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.
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