Whitelodge 11.5 & 11.6

-11.5-

Harmon proceeded cautiously, even though he had no idea what he was on the lookout for. He knew there was something in the Lodge, something that did not belong there -- or in the same universe, for that matter -- as he. The lobby, which had once been so familiar, had utterly changed in his absence. Now it held the unnatural hush that a haunted cathedral might have. All the life had been removed from it, as if a museum replica of the room had replaced what used to stand on this spot. He could only hope that his little sanctum under the stairs was as he had left it.

He moved unhurried, still leaning heavily against his makeshift crutch as he crossed the floor. By now he was used to the particular brand of pain that erupted from his broken ankle every time he moved it. Still, he went out of his way not to make any extraneous noise, skirting the bloodstains on the floor by a wide margin, still puzzling over what kind of tragedy they could be spelling out. The closer he got to them, he became sure that they didn't quite connect among the confusion of tracks, pools, and smears at the base of the stairway. Whatever had happened, the injured parties weren't there now, and thus Harmon was able to absolve himself from concern without much guilt.

After the blood, he had to weave through the scattering of women's clothing on the floor. He assumed this was the result of someone trying to outfit themselves (and maybe a few others) before going outside. He finally approached the door to his apartment -- and although it was little more than a well-equipped closet, he thought of it in more elegant terms -- and adjusted his balance before reaching for the doorknob.

He opened the door, and paused. The little light he had on the dresser was on, and had been moved. There was a staggered line of his paperbacks fanned across the floor. And most notably, there was someone lying on his cot. Harmon waited until he saw that the figure's chest was moving up and down in shallow, sleeping breaths. He stepped into the room, and closed the door.

Once his eyes adjusted to the yellowish, battery-powered LED light, Harmon was quite shocked at his new roommate's appearance. The man had clearly been through a lot, his face bloodied and burned until he was almost unrecognizable. Despite this, Harmon did recognize him; there wasn't anyone working in the hotel that he didn't know, even if their name didn't immediately come to mind. This was one of them, a familiar face from the kitchen that he had never been officially introduced to.

Harmon would have squatted down next to the man on the cot if he had been able, but at the moment all he could manage was to stand over him and look down, studying the man's battered face as he slept. He held some kind of metal piece close to his chest, and it took Harmon a moment to figure out that it was the metal logo of the Deertail that used to hang over the fireplace in the restaurant. Whatever the reason, the man was holding it like a security blanket.

"Hey," Harmon said, intending to make a more assertive sound than the tired croak that came from his throat. The man on the cot didn't move. Harmon tried nudging his leg with the shaft of the ski pole. "Hey," he repeated.

The man on the cot stirred, and just as Harmon thought he had fallen back asleep, his eyes flew wide, surprised to find someone in the tiny room with him.

"Don't worry," Harmon said, raising his hands. "It's just me. I know you from the kitchen, don't I?"

The man on the cot twitched a little, eventually making a motion that Harmon recognized as a nod. He wondered if the man was leaving dried blood and bits of charred skin on his pillow.

"Looks like you've been through hell, buddy," Harmon said. "I'm glad you found my room. Comfy, isn't it?"

No response this time, just a continued wide-eyed stare.

"I've had a rough time myself," Harmon said, looking around for a place to sit although he knew there wasn't one. Honestly, he'd never needed one before. "Don't suppose you could make some room?"

The burned man, an apologetic look clear on his face, immediately started trying to sit up, then realized he couldn't and rolled on his side, lowering his feet limply to the floor.

"No, no," Harmon said when he saw the man's difficulty. "Don't worry about it. I think you probably need the rest more than I do." This didn't deter the man's efforts, however. He kept trying to sit up, and Harmon was unable to bend down and physically stop him, so he gave up and let room be made for him. Through the maneuver, he kept a close eye on the metal emblem, trying to decide if it was being clutched so tightly because the man didn't want to let go of it, or if he physically couldn't. By the time there was space for Harmon to sit, he still hadn't decided.

"Well, thank you," he said, making sincere eye contact with the wounded man before he turned around and tried to lower himself down. Grimacing, he propped himself against the wobbling ski pole and tried to seat himself on the cot as tenderly as he could. By the time he had to give his trajectory over to gravity, he had realized that there was no way to do it without more pain than he'd experienced so far on his entire trip. He gritted his teeth and let the pain have its way with him until he was sitting next to the man on the cot.

"Whew," Harmon said finally. He turned to the man, tried not to be shocked by how much more horrifying his injuries looked close up. "I apologize," he said, "but I'm having a devil of a time trying to recall your name." The disappointment in the man's inability to communicate was obvious and painful to see.

The man, intense sadness in his eyes, seemed to be trying to form words with his lips, but they quivered and couldn't quite coordinate themselves to do it. After a few moments Harmon shushed him gently and said, "That's all right. It will come to me."

For a while, the two elderly men sat side by side in the quiet room, sharing a moment with their individual injuries and shared predicament. In that short interval, Harmon made a decision. It was one that never would have crossed his mind before this night, or even before he had gone out into the snow, trying to outrun an avalanche like a damned newbie.

This time, he didn't ask for permission. Harmon closed his eyes and reached out in that way he had with Kerren, but this time into the mind of the man sitting next to him. As he had wandered through the filigreed light of that woman's mind, he had been moved to tears by its beauty. It was like a nearly endless labyrinth made of soaring, living crystal cathedrals. But now, he immediately entered a place that was horribly corrupted. The inside of this man's mind was similar to Kerren's, but its lofty architecture had suffered a horrible attack, some awful cerebral approximation of the London Blitz.

Many parts of his mind had gone dark. Whole planet-sized areas of it had been cracked apart and stained pitch black. Elsewhere, jagged cracks were the origin of bleeding areas that coated other vast sections in crimson viscosity. But Harmon kept looking for intimations of life somewhere else; he could sense its direction by the way the dark parts were lit from behind, or from the side. It was like trying to divine the sun's position using only stray beams that punched through the cloud cover. He kept moving, and found his way to the core.

The man's name was Benny -- as soon as Harmon heard the name, he realized that he had once known was it was, but had forgotten. There was a little startled activity as he realized that Harmon was present, but calmed down quickly as the two realized how kindred their spirits were. They were two men, old enough to feel themselves past usefulness to the world in general, who had found a new place to belong, high up in the rarified air of Deertail Mountain. This was what Harmon could glean from the glittering, sputtering part of Benny's mind that was still functioning like it always had.

After this era of mutual understanding, Harmon began to ingest all the information that Benny had from what was currently happening, and in turn he shared with Benny his own experience. They found even deeper kinship there; both had sustained horrible injuries, and had fought hard to persevere despite them. It was when Benny started to unweave his thoughts about the Qoloni that true horror began to dawn on Harmon. Of course he remembered the creature, although it had been several years since he had read the book, one of the long list of things he mostly forgotten about. With Benny's sensory impressions of it, though, Harmon recalled the visceral thrill he had experienced then.

