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.
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