Whitelodge 9.3 & 9.4

-9.3-

It took about thirty seconds before the women could collectively regain their composure. Manoj knew that he looked absolutely ridiculous in Sheryl's ski wardrobe, but he had long learned that turning into emotional skids, rather than trying to protect his ego, was often the best way to go. It was certainly proving the case tonight. They had to find a way to get them all out into the elements and ferry Kerren to safety, as quickly as possible. If had to make a fool of himself in order to get that to happen, then so be it. It was what they needed to refocus on their situation.

It seemed to work; once they had finished laughing at his ill-proportioned women's clothes and faux-model posing, they got back to the business at hand. The women hurriedly gathered up the rest of the clothes and put them on. Fortunately, his body type was the most dissimilar of the group, and the process went smoothly. For his part, Manoj started to pick out an assortment of jackets and coats that could be laid across Kerren, since it would be not only painful but nearly impossible to slide any kind of leg coverings on her.

Sheryl seemed to notice what he was doing, and came over to him. "You don't need to find much for her; I've got an idea. Would you come over here with me?"

Manoj followed her, and she headed directly for the front desk he had recently hidden behind to change. She seemed to have a clarity of purpose now, one that had been entirely absent before. It was nice to see. He had been worried that he and Kelly were going to have to share the responsibility of figuring out how to get Kerren anywhere other than where she was.

Sheryl stood before the desk, appraising its jagged edges, especially the place where Kelly had pulled off the long piece that had been converted to splints for Kerren's legs. "What we need..." she said, almost to herself, "... is a piece long enough for her to lie on..."

Manoj had no problem in suggesting possible issues with proposed solutions. "Even if we find one, it's not going to be wide enough for her to lie across."

Sheryl took the criticism in stride. "That's what the rug is going to be for." He didn't know what she was thinking of, but she seemed to be working it out as she spoke, and so he let her. He stood still, giving her space to circle around the front desk in silence. When she had made a full circuit, she gestured to the topmost part of the desk, where most travelers would rest their elbows when speaking to Glenda during check-in.

"That's what we need," she said, and Manoj nodded in approval.

Once the decision had been made, Sheryl's plan came together quickly. She, Manoj, and Kelly managed to work together to rock a long, thick plank off the top of the desk, which they then laid across the seats of a pair of the lobby chairs. Then came the hard part; transferring Kerren so she lay across the board as it was suspended two feet off the floor. Kelly had the idea to ease her over while atop the sofa cushions she was already lying on; Kerren gritted her teeth and cried out just once, when they had to slide the cushions out from under her legs so she was lying directly on the board. Other than that, she complied totally. She was just as aware as anyone how pressing the idea of leaving the Deertail lobby was.

The second part of Sheryl's plan took care of both stabilizing Kerren and covering her from the elements; one of the smaller lobby rugs could be wrapped around Kerren multiple times, cocooning her and her supporting board together, while leaving the plank sticking out, both above Kerren's head and below her feet, so she could be carried like a stretcher.

The wrapping process was, at least, less painful for Kerren. She closed her eyes, furrowed her brow, and remained all but silent through the process. By the time she was fully secured, the other three were all starting to sweat under their ski clothes, and actually kind of looking forward to moving out into the cooler air.

"Ready?" Sheryl asked her wife, leaning down to kiss her forehead, and Kerren nodded in return. "Don't worry," Sheryl said. "We'll be so careful. Right?" she asked Kelly and Manoj, who answered affirmatively. They didn't seem to need to speak, in that strange connectivity that groups intensely focused on a shared activity tend to have -- Manoj had been a part of it many times, when programmers put their heads together to tackle a thorny bit of coding. He imagined that Kelly saw it in group sports as well; the physically strongest of the group, she instinctively moved up to Kerren's head and prepared to take the lead.

It was going to take two people to get each end of Kerren's board up and into carrying position, so Sheryl helped Kelly get Kerren's head lifted off the chair, and saw the athlete positioned so that she would be facing forward as they proceeded. Manoj had already established that it didn't work for the lead person to walk backward over the window threshold, certainly not the entire way to the equipment shed. Sheryl made sure Kelly's grip was secure before running around to help Manoj gently hoist Kerren's legs up as well.

For a moment, they just stood there, unsure that this was going to work. If any one of them stumbled, the whole contraption was going to fall disastrously, but at least the board didn't seem like it was going to break under the combined weight of Kerren and her rug/shroud, nor was she going to roll off without some kind of major disturbance.

They continued their silence as they steadied themselves, ready to venture out over the jagged bottom edge of the broken lobby window. Kelly took the first step, and the others moved in tandem, ferrying Kerren toward the edge of their shelter. Manoj watched the way Kelly's hands tightened around the end of the board as she stepped up and over the windowsill, with hardly a bump in Kerren's makeshift pallet.

Manoj's ill-fitting women's boots did a good job of keeping out the chill, at least while he was stepping through the randomly piled slush that had flowed in since the window had been broken. Enough had fallen into the lobby to create a slope up to the level of the snow outside, and the incoming fan of snow across the floor had been slowly melting this whole time.

The four of them quickly started heading on an upward angle that increased to just a little past comfortable as soon as they got outside. They slowed a little, partly because they were still testing their footing on the slope, and because they didn't want to get out of sync, because that would be the easiest way to spill Kerren's makeshift travois face-down onto the snow.