Reading about something terrifying and actually coming face-to-face with it were two entirely different things, however. As he thumbed through Benny's catalog of mental images from when he had been attacked by the thing, seeing how Harmon's own little sanctuary had almost been invaded by the thing, he felt despair beginning to creep in around the edges of his own disembodied mind.

Together, they began to attempt piecing together how something from a book could possibly find its way into their real world. It must have had something to do with the author's presence. If Bruce Casey were here, was it possible that he had brought the thing with it? Was it some kind of real, haunting presence that had dogged him for years -- since the book had been published back in the heady year of 1991 -- and had followed him here?

They worked together, their intellects cranking in a sort of tandem that would have been impossible in the outer world, even if they had been fully able to articulate their thoughts to each other. Inside, thoughts took on almost physical forms, intricate shapes of light and chemicals that could be understood more intuitively than any perfect string of words or line of prose. They tried to recreate their idea of the novel together; it was harder for Harmon, because he had read it much longer ago than Benny, but found that different parts of it had made impressions on each of them.

For example, Benny seemed to recall Princess Ynarra's initial exploration of Cheval Castle's dungeons more clearly due to his childhood fear of his grandparents' basement. He brought the memory forward for Harmon, who could viscerally taste the terror in the child's throat. For his part, Harmon had formed such a clear picture of the initial ceremony where the Prince of Cheval greets his suitors at a grand ceremonial dinner. Harmon read that part right after he had recovered from a bad stomach flu, and there was still a good two hours before the lodge's restaurant would open. He was ravenous, and Bruce's purple prose as he outlined the menu of the banquet had set Harmon's stomach growling in the most enjoyable way.

Eventually, they had painted a mutual picture of the story, the way the initial beauty of Ynarra's experiences at Cheval were eventually stripped away, revealing the frightening skeleton of intrigue and dark magic underneath it. They had sculpted the shape of the tale inside Benny's mind, and could turn it this way and that, examining it from all sides. It was a strange way to look at a tale, but it made sense in the way that a vision of beauty in a dream does. And when they turned it just the right way, they saw what they were looking for, the reason they had been collaborating to reconstruct it in the first place, although neither had known it.

It was there, inevitably woven into the very fabric of the tale itself. It was plain, obvious to them in this quasi-physical form. The novel's ending was menacingly unresolved, even though Ynnara escaped. But now they were able to unlock the secret. They both knew how to stop the Qoloni.

-11.6-

Carlos didn't look back. He just ran. He had no idea how long his feet would keep him ahead of the grasping hands (or, even worse, the razor-like swinging antlers) of the dark, buzzy thing pursuing him. He just kept moving as fast as he could, as fast as the uneven floor of the hallway would allow. He could only hope that it was slowing his pursuer down as much as it was him.

He was almost past the stairway down to the lobby. He thought briefly about bounding down them out into the snow, just to get the thing out of the building and away from Benny's hiding place, but it didn't work out that way. His foot caught on an unfortunate fold of carpet just as he was about to swerve, causing him to stumble and take a lateral step away from the stairs to retain his balance. He realized that he wasn't going to be able to correct his trajectory without slowing down, and then the footsteps chasing him would undoubtedly catch him. So he kept running straight, down the opposite wing of the Lodge, his heart threatening to throb itself out through his ears.

He had never run in such a blind panic before. Not even the time when he was small, and they had visited a horse farm. It had belonged to one of his dad's cousins, some small ranch far off in another mountain's foothills. Little Carlos had somehow wandered out into the pasture, and suddenly an eight-foot horse was coming over to investigate. To his child's eyes, the thing had been the size of a freight train, and closing in on him much faster than he could run away. He felt that same panic now, barreling down the Lodge's upper hallway, so fast that he felt like his legs might detach from his body. Only now, the thing behind him really meant him harm, to catch him, throw him down and impale him...

Just beyond the stairs, one of the guest room doors stood open, and it wasn't until it was too late for him to aim his stumbling body toward it that he realized it would have been an ideal place to hide. He could have just thrown the door closed behind himself and been safe. He was sure the thing couldn't have followed; it would be blocked by the physical solidity of the door just as it had before. But as quickly as this thought came, the hope was dashed and the door passed behind him.

Carlos still hadn't managed to fully correct himself, and his pounding feet skirted the left side of the corridor. He could hear some distorted grating sound behind him, which he assumed were the tips of his pursuer's antlers scraping the wall above and behind him. The sound was like nails on a chalkboard fed through a broken amplifier, and sent jagged bolts of discord up his spine. He wondered if that resistance was buying him time. His breath wheezed in and out between his gritted teeth, and he was acutely aware of how his life was boiling down to a scattering of infinitely small moments and incidents, ground gained and lost in millimeters as the distance between the clutching hands of the thing behind him and his fleeing heels.

There was something in the hall ahead, propped against the wall, giving him a reason to keep trying to steer his never-fast-enough body toward the middle of the hall. The shape drew closer, and he realized what it was; a decorative table, narrow enough to be of no practical purpose other than to carry two small but elegant vases, which were perpetually filled with dried but lovely flowers. A table runner ran the length of it, pinned down by the crystalline weights at the ends, and a large, framed mirror hung on the wall above it. Carlos was surprised to see that, despite the disruption of the avalanche, this arrangement was still mostly intact. The mirror was still hanging straight on the wall, and only one of the vases had been knocked over, tipping out its freight of pussy willows across the table and onto the floor. Barely thinking about it, he grabbed the fallen vase, then passed it to his other hand and grabbed the second as he ran by as well.

He flipped the upright one over in his hand, dumping out its freight of dried sticks, and grabbed it around the neck. He took a quick look back over his shoulder, and found that the shape -- so vague against the pervasive darkness of the hall -- was closer than he thought from just listening to its approach. *Much* closer. Now in a near panic, he flipped his left hand over his right shoulder, releasing the vase at what he hoped was the right instant. He couldn't help but continue to watch as it flipped end over end, reflecting what dim light it could gather from the surroundings, until it impacted the horned thing in its chest, right where its heart might possibly be.

He should have seen the reaction coming, although he would later think to himself that he didn't know what was going to happen. However, the pursuing thing stayed true to its physical nature. It couldn't affect the vase's presence in the world, so in the collision of kinetic energies moving both forward and backward, it inevitably lost. Carlos had a fleeting glimpse of the vase being bent out of its true shape, wrapping around the creature's shoulder like a wet towel being slapped across its skin, and then the thing was twisting in mid-stride, one side of it being almost entirely stopped in its tracks. Its antlers swung by as it pivoted, mere inches above Carlos's head.

He ducked instinctively and turned back forward, realizing that he had just bought himself a few more tenths of a second of life. He knew he had to take advantage of it, and try to get his legs to pump just a little faster. He heard the vase, having presumably slipped around the dark figure's space-warping edge and come out unscathed and unaffected on the other side, make its final glittering crash on the floor far behind them both.

At the moment, however, Carlos was trying to figure out what the end of the chase was going to be. He was rapidly approaching the end of the hallway, which was farther from light sources than any other, but he knew that there was a door there. It didn't lead to any room, instead contained a service area where the majority of the housekeeping supplies were stored. He was heading straight for that door, and if he could buy himself enough time to get it open, dash through it and shut it, he might make it out of this encounter unharmed.

