Whitelodge 10.3 & 10.4

-10.3-

Manoj didn't fully appreciated how bright the nearly-vertical moonlight had been until he stepped into the shed. It was like following Dale down into a pool of ink. He would have hesitated, but Kelly stepped over threshold with supreme confidence, and if he wanted to keep his end of Kerren's stretcher from dropping into the snow, he had no choice but to follow.

He felt better when he heard Sheryl gasp next to him. She must have been suffering from the same momentary blindness he was. Fortunately, Kerren stopped shortly after they had all gotten into the shelter and stood still, giving them all time to adjust. In a surprisingly short amount of time, Manoj's eyes found the bright areas of the windows, huddled close around them. As his eyes continued to open themselves to stimuli, he saw why there were so few of them; they were standing in only a small portion of the building that was still habitable.

Where the damage in the hotel had been clearly caused by the falling of large timbers, the demise of the small shed was of a different origin. It looked as if when the ski lift wreckage had come sliding down the mountain, it had plowed into the end of the structure holding the embarkation station. The mechanism that the cables wound around had fallen here, and the giant flywheel had come down like a buzzsaw twelve feet in diameter, tilting vertical as it sliced into the building. It now formed an uncomfortably close steel wall, a giant plate separating them from the rest of the devastation. Manoj thought he could see broken timbers and possibly a hint of the outdoors through its myriad machine-tooled holes, some as big as a foot across, but his eyes were suddenly more concerned with the contents of the half-room itself.

The falling of the huge steel wheel left only a small corner of what must have been a garage. It now was barely large enough to hold a single, oversized snowmobile, its shiny corners the only revelation of its presence. It looked formidable, but at the same time Manoj's stomach dropped in disappointment. He didn't see how five people were going to get on it and ride down the mountain, never mind the fact that two of them were incapacitated.

Considering the second injured person, he suddenly perceived a pale leaf tumbling in the darkness that turned out to be Glenda's raised hand. She was feebly waving at them from the far side of the snowmobile. He heard Kelly give out a short, sharp sound that was halfway between a bark and a laugh, relieved and horrified by the gesture.

"We're not ready to go yet," Dale was saying to them. "I've got to make sure this is secure..." He was moving around to the rear of the contraption, revealing the way Glenda had been laid down on a sled hastily strapped to the back of the snowmobile. What appeared to be cloth storage bags had been piled on its back, so Glenda could recline against them. She looked groggy and pallid in the dim light, the handle of the knife still obscenely sticking out from below her left collarbone, as if it had always been a part of her, but still had no right being there.

Dale was continuing to explain what he had done, attaching one of the low, flat equipment sledges to the back of the snowmobile, which hadn't been easy in the cramped space. "The only thing I could find was some of this heavy-duty line, so it's looped around about twenty or thirty times." He was pacing around the vehicle now, grimly studying it like someone who had customized their car might. He went on, talking about weight distribution and using the word "torque" in a context that Manoj had never heard before, when Kelly interrupted him:

"Dale, is there a way we can get Kerren and the rest of us on it?"

He stopped talking, as if she had asked the very question he was afraid she would. Manoj could see Glenda's eyes sluggishly flicker toward the security guard, as if wondering what his answer was going to be, too.

Dale swallowed hard, then said, "We can figure out a way."

Manoj suddenly felt the weight on his arms increase. He hadn't noticed how tired his arms were until he was forced to adjust them, picking up the slack carrying Kerren's stretcher as Sheryl let go and walked toward Dale. Manoj had just enough time to stabilize Kerren before Sheryl reached Dale. She put her hand on his arm, and spoke to him directly, softly.

"I'm sorry, Dale. You're trying to get Glenda to safety, and we're making it that much harder. But we appreciate it. I want to make sure you know how much." She went up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. A great sigh rose up through his chest, held, and released.

"Come on," he said finally. "Let's find a way to set them together on the sledge."

A few moments later, the four of them worked together in the minimized garage to lay Kerren's stretcher down next to Glenda, who had slid over enough to allow some space next to her on the storage bags. Dale went to get some elastic bungee cords from where they hung on the wall, which Manoj realized he never would have noticed, even though his eyes were now fully adapted to the darkness. He shivered for the first time since they had left the lodge, and the only thing he could think of to explain it was the bitter coldness of the immense steel disc standing on its edge a few feet away from him.

Dale used the cords to strap the women down, hooking both edges to the sides of the sledge and laying them snugly across the women. He moved carefully, not wanting to touch Kerren's legs any more than he wanted to touch Glenda's knife. Eventually he stepped back to survey the arrangement, trying not to look into the eyes of the two women he had lashed to the sledge. Their eyes were calm, resigned in their own individual way. Manoj thought that Glenda appeared like she was trying to stay awake, and feared what would happen if those eyes closed and stayed that way. He figured they had all managed to ignore the wet darkness that was still spreading across the extra storage bags that Dale had laid across her body.

