a child's imitation of a horse, hands and feet slapping the floor, heading straight for her. She was looking afraid, watching for him to reveal another shiny thing that he was going to try to slip through her, but he jumped over her instead. The vibrations of the floorboards hurt as they passed through her, but they eased as he got farther away. He had leapt over her to get to the stairs, and was now rising up and away from her on them. Good. She didn't like him anymore.

Dale was leaning over her, which she liked much better. He was paying a lot of attention to the wooden handle stuck to her chest. She would have tried to brush it off her, if her arms had been working properly, but she somehow knew it wasn't going to make the thumping fire go away even if she did. It was okay, though. Dale was here. He would know what to do...

Why, then, was he turning away from her again? She wanted to call him back, to make sure he wouldn't leave her side. She didn't want him to leave her, ever. She had known that for a long time. But now he was moving away, picking up something... one of the large upholstered chairs that this room had several of. He was moving toward the tall, flat piles of snow at the far end, his muscles tensing...

And then the chair was leaving his hands, flying through the air, tumbling a little through space before a web of white lines spread away from it in a brittle webwork. The lines all fell away, and a cold wind struck her, as if they alone had been holding back the chill. It should have helped quell the fires inside her, but it didn't. She began to shiver while still burning.

By this time, Dale was coming back to her, and she tried to smile for him. She managed to gather enough strength to lift her hands a little and reach for him, like a child silently asking to be picked up. He gently tucked a tentative arm behind her shoulders, and another under her legs, and lifted her up off the floor. She felt his muscles trembling as he did this slowly, and it matched the way she was shivering in a way that almost felt comforting.

Lying across his arms, her head was a little higher than when she was standing up. He floated her toward where the white web had appeared (and just as quickly disappeared), toward the source of that cold wind. Maybe going out into it would cool her, and her body wouldn't burn so much. If Dale was the one taking her there, she knew it would be a better place.

She looked up into Dale's face. The pale moonlight hit his cheeks directly as they moved out into the blowing snow, but her vision was starting to darken around the edges, like the closing iris at the end of a silent-era movie scene. There were tears sliding down both his cheeks, brilliantly lit with whiteness. She wanted to lift her hand to them, to swipe them away and ask what they were for, but her hands wouldn't do even that.

-8.8-

Manoj would have told Harmon what was stalking him, if the older man's walkie had been on. But since the veteran skier had switched his off, Manoj's clicks radiated out into the surrounding atmosphere unheard, and were lost forever. Harmon, for his part, was trying to hold his breath so the thing stalking the woods nearby wouldn't find him.

Harmon had spent enough time in the woods, thanks to his hobby, that he had witnessed all sorts of creatures. This one, however, was confounding him. The way it seemed to move, the irregular path it was treading... but most of all, what frightened him and gave him extra incentive to stay absolutely still was the feeling of intelligent intent behind what he was hearing. The longer he listened, the more he realized that he was hearing something moving through the world in hunt mode. And that he was its prey. Was this how rabbits felt, he wondered, cowering down in their burrows while foxes roamed the world inches above them, razor-sharp teeth and sniffing, searching noses and held close to the ground?

Whatever it was had stopped moving. For a long, dark moment, Harmon was sure that it had located him, and was only relishing the moment before pouncing. But then something happened, something far away. If anything, including him, had been producing sound, Harmon wouldn't have heard it. Far off, and so close to the edge of hearing that he would not be surprised to be told it was his imagination, there was a brittle, splintery sound. The hunter, in whatever odd form it was taking on, immediately pivoted and sped off in another direction. Harmon could only guess that it was toward the distant noise.

He was alone again. He let out his breath, gulped down more as deeply as he dared, so much that his leg ended up moving and flaring in pain again. His breath hitched, he coughed, and then held his breath once again, sure that the thing's acute ears would direct it right back to him. Moments passed, and it didn't return.

Harmon was aware that he couldn't stay where he was. Waiting for people from the Lodge to come find him had been folly from the beginning. And now they had something else to contend with. Maybe whatever they had done would end up buying him enough time to get out of here, to find a new hiding place. But how would he do this? Skis could be used as a decent shovel to dig himself out with, but they happened to be at the far end of his snapped legs -- if they hadn't flown off his feet during the snownami he had been plowed under as it flew down the mountain. With his luck, both of his skis would both be lodged like anchors in the snow, making it impossible for him to move them.

There was a particularly thick branch ahead of him, just a few inches beyond his comfortable reach. He had been eyeing it ever since awakening under the tipped-over tree, and might have even wondered if he would be able to pull himself forward by grabbing it. No doubt, it was the parent of the fine network of twigs above him that was holding back the rest of the snow directly above his head. No matter. The time for waiting had passed. He had to get out.

Steeling his nerves, Harmon reached his gloved hand forward and gripped the branch. Its woody solidity was actually nice to feel in the midst of all this smothering softness. He felt sap locking his fingers into place, and pulled. Fire immediately shot down his leg as it stretched, and Harmon ground his teeth together to keep from crying out. To his surprise, the snow let go of his legs and he slid forward a few inches. He stopped pulling, and took as many deep lungfuls of breath as he could to calm the burning in his chest.

So he could move, a little. Good to know. The only obstacles left to him, then, were the broken ankle itself, and the climb to the surface. He still wasn't sure of how far that was, and then the trip to the Lodge itself. All while under the eye of something that most likely wanted to tear him apart. Easy as pie.

When the pain had started to recede, Harmon realized that not much snow had fallen on him when he pulled on the branch. It was right next to his cheek now, and he was feeling bold, so he made one more experiment. He shook it hard, and ducked his head. As he expected, whooshing waves of snow fell on his head, but not as much as he had feared. When it seemed to be done, he shook off what must have been a sizeable pile on top of his hat, and looked up.

The branch he had shaken spread overhead to a wide swatch of compressed needles and twigs, and with the weight of snow pressing down on it, only a little had sifted through to land on him. But the light above the area he had disturbed was definitely lighter. Quite a bit so, actually. If he had to guess, he thought he might just be another inch or two from the surface.