Sheryl had the foresight of pulling one of her wooly hats down over Kerren's head before they walked out, and it proved a good idea; powdery snow was swirling around them as they rose up to a height of about twelve feet above the floor of the lobby they had just left. Manoj felt Kelly's feet falter only once, when her head finally cleared the top of the thick snow blanket, and when he did the same, he understood why.

The slope of the mountain spread down and away from them in an immediate panorama that was expansive enough to startle. The view was very similar to that he had seen from the second-floor guest room -- he was very close to that same elevation now -- but it was so much sharper and clearer when not seen through glass. The snow stopped blowing across them, as well. There was wind, but there was nothing to keep it from just flowing like water around all obstacles, imparting to the air a clarity that made even the town far below seem close and toy-like, though still unmoving.

The moon, almost directly overhead, cast a constant flash-bulb shadow of whatever shapes managed to stick up from the frozen onslaught that fell across everything. They all kept their feet moving, and he heard Sheryl gasp as she looked up from her wife and beheld the vista that had unfolded before them. There was absolute silence here, away from the sharp angles of the building they had come from, which could have been the sole cause of the strange sounds they had heard while still inside. Out here, there was no such unnatural resistance to the flow of air down the altered sides of the mountain, and the result was visual and aural serenity.

If only they had a chance to enjoy it. After being in the unheated lobby, the group had no residual body warmth to protect them for even a minute of exposure of the chill, even though the wind was nowhere near as strong as they anticipated. They had to get around to the side of the lodge, hopefully before Dale and Glenda got any of the snowmobiles up and running. It would certainly be easier to pool their rescue efforts and get both injured parties down the mountain together.

Even while thinking this, Manoj held no ill will against Dale for leaving without them. Glenda's situation was certainly more perilous, and he had looked in the security guard's eyes as he walked out of the lobby, Glenda draped across his strong arms. He had clearly been in his version of panic mode, his mind ceasing to function except for the imperative of getting the woman he loved to a safe place. He didn't know if he'd ever felt such a powerful version of the emotion, but he certainly could understand it.

Kelly wasn't turning her head back to look at him as they carried Kerren's stretcher, and this made him strangely proud. She wasn't checking on him, or seemed at all unsure that he couldn't keep up. This had been his underlying fear all through their relationship, that he wouldn't be able to keep up with her. But now that it was necessary, he was holding his own. It was her that needed a little reassurance from him. Maybe he was deserving of a woman such as her, after all.

The trio trudged along, following Dale's heavy footprints in the snow, surprised at how their group confidence was growing with each step out into the elements. Things were strangely tranquil here, as if the world had stopped in the aftermath of the avalanche. And, if Manoj's theory proved to be correct, perhaps it had. Thinking this, he looked down toward the frozen town, wondering if it really were just a mirage, a visual echo of some sort.

But then he spotted one thing that was moving. It was small, still far off along the devastated tree line, but once or twice every second it would eclipse the whiteness that lay partially over everything. All he could determine was that it was dark, a stark contrast to the lightness of the rest of the scene, and that it was bounding quickly through the snow, heading their direction.

It had two legs, and moved upright, like a person, but Manoj's dawning realization was that it wasn't.

-9.4-

Dale's arms were warm, the perfect balance between the air (too cold) and her body (too hot). They buoyed her up like tropical ocean waves, or at least what Glenda imagined tropical ocean waves must feel like. She'd never been south of Texas, and some part of her distant mind felt like she should be regretting that.

They moved along the thin border between the white below them and the black above. There was a bright -- too bright -- spot of white in the black overhead, just like there were black things in the whiteness underneath. What was that Eastern symbol that did that? Black with a spot of white, white with a spot of black? It was supposed to symbolized how everything came in pairs, and in every single thing there was a bit of its opposite.

That made her think of Dale again. He was strong, his skin dark, carrying the weak one with pale skin, across the divided/united landscape. Duality within duality. Wow. Where did that thought came from? Glenda had never thought she would start thinking so philosophically with five inches of steel stuck in her upper chest.

That was where the heat seemed to be coming from. It was spreading through her body, radiating from that spot in movements that sometimes felt like waves of rich syrup, and sometimes like pointed, probing fingers. The feeling wasn't supposed to be there, and her body knew this. It was rebelling, waging a little war against the metallic invader, and she thought this internal battle was causing the worst of the heat.

Dale was talking to her as he brought his feet down over and over again into the snow, moving them a little forward each time. Everyone should have a Dale, a warm protector to carry her wherever they needed to go. Even Dale himself should have one. She wished that one day she would get the chance to be that for him.

Glenda was only slightly aware that she was dying. It was part of the rebellion of her body (a unit in which her mind was definitely included), shielding itself from the truth. Sometimes lies were just as important. She was thinking about philosophy and half-drunk musings about how the world should be, instead of how it actually was. But she had lost a lot of blood, and some nearly-vacant corner of her wished she knew more about how much a person could afford to lose.

Dale kept moving his feet toward the side of the building, first one then the other. He was almost lulling her to sleep with the side-to-side rocking and his voice; he was speaking to her almost subconsciously, his voice as methodical as his steps, first one word then the other...