"Now how do we sit?" Kelly asked, surveying the snowmobile-and-sledge hybrid he had constructed.

Dale looked up and down the length of the vehicle. "Kelly," he asked finally, "can you sit on the sledge? Every time I have to slow down, it's going to want to keep going and bump into the snowmobile. Maybe--"

"Brace my legs against it. I got it," she said, comprehending immediately, and gracefully slid into poisition, gingerly sitting between the supine women's feet. Raising her own, she propped them up against the back panel of the snowmobile. Manoj couldn't help but recall times when she was in a similar position with him, and the coiled strength he had felt hidden inside those calf muscles. He swallowed hard.

"I think the three of us--" Dale was speaking about himself, Manoj and Sheryl, "can fit on the seat. It's only supposed to be for two people, but we can make it work. I'm not going to go any faster than I have to, so it's okay if I'm right up on the handlebars. Twisting them too far in either direction wouldn't be a good idea, anyway, because of the added weight. First, though..." He motioned to Manoj, and then swept his hand toward the side of the mini-garage, which the snowmobile's nose was almost grazing. Now Manoj could see it; next to the door they had come through, a set of shutter-like garage doors were securely fastened closed.

Manoj stepped forward to help Dale open them. It didn't look like the structural damage had warped them at all, and that made him recall what they had seen on the way here. As Dale messed with the lock mechanism, Manoj said, "Dale, we saw the horned thing again." The tall man's hands faltered against the knobs and hooks, then continued. Manoj pressed on: "It went into the Lodge. I think it might have been attracted to the sound of the window breaking."

"Yeah?" Dale asked, clearly more interested than the tone in his voice was letting on."

"Um... how loud is the snowmobile going to be?"

Dale shrugged as his hands worked. "Pretty loud. It's not really built for subtlety. But it's the only way down the mountain, so what choice do we have?"

"None," Manoj agreed. "I just wanted to be sure you knew."

The lock finally popped open. "Thanks," Dale said. "I can't go any faster than it's safe to, though. If we lose traction or the sledge tips, it's all for nothing anyway."

Manoj nodded, grasped the righthand door as a moonlight gap appeared between them. Dale took the lefthand one and started accordioning it back, creating a wide opening that looked down the mountain's slope, as starkly white and forbidding as always.

Manoj mimicked the guard's movements, pulling back his own side of the doors. The gap was more than wide enough for the snowmobile to pass through, and probably would have been able to accomadate two of them at once, which it mostly likely had been deisgned for.

Dale, then Sheryl, then Manoj, climbed onto the long, padded seat, which was refreshingly soft but ice-cold. Manoj turned his head back far enough to look down at Kelly, still lying back with her feet braced against the back of the snowmobile. Her lips tightened in a concerned approximation of a smile. He reached down behind himself and clasped her ankle with his near-numb hands, trying to convey more reassurance than he really felt.

Dale turned the snowmobile's key, and the sound of the engine revving was deafening, even with nearly a whole wall of the garage open to the air. Manoj felt his entire body wince. As the engine cycled up, he was sure he heard a moment where the steel disc behind them picked up the sympathetic throb of the engine, and began to ring like an immense gong.

Praying that they wouldn't attract the attention of the horned thing for a second time, they pulled out of the garage and back into view of the moon, which shone down on them like a cold spotlight.

-10.4-

The cool air felt good sliding across her face, so much that she wished Dale hadn't laid the other covers across her. It would help to cool the burning heat, which had dissipated somewhat but still hurt her, making her insides itch. She hadn't been able to pull together the strength to tell him; it had taken everything she had, fueled by the adrenaline of joy, to wave at the others as they came through the garage door.

She was so glad they were together again, and she felt so sure she was going to be away from this horrible place soon. It was strange how something that seemed a home away from her home like the Deertail Lodge, a place of sanctuary and comfort, could change character so quickly. It really wasn't the fault of the lodge itself, she supposed. It had taken something with the force of an avalanche to turn it into a place of cold, dark, and fear. But now she was away from it. Dale was shepherding her to safety, and soon they would find someone who knew how to take the metal and its heat away from her, find her a clean place to lie down until she felt better.

These were the thoughts that she held onto as the snowmobile and its passengers began its long downhill slide. More than anything else, they were what kept away the strange sensation Glenda had of being pulled backward, away from the light of world. The feeling was always there now, waxing and waning in intensity. Kind of like she suspected the moon would, if she could lie still and watch it long enough. Or the tides the moon brought. And that didn't sound so bad, did it? To just let it all go and look forever up at the sky...