He braced himself, shook the branch again, making sure to change the direction of his tugs; instead of side to side, this time he went back and forth. This new motion caused more falling snow than before, and he closed his eyes against the stinging onslaught. By the time he stopped, he had dislodged enough snow that he could feel the weight of it starting to press down on his body.

Slowly, Harmon opened his eyes. The change had been immediate and visually brutal. He had opened up the sky. Not only that, but now that the weight of the avalanche had been removed from the branch he had shaken, its smaller ends had been able to reach out and stretch for the first time since the tree had fallen. Harmon grinned to himself as he imagined what that must have looked like from the outside: a needly arm unfurling out of the ground, like a zombie starting to emerge from its grave in one of those novels he obsessively read.

He loved the thrill of coming across visceral moments like that, and they never failed to make goosebumps break out on his skin. He had thought it was because the image was so terrible -- the moment when the sane, real world was breached by the unreal -- but now he was on the other side of the equation, and realized what all those zombies must have felt in that moment of breaking through... ultimate triumph over the death that tried to keep them underground.

He had barely moved and had a long way to go, but now he could see the night sky punched through with stars overhead, and it was amazing how much difference that made.

Whitelodge 8.5 & 8.6

-8.5-

"There's a meaning for each of us," Bruce had said, "a reason why we've been detained here." That phrase had stuck in Kelly's head since it had been spoken. Her mind had started roiling with the implications of it. A reason? To what end? And determined by whom? As much as she tried to find logical explanations for what was going on here, she seemed confounded every way. She couldn't accept as Manoj had -- too easily, she thought -- that the laws of time and space had suddenly decided to take exception to themselves, nor could she come up with a way that all these strange occurrences could take place in a universe she thought she understood.

It was the ambiguity that she hated most of all. In athletics, it was easy. It was pure physics. Action A becomes Result B, and the only thing of importance was executing Action A as perfectly as possible. In this lodge tonight, nothing made sense or added up correctly. It what hard to deal with, when she had never seen a moment in her life where it hadn't. She was totally out of her depth. At least, she decided looking around the room, she wasn't the only one.

Even though he was speaking the most and seeming to steer the conversation, Bruce was the one she was most concerned about. Granted, she had spent the most time with him since this whole experience started, so that made her more fluent in the quickness with which he could transition from one emotional state to another. This was what bothered her the most, and also caused her to spend a lot of time rationalizing that this was just the way his writer's personality worked: a focused laser-beam attention to detail that could swing wildly between subjects without taking any break in between. She certainly could identify with that, but there was something acutely unsettling about the way he was doing it...

She wished Manoj would pay more attention to what was going on, but he seemed distracted by the walkie's clicking. It was a sharp reminder that one of their group was in real danger somewhere else, but then again it was starting to seem like they all were. This was something her boyfriend did sometimes, focus on the thing that wasn't really relevant or even important -- hadn't their argument at dinner been another example? -- but over the time they had been together she had learned how to grab his ears and get his mind to come back from whatever corner it had run to. He even had started to do this himself, which she appreciated.

Kelly looked down at the woman lying on the couch. No one else seemed to be doing this; if they did, they would see what she was seeing, a look of dawning horror in her fellow blonde's eyes. And those eyes -- an intriguing hazel -- were focused squarely on Bruce Casey. Kelly kept hoping that Kerren's eyes would swing her way, so they could connect in some wordless way and share their growing anxiety.

Dale and Bruce were currently having an escalating conflict of words about whether the group should stay, leave, or split up. She had to admit, right now she wanted to be anyplace other than where the author was. She doubted the security guard could see it, but there was a patch of skin on the back of the writer's neck that was ripening to deep scarlet. She noticed he also reached back from time to time, absently scratching just above and behind his right hip. He tugged his t-shirt down after he was done, even though it wasn't riding up.

Kelly noticed that Kerren's hands were still entwined with those of her wife, suspended in a knot between their bodies. There was some vibration there, which at first she couldn't explain. Sheryl seemed not to notice because she was looking up at the progressing argument -- Bruce was getting louder, Dale more reserved -- but Kerren's gaze remained laser-focused on the author.

All of a sudden, Kelly got it; Kerren was pointing. Her entire body remained motionless, but one of the index fingers in that ball of knuckles was straightening, almost imperceptibly and twitching, in the direction of the ranting author. It all came together in Kelly's mind at once: the pointing, the fear in Kerren's eyes, the hesitant scratch Bruce had made above his hip.

When she looked back at the author, he was taking his second step toward Dale, and his hand was sliding around his back again, but this time it wasn't to scratch. As he turned further away from her, the barely visible lump just above the waistband of his pajama pants solidified under the stretching fabric, transformed into an unmistakable handle.

No. A hilt.

Kelly lunged forward without any kind of forethought. All she could manage was "He's got a--!" before she slammed into him. Her hands reflexively came down on the pajama fabric bunched just over his tailbone. Bruce's hand had come down on the rounded hilt, his fingers had closed around it, and he was just starting to draw it when she struck. Kelly's hands pressed hard against him, but his hand was unable to stop the upward motion of his hand. He slid the knife up and out of his waistband, but with Kelly's hands pressing it against him, he ended up making a long slash up the base of his spine as he drew it out.

Kelly had meant to grab his wrist, to restrain him from fully pulling the blade out, but as she leapt forward her hands became too low to do this; she ended up pressing her hands against the back of his pants, with the blade underneath. Bruce didn't cry out as he raised his hand, and Kelly didn't know how badly either had been cut until the blood almost immediately started to soak through the thin fabric of his pajama pants, staining her hands. Bruce was still moving forward, and her recoil from the blossoming red spot on his lower back sent her sprawling to the floor. As she fell, she managed to get a look at the blade he was drawing as he brought it around to threaten Dale.

It was a hunting knife, at least five inches long. It had been drawn up so quickly that Bruce's blood did not have time to touch it, and the metal caught the feeble moonlight in a way nothing else in the lobby did. Kelly kept looking at it as she fell, watching the way it swept cleanly through the air, unaffected by the long cut it had left behind. Then it was out of sight, eclipsed by Bruce as he brought it around to his front, toward where Dale and Glenda were advancing on him.