That was a big if, though. He could already hear the horned thing's footfalls regaining their rhythm, not as far away as he would have liked. Maybe he had just prolonged the chase, instead of winning it. His legs were getting weaker, his breath rasping in his throat. Before he knew it, he was just a few steps from the door, and couldn't remember... did it swing into the storage room, or out into the hallway? His shoulder impacted with the force of his entire body behind it, and he immediately knew it was the latter.

He bounced off and spun to the side, which brought him around to see the horned thing. It was bearing down on him with frightening speed, and for a moment Carlos thought they were going to replay the tackle that had happened at what was now the far end of the hall, this time with Carlos pinned between the thing and the wall, instead of the other way around. He obliquely wondered how his body would react when compacted between the thing and an immovable object, and braced himself...

But it turned out that he had been thrown too much off course for the thing to collide with him. Instead, it ran full speed into the maintenance door; clearly, Carlos's prior knowledge of the Lodge's layout was an unexpected advantage in this near-total darkness. He threw his hands protectively over his hand and ducked away, aware of the way those fearsome antlers were spearing their way into the wall above his head. Even so, he could figure out what had happened. Similar to what had happened at the far end of the hall, the horned thing bent the door inward almost three full feet. Then, after a moment of suspension, it was flung back out. Carlos marveled again at how the immovable material that he had smacked his shoulder into could now appear so pliant. The horned attacker stumbled backward, its arms pinwheeling in a decidedly human fashion, trying to keep its balance under the weight of its enormous antlers tipping backward from the impact.

Carlos saw his opportunity, and grabbed for the door handle. At the exact moment he felt the cool solidity of the knob, he also felt a debilitating pain shoot up his arm, collecting at his left shoulder and turning into a bright flare. He still held the second vase in his right hand, so opening the door with it wasn't an option. He pushed through the feeling that his arm was on fire, grabbed the knob, and yanked the door toward him. It swung open easily, but he overestimated how hard he had to pull that the knob flew out of his hand, and the door swung wide open.

If there had not been a small window high up in the wall of the storage closet, the blackness inside would have been impenetrable, but after the dimness of the hall, the small gateway to the moonlit mountainside turned into a virtual spotlight, shining on the horned thing as it strove to regain its footing. Carlos realized he had maybe a second to make it inside. At this point, he didn't even care about getting the door to close behind him. Maybe the thing's wide antler-span wouldn't allow it to enter anyway. That was all he had to hope for as he dove into the gap. Two steps in, he wheeled around.

The horned thing was so close it was almost filling the doorway. At the same time, he was aware of his peripheral vision revealing the way the antlers were pressing into the walls above both sides of the doorway as well, like splayed fingers trying to push through a membrane. It lunged forward, trying to force its way over the threshold, stretching the doorframe farther than Carlos had thought it could. Its outlines, while still far from certain, were limned by the light from behind Carlos, making his heart threaten to stop out of terror. Because of the stark lighting, he could truly see the contours of its face for the first time... and he felt that sudden sense of dislocation that only comes with profound shock. Fortunately, the one instinct he did have was to raise his hand and throw the other vase.

It was little more than a lob at such close range, but it caught the thing squarely in what would have been its throat, had it truly been human, or even animal (Carlos had long since begin suspect that it was neither). Instead, Carlos witnessed in full illumination the way the shape of the crystal distorted, wrapping around the thing's neck like a melting choker necklace, and the thing was swept backwards by its light but undeniable kinetic force. It wasn't until it had backed away that Carlos realized he now had an opportunity to close the storage room door.

He jumped forward, every impulse in his body screaming at him that it was the wrong direction to travel in. He threw his right arm -- now blissfully available to do work his left couldn't -- around the jamb and fumbled for the knob while trying to keep an eye on the horned thing. He couldn't keep his eyes off it, trying to tell if what he had seen in its face a moment before had really been there, or was just a trick of his eyes.

His hand found the knob, slipped once across its slick surface, then tightened around it and pulled. At the same time, his nemesis started recovering from the attack, and Carlos watched in fascination as the door swung closed and the thing lunged. He had no idea which was going to win the race.

Whitelodge 11.3 & 11.4

-11.3-

For a long time, none of them moved. Seeing Dale bent down, his massive shoulders heaving as he silently sobbed over Glenda's cooling body, was nearly impossible to stand. But they all sat quietly, patiently waiting, unwillingly sharing in this tragic moment together. Kelly had stood up from her position seated on the front edge of the sled and Manoj, turning to sit on the back part of the seat, had scooted around to accommodate her. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, her gloved hands tenderly coming to rest on his mittened ones. Even in this comforting pose, Manoj felt stunned more than anything else. He had never seen death up this close, and frankly was having more trouble processing it than he could have guessed.

This was the result of his relatively protected life, he knew. Both his parents and all four grandparents were far away, but still alive. And since he was a child, he had been steeped in gaming culture, where death and injury were regarded as inconveniences, and the discovery of a health pack or a flick of the Restart button could put everything right. Vanquished enemies usually took only a few seconds to disappear from sight.

But this was entirely outside his realm of experience. The specter of death, thrust on him like this, after they had all survived so much already, threatened to force his mind into retreat. He felt the impulse to detach from it all, to hold onto the warm, living force that was Kelly and draw from her strength, to experience nothing else until he was ready to return. He might have done just this, if he hadn't felt Kelly's lips pressing against him. She had surreptitiously turned toward him within his enclosing arms, and brought the soft heat of her mouth up against his. The urge to mentally check out completely flipped over, and her presence was suddenly all he needed. When she pulled back after a long moment, they looked into each other's eyes.

"Thank you," he mouthed. She nodded, the corners of her mouth turning up just a little bit, as if she was aware of what she had just done for him. Her marveled at her; she was so intuitive, so often seeming to know exactly what he was thinking. He couldn't help but wonder if Dale and Glenda had that kind of bond, if they had ever had the chance to find out.

Dale was standing up. The four surviving members of his team looked at him, wondering what he was going to do next. He stood over Glenda's body for a while, the blood-soaked coverings, the protruding handle of the knife, and just looked down at the sorry tableau for a moment, as if to make sure it was permanently registered in his mind. Then he spun, and headed back to the head of the snowmobile/sledge rig.

Kelly spoke to him as he passed. "Dale...?" Couched in that one word was a world of empathy, reassurance, and questions.

He didn't respond at first, instead threw a leg over the seat just in front of Manoj, who was still facing backward. Dale said something under his breath, and it took several seconds for the sounds to register in Manoj's brain as: "I'm still taking her home."

When it became clear that Dale's intention was to press on, the remaining passengers scrambled to find a place to sit. Sheryl quickly stepped to where Kelly had been sitting, just as the athlete was preparing to get back down onto the sledge. Stopping her, Sheryl put a hand on her arm and said, "You stay with your love. I want to stay with mine." Saying this, she looked back at Kerren, who had seemed to have calmed down somewhat, but was still clearly wishing she was able to get up and run away. Unsure of quite how to sit, Sheryl tried to position herself the way Kelly had been, feet planted against the back of the snowmobile to keep the sledge from bumping into it.

