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.
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