Kelly had meant to stop him, but instead she had imparted more force into him forward motion. The author was stumbling forward, straight toward Dale and Glenda, the gleaming blade coming between them, it and their frail bodies lining up like planets moving toward an eclipse.

-8.6-

Bruce had felt his mind slipping. His first sign had been when the wind swishing along the outer edges of the lodge had started to sound like Theda's screams. It brought last night -- that was the appropriate term, because in a very real way, he felt like he hadn't really slept in all the months since -- back to him, slipping under his skin, as real a presence as Theda herself still felt to him. It made him realize that he felt much like a parent whose child has wandered off in a vast department store, stricken with paralyzing fear but knowing that he had to move, had to search, and nothing would be right again until he regained what he had lost.

He tried to remain calm as he explained to everyone present what he knew, and what he thought they should do next, but they refused to behave like the characters in his fiction stories. They made their own decisions, had their own outside allegiances and interior fears, none of which he had any power to make them ignore.

And then there was the horned thing. Waves of chill went through his blood every time his mind turned toward it, almost as if it were an invading force, letting him know that it was sweeping its forces of detection across him, and soon it would find him. If it were just some physical presence that were coming after him, he thought he could stand a chance against its encroaching darkness; however, he knew it was much more than that.

He could hear his voice rising in pitch and volume, despite his best attempts to modulate it. The people around him just weren't *getting* it, this motley crew he had been thrown in with. They were unfathomable to him in their ordinariness. At the same time, he had no choice but to believe that they were there for a reason, some unifying theme that he couldn't get them to stand still long enough for him to understand. If only he could pin them in place somehow, so he could fully examine them and give his creative mind a chance to work, he was sure he could suss out the reason they all were still here.

He was the center of this drama, of that he was sure. Whatever cataclysm had been called down on them all, it was because of him. His current working theory was that the horned thing was coming to take back all the ideas he had received from Theda. It didn't seem to understand that she had given them to him freely, nor was it particularly interested in bargaining with him. What would happen when it finally tracked him down, he didn't know, but he had never been more terrified of any oncoming event in his life.

Thus the increasingly frantic voice and the wilder gesticulations, as he tried to rally these random troops to stand along with him; thus his motivation for tucking the hunting knife into the back of his pajama bottoms. It had been in the first aid kit, Velcroed into the lid above the gauze and bandages that its usage might necessitate. He had taken the healing equipment for use on Kerren, and kept the defensive piece for himself. He had originally meant it only to do whatever damage he could to the horned thing, but he felt it tugging at his back whenever he turned, as he was beginning to lose control of those around him. They were starting to move away from him, saying they were going to go down the hill to get Harmon, and then on to the town.

The knife felt like it were gaining mass and gravity, until he thought he could begin to feel how the vast lobby was starting to rotate around it. He could bring it out, take control back with it, present everyone with concrete evidence that *he* was the center of all this, and if they didn't understand that, then he was perfectly willing to use threat of force to set them back into their proper orbits.

He had put off drawing it out as long as he could, until Dale started moving toward him. He was being tested; he had been in enough physical altercations to know that. Dale's half-steps forward were prelude to attack, and Bruce would have no chance if the larger man really decided to put him down. He waited for his moment, making a prior feint out of scratching his hip so that no one would think twice when he finally reached to pull the weapon out...

But as fate would have it, someone did. He had made the mistake of turning too far away from Manoj and Kelly. The Indian fellow was messing with that infernal walkie-talkie, but the woman must have been watching him more closely. He didn't even see her coming, only heard her blurting out the front end of a warning, and then the pressure on his lower back as he lost the race to pull the knife free before she could reach him. He had gone too far and pulled it anyway, as he did feeling a stinging sensation that spread like ignited primer cord up his tailbone. It didn't immediately dawn on him that what he was sensing was his own skin splitting open as Kelly pressed the sharp side of the blade against him, but soon the blade was out in the open, undeniable and known to all.

Everything in his mind was telling him to stop, to take a moment to assess the damage that the blonde had done to him, but there was no time. A show of force had to be just that, brandishing the weapon between himself and his biggest threat as soon as possible. His teeth gritted as the severed nerve endings began to cry out and he felt an odd warmth begin to spread across his lower back, but his hand still obeyed its original instructions and came front and center. The satisfaction he felt as he saw Dale's eyes widen in fear and surprise was almost worth the tear-inducing pain.

Bruce pushed the weapon a little closer to Dale, not really intending to harm him, just to give him a better look at this little shiny piece of reality as it shifted the room's balance of power. He moved it forward, tipping the blade away from vertical, and for just an instant it caught the faint moonlight sifting through the front windows. His eyes glanced down in appreciation of this moment of beauty, and when his eyes came back up, Dale's body had completely changed position.

The security guard's arm, which before had been protectively draped across Glenda's shoulders, in the interim had dropped behind her and come up again between the couple's bodies, so quickly that Bruce couldn't quite understand how it had been done. That darting hand clapped around his wrist, as tight and as strong as a bullwhip. Dale's other hand was close behind it, slamming into Bruce's elbow, forcing his arm straight and locking it in place.

Bruce's pain was suddenly doubled, a hot circuit running between his brain, arm, and lower back, skewing his vision out of focus. If Kelly hadn't just pushed and hurt him, his balance would have been better, but as it was, the force of the heel of Dale's palm hitting his elbow caused him to stumble. The two men begin to rotate as if dancing, Dale twisting Bruce's arm upward and at the same time starting the rest of him on an arc that would bring the author down to the floor. But the severed muscle in Bruce's back caused miscalculation in both men's trajectories, and Bruce stepped closer to Dale. The blade swung up... and Bruce felt it sink home.

He had already felt the sensation in his hand that resulted when blade met flesh -- his own. This feeling, however, even though he was half-bent over and couldn't see it, was different. It was completely obvious that this wasn't a slice, but a stab. The blade sank into something totally, and blood that wasn't Bruce's own immediately flowed hot down over his hand.