"Gonna get you to the shed with the snowmobiles, honey, hopefully you can sit upright enough that I can steer us down the hill, that's what we're going to do... Those things are so noisy but that would sound so good right now, can't hear anything out here except for that ringing your ears get in them when there's nothing else to listen to, I heard once that's the actual sound of the electric circuits in your brain running, they're there all the time but you can't hear them until it gets so so quiet like this... Glenda, I wish I would have kissed you back, I was just so surprised, I mean I knew there was something between us but I didn't know you'd pick that moment to jump me, and don't get me wrong, I'm all about you jumping me, but I was thinking about something else, on any other night you're pretty much all I think about... Honestly, I thought maybe you never would want me, not after... that night I told you about. I was just a kid, you know? And my dad... he was so drunk. He shouldn't have gotten either of us into the car. That's something else I wish I had done differently. After the crash, I should've... I should've helped him. Instead of just sitting there after I was thrown clear. He at least did that much for me, not making sure I was belted in right. How crazy is that? He hits a tree, trapped in the wreck, can't open the doors, burns up right there, and I'm thrown clear with hardly a scratch. I should have helped, I know. But I was so scared and angry at him... an attitude I supposed I inherited from him. So ironic that I just stood there, and I know he saw me there, watching me watching him die. God..."

Dale fell silent for a long time after that. Of course, this was the story that Glenda had heard before. He had confessed it to her at that opening-day party. He was right in his suspicions that it had changed the way she felt about him, but wrong about the way in which it had. It had shown a side of him she had never seen or even suspected before then, seeing a whole man where before he had been mostly the function he served at the Lodge. But here was a man who had pain in his past, who carried it with him wherever he went.

On any night before this one, if Glenda had been asked where those feelings had come from, she would have answered incorrectly. She would have said that seeing this large, powerful man choose to be vulnerable in front her (even if it had taken several glasses of wine to get there) threw her natural, nurturing instincts into overdrive. She was a mother to young boys, so of course the story of something Dale went through when he was young would resonate with her mothering instincts. However, this heat under her skin, spreading out from the knife in her chest until it felt like it was going to make her brain burn, was making her see things more clearly, seeing reasons not only deeper than the surface, but even deeper than the ones she thought were the deepest. Just as she could now observed the individual beams of moonlight as they streamed across the two of them trudging through the snow, even more complexity was being revealed.

She loved Dale not just for the pain he had been through and her own most basic tendencies, but for what he had done since then. She had never made the connections before, but it was plain as day in her last few moments of consciousness. Ever since that terrible night his father had died, Dale had never once turned away from helping people. Even when the noise and horror of the world became too much and he ran away to work in a high, mostly quiet place where the number of life's variables had been whittled down as much as they could be, he was still helping people. He was unable to do otherwise.

If she had the strength, she would have started crying with the painful gorgeousness of that realization. Instead, she just continued to look up at him, witnessing every moment of his life etched in his face, limned in moonlight. Even when she felt their forward momentum toward salvation stop, and that steadfast expression change into one of horror, he was still beautiful.

He uttered one more thing, little more than a breath exhaled, that fell across Glenda's face with a puff of warmth that defied the despair in it: "It's gone... smashed." She didn't know what he was referring to, and found she didn't care. She just wanted to stay there, warm in Dale’s arms, forever.

Whitelodge 9.1 & 9.2

-9.1-

Sheryl had no idea what had happened. Dale and Bruce had been arguing, and she had looked down momentarily at Kerren because their hands, clasped together almost since her wife had regained consciousness, were trembling. By the time Sheryl looked up again, everyone had changed places and Glenda had been stabbed, Dale slowly lowering her to the floor. No one had even thought to scream.

Despite everyone's best efforts, Bruce had run up the stairs, trailing blood of his own. Dale had then thrown a chair through the front window and carried Glenda out into the white/dark night. That left the remaining four of them, herself, Kerren, Manoj and Kelly, standing there, wondering what to do next. For a long moment, they just listened to the sound of Bruce stumbling up somewhere down the upper corridor. It wasn't until later that they realized that none of them had noted which way he had run: back down the half-ruined wing where his room used to be -- and the last place the horned thing had been seen -- or the opposite way. It would have been a valuable piece of information to have, to know whether the author was running toward his nemesis, or away from it.

At that moment, however, the group's own well-being was the most important thing. Kelly broke the silence, by saying, "Do you guys think we can use this couch to get Kerren out of here?" She spoke insistently but quietly, but who or what she was afraid of being overheard by, none of them could tell.

"I think so," Manoj said, visually appraising it. "But where would we take it to?"

Sheryl spoke, nodding to the broken window. "After them. Wasn't Dale talking about snowmobiles in a shed or something?"

"Right... but how will we get Kerren on one?" Kelly asked.

Kerren, in a voice whispery and barely audible above the new volume of the blowing wind, "I think I can get up."

Kelly smiled at her, wistful. "Oh honey, I don't think you can. You've got multiple fractures in both legs. You're going to have to let us carry you for a while."

"But we can't stay in here, not with *him* running around!" Sheryl let go of Kerren's hands long enough to thrust an accusing finger up the blood-spattered stairway.

Manoj was over by the side of the couch, looking behind it and pressing his hands against it, trying to gauge its weight without actually jostling it. "That's true, but once we're outside, we're committed to leaving. We don't even know if that's possible yet."

Sheryl's rational mind rebelled against this thought. She had seen the horned thing, of course, but accepting that she couldn't get away from this place was a step too far for her. "If it's a choice between staying in here with that thing or going with Dale and Glenda, then we're going!"

Manoj continued to check the couch, nodding at Sheryl's shout of protest, as if it were just more information to add to everything else that was going on. "I'm not sure if we can move this. It's old and pretty solid. Can we give it a try?" He looked to them expectantly. Sheryl's heart melted a little when she saw how quickly Kelly leaped to help. She also noticed that there was a streak of blood down the front of Kelly's bathrobe, but it was so light and spotty that it couldn't have been hers.