While Kelly tried to help Sheryl get set, Manoj turned back around to the front. Dale had got himself back over the handlebars, hunched over them, but not yet restarting the engine. Manoj placed a hand on the big man's shoulder, but couldn't think of a meaningful thing to say. After a few moments where Manoj wasn't sure that Dale knew he was making this gesture, the security guard gave a long, slow nod. Manoj took this as acknowledgement, and removed his hand.

Sheryl and Kelly had finished their exchange of information, and before Kelly spun around and took her place as the rearmost occupant of the snowmobile, Manoj threw his leg up and over it, dismounting. "Scoot up," he told her.

"Yeah?" she said.

He nodded. "You'll be warmer, and... I want to hold you as tightly as I can."

Kelly seemed to understand that this was more than just a matter of temperature and proximity. She nodded back, and scooted up against Dale's back. She slipped her fingers through the sidemost loops of the driver's belt, clearly having noted how Sheryl had been riding earlier. Manoj slid up close against her, wrapping his arms tightly around her middle. He felt her rest her head back against his shoulder for a moment, before Dale started the snowmobile's engine and they resumed their downward trek.

Manoj tried not to think about Glenda too much. He acknowledged the loss, and knew there would be time for true grieving later, but there were other pressing matters that were coming to the surface, now that taking care of her severe injury wasn't top priority. Part of him realized how callous this was to think, and he would never say it out loud to anyone (maybe not even to Kelly, which was something he would never have considered before this), but he at least could comfort himself by calling it self-preservation. And maybe that's all it was. He forced himself to focus on his view of the town below, because there was something strange about it.

The image hadn't changed much, even though they had drawn much closer to it; it clearly filled more of his vision than it had before. What was bothering him, though, was that it wasn't any more distinct than it had been up at the Lodge. The effect gave his mind a slight queasiness, as if aware that it was being shown an illusion, but unsure of its origin. It actually reminded him of when he had looked at the orange full moon on the horizon as a child, and noted how it seemed much larger, much closer than when it was high in the sky. He had already heard that this was a trick of the mind, that the moon was actually a few thousand miles closer to the Earth when high overhead as opposed to when it first rose, and understood the geometry of this, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that there was magnification going on. So what was it, then? Some kind of refractory property of the Earth's atmosphere, maybe the same kind that gave the moon that mildly unnerving sunset color? It seemed so clearly that it was, so why were his eyes deceiving him?

He finally convinced himself that it really was an illusion with an argument he came up with all on his own. If the moon really was larger when on the horizon, then at that time its features should be clearer. But as long as he looked at the orb low on the horizon and high, with binoculars and without, night after night, he realized that nothing was more distinct, no lava plain or mountain that looked any closer or clearer just after moonrise. He was forced to accept that the giant harvest moon was a myth, playing against the mind's understanding that, in every earthly case, an object on the horizon has to be much bigger than an overhead object with the same apparent size.

He was experiencing that same disorientation now. The town was there, definitively closer, but also remote somehow. Looking at it, he didn't like the way it made his brain feel. It gave him the sense that they were going to be going down this hill forever, perhaps losing more of their band one by one, never really reaching the base of the mountain.

His hands instinctively tightened around Kelly's middle, and she removed one hand from Dale's belt long enough to grasp his fingers in hers for a brief, reassuring moment. This put Manoj's mind as much at ease as it could, which was why he missed the change in their surroundings. By the time he realized it, it was too late to warn Kelly, so that she could warn Dale, or to change anything about the speed they were traveling.

The air around them had started to lighten. It wasn't an intensification of the moonlight, or the warm light of dawn (which he couldn't help but doubt they were ever going to see again). It wasn't even because of snow being kicked up around them, or falling from the sky. This lightness was the same as if someone were slowly cranking up the brightness, a fade-out but to bright white. And being a programmer, he instinctively sensed what this kind of transition meant. He saw it all the time, when game designers needed to mask an abrupt transition.

They were being taken from where they were, and brought to some other place. By the time this thought had fully formed in his mind, the world around them had gone to an impenetrable no-color, and the wind shifted direction.

-11.4-

Dale welcomed the white. It gave the only sense of relief he had felt since he had seen the blade disappear into Glenda's chest. Take it all away, he thought. Let it be wiped clean. Take away every bit of everything he was feeling. He would never have to reach the bottom of the hill, never need to give up responsibility for the people he hadn't failed yet. He wouldn't have to deliver Glenda to anyone else; she would be with him forever and he wouldn't have to give her up. He'd be perfectly fine with that. Let the white come. Let this be the end.

This was the second time he saw someone he loved die. Yes, he had loved his father, in that strange, distant way that many fathers and sons loved each other. Back then, he hadn't tried to save the person in peril. This time, he had done everything he could, and the result was the same. Did any of it matter, then? He had spent the larger part of his life trying to protect those around him, in any way he could, and this was the final result of it, hauling a bunch of people he barely knew and the body of the woman he loved to... where?

Whatever the white finally proved to be, it wasn't the end. After too short a time, the world slowly returned, like a fader knob being turned back down from overload. He didn't know what he had been expecting, but it certainly wasn't more of the same. But here they were, heading down the side of the same mountain, with the only difference that the terrain was somewhat flatter, not as many trees to look out for. There was only one major deviation from the flat paleness, which was some sort of outcropping far ahead, where something dark was pushing up through the thick, pervasive covering of snow...

Dale was not a man who swore easily. He'd never thought about it much, but Glenda had pointed it out to him on more than one occasion, so it must have been true. He didn't know why this was, he just never felt the need to express himself that way. There always seemed to be other words, better words, when the time came to say them. But when the outcropping grew closer, however, and he began to suspect what it was, only to see that thought realized, crystallizing before his eyes, he muttered a phrase under his breath that he knew would have delighted Glenda for its rarity.

"Oh, God damn it."

The outcropping was really a large building, downslope from them, partially smashed where the leading edge of the avalanche must have punched it down. The junction of the L-shaped wings was the least covered part of it, sheltered for the most part, but the nearer side was piled high with snow, which spread out over the entire roof and had most likely spilled copiously over the front...

It was the Deertail Lodge. They had somehow circled around and were now approaching it again, this time from the back. He had no idea how it had happened, but that didn't change the fact that it had. He felt all the strength drain out of his arms; after all this, they had just come back around to where they started. They hadn't made any progress at all. Instead of delivering her into the arms of her family, Dale had brought Glenda back to the place where she had been fatally injured.

He braked them to a stop, and shut off the engine. There was a little bit of rustling behind him, but no words, as his passengers looked around him, individually recognizing the Lodge on the slope below them. They all knew what its existence in front of them implied. For a long time, they just sat there. The wind stirred a little, died before it really became anything.

"It looped us," Manoj finally said. "We hit the boundary, and it took us back to the far edge. Toroidal space." No one asked what that meant. All they needed to know was that there was no way out.