For the first time in many minutes, the lobby was totally silent.

Whitelodge 8.3 & 8.4

-8.3-

He didn't quite know where to begin. This had happened to him many times before; his mind had made all sorts of leaps to get to the conclusion he had drawn, but he had no idea how to articulate them to someone who couldn't see inside his head. As had happened to him many times before, language had not been a part of the thinking process, replaced by a series of images and connections that made sense to him, but he couldn't hope to explain. Still, everyone was staring at him, so he had to say something.

Without looking, he reached for Kelly's hand, and was surprised at how quickly it presented itself for him. It gave his a reassuring squeeze, and he felt a little stronger.

"Bruce is right," he said. "I believe that where we are... is somehow outside of the world we are usually in. I don't know if the avalanche caused the displacement, or if the displacement caused the avalanche, but I don't believe that anything we can see outside this lodge is actually there. Beyond, there seems to be a shadow of reality, some sort of visual remnant..." His voice was steady, confident, but he was losing them, and he could feel it.

"The town's still there," Dale said, gesturing toward the front windows and down the mountain. "We saw it. The lights and the far side of the valley..."

"But there's no motion," Manoj said. "Think about it. If the town were still there--"

Glenda jumped in, a tinge of panic edging her voice. "What do you mean, if it were still there?"

Manoj put his palms toward her in a placating gesture. "I'm not saying it's not. I think the town is fine. It just us who aren't. Like I was saying, if this had been a normal avalanche, how long would it take before we would start to see rescue vehicles at the bottom of the mountain slope?"

Dale shrugged with the arm he didn't have around Glenda's shoulder. "Half hour, maybe, this late at night. Volunteers and reserves are pretty quick."

Manoj spread his hands. "Exactly. But there aren't any. Even though we haven't been able to communicate with anyone -- save for Harmon, that is. But I couldn't see any moving lights in the town at all. Traffic lights aren't changing, no cars are moving. Even the cell tower lights aren't blinking."

They seemed to be seriously considering this, and he thought he was making progress, until he heard from behind him, "What about Harmon, Manoj?" It was Kelly. "He's not in the lodge with us, but you can still communicate with him. And he somehow communicated with Kerren, too. How can he do that?"

Manoj winced inwardly. He could always count on Kelly to poke holes in the logical argument he was trying to build. He bore no malice toward her, though. In his philosophy, it was more important for the right answer to be reached than for him to be the one to provide it. "Perhaps," he thought aloud, "there's some kind of radius that's being affected. After all, he didn't make it all the way down the hill. And up here, Mr. Casey seems to think there's a barrier of some sort within the lodge, the one that he came through but his pursuer didn't. Maybe Harmon just didn't get beyond the downhill end of the zone."

As he spoke, Manoj was dimly aware of the walkie clicking in the pocket of his bathrobe; he had placed it there when he was preparing to lead Bruce and Kelly away from the rest of the group. He ignored it now because he assumed it was just a check-in message from Harmon, but it was still going after he stopped talking. Something about the end of the message caught his ear, but all he could register was the fact that it was different from the ones he had received before. Until now, they had all been identical by design, but this seemed to be new information. He thought he should probably step away, click Harmon back and ask him to repeat the new message--

"I'm going to put this forward again," Glenda said suddenly. "If Harmon is out there and we can reach him, then we should." She stepped forward, out from under Dale's arm, and walked toward the front windows, piled higher than ever with dark gray snow. She stopped as she drew up next to the couch, and spoke down to Kerren. "You said that you can show us the way to him?"

Kerren didn't give a response other than with her eyes, but Sheryl was quick to jump in from her spot crouched next to her wife. "She can't go anywhere right now, of course."

Bruce jumped in quickly, holding out a turned-down palm as if the desk clerk were going to immediately move forward and pull Kerren to her feet. "Sheryl's right. Moving her would be dangerous at this point, I think."

Glenda apparently hadn't considered this wrinkle before. Her face showed acute disappointment. "Isn't there some way? Once we find Harmon, we can try to get everyone who's injured down to the town. If there's some reason people haven't started trying to get up here and help us, we can find out why." She hesitated, as if the next part was going to be hard to say: "And of course, I want to..." Her voice unexpectedly choked itself off, and although she shook her head to clear the emotional thoughts that stopped her voice, she couldn't and fell silent.

Dale stepped forward, reaching forward to put a hand of reassurance on her back. Before it even touched her, however, she seemed to sense its approach and twisted away, raising her hands in a please-don't gesture. Dale's hand stopped in mid-air, but he did finish her sentence for her: "She wants to try to get back to her kids."

Glenda nodded with her face turned away from the group, crossing her arms and pressing the index finger and thumb of one hand against her eyes. Dale spoke again, and while he didn't move toward her, this time it was her he spoke to directly, softly enough that he clearly didn't care if the rest of the group heard or not: "I'll get you there, Glenda. No matter what. We're going down this mountain. I'll take you to your family." She must have heard him, but didn't react.

Bruce stepped into the silence that had descended on the room. "Now, I understand your eagerness to get away from here," he said, loud enough to show he was speaking to everyone but looking at Glenda's back, "but we can't forget the wild card in this hand. This horned... *thing* that Sheryl and I have seen -- and you've seen the painting too, Glenda, don't forget -- is as far as we know still here with us, still looking for ways to get in --"

Manoj spoke up, presenting something he had been thinking about ever since Sheryl told of her vision. "And what will it do when it gets in, Mr. Casey? If it means us harm, then isn't the best course of action to get as far away from it as possible?"

Bruce turned in Manoj's direction, and for just a second an expression of raw fury passed across the author's face. It was replaced almost immediately by his previous look of impassioned concern, so quickly that Manoj wasn't entirely sure he had been tricked by the diffused light and odd shadows of the lobby. In his usual calm, mannered voice, he responded, "Perhaps... but I would remind you of your own argument, my friend. If we are in some sort of bubble and cut off from the rest of the world -- and I think we can all agree that we are cut off, regardless of whether the rest of the world is frozen, or an illusion, or whatever -- then being inside, behind walls that thing clearly does not have the power to break through, is preferable to being out there, in the open, in the dangerous cold. Don't you think?"