Sheryl got to her feet, shaking the minor pins and needles from her legs, which she had gotten from kneeling for so long in the cold. She moved to the end closest to Kerren's feet, mostly because she wanted to be able to watch Kerren as they attempted the move. Kelly stood right next to her, with Manoj taking the end closer to Kerren's head. He would also have the disadvantage of walking backward.

"Ready, baby?" Sheryl asked Kerren, and was answered by a terse nod. Her wife's hands clutched the back of the sofa and the edge of the cushion for purchase.

"On three," Manoj said, and Kelly's feet spread apart in a professional stance. "One, two, three."

They all lifted at once, and the sofa began to rise. It rocked a little, stabilized. "Now, let's take a few steps toward the window," Manoj said. "Slowly."

The couch, bobbing as if it were floating on a pond, began to move toward the window. Manoj craned his head back over of his shoulder, then turned back to the women at the other end of the sofa. "Wait, wait," he said, and moved to set his end down. Kelly and Sheryl followed suit. They had only traveled three or four feet farther along the wall. Kerren looked from one of them to the other, bewildered.

"It's not going to work," Manoj said, surveying the entire scene and not speaking to anyone in particular. "I can't back up over that windowsill. Even if we were able to clear the broken glass from it, it's still too high and too wide for us to lift the couch. Plus, Kelly and I still don't have proper shoes."

Sheryl had totally forgotten about that. Manoj was still wearing his flimsy hotel slippers; Kelly had left hers behind entirely. Kelly spoke up quickly. "I don't care about that, Noj. It can't be that far to the shed Dale's heading for."

"And after that?" Manoj asked. "How long are we going to have to be out there?"

Kelly thought for a moment, then growled in frustration. "Well, we can't stay here, so how are we going to get Kerren out?"

Sheryl looked down at her wife lying there, injured, nearly mute and immobile. She thought back over the events of the night, and was surprised to find that she had hardly done anything to help her. Ever since Sheryl had slit open the sheets that she had been trapped in -- and she hadn't even been the one that finally set her free from that situation -- she had only followed along, as Bruce carried Kerren down the stairs, Dale as he escorted her back to look for clothes, everyone else as they discussed what to do next...

Kerren was lying across the couch, looking to her for help, and Sheryl realized that their places had somehow reversed. She had always been the one chasing Kerren, trying to keep her near. Now, she could see in Kerren's eyes the same please don't leave me here that had gone around with the whole time she knew Kerren was seeing someone else.

Until now, Sheryl had always thought that if she ever saw that expression on Kerren's face, she would enjoy it. Of course, he didn't wish for it, but if Kerren could just know a little bit of that helplessness that Sheryl had felt for so long, at least then they might have some kind of mutual understanding. But now she was really seeing it, Sheryl found she didn't like it at all. Kerren needed a hero, and all Sheryl felt was guilt that she wasn't rising to the occasion.

So she would do it. No more following behind the bold, wringing her hands and looking for a "right time" to step in. This was her chance to prove herself. "Hold on," she said, and then ran to the piles of clothes she had tossed over the banister. She thought about bending over to sort through them, but then decided to kick them about, spreading out the various piles until she found the things she was looking for.

Manoj and Kelly could have been standing behind her, watching her leap around like a kid playing in a pile of raked leaves, for all she cared. Seconds were important. They had no idea what Bruce was doing upstairs, and he could decide to come back down at any time. The only plus was that he was now unarmed. This made her think of Glenda, and made her work even faster.

She found the boots first. They were ones she had purposely bought for the trip, overlarge to make sure she had room for multiple pairs of socks inside. She grabbed them and threw them back in Manoj's direction. She went back for more, grabbing articles as she saw them, for the first time seeing them as purely functional items, instead of wondering how she would look inside them, or whether they lived up to her current sense of fashion.

Every time she found something useful, she tossed 1them back toward the small group. By the time she figured she was done, she thought she should have enough accumulated fabric to cover everyone adequately. It was strangely thrilling, taking such strong action to get her wife to a safer, warmer place, even if it was only the first of what would be many steps.

When she turned back, her blood pounding in her ears and an inexplicable smile on her face, she found herself looking at three immobile pairs of eyes. She waved her hands at the debris field of clothing she had just hurled at them. "Get dressed!" she said. "We're running out of time!" She didn't know exactly what aspect of their situation she was referring to, but it felt good to say.

After trading a glance with each other, Kelly and Manoj moved forward, scooping up pieces of clothing and trying to figure out how they were going to wear them. It was easier for Kelly, but for a man to try to put on women's ski clothing was going to be tricky. Also, there was the fact -- and Sheryl had noticed this long before now -- that the two of them were naked under their robes. In order to get dressed, they had to take those robes off entirely. Kelly didn't seem embarrassed at all, fully exposing herself before stepping into some of the ski pants. Sheryl made a pointed effort to avert her eyes.

Manoj, ironically, took his selections and moved behind the broken front desk before disrobing to put anything on. It made Sheryl smirk, noting that he was doing this in a room that contained no one but his current girlfriend and pair of married lesbians. When he stepped back out again, looking uncomfortably stuffed into clothes that Sheryl had chosen in hopeful preparation for this weekend -- (perhaps literally) another world ago and away -- she couldn't help but snicker.