"We've got to get back inside," they heard Sheryl say from the back of the group. "We'll freeze out here." Meaning that Kerren, immobile low to the ground, would freeze first. Dale nodded to himself, knowing that what she said was true. But he had half a mind just to get up off the snowmobile, lie down on the sledge next to Glenda, and wait for whatever new, pointless event was going to come next. Maybe he would just wait there until he froze, joining Glenda in a more intimate way than he had ever managed to in life. It was only force of habit, his ridiculous instinct to help others, that made him start the engine and let the vehicle start sliding downhill again.

He didn't quite know where to go. From this new, higher vantage point, he could assess more of the damage the avalanche had done. He could see how the crushing weight of the snow had almost entirely destroyed the side of the Lodge where Bruce had pulled Kerren out from under her bed. The author's own room, which he said he had been near when the deluge came, was nonexistent. Before he could stop to think about how Bruce could have possibly survived, he saw the restaurant, which stuck out from the first floor near where the crumbled wing spilled its guts down the slope. It was strange; although he could make out the bulk of the restaurant's lone chimney, he couldn't make out any of its roof.

So he couldn't circle around to the front of the Lodge that way. The area at the junction of the L-shaped wings looked out, too. The snow hadn't piled up very high there, but the doors on the bottom floor (which were mostly staff access to the utility areas) were entirely covered, and getting any of this group up to the level of the second-floor rooms would be both dangerous and difficult.

Then there was the closest side, near where the wreckage of the ski lift was piled up against the very shed they had departed from. That wreckage, all the thick, tangled cable, and towers bent like toothpicks, was only partly covered by the snow. He couldn't go that way, either... he had no way of knowing how much twisted metal was lurking just under the snow to snatch their wheels out from under them, or how far the debris field extended up the slope.

He felt the futility of all this pressing in on him again. He imagined himself pulling the snowmobile back into that tiny garage, returning to where Glenda had last been alive, and there had been hope of getting away from this place. Now he had nothing, and all the support of the other people in his group wasn't going to get him to pretend that he did.

Which brought him to the closest wing of the Lodge. It was still intact as far as he could tell, and the way the snow had spread broadside across its roof, making it all but perfectly flush with the new slope of the mountain, it was starting to take on a familiar form, one that the Deertail had never had before, but that nature had fashioned, seemingly just for him.

That was when an exhilarating horror rose in him, breaking like the dawn that he was increasingly more sure would never come. That near wing, from the point where the snow stopped at new ground level, to the front, fifty feet up, looked an awful lot like a ski jump. Even the thin lines of chimneys protruding from the shallowest parts of the snow looked like guide lines, leading right up to the roof's front edge.

He swiveled the handlebars in that direction. He wondered how long it would take before his passengers realized, once the snowmobile started skating across the roof shingles, that Dale had no intention of stopping until they were plunging, snowmobile and sledge and all, off the far end of the roof. To fly, to see the whiteness rising to meet him, and then to hurt no more. To go with Glenda on their first and last journey together. It made perfect sense.

He pressed his foot harder on the accelerator.

Whitelodge 11.1 & 11.2

-11.1-

The sound was horrific. Even sandwiched as she was in between Dale, hunched over the snowmobile's handlebars, and Manoj, his hands delicately placed on her shoulders as he tried to keep his balance on the very back of the seat, the roar of the engine was the sensory input that overrode everything else. She kept her eyes shut most of the time, trying not to think about all the ways they could crash, or skid, or slew sideways, maybe causing the sledge to flip, crushing Karen and Glenda face-down in the snow under its weight...

Even though she knew Dale was taking it slow, travelling not any faster than he deemed absolutely safe, she couldn't keep the fear from her mind. It still seemed like they were travelling unusually fast. It must have been her anticipation, knowing that they were leaving the broken mountain behind, and heading for something better. She had a very limited view of where they were going (Dale was a big, sturdy guy, after all, one of the few facts that helped to ease Sheryl's mind as she kept tight hold of both sides of his wide security belt, per his instructions), but she tried to piece together a mental picture of the terrain from what she could glean off to either side, and what it had looked like as she and Kerren had driven up the service road. It felt like that had been ages ago.

From what she could tell, Dale was following a downhill track that ran between that service road and the open range of large bumps that she never would have imagined a forest looks like after an avalanche. It was the most gradual and smooth way to go, and she was thankful for that. She had already been worried about what Kerren's injuries would mean in terms of her long-range recovery; she didn't need to add fear of further damage from a jarring journey on top of that.

All in all, it should have been a tranquil journey... but there was something off about it. It might have been the high whine of the engine, but it sounded wrong. She never ridden on one of these things, and didn't know why she was thinking that, but there it was. The thought wouldn't leave her head. There seemed to be some component of it that seemed oddly familiar, a high-pitched sound that arose, held, and fell off again in a repetitive way that raised the hair on the back of her neck.

What *was* that? Now that she was focusing on it, she had the disorienting sense that it was coming from behind her, instead of from the engine up front. Could it be some trick of sound, bouncing off of something and coming back from a different direction? But there was nothing out here for it to bounce back from; they were traveling through a virtual wasteland, with nothing over a few feet still standing save for the Lodge itself, far behind them now.

Her face suddenly felt as cold as the wind hitting it. What if it was the horned thing, following them down the mountain, roaring as it leapt, the fury of a whole pack of wolves bearing down on them as they fled? She felt a stripe of electricity shoot up her spine, and felt her head start to turn of its own volition. Her body clearly didn't care if death itself was bearing down to gore them all... she had to see, had to know.

But what she could see of the mountain behind them was clear. Everything was as it had been the last time she had seen it. Manoj was behind her, Kelly sitting on the sledge with her strong legs propped up against it, behind them the reclined forms of Kerren and Glenda...

When she saw Kerren's mouth, and the way it was stretched wide, it came together in her mind. Kerren was *screaming*. That was the high sound, and why it had seemed familiar! Suddenly her hands, which had been holding so tightly onto Dale's wide leather belt, were yanking at them, pulling at both sides with equal panicked insistency.

"Stop!" she was screaming into the wind, into the security guard's ear. It didn't matter whether stopping would expose them to the horned thing; something horrible was happening, and she had to know what it was.

Dale swiveled his head from one side to the other frantically, trying to determine what was going on, whether the problem was with Sheryl or something nearby. He couldn't see anything, Sheryl knew, but he was slowing anyway, trying to keep their vehicle from skidding as they came to a stop. Even though Kelly was using her legs to keep the sledge from bumping into the back of the snowmobile, Sheryl felt the jolt when the two impacted.

"Cut the engine!" Sheryl was now yelling into Dale's ear, afraid that if he stopped but kept idling, they would miss the horrific sound of Kerren's screams. He did, and the air was filled with... silence.

Then a deep intake of breath came from behind them, and Kerren screamed again.

Sheryl threw herself sideways off the snowmobile, falling into the snow. There was no other way to dismount, being stuck between Manoj and Dale. Snow got into her eyes and mouth, she stumbled to her feet, and she staggered back to where Kerren was. Her wife's scream died out as she approached, but her eyes will still wide open. She looked over at Glenda, whose eyes were still open as well. But Sheryl could immediately tell the difference.