No. She was going home, Dale was making sure of that, and she wanted to get there, to her children, to her... husband. Would he like Dale? She didn't see any reason why he shouldn't. One thing she had learned through all this was that there was enough love in the world for everyone. There was no reason to be jealous, or envious, or anything like that. Just love... that would be a world worth going back to. That possibility was another handhold that she could cling to when the backward pull into the dark became too much, which was become more and more.

She turned her head back and forth, savoring the way it made her hair ripple as the snowmobile made its way downhill. She silently thanked Dale, for letting her feel this. Trees moved by incredibly slow, far off at the edge of her vision. She looked over to where Kerren lay beside her, noticed that the woman's hair -- blonde, longish, curled -- was moving the same way she imagined hers was. Glenda didn't care for the look in her eyes, though.

Kerren's lips parted and she silently mouthed two words. "I'm scared."

Glenda was charmed, much in the same way she always was when her children woke from bad dreams in the middle of the night. Not that she doubted Kerren's fear... With her kids, she it could be cured with fifteen minutes of snuggling under warm covers before being carried back to bed with a drink of water and a few extra clicks on the nightlight timer. She wished she could help Kerren in a similar way. Maybe she would come to see what Glenda had, that all the fear and doubt and pain was temporary, ephemeral. It would pass, and all there was to do was hold on as best you could until you reached the bottom of the hill.

"We will be okay," she spoke back to Kerren, sure that no one else could hear it above the wind and engine noise. She had no idea how strong her voice was, so she hoped her lips weren't slurring so much that they couldn't be read. She could feel that backward pull growing ever stronger. "Dale will take us home," she said.

And with those words, Glenda died.

Whitelodge 10.1 & 10.2

-10.1-

No words needed to be passed between Manoj and Sheryl. Since all their hands were occupied with holding their shared end of Kerren's stretcher, he resorted to elbowing her in the ribs. She looked at him, saw the trepidation in his eyes, and followed his gaze.

There it was, skimming along the edge of a field of fallen, snow-covered trees. It swept along with a weird kind of grace, not disturbing any terrain it covered as it swept up the mountain, almost directly toward where they were standing. Sheryl didn't need to see it fully revealed to recognize what it was. She had seen that grace of movement before, protruding from the back of her closet upstairs.

The breath in her lungs, already composed of well-chilled cold mountain air, seemed to solidify in her chest. She could tell from its speed that it would be much closer to them very soon. Her legs hesitated momentarily, and when the snag in their progress was felt at the other end of the stretcher, Kelly turned to look back from where Kerren's head was. She and Manoj shared a look, and through whatever telepathic link the couple had -- and Sheryl was definitely considering becoming a believer in that sort of thing now -- he got her looking in the right direction. When she did, her steps faltered as well.

As a unit, the entire group started to skirt a little closer to the exterior wall of Deertail Lodge. It was kind of impressive; it reminded Sheryl of the way the pointer of a Ouija board will move as if of its own volition, with none of the participants aware that they're all moving in tandem toward a common result. No intentional communications passed between them, but they instinctively moved to where a darker background might shield them from standing out against the moonlight.

The snow was less deep along the wall. The overhanging eaves had diverted most of the snow that had come smashing over the top of the Lodge. The churning of their feet was mostly concealed from view, but the group would be passing in front of a view intact patio windows that normally belonged to the second floor rooms. Still, their silent consensus was to keep moving. Every step took them out of line of the direction the thing was heading; more and more, it seemed to be aimed for the lobby they had just left. Any distance farther from there seemed like a another step out of danger's path.

They trudged, each of them keeping an eye on the thing's progress, watching as it became less and less distant. After a certain point, as the lobby fell farther and farther behind them, Sheryl stopped glancing toward it every few steps. It was taking even more severe turnings of Sheryl's head to keep track of its progress, until she wasn't sure she could keep her hands level, and that might mean dumping Kerren onto the snow. In the necessarily immobile state she was in, her wife wouldn't even be able to protect herself from being smothered in the snow. So Sheryl turned her eyes forward again, biting her lip, expecting at any moment to see the tips of the thing's antlers invade her peripheral vision on both sides, the instant before it was upon them.

That moment never happened, though. With each increasingly heavy step, that outcome felt less and less likely, until her heartbeat's speed was due only to the physical effort she was putting out. She found herself watching Kerren's face instead. Despite having closed her eyes in the effort of tolerating the pain she must be feeling, she seemed to be the least troubled off all of them. The need to get her wife to safety swelled again in Sheryl's chest, and she tightened her grip on the makeshift stretcher, trying to make the journey as smooth as possible.