He had put on purple snow pants, a thermal undershirt that was being stretched within an inch of its life, and a diamond-pattern jacket that could only be pulled tightly enough to cover just past his elbows and wouldn't entirely close over his chest. Manoj, aware of his ridiculous look and turning into the skid, pivoted and shot out his hip like a model. "What do you think?" he asked.

All three women, despite everything else that had happened to them that night, began to laugh. They didn't stop until Sheryl and Karen were clutching their sides, and Kerren had put her hands over her face in an effort to hold her aching body still.

-9.2-

It was up here, somewhere. Bruce hadn't hesitated as he hit the top of the main staircase, and turned left, heading back toward the ruined hallway where his room had once stood. It was a long, dark expanse between him and the end of the hall, but he didn't care. If he kept moving, he thought, he could outrun it. The only thing that was following him right now was the excruciating, fiery pain in his lower back. He could tell that no nerves or important muscles had been severed, but the cut felt so deep that he imagined some more intangible part of himself had been severed, perhaps a tail he'd never known he had.

As he took time to think about it, hurtling over familiarly uneven parts of the hallway, he considered that maybe he should be heading the other way, if he really were trying to avoid the thing that had followed him into this world (or, perhaps, they had chased each into a world completely alien to them both). So was he the pursuer, or the pursued? He didn't know, but he was incapable of just staying still and waiting for it. He had to *move*.

On a deep level, he knew what the thing was. He had created it, after all. Or, to be more specific, Theda had. It had been she who had given him the idea, wasn't it? That had been back in the heady days of productivity, when he woke from every night's slumber with a head so full of ideas that he sometimes took until lunch just to set them all down on paper. He had felt invincible back then, and why not? He was a writer, with enough stories to chase down until the end of time. He would live forever, he thought in those near-druglike fugue states, simply because he had too many things to write.

But it had all dried up, eventually. Not enough of the ideas Theda gave him during the nights survived the light of day. It was discouraging, yes, but after a while he began to see the results of the diminishing payoffs he saw. There was a power lurking behind the stories he wrote, and even as Theda began to withdraw from him, they continued. The strongest one had been the night after the movie premiere...

It was the first time one of his books had been translated into film, and perhaps if it hadn't been such a success he might not have realized how a story can take on -- it was such a cliché to say, though -- a life of its own. But somehow, that first foray into the visual medium clicked. It was a feeling he had noticed in the theater, sitting in the back and watching the audience become rapt with the experience.

He couldn't say whether what resonated with them was the story itself, the way it had been directed, or the way the screenwriter had deeply understood Bruce's source material, quoting lengthy dialogue from the book with a skillful sense of when it would best suit the cinematic vision. It could have been all these things combined that wove such a potent spell. Regardless of the reason, when the lights came up, and the standing ovation was over, there was an energy in the room that Bruce had never felt before. As much as he wanted to write it off as usual communal experience, it seemed to extend farther than that.

The feeling continued at the afterparty. Just as Bruce had convinced himself that what he was experiencing was the heady mix of pride and ego that any author would feel after seeing his ideas so richly and faithfully imagined, the film's editor pulled him aside. "This *never* happens!" she said excitedly.

"What doesn't?" Bruce asked, back in those days entirely innocent of the bizarre machinations of Hollywood.

"Listen to them!" she said, throwing her hand -- which held her martini, spilling half of it over onto the floor -- in an expansive gesture that encompassed the entire room.

Bruce tried to parse out what was special about all the conversation swirling around them. "I don't know," he finally said, shrugging. "They're just talking about the movie, aren't they?"

The editor beamed at him. "That's the thing!" she gushed. "They're talking about the movie!" She moved in closer to him, so much so that he could smell all of the drinks she'd already imbibed that evening. She was an industry veteran, nearly twenty years his senior, but she was now so close that Bruce tangentially wondered how hard it would be to finish this evening in her bed. "This never happens!"

Bruce mentally shook his head, trying to understand. "What doesn't happen?"

"Listen," she said, leaning even closer and speaking so loudly that there was no way should could have meant to be conspiratorial, "I've come to dozens of these things before. And it took me about three of them to realize that they're never actually about the movie everyone's just seen. It's all about the schmoozing and the boozing and playing the angles to get their next job. It's the one thing that everyone here actually has in common... now that This Thing is done, everyone already has to be thinking about the Next Thing. The last thing on their minds is the movie they just walked out of. But listen!"

She fell quiet again, and this time Bruce could pick up bits of the conversation around them. Here, someone was extolling the film's performances; there, he fell into a diatribe the director's exquisite use of angles; wasn't the dialogue just so snappy; no, not just snappy but *whip-smart*; the onscreen world just felt so inhabitable; was it too out of line to talk Oscars so early in the year?

She was right. They were both right, he would come to find out; such after-party topics of conversation were totally outside the norm, and he did go home with her that night. He actually lay awake a long time in her middle-aged insomniac's apartment after she had fallen asleep, thinking about it all. He should have been able to sleep peacefully, content with all his jobs well done, if it hadn't been for one incident, which came while they were outside the afterparty's restaurant, caught together on a silent street between pockets of debauchery.

She had downed three more drinks by this point, but was holding her own and not taking "maybe I should go" for an answer. They had been standing at the curb, waiting for the valet. She had been sloppily flipping through a dozen manners of social media, trying to glean what the buzz from the screening was. Bruce, who never thought of the phone in his pocket although he was never without one, had stepped a little away from her because she was also puffing on a cigarette. The prospect of tasting smoke for the remainder of the evening didn't particularly enthrall him, and so he had moved a little away to prepare himself.