The walkie was going off in Manoj's pocket again, reminding him that there was something else going on, something vital to their current situation, that he was missing. Harmon, like it or not, had been proven as a part of their group, if for no other reason than that he hadn't disappeared like the rest of the lodge's guests. Manoj was distracted by it, didn't want to let go of the little control of the conversation, but couldn't deny its siren call of more information. Maybe Harmon was telling them some vital new piece that would unlock everything...

-8.4-

Bruce filled the silence with "This goes back to what I was saying. The more we talk about this, the more convinced that we -- all of us -- are here for a reason. There's something greater at work here, and running away isn't what's going to help us figure out what those things are."

Dale didn't like the way Bruce was steering this discussion. The author seemed bent on getting everyone to stay where they were, and in his experience, people who did that often had their own interests in mind more than anyone else's, regardless of what they said.

Dale hadn't seen the thing that Sheryl claimed was in the upstairs closet, but when she spoke of it, there was nothing but the ring of truth to it. He had heard of people in traumatic situations -- the kind of situations he had been trained to handle -- seeing or hearing things that weren't there, but this felt different. He had examined the wall of debris that Bruce had apparently come through, and it had been totally impassable. He had also seen the painting in Jerry's office more times than Glenda had. Jerry sometimes liked to have Dale hang around the office and shoot the shit a while during the course of a day. He tried to recall if, in their rambling conversations, the lodge director had ever said anything about it. It seemed to him that he had, but exactly what was out of his reach at the moment.

Now people were throwing all sorts of new information at him, and his brain in danger of burning out trying to process them all. Bruce clearly thought they should stay put, and Manoj hadn't quite put forth his thoughts yet, but... He kept looking at Glenda's turned back. She wasn't crying; he knew her well enough that he would be able to see the slight change in her shoulders if she was. She clearly wanted to go, and if that's what she wanted, then it was hard for him to justify staying, regardless of how logical Bruce was making it out be.

He had been thinking a lot ever since she had planted a kiss on him at the top of the stairs they now stood at the foot of. Not enough, because of all the pressing matters they had to deal with, but by the time she had turned her face to his chest in the guest room she had called him into, it was clear. He was in love with her. There was no disputing that fact, and that she had a husband and children down at the bottom of the hill couldn't make it change.

It had snuck up on him, sometime during the last eight months that they had shared custody of the Deertail. That was how he thought of it. She was the public face of it, and while Jimmy was the official mind behind the operation, Dale was the one who kept things together. That shared responsibility was how it had started. Now his mind was a churning mass of data, every instance of intimacy unearthing itself: every time their fingers had grazed when he passed her the lunch he brought from the kitchen, each time she had shyly asked him in that soft yet authoritative voice to help her with some task, the heartbreaking smiles she sometimes gave him across the lobby from behind that now-shattered front desk. It was all clear now.

This came in spite of what she knew about him, the thing that no one else did. He hadn't meant to tell her; when he thought about it, it had all been Jimmy's fault. He was the one who had the brilliant to open some of the older wines during their annual fall re-opening party. He and Glenda had found themselves away from the crowds, out on the slope overlooking the parking lot (where Jimmy had rented a small tent to house the food and dining tables). Dale didn't even remember how the tipsy conversation had veered from stereotypical co-worker talk to that of life histories, triumphs and regrets, and he had told her. There had been no preamble, no testing of the waters before jumping into such a subject, it came out as easily as tipping over his half-full chardonnay glass onto the grassy hill. Even after hearing him speak his piece, for her to still feel the way she did about him, seemed just short of miraculous.

He spoke aloud, cutting off Bruce's ongoing monologue about the merits of standing their ground. "Glenda and I are going to get Harmon. We'll take Kerren if she's able to move, load her onto one of the snowmobiles, and find him." It didn't even matter that getting Glenda to her family would carry her further away from his arms. And as much as he longed to feel her weight there, to feel the curls of hair on top of her head grazing his chin, what she needed now took precedence over anything he might want.

He held up his hand in the direction of both Bruce and Manoj. "I know, you both think that there's no point to it, but if we're here for a reason, then Harmon is too, and leaving him out there isn't an option. Maybe when we get to where he is, we'll have a better idea of what's going on in the town."

Manoj spoke up first. "You may be right. We certainly won't learn anything new by staying here."

Bruce's head whipped around toward the programmer, although his tone remained even. "Go out into the elements? With this horned thing on the loose? I don't know if I can get behind that course of action."

Dale's brow furrowed, and he moved toward Glenda where she stood facing the wall. "You don't have to. You're welcome to stay up here as long as you want. But we're going, with as many others would like to come." Glenda started turning back toward him, removing her hand from her eyes, and he hadn't known until that moment how badly he wanted her to do just that. He felt new strength in his body, new surety in his heart.

"Now, let's think this through," Bruce said, stepping toward the center of the group. He looked to Manoj, who had produced the walkie-talkie from the pocket of his bathrobe and was punching the Send button in a seemingly random manner. "Clearly --" here, he almost spoke a name aloud again, but stopped himself. "-- Kerren is in no condition to be moved. Whatever this thing wants, it's obvious that she and I are the ones it's trying to reach."

Still crouching, Sheryl instinctively moved forward to block Kerren from as much of the rest of the room as she could. Bruce continued, undeterred: "I think we should stay here, do what we can to fortify our position. Who knows whether it could bring down another storm on us? Maybe it's the force behind everything that's happened so far!" There was a wildness creeping into his eyes, and the anxiety level in the room was clearly being ratcheted up by it.

"It's something to think about, no?" he was continuing. "It couldn't destroy me with a storm in my dreams, so it tries an avalanche out here? In the real world? But what is this thing? And what does it want with me? I'm not going to sit here and wait for it to come! No, that's exactly what it expects me to do!" He was rocking back and forth now, manically passing his body weight from foot to foot, as if he were about to dash off and hadn't decided which direction yet.