They came to the corner of the Lodge after what seemed like hours. They passed it with little change to their manner of travel, and a whole new side of the mountain silently opened up before them. Sheryl couldn't remember a time when she had ever seen such a gigantic, featureless expanse. It almost felt like she was standing on the edge of another dimension, a never-ending plain of pure, flat white. Even though her mind knew it must be an illusion, and what seemed like the infinitely distant horizon was just the farthest she could see before the curve of the mountain blocked out the world beyond, it was still frightening to witness.

Then the group's collective will was turning them again, and they were heading away from the new wall that had been exposed, until they were no longer following the shape of the building. It took Sheryl a while to realize that their destination was now a very complicated shadow upslope from them, something massive with lots of random angles and curves, thin black arcs rising out of the snow and bending back again, and behind all that a long, large canted shape, sticking out of the frozen tumult of snow.

"Is that the ski lift?" she heard Manoj utter from next to her, and then she could see it. The last few hundred yards of thick cable, and at least one of the towers, had been pushed down here, piled up against the chairlift boarding platform, which was mostly demolished under the cascading debris. Before the avalanche, this building had been little more than walls and a roof, a slight shelter from the wind, where skiers would wait for a bench to swing around a huge flywheel, sweep them off their feet, and whisk them up and away, cruising thirty feet above the ground toward the summit of the mountain. Riding a ski lift had seemed like a crazy proposition to Sheryl in the first place, and now that she was seeing many of its components jumbled in one place, she swore that she'd never travel that way.

The group was still moving toward the smashed structure. The lift platform was really just a glorified deck off the side of a slightly more substantial outbuilding, part of which was still standing. As their angle changed, Sheryl became sure that was where they were headed. Was this the equipment shed that Dale had been talking about? If it were, the chances of there still being even one working snowmobile inside seemed slim. Her skin felt suddenly colder, even under the layers of warm clothes she had put on.

When the tall, dark shape emerged from around from the side of the building, she almost stopped working altogether, brain and body. We've been tricked, she thought to herself. That thing that came racing up the mountain made us think that it hadn't seen us, but it really went the other way around the building and beat us here, and now it's finally come out to--

But this figure had no antlers. And it was definitely bulkier than the horned thing was. It was Dale. He was staggering around the corner of the building, his arms empty. The stretcher's speed increased, and Sheryl struggled to keep up. The security guard wasn't urging them onward, was only facing them, as if waiting for them to catch up. But where was Glenda?

As if understanding the need for as much silence as possible, it wasn't until they were a few feet from Dale before he spoke. "This isn't going to be easy," he said.

"What isn't?" Kelly asked him. "Are the snowmobiles still working?"

He held up one thick finger. "Just one. And it's the spare. I'm surprised anything's still intact. I just gassed it up, and was about to give it a try, when I saw you coming." He pointed to a small pair of windows in the barely-standing front wall of the shed.

Sheryl spoke up, "Let's get inside and see. Is there room for us all?" She suddenly felt very vulnerable standing out in the open, so close to a massive pile of wrecked machinery, which could conceivably decide to shift again at any moment.

Dale's response was a puzzled shrug, delivered as he turned and went back around the side of the shed, not seeming to care if they followed or not. Sheryl took another cautionary look back over her shoulder, hoping that her scan of the Deertail Lodge was the last she'd ever take. Then, as one, the quartet followed Dale around the side of the building.

-10.2-

The answer had to be in there somewhere, some magical solution that Bruce wasn't finding. He was just going to have to dig his way toward it. He had made his way back to the massive deadfall that marked where the hallway to the room that contained all his belongings had collapsed, and was trying to see if he could pry away some of the debris. He had no illusions about digging his way back to his things and finding them undamaged; he was pretty sure that everything past this barricade was just as demolished as the wall he was facing.

He also tried to ignore the flaring pain in his lower back, and the way the backs of his slippers would squelch and let out trickles of his blood every time he put his weight down on them. He felt strong and adrenalized; he felt he would know if blood loss was starting to be a problem. He had tucked his t-shirt into the back of his pajama pants and tried to hoist the elastic so that the wadded fabric would be held tightly against the wound, but he had no way of finding out how effective this technique was.

He focused on trying to remove as much of the barrier before him as possible. He could wrench free a torn, splintered board, or unwind a length of insulation that until recently had been shut up inside the walls, but the more he pulled stuff free and tossed it haphazardly behind him, he began to realize that even if he pulled all the loose stuff free, he would be confronted with a thick network of immovable logs, pieces of tree trunks which had been the original supports when the structure was first built.