"Oh no..." Sheryl breathed. Glenda's sightless eyes were looking right at Kerren, who had no way of moving out of their glassy stare. That must have been why she started screaming, Sheryl thought, because she couldn't avoid that final look.

Sheryl knelt down next to Kerren, rested her hand on the top of her wife's head, mostly because there was no other exposed place for her to put it. "It's all right," she said, her throat already starting to become scratchy with impending tears. "She's okay now." Sheryl didn't even know what she was saying, or what kind of consolation she was trying to give. A clearly sweet, conflicted woman had just been accidentally killed by a famous author. What meaningful words were there for her to say?

Those eyes... they were deep blue, Sheryl noticed now that they were still. Unsure of whether it would work the way it did in the movies, she carefully reached out with one hand and tried to lower Glenda's eyelids. She succeeded, sort of. There was still a rim of white at the bottom where the lids didn't quite meet the bottom row of lashes. The effect was debatably creepier than having her stare at them.

Now Dale was there, falling to his knees in the snow just as Sheryl had done on Kerren's side. His hands reached for the deceased woman reflexively but stopped themselves, unsure of what to do. "No... no..." he murmured, his deep voice clear as tolling bells in the snow-blanketed silence surrounding them. "We just needed a little longer, just a little longer..." One of his hesitant hands found a place on Glenda's temple, as if he were feeling for a pulse, and remained there even when they found nothing.

Kerren and Glenda were both crying now, as silently as they could. Sheryl wanted to move away -- Glenda and Dale's final tender moment was less than two feet away from her face -- but stayed because Kerren couldn't go with her. Deep rivers of guilt flowed through her stomach like cold lava, this death made even more awful by the fact that her own love was still here, still alive in this most precarious of situations.

Dale's fingers drifted back through Glenda's hair, stroking her head softly, and Sheryl realized that he probably never had the chance to touch her that way before. His fingers disappeared into the soft waves, and his head bent down to hers. He rested his forehead just above her ear, and paused.

"I'm so sorry, Dale," Sheryl whispered. She was aware that Kelly had gotten up off the sledge when she realized what was going on, and she and Manoj were now half-seated on the snowmobile, arms wrapped protectively around each other.

Even though he was whispering, his voice hoarse with regret, Dale spoke almost directly into Glenda's unhearing ear. "There just wasn't enough time," he said, his face scrunching into a horrific mask before springing back into some woeful resemblance of his warm, kindly face. "It all happened so *fast*... and I didn't think I deserved any of it... but *you* did. You always did."

Sheryl laid one arm lightly across Kerren. Watching the sorrow of Dale saying his final goodbye to Glenda, she realized how much she needed Kerren, loved her even through all the trouble and uncertainty they'd had. It had been too late to get Glenda to help, but there was still time for the rest of them. She and Kerren could be the way they had been.

None of them made any indication that they needed to hurry to continue their journey. They gave Dale the time he needed, to kneel there in the snow and make the first step of what would be many, into deep grief. Until he was ready, they all patiently waited and said their own private prayers, both for the dead and those still in need of saving.

-11.2-

The passage was longer than he had expected. He tried comparing its length to when he had crawled down it just after the avalanche had collapsed the hallway. Then, as now, he had been traversing a narrow, low passage that may or may not actually have existed; this time, however, he had the experience of his previous trip to keep claustrophobic panic from his mind.

Devoid of other options, he kept retreating, sliding backwards into the tiny crevice on his stomach, his feet ceaselessly flailing around, trying to determine the point when the passage would either open up or close down entirely. Neither happened. The pressing weight of debris around him was always just big enough for him to slip through, just clear enough for him to not spear himself on a jagged edge or lacerating point. He knew he didn't have to go all that far for the Qoloni to be unable to follow, but kept moving anyway. Perhaps he was hoping to rewind time, maybe it was merely the act of backing away from his nemesis that kept him from pondering the more insane questions that were pressing in on him as closely as physical space was.

So he kept moving, waiting for a change, any kind of change. The dim point of light ahead of him had dwindled until he could not tell where it was anymore, or whether some subtle curve in the crawlspace had turned it out of his view. In any event, the sounds of struggle had long since ceased from that direction. Now there was only his breathing, the rasp of his elbows on the jumbled carpet, the scrape of his toenails against dirt...

What? The terrain he was advancing into was definitely changing, from the uneven floor of the hallway to soft, slightly damp dirt. He stopped, unsure of whether he should continue. What was his other option, however? He couldn't retreat (in this case, that meant move forward) to the place where his dark creation might still be waiting. Also, he was victim of the writerly curse of needing to find out What Happens Next. So he pressed on, the ache in his spine beginning to lift as he passed completely over to grassy ground. He felt that strange, lifting sensation that he remembered from his dreams, as if he had entered a place where gravity had less of a persistent grip on him.

He knew this place. It was his. And Theda's. He sped up his efforts. He could not pinpoint when it happened, but he became aware that he was no longer crawling on his belly in a low, tight tunnel of debris. He was on a patch of ground in a moonlit grove, the air lying refreshingly warm over him like a soothing blanket, limitless space above him.

He stopped, rolled over onto his back (not even thinking about the knife wound there, although it didn't seem to hurt anymore), and sat up. His breath caught. He was once again in his dream place. He was within the ring of Sounding Stones, their carven runes still absent of their inner, pulsing light. But they were still there. This place still existed. He didn't truly know how afraid he had been until this moment how afraid he had been that the storm (and don't forget the horned thing, he had seen its shadow here!) had blasted it away.

It was much as he remembered it, although he had never been here during whatever passed for night in this realm. He looked out beyond the ring into the forest beyond, trying to see how far the familiarity of the place stretched. The trees still seemed as thick and lush as before, the farthest depths lit with flickering their usual will-o'-the-wisps that seemed to promise even more wondrous lands beyond.

There was no moon in the sky, and Bruce noted that he was unaware if one even existed in this world. Or, if there were one, what it would look like. He had to investigate only by the light of the stars, which knitted themselves into unknown constellations overhead, and a thin, pale curtain of aurora that hovered high, high above him, barely moving as it cast a faint, evenly green caste over everything.

No wind stirred the dream world, and similarly Bruce was holding his breath. He moved to the edge of the ring, moving as closely as he dared to the gap between the two Sounding Stones where Theda invariably made her appearances. Would she come now? Or had the storm and Qoloni permanently chased her away?

"You've come," she said, from behind him. Bruce whirled around, and there she was, not inside the ring with him but at the gap on the opposite side, although the source of her voice, as always, seemed to be coming from inside his head.

"Yes," he said, turning and walking toward her. "And so have you. I'm so glad to see you."

Her robes, myriad veils that swirled around her as if she were underwater, hid most of her form from his view. Only her face, with those crystal-vivid eyes, did he see with absolute clarity.

"The Qoloni," she stated, and he was surprised to hear her pronounce it with a slightly different inflection than he had always imagined it. "It went over with you."