Dale's sense of danger was now beyond flaring up, a burning in his chest something like heartburn. It was an internal signal he had learned to accept without question over the course of his career. He stood next to Glenda, but underneath his uniform his muscles were tensing, ready to react if the author's body started to get as out of control as his mind was. Despite all the evidence that had been presented so far, he had to admit that he didn't believe the confusing combination of dreamscapes, ESP connections, and otherworldly creatures that was being laid out. He needed concrete threats, tangible problems; without these, there was no hope for rational solutions.

Dale knew that the only thing to do with an irrational person like this. He took a step forward, Glenda forced to come with him only because he still had his arm around her shoulders, and Bruce took a reflexive half-step back. The writer's hand ducked briefly behind him, and Dale paused, but then he scratched his hip where his pajama pants had slipped down a little, exposing a little middle-aged love handle there. "Look," Dale said flatly, firmly. "Staying here isn't going to improve our situation. Until I see this *thing* with my own eyes, I'm going to work toward getting out of here. If you have a problem with that, then you're welcome to stay!"

He took another step, hoping to get Bruce to back down mentally by making him do it physically. That wildness didn't leave Bruce's eyes, but he did back up, and his hand went to his hip again... and then it reached beyond. Maybe it was the dim light, maybe it was his imagination, but it almost looked like Bruce was reaching--

Kelly, who had been silent for the last part of the conversation, was rushing forward. Bruce was turned mostly toward Dale, so he was mostly turned away from Kelly. She dashed forward with her hands raised, looking like she was prepared to tackle the man from behind.

A screech rose from her throat, so panicked that Dale wasn't sure he had heard it correctly. All his brain had time to register was "He's got a--!" before his instincts fully took over and everything started happening automatically.

Whitelodge 8.1 & 8.2

-8.1-

Kerren continued to lie still. Her eyes moved incessantly, but she was careful not to move her head. Once in her teenage years, she had awoken in the middle of the night and been inexplicably, stupefyingly dizzy. She could still remember the feeling of that traumatic, dark stumble, down a hall that suddenly seemed to be alive and trying to thwart her attempts to get to her parents' room to plead for help. Now, lying on the couch in the lobby of the Deertail, she worried that the same thing might happen if she were to move too quickly. Sheryl's hand gripping hers helped, but she still was afraid to move.

Her mind felt like a deserted battlefield. There had been feet tramping across it, ground fought for and lost, the interior of her head resembling a large open space. She wasn't thinking any less clearly than since she had fallen -- and it might be the continuing pain shooting through both her legs that was keeping her awareness sharp -- but something had gone on while she wasn't quite present, and she was still trying to figure out what it was.

Meanwhile, there was a lot going on around her. Manoj, Kelly, and Bruce the author (who seemed to have some kind of strange sense of ownership about her) were huddled together on the far side of the lobby, having some kind of intense, half-whispered conversation. Nearer to her, Dale and Glenda had managed to agree on leaving the Lodge, but for different reasons: the security guard seemed intent on getting Glenda home to her family; she still wanted to find Harmon, who had crashed somewhere out in the snow.

Kerren looked back into Sheryl's eyes, a calm place in the chaos that swirled around them all. How? she wondered. How had she ever thought that leaving this safe harbor, this woman who loved her so deeply, could have brought anything other than ruin? She couldn't recall the reasons now. She had cheated, been caught, and had been brought back her wife's grace. There was still tension there, of course, and Kerren understood it was going to take a while to earn back all that trust she had cashed in for one foolhardy spin of the wheel, but as of this trip, she could say that she was more than willing to put in the time.

Being trapped in that choking cocoon under their hotel bed had proved it to her. Even as she had been slipping into unconsciousness, Kerren had never been more sure where her true passions lay, and they were with the woman who now knelt next to her, and would have knelt there for as long as she needed to until Kerren came back from her inner journey.

But where had that been? Kerren had told the truth to those who were present when she awoke... that she had felt Harmon's presence, and it had called her in a particular direction, outside and down the side of the mountain. It was like he had left a trail of mental breadcrumbs, and if she were to concentrate and pick up the signals, she would be able to lead them right to him. If Dale and Glenda were seriously thinking about leaving, she could help them.

That presented a problem, however. Not only was she afraid to move for fear of severe vertigo, but she felt that if she were to try, she might not be able to move at all. That would be worse than just being dizzy. Not only that, but something was telling her -- as clearly as receiving a broadcast from somewhere else (Harmon again?) -- that it would be best for her to remain where she was a little longer. As much as she knew Sheryl wanted her to sit up, and as much as she was longing to put her arms around her wife, Kerren heeded that voice.

Bruce, Kelly, and Manoj were rejoining the group now. "Everyone," Kelly was saying, "Bruce just told me and Manoj something that we think is important." She turned to the writer. "Can you say it again, Bruce, so that we all can know what we're dealing with here?"

Bruce looked like a whipped dog as he stepped forward and drew focus, albeit a dog that still might bite if pressed too hard. "I don't want to assume, but I think you've all realized by now that I'm somewhat known as a writer."

The group nodded its agreement with this fact, and a few smiles were suppressed. Of course they all knew who he was.

"I... I was telling Kelly and Manoj about my writing process, more specifically the dreams I have when I'm deciding what to write next. There's a particular recurring dream I have -- and when I say dream, I'm almost inclined to point out that it's a particularly vivid dream, a vision, one might say... It's of a woman. She meets me in a sylvan glade and gives me ideas, plotlines, sometimes pointing my attention in directions I never would have consciously thought myself. Like one of the fabled Greek muses. For a long time I've taken her assistance for granted. Maybe it's because she never asked for anything in return, and perhaps it's that I could never shake the idea that she was really just a part of my own mind. In any event, she's been gone for a while now, and I actually came to the Deertail hoping what I needed to get her back was a little isolation and relaxation. And in a way, I was right.