As his body worked, his mind raced, trying to put together mental puzzle pieces. Ever since he had seen Victor in that alleyway after the movie premiere, he had tried to understand how that particular hallucination had happened. And the deeper he got, the more insane the machinations of the AllStory became. But here, tonight, was something he hadn't know how to interpret, even after his years of theorizing and investigating. He was still trying to sort through the tangential relationships the various people here had to his dreamworld. Jimmy Gough clearly knew of Theda, or was at least aware enough of her to paint an accurate picture, and that Kerren looked exactly like both his own muse and Jimmy's painting. That was all he knew so far, and yet it seemed to have been enough to manifest the Qoloni right here.

Did the avalanche have anything to do with it? Was its sheer elemental force somehow responsible for bringing something from his dreams (or from the book they had subsequently inspired) into this world? Perhaps it had somehow amplified the connection to Theda they all shared... He had definitely made a mistake when he told the whole group about Theda, but he had needed to know if any of them understood what was going on here. If he had to guess, he would say that Jimmy knew the most, but he wasn't even here, and anyway he must have thought that Theda was a manifestation of his own personal creativity, just as Bruce himself had thought at the beginning. He knew better now.

This brought on a horrible thought: what if his growing understanding in the past months of the AllStory, and its implications, was what had summoned the dreamstorm that had driven Theda away? Or was it this knowledge that had been keeping her away since then?

All of a sudden, he knew it was behind him. It wasn't akin to other form of terror he had ever felt before; there was no creeping-skin feeling, no chilling of the blood. He merely became aware of it, almost as if he were seeing himself from behind, through its eyes. He had scattered broken objects he had pulled from the crumbled wall in around him, but none that were sufficiently weapon-shaped were within easy reach. He pivoted to face it, saw it standing right at the corner where the lodge's main corridor turned toward his former room.

They regarding each other silently for a moment, the creator and the created. Bruce realized that, even though their paths had crossed several times, he had never really taken a good look at it before. Even when he had written about it, he had always taken the Hitchcockian route, merely implying its appearance rather than shining a clear literary light on it. This might have been why its form, while uniformly dark like a shadow come to life, was a little wavery around the edges. This didn't seem to diminish its power, however. Its antlers stood out straight from either side of its head, arcing upward and catching what little light there was to be gathered from the distant lobby at the far end of the hall, revealing sharpness on its myriad points.

"You've finally come," he said to it. "So what is it you want? Is it me you're coming after? And why did you feel you had to tear down a whole hotel to do it?"

The Qoloni did not answer. It only stood and watched. Bruce supposed he only had himself to blame... In his book, he had left its motivations intentionally vague. He had originally conceived the creature to be a metaphor for Ynarra's fears about marriage, adulthood, and possibly even pregnancy. It was supposed to be the ultimate Other, an embodiment of the horror that lurks just beyond what we can see. He had written the book in a flurry of activity twenty years ago, and honestly, he had flown through transcription on its way to publication so quickly that he hadn't thought about it much. He barely remembered those days, other than that those were the times cocaine kept him focused, moving his fingers during the day, and causing a crash that made him sleep heavily -- if not soundly -- at night.

And here that very thing was, staring him down. It had finally broken free of that cursed Chevalian castle to... what? "Come on!" he called to it, exhausted from fright and cold. He was as close as he had ever come to not caring, to just throwing himself at it and ending this, one way or another.

It still did not answer or move, save for the slight, pendulous tilting of its head back and forth, which would not be noticeable except for the magnifying movement of the antlers. They came close to scraping the wall on first one side of the hall, then the other. No, that wasn't right. They *were* touching the walls, but he could just make out that it pushing the walls a little where it touched them. The antlers pressed into them, denting them like a pin slowly being pressed to the surface of a balloon that refused to pop. As the tilt reversed itself, the wall snapped back into shape, unaware of the way it had just been violated.

The thing seemed to be studying him, and maybe it was just the way it was cocking its head, but it seemed curious. It had, after all, traveled a long way to find him, if that really was its intent. Now here they were, facing each other across an expanse of empty corridor. Bruce had just started to relax, when the thing suddenly bent its knees, preparing to launch itself at him. Standing defenseless before it, Bruce opened his hands, turning his palms to it, and raised his chin slightly. After all the time he had spent running from it, he was ready to accept whatever punishment it had to give him. Maybe this was his way back to Theda, who knew?

The instant before the thing lurched forward, a blur of dark motion came in from the side, around the corner the Qoloni still stood near. It came in low, legs pumping to keep away from the horns and hurtling forward. It hit the Qoloni in its midsection -- much like a linebacker slamming against a defensive line -- diverting the thing's spring-like momentum to the side. The pair crashed against the far wall of the hallway, and Bruce watched, fascinated, as the thing's weight distorted the wall far out of true.