Out of the sonic rumble of the party, he could appreciate the Californian night. It must have rained at some point while they had been inside; the asphalt of the road had that just-wetted gleam that it only has in the movies, reflecting the street lights as colored bars extending away into the starless night. A sound slightly behind him caught his attention, and when he turned to find its source, was pleasantly surprised.

Victor Richardson, one of the movie's stars, was standing a little ways down a side alley, turned his way. The strangest part was that Victor was dressed as his character from the movie, down to the futuristically-piped trenchcoat and trilby. Bruce was a little shocked; had the stars from the film made an in-costume appearance during that party, and he had missed it?

Victor looked out of the alley, right at Bruce. The actor had apparently taken the time to grow the three days of perpetual beard stubble that his character maintained in the film, too. Bruce was about to say something to him, when Victor gave his character's traditional gesture of running three fingers along the brim of his hat and turned, his trenchcoat flying out in a convenient gust of wind as he disappeared down the alley, which looked like one of the dressed sets from the movie too, down to the sprays of steam that hissed out of random places along its length.

Bruce stood there, puzzled. He turned to look back at the film editor, saw she was still hunching over her phone, her face bottom-lit by its cadaverous glow. He turned back for one more glimpse of Victor's disappearing back, but the alley was empty. Now that he thought about it, it didn't look much like an alley set anymore, either. And the pavement had dried.

"I didn't know the actors were going to be here," he said to her.

Without looking up, she laughed a little. "What's that? The actors aren't here tonight."

"I just saw--" Bruce started, but she interrupted him by holding up her phone.

"See?" she said, using her thumb to scroll along a long list of congratulatory posts from various members of the cast (including Victor), all hashtagged to denote the con they were all currently attending, over six hundred miles away.

Bruce frowned. Taking a moment to tally up how many drinks he had downed that evening, he decided that it was just the right amount to allow him to both hallucinate a little, and to not question his judgment when spending the impending night with the editor.

Now, running down a hall that reminded him a little of that temporarily transmogrified alley, he remembered that was the first time he had gotten a glimpse of what combined human consciousness could do, and wondered if this night was more of the same.

But it if was, why had it happened here, at the Deertail Lodge, with these particular people?

Whitelodge 8.9 & 8.10

-8.9-

For a long moment, Benny and Carlos stood there, surveying the lobby, so familiar, but with parts rearranged, clothes strewn across the floor, an unsettling volume of spattered blood. They had not quite come out from underneath the overhanging second floor yet -- and it was only going to be a matter of moments before Benny's strength would totally fail and he would go sprawling across the floor, causing even more damage to himself -- but the violence of the occurrence couldn't be missed, even at this distance.

Carlos's mind instinctively tried to piece it all together... someone had been traumatically injured near the foot of the stairs and fallen, and then either gotten up or had been picked up and had been carried -- still trailing blood, but otherwise in a situation very similar to his and his co-worker's -- through the huge broken window at the front of the lobby. The rearranged furniture must have come from some kind of scuffle. Between the injurer and the rest of those present, maybe?

If he had been by himself, Carlos would have moved slowly out into the room, and assimilated all the evidence more closely. But as it was, he was carrying almost two hundred extra pounds of semi-sentient weight, and couldn't move smoothly or without specific purpose. For now, he had to be content with whatever he could glean while on the way to getting Benny someplace soft to lie down.

"Come on," he said to Benny, unaware if the man was fully conscious or not. "Let's get you to that couch. Then we can relax for a minute." Of course, he had no intention of Benny getting back up without the help of medical professionals. The two men were resuming their two-and-a-half legged stumble forward, and Carlos was just starting to evaluate the easiest path through the random piles of fallen clothes, when he sensed a shadow passing in front of the now-open window at the lobby's far end.

He looked directly at it, then turned his attention back to analyzing the floor, then paused. What he had observed finally sank in, and he turned his head back up fully expecting for the shape to be gone... or to have it resolve itself into what it actually was, rather than what he had thought he had seen.

It was still there, just as he had seen it the first time: the silhouette of an idealized human form, so sleekly shaped that it might not have been wearing any clothing, with a wide array spiky antlers protruding from either side of its head. It stood just outside the broken window, its lower legs and feet lost from sight.

"What...?" Carlos asked incredulously, and the thing tilted its head slightly. If the antlers hadn't magnified the movement, Carlos wouldn't have thought it heard him. But it did. It crouched the tiniest bit, preparing to step or jump over the low sill and come into the room with them.

It would be in the room with them. Carlos's mind revolted against this thought, instinctively understanding that was the worst possible thing that could happen at that moment. He immediately halted his and Benny's forward progress, threw his mental and physical gears into reverse. He had no idea what he was thinking, that one man carrying another man could outrun this lithe being, who was already nimbly stepping over the threshold and striding across the floor toward them. All he knew was the encompassing sense of revulsion he had at being in its presence, and that he wanted to be out of its sight.

He half-turned, trying to swing Benny around to give them some extra momentum. He could already hear the shadow-man's feet clacking (clacking?) on the floor behind them, gaining. Carlos turned them back the way they came, down the hallway toward the roofless restaurant. He already knew it was too far, there was no way they could make it to the broken double doors by the time whatever this was could reach them -- and at the same time found it mortally important that this not happen.