"However, it hasn't happened in the way I thought it would. I have seen her, yes, but this time it wasn't in my dreams." As Bruce continued his speech, he slowly started walking in the direction of the couch where Kerren lay. She didn't like that; she felt her body tensing as he came closer. She could tell that Sheryl was feeling it through their clasped hands.

Bruce stopped as he stood beside where Kerren lay. "I'd know that face anywhere. You look just like her, Kerren." Then he just stood there for several seconds, silently regarding her. Was it for dramatic effect, or was he expecting some kind of response from her? If he was, she was unwilling to give him any. She was still afraid to move.

Finally, he broke from her gaze. He spoke to the rest of the group again. "If it were just that one coincidence, I'd have written it off, either as a trick of my own imagination, or some kind of traumatic mental stress after everything that we've been through tonight. But..." Here, he started walking toward the reception desk again, his hand slowly rising from his side, "... I went looking for a first aid kit in Mr. Gough's office, and found that there's a painting on his wall that contains her image as well. Not just her face -- which also happens to be Kerren's face -- but her surroundings too, the way I always saw them, her robes, her garden, even the ring of stones that I was always standing in when I saw her in... my dreams."

A ring of tall stones, each with faintly glowing runes... the idea sparked something in Kerren's mind, a dim recollection that a memory had once existed. The strange thing was that it didn't feel like one of hers.

Glenda spoke in the pause that Bruce gave to his audience. "I've seen it. On his office wall. And now that I think about it, it does look a lot like you, Kerren."

"More than just a lot, to my mind," Bruce said.

"I never really noticed it until I was in there a little while ago, but I think he painted it himself."

A smile spread across Bruce's face. "Yes! This confirms my theory even more, coupled with what my friend Manoj has already guessed at." He nodded toward the computer programmer. Manoj took a half step back, unconsciously refusing to be drawn into these ramblings. "He believes that the avalanche somehow took us out of the world, that we're now in some kind of bubble that exists outside it. And if my vision, Jimmy's painting, and Kerren's corporeal appearance all seem to coincide, doesn't it seem like that should mean something?"

There was less sound in the lobby than there had been at any time since the mountain's rumbling had subsided. Cold, insistent wind could be heard pressing against the outsides of the windows.

"Now I'm thinking that we're all involved in this, in some way," Bruce said quietly. "If the other guests are gone, and we're all that's left, then it must be for a reason. There's some kind of purpose we're all intended to fulfill. We already know what that is for some of us. Others, I'm not yet sure about." He looked around at each of the lobby's inhabitants in turn, and no one seemed to know which group they belonged to.

Kerren was starting to panic. It had been bad enough when the author had claimed that she was some kind of real-world representation of a woman he had repeatedly met in his dreams, but Glenda's corroboration his ravings was almost too much. Her head was swimming, this time not with vertigo, but with too much conflicting information. She was definitely not anyone's muse... this was just a case of mistaken identity...

But didn't she now feel that there was space in her mind for other memories? It had something to do with Harmon. He had somehow entered her mind... but why her? The more she tried to grasp hold of the impression he had left in her brain, the more she realized that she had felt familiar to him, at least at first. There had been a level of recognition as he was slipping between her synapses, but it hadn't lasted. She didn't know what to make of this, or what to make of any of it. Still, it felt truer than she wanted it to. It was like the scattered pieces of a puzzle; she had a sense that they fit together, but she was inexplicably afraid of the completed image they would disclose.

Glenda was the one to ask what they were all thinking. "So what does this mean? Are you saying the rest of us are here to fulfill some kind of purpose that only benefits you?" Her jaw was set tightly as she spoke. Dale's arm held her securely to his side.

"I don't know," Bruce answered, shrugging innocently. "But there is one detail I've left out... The last night I saw my muse, there was a terrible storm in my dreams." His eyes drifted into the distance as he spoke of it. "It was terrible... the wind and the thunder. It felt like the whole dreamworld was being torn apart, like the end of all things. I tried to reach out for her, to either her pull her into the ring of Sounding Stones, or to pull myself out of it, I couldn't tell and didn't care. But like always, she was too far away for me to reach. Forever just beyond my fingertips... And then the storm grew stronger..." Kerren had known he would say this, and she found she knew what was coming next. Then I felt a presence behind me...

"Then I felt a presence behind me... Something that had invaded our secret place, something that did not belong in this or any sane world. I don't know what had summoned it, or how I could get rid of it. I only knew that it had been on its way for a long time, and that its arrival would signal an enormous change for both of us. Then I saw the shadow of its antlers falling across her face, as it emerged from the storm that was its shroud, lightning flashing like explosions..."

Kerren could feel Sheryl's hands starting to shake around her own. She looked into her wife's eyes, and had never seen such abject terror in them before. Her head turned toward Bruce, still lost in his verbal reverie, but she did it slowly, as if afraid of what she would see when she faced him. She made to open her mouth, and now Kerren was the one who was afraid.

-8.2-

Sheryl had only been half-listening to Bruce's rambling, overwrought tale about his dreams, until he openly recognized her wife as the recurring star of them. She tried not to show her shock, both then and when Glenda seemed to corroborate the evidence of the painting in the director's office. The idea of it was all too abstract, too hard to accept.

Kerren, in stark contrast, was real. Among all the mentally and physically numbing things that had happened in the last few hours (had it only been that long?), Kerren had been taken away from her twice, once physically and once mentally. The fact that she had been given back both times gave Sheryl the only tangible hope she was managing to hold onto, the one thing she could truly feel. The way her and Kerren's hands clasped together -- and she felt that neither one of them was holding on more tightly than the other -- acted like a grounding tether. This unity was what she had wanted to feel with Kerren all these past, tenuous months, and its return threw into relief how badly she had been feeling without it. It was exactly what she had been searching for through all the uncomfortable, silent evenings, and nights of restless sleep and vaguely threatening dreams.

They were together now, in every sense that mattered. But Bruce's monologue impinged on that, made jealous hackles rise on Sheryl's skin... that was, until he mentioned the antlers. She knew immediately what he was talking about, and was powerless but to say what she knew.