True to the design of his creation, the thing met resistance at the physical barrier, which increased the harder it pushed, until it could go no further. Now, with what was clearly a human form pressing it into the wall, the combatants scrambled against each other, the Qoloni trying to twist away and be free, Bruce's savior trying to keep it embedded in the softened reality of the wall.

Bruce suddenly realized that he didn't want to find out what the thing intended to do to him. He wanted to be away from it. The only ones who would call it cowardly were ones who weren't in his place. He had been temporarily blinded to it, but now he realized how incredibly wrong it was for a creative mind to be destroyed by something it had created. Such blasphemy violated every rule of creativity itself.

Now someone had temporarily saved him from it, and while he wanted to stay and thank whoever it was, he knew that what they intended to do was buy him time. It was his imperative to use these precious seconds to figure a way out. He thought to just run past them as the thing was pinned to the twisted wall, to run down the corridor and back to the lobby, but just as he thought this, the tide of battle turned a bit. The Qoloni used a little of the tension it inspired in the wall to push back, rebounding the pair out into the center of the hall again. Bruce's rescuer stayed low, keeping its head down and its arm wrapped around the thing's middle. For the time being, it was managing to keep the dark thing's arms pinned to its sides, but it was unclear how long this advantage would hold.

There was nowhere for Bruce to go, but he still scanned his surroundings. Off to his left was the doorway that led to the room where he found the woman he mistook for Theda, and behind him... Strangely, it seemed that all the pulling of random loose pieces from the wreckage behind him had revealed a passage after all. He wasn't surprised he had missed it; it was right at ground level, no more than a little triangular space between two of the larger fallen timbers. It would be tight, but he was sure he could fit.

Keeping an eye on the combatants, he dropped to his knees in front of the gap, and slipped his feet backward into it. He wasn't plunging into that darkness head-first, absolutely not. He wasn't about to turn his back on his enemy, his body blocking out the remaining light as soon as he was fully inside. And if there turned out to be anything dangerous in there, he would much rather his feet find it before his head did.

He pulled himself back into the tiny space, feeling his shoulders painfully compressing as he strove to pull them in close to his body, scraping against the rough edges of the thick wooden trunks. He wondered if the dark creature would be able to follow him into this vast debris pile. He didn't know, but wouldn't risk pulling anything down in front of him for fear of becoming trapped himself, or causing a deadly collapse.

He kept his eyes on the struggling Qoloni and human in front of him, until all he could see was their feet. Then they disappeared fully from view and utter blackness descended.

Whitelodge 9.5 & 9.6

-9.5-

For a long time, Harmon just lay there, drinking in the moonlight that now fell across his upper body, soaking it in as if it were nourishment. The sense of euphoria he felt inhaling the fresh air made him wonder just how close to suffocation he had been under all that snow. And, on the heels of this thought... would he have stayed there too long if that thing -- whatever it was -- hadn't passed by so closely and goosed him into action?

All these thoughts were nicely distracting him from the corporeal concern of his broken leg, a subject he knew that he had to address soon. Although being packed in snow for an hour or so had reduced the sharpness of the pain, there was still no way for him to move in any meaningful way without rousing its wrath. He'd had plenty of broken bones before, and could tell that this one was shaping up to be in his top three, both in terms of pain and inconvenience.

His first goal should be to get his head up above the snow and take a look around, but since he had been thrown under this sheltering tree and half-buried while face down, this was going to require his turning over first. To be honest, at his age there were mornings when this exact maneuver seemed like a tall order even when he was in his own warm bed, all his body parts in working order, an urgent need to piss jumpstarting his motivation.

He grabbed on to the branch that he had shaken to clear his way to the open air, and pulled forward. He didn't think about it, didn't prepare for it, because no amount of either of those things was going to make it easier. This was the time when he just had to do the thing that was hard to do. Do it, and have it done. He pulled again. By increments, at first large and then smaller, he drew himself forward until his shoulder was up against the branch, his legs had almost fully emerged from the leg-shaped hollows they left in the snow, and tears were coursing down the veteran skier's cheeks.

Then he rolled over onto his back, wincing for the fiftieth time as his legs crossed. He had done it with the intact leg going over the top, however, so he could reach down and pull it the rest of the way without too much extra pain. Then he braced himself against the branch, and sat up. The old pain hit him in all-new places as he changed position, but he had expected that. He tried to imagine being a rock in a stream, letting the water pass over and around him without resisting against it. It had been a meditation exercise that had sounded like bullshit when he first learned it, and only slightly less so now. But it was working (or at least he thought it might be), so he kept at it.