Benny was so heavy, it felt as if he were pulling him in an entirely other direction -- and then he noticed that he actually was. His injured friend had swiveled his head away from Carlos, and toward the unornamented door leading under the main stairway. It led to the tiny room where Harmon lived, which they'd noticed when they first entered the lobby. Carlos took about a tenth of a second to wonder whether Benny was acting consciously, another tenth to consider this new option, and then pivoted that way as well. Whoever it was behind them was going to catch up -- this was an indisputable fact -- and when that happened, Carlos thought he'd rather have a thin door between them than to be caught in the open, in the middle of a dark hallway.

The odd clacking sounds didn't increase in speed, although they did ramp up in volume... if Carlos had to guess, he would think that the man behind them was starting to *bound* after them, unhurried, like that cartoon skunk who always ended up catching whatever scrambling prey he was after.

Benny was reaching for the doorknob to Harmon's quarters, but there wasn't time. Carlos swung around and grabbed it himself, twisting it before Benny's weight slammed him into the door itself, pushing an exasperated "Unngh!" from Carlos, his shoulder taking the brunt of their combined force. The side-by-side pair of men bounced erratically off the door, and it was only Carlos's iron grip on the knob that kept them from tumbling right into the leaping thing's path.

The door popped open, stopping when it rammed against two of Carlos's toes. He cried out again, and used his pained frustration to basically throw Benny into the gap that had appeared. He dove in after, making a grab for the inner knob at the same time. His fingers somehow found purchase, and he yanked the door closed behind them. Against every estimation he could have made up until that point, the lock clicked.

In the instant Carlos had to swing his head around to watch as the person pursuing them (although he doubted that was really what it was) opened the door and finished whatever job it had come to do, he noticed that the small under-stairs room wasn't as cramped or dirty as he had assumed it would be. Harmon's quarters were fully ten feet square, although the downward slope of the stairs cut a sizeable diagonal chunk out of the ceiling. Still, there were amenities he would expect to see in anyone's room -- a simple cot against the wall where the ceiling was lowest, a pair of dressers and haphazardly filled bookshelves lining the others. A shaded lamp atop one of them threw warm light across the wood of the walls and floor, which were polished and lacquered, the exact same shade as the lobby itself.

Carlos's attention was drawn to the doorknob he had just let go of, most notably the way it was now extending out into the room. It wasn't just the metal that was stretching, but the surrounding wood as well, melting toward him like a burning photograph. The knob itself didn't turn, although he could hear something vaguely animal scrabbling against it on the other side. Other bits of the door and adjoining wall did the same thing, pressing inward and receding, in two or three places at a time.

Then, almost hesitantly, one single place started to flow outward from the wall. This time, it was clear what Carlos was looking at...

A hand, five fingers splayed, trying to push its way through from the other side.

-8.10-

Benny was trying so hard. Trying to stay awake, to stay conscious, to stay living. But he was so, so tired. He was aware enough to appreciate everything Carlos was doing for him (even the improvised stovetop cauterization of his head; he had no idea how bad the wound had been, but it must have been bad for his friend to take such drastic measures), and was still trying to help their escape in any way they could.

At least he had something now to help him focus. It had called to him from its spot over the fireplace in the restaurant, and was now clutched protectively in his hand. The Deertail logo was solid, cold, exactly what he needed to keep himself -- which, after his accident, had never felt more feverish or insubstantial -- stuck together. The metal triangle was almost literally an anchor. If he hadn't heard it thrumming like a tuning fork there on the wall, or if Carlos hadn't indulged him and made a detour from their tortured path to the lobby, he was sure his soul would have floated away by now.

Not only that, but they would have been a lot farther out into the lobby when the figure with the antlers appeared at the broken window. It would have been much closer, and they wouldn't have made it back into this little room before the Qoloni caught them. And yes, he knew exactly what the thing was, knew its name, and even thought he knew where it came from. He had seen it before. Ironically, right in this very room. Except that now it was alive, and real, and trying to get in. It couldn't, though. It was trying, but it seemed like even the thinnest physical barrier in this world was too much for its extra-natural body to overcome. Benny thought he might know why that was, too.

He had fallen on his side on the floor, knocking his already violated skull against the wooden boards, and was untold minutes away from being able to gather the strength to get up, or even roll over. If the Qoloni found a way in, then he would just have to accept that he might not get the chance to, ever. If it got through, he would hold up the Deertail logo, to see if it might act as a talisman; it might turn out to be the cross to this thing's vampire. He doubted it, but it was the only hope he had.

Carlos was watching the bulging door and wall with fascination, his eyes wild and uncomprehending. Benny half-wondered if he would be reacting that way too, if he hadn't been knocked so hard into this semi-conscious state. He certainly wouldn't have made the connection that made the thing's name plain to him. That had been, what? Over a year and a half ago since he had first seen its picture? He wondered if it was still here. If they had any time left at all, he could at least warn Carlos, show him what it was they were running from.

He managed to raise his aching head and turn it toward the bookshelves. He tried to focus on the volumes there, but he hadn't really been able to do that ever since the white fist had punched through the kitchen window and shattered him. All he could make out were crazily tilted stacks of paperback spines. The letters refused to behave, all their different colors and fonts and sizes swimming around, none of them readable.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, Carlos had seemed to accept what he was looking at. The Qoloni had been pushing at various places along the door and wall, trying new methods of entry. Once Carlos had sat with his back against one of the walls, elbows resting on his knees, watching it work, his eyes became less and less wide with fear each passing minute, transforming into the focus of a war commander studying the battlefield. The only time he jumped a little was when the Qoloni pressed its horned head against the wood of the doorjamb, and that was only because its antlers stuck almost halfway across the length of the little room. Maybe it had been hoping to tear through the impossibly warped wood, but it hadn't worked. Whatever power this thing had to bend reality, it couldn't entirely break it.