"I saw it!" she blurted, interrupting Bruce's continuing florid description of his dreamstorm. "Upstairs! While Dale and I were getting clothes out of the closet!" If her hands hadn't been held so tightly by Kerren, she would have slapped them over her mouth in an attempt to call her words back. No, her mind was telling her even as she spoke; no, you didn't see that, it was just the way the flashlight was swinging around.

"You... saw it?" Bruce had frozen in mid-gesture, about to lift his splayed hands to his forehead to exactly portray the creature he was describing. "Actually saw it?"

Sheryl's brow furrowed. "I don't... know." She shook her head a little, acknowledging that now she had started, the best thing to do was neither to embellish or downplay, but to say exactly what she had seen. "It was pushing against the back of the closet, like it was trying to break through. It couldn't, but I could see how it bent the wood forward."

Bruce's voice was distant, flat. "Did you see its face?"

"No," Sheryl said. "Just its shape. Its antlers were so close to breaking through they were actually catching on the hangers..."

Dale spoke up. "I was right there with you, ma'am, and didn't see anything like that." His tone was as professional as always.

Bruce turned to the security guard. "I realize I was in that room before, but please refresh my memory. I was focusing on other things." He gestured again to Kerren, reminding everyone that he had been the one to pull her out from under the bed. "That closet is on your left as you enter the room, correct?"

Dale nodded. "That's right. We pulled out as many clothes as we could carry." He gestured to the pile of clothes spread out by the main stairs, where Sheryl had unceremoniously tossed them over the railing when she had been informed that Kerren was awake.

Bruce's hand slid across his scraggly chin as he thought this over. "That's on the same side as the hallway that leads to my room. Or led, I should say, since it has collapsed. Right next to it, in fact."

Dale furrowed his brow a little as he said, "That's the hall you said you came down, though I honestly don't see how you made it through. I checked it. The passage is entirely blocked."

Bruce nodded and wagged a professorial finger at him. "Yes, but you see, I did come through it. And that... thing... almost did as well. We came from the same direction, like it's trying to follow me. I ended up emerging into an open passage, but it ran into the back of a closet, merely twenty feet away from where I was. It was stopped... perhaps only for the time being, until it finds a way around."

Sheryl couldn't take it anymore. "None of this makes any sense! You think that horned thing is trying to get you?"

Bruce shrugged. "I do not know its motive. I only know that it first arrived with my dream-storm, and that it was trying to follow the same path into this world that I did. Fortunately, it seems to have missed."

Glenda spoke softly from next to Dale. "The suite Mr. Casey was in really is down at the far end of that hall. The one that collapsed."

A long silence followed. For some it was a silence of disbelief, others began to wonder if so many coincidental things could be added together, no matter how ludicrous the sum.

Kelly was the next to speak. Her words came slowly, tentatively, like a skater taking her first steps out onto an icy pond that she hopes is solid enough to hold her. "This storm in your dreams... did you wake up from it before or after the avalanche?"

Bruce smiled at her, cocking an eyebrow in a roguish way that Sheryl immediately recognized as a go-to move he often employed in his dust jacket photos. "Ah. Here's the crux of matter, Miss Kelly. The last experience I had in my dreamworld was four months ago, the night of that storm. And my writing dried up immediately." He snapped his fingers for dramatic effect. "I suppose I didn't realize how reliant I was on... " he caught himself, as if he were about to say a familiar name, "... on my muse until I had to go without her, cold turkey. I've been trying to find my way back into that garden ever since. Not all of my attempts have been actions I've been proud of. I actually came here this weekend in the hope that unplugging from the sordid world and all its distractions would be the thing to finally bridge that old connection." His gaze drifted up the stairs, toward the blocked hallway he claimed to have come down. "And perhaps it was."

Manoj said, almost to himself but heard by everyone, "Or perhaps the something that broke your dreamworld in the first place has come looking for you."

Bruce nodded, looking out the half-covered front windows of the lobby, out into the blowing snow, and repeated, "Perhaps."

Sheryl shivered, vividly recalling the way she had experienced her own small, terrifying part of the writer's vision, which was quickly proving not to be a vision at all. And how did Kerren fit into this? Her wife -- or someone looking like her -- had appeared in at least two other people's minds, Bruce and Mr. Gough, the lodge director. Sheryl's lips pressed into a thin line. She had already experienced what it was like sharing Kerren with others, and she wasn't about to let it start happening again. That it was against both her and her wife's wills this time didn't make the jealousy any less cutting.

"Kerren isn't the muse you've been looking for, though," Sheryl said, looking Bruce directly in the eye. "You know that, don't you?"

Bruce took a long look at the woman lying on the couch before answering. "Yes. At least, not directly. But the resemblance is so uncanny that I think there's got to be a connection. My guess is that there's a similar meaning for each of us, some reason why we've been detained here."

More uncomfortable silence followed, and Bruce seemed fine with just letting it unspool in the cold dimness of the lobby. Sheryl had to ask herself if she really believed that she and Kerren -- and Glenda and Harmon and all the rest -- were really being put through this just so that an already world-famous writer could crank out yet another bestseller.

Bruce lifted a finger in Manoj's direction. "Our friend here has a theory. Maybe he'd like to fill us all in on it, as he just told it to myself and Kelly." Manoj almost sneered at Bruce. He had clearly called the two of them away from the rest of the group for a reason. But Bruce seemed to think that laying out all the cards was the best way to go about this, and he might have been right. That was a writer's job, wasn't it? To take all the scattered nonsense of life and shape it into the something meaningful?

Bruce began urging Manoj. "Come on, then. We're in this together, you all but said it yourself. As a group, we should be privy to your thoughts, just as you are now privy to mine. After all, Sheryl might not have admitted experiencing her vision of the horned menace if I hadn't told you about my inner life."

Sheryl winced, wishing she hadn't done that. Then they all might have been able to retreat back into the safety of self-delusion, that blissful state of not-knowing. But there was no going back; the worm can had been opened. Manoj stepped forward.