His head rose above the level of the snow, and he sucked in his breath in shock. It wasn't that the view of the mountainside wasn't familiar, it was that after an hour or two of being trapped in such a small space, the sight of such a huge, open area was hard to process. He found himself looking across a field of tiny hills, and immediately assumed these were other trees that had been covered the way his had. The constant rising and falling of the land added up to an upward slope, revealing that he was looking back the way he had come.

He was too low to the ground, or perhaps merely looking in the wrong direction, to see the lodge, but he wondered how quickly the thing that had been stalking him got to it. After the sound of shattering glass, it had seemed to take off at a considerable speed, but he also knew that he got well away before the snow-wave had overtaken him. Whatever the reason, he hoped that the residents of the lodge had figured out a way to evade it, or scare it off. He knew that he could attempt to slip back into Kerren's mind to check, but was reluctant to. It took so much of his energy, and he would need every ounce if he were going to get out of this situation on his own. Not only that, but it had felt like an invasion of the woman's privacy, and then she had only been partially conscious. Now it would be too weird. He chuckled at himself for thinking in such terms at a time like this, as if social mores really applied here and now, whatever that term even meant anymore.

There was something he was starting to notice, especially now that he was above the surface again. He had spent over half his life on mountains, and knew the feel of them, their breath and temperament. There were even times -- usually when he was high -- that he felt he was tapping into a sense of its movement, those impossibly vast, geologic time scales by which mountains roam the world.

But now, he could sense none of those things. This mountain was dead. Or possibly not even a mountain at all.

As he turned his head from side to side, a thin, flat gleaming line leapt into his vision. He turned his head toward it, but it disappeared. He bobbed his head around, ducking it weaving it, trying to regain sight of that light, and eventually found it. To his surprise, it was moonlight bouncing off the grip end of one of his ski poles. He had assumed they had both been thrown even farther than he had when the wave hit, but he must have held on to this one long enough to get it tangled in the tree's outer branches.

He smiled at his good luck, and then realized that he now had very little excuse not to tuck it under his arm like a crutch and try to hoof it the rest of the way down the mountain. Well, then that was how it was going to have to be.

He was surprised to find that he had enough strength in his hand to wrench the ski pole free from the tree's formidable grip. Doing so only caused mild discomfort in the parts of him still under the snow, all of them. But this was the unspoken pact of the athlete; there are times when you will be hurt, and when this happens, you will have to take care of it yourself, to one extent or another. You do it without complaint, knowing that everyone else falling down the hill/plunging through the air/slamming into other people are running the same risk. The hard part comes, and then you deal with it.

Like a chick emerging from the whiteness of its egg, Harmon began to squirm his way up and out of the imprisoning snow. He grimaced constantly, and progressed slowly, but progressed nonetheless.

-9.6-

Carlos didn't ask any questions until after he was reasonably sure that the thing outside wasn't going to try to push itself into the room again. The door and wall on that side of the little room was stable and solid for a good two minutes before he scooted over to the fallen stack of books. He scooped up the old paperback copy of The Qoloni and looked closely at the cover art, scrutinizing it.

"What are you saying, Benny?" he said, waving the book in his injured friend's direction. "That the thing out there, is like this?" He pointed to the figure pressing against the bent mirror on the front cover.

Benny, still lying on the floor next to the fallen stack of books, clutching the iron Deertail logo, expelled a great amount effort, and took a deep breath, before belching forth the words, "Not like... Is."

This just confused Carlos even more. He looked at the artwork, then at the door again. It couldn't be... He tapped the author's name on the cover. "Bruce Casey. He's actually here this weekend." His brow furrowed, struggling to put the pieces together. He said his next sentence as matter-of-factly as he could, trying it out, seeing if he could do it while remaining sane. "So this book is based on real life, he somehow brought this creature with him, and now it's terrorizing us after a terrible avalanche." He considered this last part, then amended, "Or it actually caused the avalanche."

Benny made as much an approximation of a shrug as he could, lying on the floor on his side.

Carlos blinked his eyes, widened them in the dim light of the lamp, as if trying to fully rouse himself from sleep. "Well, I'll tell ya, old buddy, if I hadn't just spent the last five minutes watching that thing--" he pointed at the door, trying not to let his finger tremble as he mentioned the monster outside, "-- doing its fancy trick, I would say that you were crazy. Or maybe we were both hurt in the avalanche, and we're hallucinating the same thing." Even as he said this, he knew it wasn't true. He hadn't seen the book until now, so why would he have already imagined it? Down that road lay the possibility that the book wasn't real either, and once you got to that point everything was up for debate. Better to assume that at least some of what was going on around him was real.

He looked at the title again. "The... Koh-lon-ni," he sounded it. "Like 'colony', sort of. Is that the thing's name, or what?" He flipped the book over, and read the synopsis on the back aloud.