Bruce nodded, hoping that now, finally, he would get some answers. "That's right," he said. "I don't know if it was the storm you had here, or the avalanche I had there, but it did. It took a while, but it found me. And now you have to tell me how to get rid of it, or defeat it!"

Theda considered him closely, even as he came to stand at the gap between the two stones, the limit of how far he could venture into this strange world. She didn't seem in any particular hurry to clear things up for him. "You are in great danger," she said. "The others, as well. The Qoloni does not discriminate. It knows only its own rage."

"I know I am!" he agreed. He spun around, lifting his shirt in the back to show her the knife wound. "I've already been attacked! And by one of the others!"

He craned his neck to see her reaction, but there was none. He got that feeling he often felt when he was talking to her; that this idealized image of a woman was but one facet of a vast intelligence that often acted as if it were speaking with a belligerent child. "There is no wound. It does not translate here." Bruce probed with the fingers of his other hand, realizing how ridiculous he must look, and found his skin at the small of his back smooth and unbroken.

Theda went on. "I had feared this. The convergence of your mind with several others has caused an anomaly in the Allstory."

"Others?" Bruce asked, tugging his shirt back down and facing her again. "What others? You mean the woman who looks like you?"

"Not just her," Theda said calmly. "The woman who resembles me. The man who painted me. The men who have read your story. These are just a few of those who have caused a rift. I had feared this... the gift I gave you, the story that yearned to be told, was a powerful one."

"The story of the Qoloni?" Bruce asked. "Are you saying that I wrote it so powerfully that it stuck in their minds? And combined, they've managed to harness that part of the Allstory?"

"In part," Theda said, her voice edging toward impatience. "The woman who resembles me is more that she seems. As is one of the readers. A strong combination, and your physical presence has caused a sort of bubble to split off your particular reality. That disruption caused the avalanche."

Bruce thought this over. Hadn't the Indian fellow said something about an alternate reality? Did he have some inkling of what was going on too? Is that why he remained behind as well? "But it can be restored, can't it?" Bruce asked. "We can sort of... reattach ourselves back to our own reality?"

For the first time, Theda's face registered a clear expression, and it was concern. The hair on the back of Bruce's neck rose as if he were about to be struck by lightning. "Perhaps," she said. "But they would need to be made truly aware of the power of the Allstory."

"I can tell them!" Bruce blurted. "I know that I don't understand it much, but I can explain what I can! I already told them some of--"

"You have already told them too much!" Theda said, so loudly that it made Bruce feel like the insides of his skull were being pushed outward because of its force. He recoiled, and when she spoke again she had reined in her volume. "There is danger in letting others in on the secret. The result could be more damaging than what the Qoloni could do."

"But I can't just give up, sacrifice myself as a necessary loss! And what about the others? I've already... hurt one person. How can I accept letting them all go down with me, as part of some trans-dimensional accident that they don't even know they helped cause?"

Theda stared at him for a long moment, and where he had once read affection in her goring stare, he now read blankness. "The Allstory preserves itself in any way it needs to. Its near-infinite blind alleys and ruined worlds are inevitable. You may have just ended up in one. It's no one's fault." The words did nothing to soothe him.

Bruce was growing angry again. If he had only known, on that long-ago night when Theda first came to him and gave him his first story, that there would be such a price paid for her generosity, with such astronomical dividends...

"Why?" he asked her suddenly. "Why did you even come to me in the first place?"

"Because you asked for me," she said. "All those nights that you lay awake, begging the Universe for inspiration. That was what drew me."

Bruce couldn't take responsibility for this catastrophe. He had never signed a contract in blood, never made a deal with the devil, which was what he was quickly determining Theda to be. "I'm going to find them," he said through his clamped jaw. "I'm going to tell them, and we're going to beat this. The Qoloni, the Allstory itself, can just go to hell!" But his words sounded flat and toothless.

"I cannot stop you," she said. "But what I can tell you is this... You cannot win."

"We'll just see about that," Bruce said. "If I created the damn thing--" he ignored the arched eyebrow he received from his muse, "-- then I can put it down." With this, he turned to storm away. He got to the midway point in the circle of Sounding Stones before he stopped, realizing that he did not know how to leave this place. He had never consciously left it before, had done so only by waking up.

He turned back to Theda, about to sheepishly ask her for a manner of exit, but she had disappeared. The wind picked up, flowing through the giant stones like hissing breath through teeth.

Whitelodge 10.5 & 10.6

-10.5-

Harmon was mentally ready to pass out from pain long before he had lifted himself out of the snow and back into the world. The fact that he didn't, and that he even managed to use the ski pole to bring himself to standing, was a testament to every injury he had up until this day. They now seemed to be mere prep work for this one. Even so, he could feel bones grating against each other down there, sending out little glass lightning bolts when they touched. He closed his eyes, ground his teeth a little tighter together, and attempted a step.

The snow, he found, was packed a little looser around his fallen, imprisoning tree than it was a little farther out. This was a good sign; maybe if he could stay in the little valleys between the long hillocks of other buried trees, he could make decent progress. These were thickly scattered, but there were thin, shallow paths between many of them. The landscape looked like a white cemetery where every grave has been freshly dug, but it could be managed.

Now came the big question... to continue downhill, the direction he was headed when the avalanche knocked him down, or turn around and head back up toward the Lodge? Returning certainly had a few marks against it. Whatever the thing was he had heard/felt prowling around, he was convinced it had gone that way, toward the distant sound of breaking glass. Definitely not a place he wanted to be. But it also was much closer than the town, which was something to consider when you were working with a broken vessel.

And speaking of that town, Harmon was getting a better look at it as he turned his head first one way, then the other, gauging his options. When he looked down at the town, he found himself a little puzzled. It was there, pretty much exactly as he expected to view it from this distance, but also... not. There seemed to be a lot of wavering air between here and there, as if an unseasonably warm wind were blowing up out of the valley, colliding with the cool drifting down the mountain and making the town seem more like a wavering mirage than usual. He couldn't quite put his finger on why, but that unsettled him.

Another thing to consider was that there were people back at the Lodge he cared about. Dale and Glenda, of course, but there was also that woman named Kerren whose mind he had stolen into, and altered somehow. There was a tiny, insistent drive in him to find out more about her, and exactly what he had accomplished while exploring her mental interior. It felt like he had done something significant, but he wouldn't know if he descended and left them all behind. If anything, he would like to have the chance to apologize to her. He, more than most people, understood what it was like to have your mind invaded, and thought he owed her at least that much.

He looked back toward the town (but it's *not* the town, something in the back of his head corrected him) and sighed. Like nearly all of the most important decisions in his life, he found that his course of action was really just a foregone conclusion. He pivoted on his good leg and looked upslope, back in the opposite direction that he had cowardly fled from. He planted the ski pole as far in front of him as he dared, braced it under his armpit, and hopped forward. The pain in his raised ankle flared even though it didn't touch down, sending hot sparks up the length of his leg. He grimaced, but in all it wasn't as bad as he had feared. He found he could even do it again, and so he did.