Even as they were being threatened by this otherworldly force, Benny was glad for the break in the action. Still, he ached all over; the large piece of glass that at the time felt like it had split his skull in two was hardly the only source. He guessed that he had been battered about as much as a human being could be without actually breaking anything, although he wondered how he would know if he had, through this haze of pervasive hurt that covered him, draining away his mental and physical strength.

He had to show Carlos what he was thinking about. But the words on the book spines wouldn't stop swimming around, and Benny couldn't move much, or speak. He wondered what kind of nerves had been severed by that flying spear of glass that made it so hard to do things that were so simple before. He couldn't even shake his head to clear it.

Carlos kept studying the Qoloni as it tried various methods to break through the wall. First, it swung its antlers from side to side, trying to slash through the abnormally stretched fabric of the wall, then pressed its entire body against it, clearly straining with the effort. None of these tactics made any progress, but it didn't seem likely to give up either. Benny noted that the creature didn't seem to focus on either of them as it made these attempts. This made him believe that it couldn't see through the barrier.

Looking around him, Benny realized he had fallen not far from the simple military-style cot that Harmon spent his nights in. The old man lived in a cramped apartment, but he also made an effort to keep the place nice. Benny had originally noticed this when he had been in here before, invited back for a late-night story trade between two no-longer-young bachelors, after the younger folks had all gone to bed, in pairs and solos.

The room was the same, clearly the way Harmon liked it. The bedclothes were still neatly tucked in, meaning that he had never gone to bed last night. Benny could detect the smell of hair tonic on the perfectly-aligned pillow. He thought of his own messy apartment down in the town, and felt envy. Harmon was a part of the Lodge, was needed here, and lived so simply. Benny thought that if they made it through whatever this was that was happening, he wanted to try to live out his remaining time little more like this.

Another stack of paperbacks stood next to the cot, almost rising to the level of it, clearly situated to be in easy reaching distance of a person lying in it. Benny remembered noticing the narrow, makeshift table when he had been here before, during that late-night confessional that had not been repeated since. When he had asked Harmon about the sheer volume of books he had, Harmon answered:

"If you see something you like, go ahead and take it. I ain't precious about the books themselves. As I see it, if an idea is strong enough for me to remember, I can do it without having the book itself around. I can always find another copy. These are all one that have spoken to me, in some way."

Benny's eyes became focused on the base of that singular stack of books, but this time he was not trying to reach them. He was trying to get his arm to move. The large metal weight at the end of it twitched.

Not far away from Benny but across the room, Carlos continued to watch the shape bending and twisting the room's door far out of true, and then backing off, letting reality snap back into place. The Qoloni's attacks were getting less and less insistent; maybe the thing would eventually give up and head for easier prey.

Benny struggled to move across the floor, the metal Deertail logo in his hand slowly making its way across the polished boards toward the precarious stack. He hoped that he wasn't wrong, and that the books near the bottom were still basically the same as they had been before, effectively being changed from entertainment into furniture, propping up newer acquisitions.

He was disgusted by the way his hand looked, still stained with streaks of his own blood, the strain of moving the weight it carried making the tendons stand out. Mostly, he had never before now realized how old it looked. Using this frustration as fuel for his rebel muscles, Benny thrust his arm forward, only managing to hook the corner of the logo around the closest corner of the bottommost book. Using every last bit of his strength, he jerked his arm to the side along the floor, spinning the whole stack no more than an inch.

For a long moment, Benny thought he had failed. But then, several of the topmost books on the wavering stack began to tip over, and their slide began to drag others along with them. The top portion of the tower tilted past the point of no return, and fell. As they did, they pushed against the bottom half of the stack, forcing it the opposite direction. The result was better than Benny could have hoped for. One half of the books fanned out like dominoes in one direction, the others toward him, most of them showing their covers.

Carlos's head whipped around at the sound, which was a rapid-fire staccato of paperbound corners hitting the wood floor. In reflex, he rhetorically asked, "Benny, what the *fuck*, man?" Then he looked just as quickly back up at the door, to see if the horned thing would come back again. It had been several seconds since its last attempted intrusion, and a few more silent moments seemed to prove that it had moved off. Or it at least wanted them to think that it had.

With the immediate threat gone, Carlos looked with more concern toward Benny. "You all right?" His eyes followed Benny's extended arm and metal logo, the tip of which rested on a book that would have been located only two or three from the bottom when the stack was still intact.

Benny tapped it, patiently, as if he had known it would be there all along. It was one of the books he had almost taken with him when he had spent that late evening shooting the shit with Harmon. At this moment, he was glad he hadn't, because then it wouldn't have been here.

Carlos looked down and picked it up slowly, marveling at it. The same kind of horror that had recently left his eyes returned, mixing now with confusion. "What the...?" he breathed, scanning the cover for an explanation. Benny didn't have one, only knew that what was happening, this strange confluence of reality and fantasy, was important.

The book's cover art featured a dark-haired woman in flowing Renaissance clothing turning in panic away from an ornate, full-length mirror. Its surface, reflecting a twisted version of the woman's fleeing back, was being pushed forward from behind, flowing like quicksilver... into the form of a horned human being.

The name of the book was The Qoloni, by Bruce Casey.