"'Princess-to-be Ynarra Mednik arrives in the Kingdom of Cheval thinking she knows everything about her prospective husband. He will one day soon be King, and the girl who can win his heart will find herself in a world of riches and luxury beyond measure. However, not only does Ynarra have to compete against the Prince's other suitors, but Cheval Castle holds many secrets, inaccessible tower rooms, levels below the dungeons, hidden passages behind walls, hallways that lead nowhere. Too late, Ynarra will learn that this architecture is designed to confound and trap the one inhabitant of the castle that no one speaks of, yet all fear. And with good reason, for she is about to unwittingly unlock the biggest secret of all. The secret of... The Qoloni.'"

He sat there for a minute, trying to work out what new light this threw on what he and Benny had just experienced. He looked across the tiny room at his injured friend. "You've read this?"

Benny closed his eyes, nodded.

Carlos riffled through the pages quickly as he continued his musing aloud. "And if what we're hiding from really is the thing in this book, then how are we thinking that's possible? Did Mr. Casey write about something real, something that has been following him around?"

Benny had enough strength enough to make a fist, extend his thumb, and point it toward the ground.

"Don't think so, huh?" Carlos thought a little longer, wishing that Benny was able to articulate himself better. "Okay, how about this? That this is an idea that Bruce had, and he somehow made it real?"

Again, Benny turned his thumb downward. Carlos furrowed his brow.

"Not that either? Well, how do you know?"

Benny made no response other than lifting his other hand, which still held the metal Deertail logo in a white-knuckled grip.

"What is that?" Carlos asked, puzzled. "What does that mean?"

Benny didn't answer right away, but deliberately lifted the metal to his forehead and gently tapped his temple with it. Finally, he said, "Just know... We... *made* it."

Carlos just stared at him for a long time, trying to comprehend what his friend was saying. He couldn't quite piece it together, and after a minute or so of silence, he became aware that he could tell something was going on elsewhere in the lodge.

At first, he thought it was a distant sound... footsteps, or maybe someone moving furniture around. But the longer he listened, he realized that it wasn't sound traveling through the air; it was the slight vibration of the wall he leaned back against. The thought should have made him realize how vulnerable he currently was to a creature who could bend and twist the fabric of reality, but instead he found he was only curious.

He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to divine what the lodge was telling him. He could hear/feel distant thumping, but it fell into no regular pattern. Now that he was paying close attention, he found he was getting two sets of thumps, varying in distance and intensity. One seemed random, farther away, and was occasionally punctuated by "louder" thumps; the other was slower, stealthier. Strangely, he thought he understood what the wood was telling him... There was someone upstairs moving things around, and the thing -- the Qoloni, if what Benny was telling him was right -- was approaching.

His eyes snapped open. "Benny," he said, "we've got to warn whoever that is!" He struggled to his feet. Benny looked like he was less on the verge of dying than he had been since Carlos had pulled him from the avalanche, but he would still be incredibly hard to move at this point. Thinking as quickly as he could, Carlos reached for the lamp that had been steadily glowing on the bookshelf closest to the bed. For what he had in mind, he had to give it to Benny. Unfortunately, the cord was short, and didn't reach anywhere near to where his friend was lying.

Carlos turned it over, trying to figure out if there was any more cord he could play out, but instead found himself looking at a screwed-down battery compartment cover. Of course. The power in the whole Lodge had gone out long ago; the only reason they hadn't been sitting here in the dark all along was because it had backup. He yanked the cord from the wall and set the lamp down next to Benny.

"I'm going to go out there..." Benny started to rouse himself, clutching the metal Deertail logo even closer to himself if that were possible. "Just for a second!" Carlos reassured him. "Someone's out there with that thing, and I can't just sit here while it catches up to them. Now, we know the thing's weakness; it can't pass through wood, maybe it can't pass through any physical material at all. It sounds like the book says that it can be confused, or get lost easily. Maybe it can't really see the way we can. I think I can get around it, or at least hide from it when I need to."

Benny struggled to speak, and Carlos gave him a few minutes to get it out. "Can't... fight. Run. *Run*."

Carlos knew what Benny was saying, but chose to act like he misunderstood. "I'll go as fast as I can. I'll bring whoever it is back here, if I can. Just hang tight, okay? You can turn this back on when I close the door." He tapped the lamp and then, without giving Benny time to react, Carlos switched it off. He set it on the floor next to Benny's free hand, then turned to the door. He wondered if the knob would feel any different, or maybe the door would stick a little in its frame, but the thing's distortion of it apparently hadn't caused any lasting effect.

He turned the knob, knowing that no extra light was going to be spilling out into the lobby, and slipped out. He heard only one final, whispered "Run!" from behind him as he closed the door silently behind him and stepped back into the silent lobby.