The snow did prove to be nearly solid in between the piles that marked every fallen tree, and Harmon was able to scan far enough ahead to keep from being caught in a blind alley, forced to backtrack. It was a slow, arduous process, but with each step he felt he was getting closer to the Lodge, even though he couldn't quite see it yet.

After many minutes of this, he was starting to get into the meditative groove of motion, which made even the pain seem manageable. There was virtually no wind, easing the journey as well. Plant ski pole, transfer weight, hop, breathe. Plant ski pole, transfer weight, hop, breathe. All other things fell away. It wasn't until he had been in this modified meditation for several minutes that he realized the presence of some kind of motorized sound. It was far off, almost as far away as the breaking glass had been, but more constant and insistent. It was an engine running, somewhere out of sight. Sound traveled funny around the mountain, which was true at any time, but especially on this strange, suspended-time midnight; Harmon couldn't discern exactly where it was coming from. That was too bad, because it sounded like one of the snowmobiles in the emergency shed. He would have liked to hitch a ride.

Someone was heading off, and he wished them the best. But it wasn't until he had covered several hundred more feet that he started to ask himself what his endgame was, exactly. To confront whatever it was that had been stalking him? To crawl back into his bed and wait for this bizarre dream to be over? He didn't know, and for the time being didn't allow himself to try to figure it out. He had made his decision, and he was sticking to it.

It was strange... he had always thought of life in terms of the many varied hills he had skied down, those pumped-full-of-adrenaline moments where he had felt most alive. But now that he was clawing his way back up one of them, he was becoming aware of how little of his life had actually been spent in that downhill rush. Far more time had been spent climbing, and he had paid so little attention to it. Now, he was forced to confront those long moments between the things he actually noticed. He began to wonder if this was how he had lived the non-skiing part of his life too.

What felt like hours had passed, but he noted that the moon was in the exact same place it had been when he had climbed out of the snow. He took this as plain fact; by now, there was nothing that would have seemed impossible. He would just keep moving forward, avoiding the obvious pitfalls, and he'd eventually the journey would reach a conclusion. He already felt as if he had gotten away with something by surviving the avalanche, so he had no right to demand anything of the world anymore.

He became aware of the Lodge, ahead of him and a little to the left. It was close enough that he must have been moving toward it for many minutes without seeing it. His eyes scanned the upper part of its facade -- all that was visible from here -- for signs of danger or comfort, but found neither. The Lodge had always been a welcome sight to him, a view that meant he was home. Now, partially obscured by snow, Harmon couldn't help but see it as a blank slate, one that gave him no impressions at all, positive or negative. The points of the eaves were familiar, but lacked a sense of presence. This sudden disappearance of architectural personality disturbed him even more than if he had tuned into a vibe of pure evil radiating from it.

And yet, his feet kept moving. There was a notch in the evenly-distributed snow blanket that rose halfway up the front of the facade, and Harmon felt his legs hobbling toward that point. It was just to the side of where the lobby doors should be, and the closer he got, the more he could tell that there had been activity there. Multiple foot tracks came up through the notch, which he found out was a slope, formed when a mini-avalanche occurred with the breaking of the front window (that crashing sound both he and the invading force had heard?). The only time he stopped walking in his entire uphill journey came when he realized the darkness laid across the snow wasn't a shadow.

Blood. A faint, dripping trail that led from the window along the front of the building, disappearing around the side. It had happened a while ago, and the snow had melted against its warmth, dyeing patches of the path pink. His first instinct, as someone who had routinely needed to help people who had been injured in the great outdoors, was to follow it to the end, but he really had no idea which direction led the way to the person who was hurt. His original intent had been to get back into the Lodge, if for no other reason than to maybe find heat or food, so he took a chance and topped the slope that led to the shattered window.

It was as bad as he feared. As he descended the slope to the window -- extra slowly even though he had almost mastered traveling without putting any weight on his broken ankle -- more and more of the darkened lobby came into view. The blood continued across the floor, along and under overturned and broken furniture, staining the familiar patterns of the large rug into strangeness. Then the trail seemed to change consistency and continued up the main stairs. He didn't have time to figure out what it all meant, he just wanted to get to his room. There, he knew, there was at least a battery-powered light, aspirin, and some canned food he kept for emergencies. Maybe he could lie in his cot for a little while, prop up his ankle (which felt like it was bearing hundreds of pounds and meters of circumference in accumulated pain), maybe sleep a little...

Dragging his leg and thumping his ski pole on the floor in the sound-deadened lobby, he wondered what kind of creature he sounded like to a listener, possibly someone hiding somewhere else in the lodge.

-10.6-

Carlos saw the horned thing standing in the near-utter darkness ahead of him, and the sight froze him where he stood. It wasn't because it was looking in his direction; in fact, it was turned to the side, standing at the L-junction of the Lodge's two main halls, staring stoically down the other length.

Now that he had the time to take in its unobscured form without immediately fearing for his own safety, Carlos felt his feet inching forward, eager to learn more. The thing was uniformly dark, so dark that it was hard to tell whether that was its skin tone, or if it had been assembled from pure, distilled shadow. Its form was human, and male as far as he could tell, but rail-thin, so thin that he thought he should be able to see a trace of its skeleton outline. He couldn't, however. The more he tried to discern its true form, the less distinct it seemed to become. It was like he was looking at a hasty living charcoal sketch of a human being, one that was being left out in the rain.

The horns/antlers, though, were something entirely different. They were clear as cut ebony, in hi-res focus while the rest of the thing was fuzzy around the edges. They tipped slowly from one side to the other like scales, as if the thing were considering a particularly difficult problem. He couldn't really see the tips of the antlers, because they extended far enough ahead of the creature that most of them were hidden by the hall's change in direction. Carlos wondered how a creature so slight could support such a ponderous array of stony appendages.

He didn't like the way it was making that motion. He had once seen a cat watching an oblivious mouse, waiting for the moment to pounce, and the thing's attitude reminded him more of this than anything else. There was something at the other end of its gaze, and Carlos feared for it. His feet stepped lightly, his body hugging the wall, getting as far out of the thing's peripheral vision as he could while still drawing closer. He surprised himself about how quiet he could be. Soon he was within ten feet of it, and it seemed not to notice his presence at all.

His intent really had just been to see what had so fascinated the beast. He felt that if he could get close enough behind it, he would be able to see down the other hallway to figure it out. His noble thoughts about warning the other inhabitants of the hotel had long since fled his mind. Now he was serving only his own curiosity. He could almost see the other, darker section of hallway beyond the creature. Just a few more steps...

The thing tensed. It was just a slight movement, a bowing in the area of what should have been the thing's knees and a spreading of what should have been its elbows, but it telegraphed exactly to Carlos what it was about to do. The time had come for the cat to pounce. And Carlos, much to his own surprise, found himself flooded with an overwhelming feeling that he should not allow it to do this. Whatever its intention, this dark, abominable thing should not carry it out.

Carlos was rushing forward before he had fully conceived of what he was going to do. He came in low, for no other reason than staying away from the fearsome antlers. He drove his shoulder into the thing's side, simultaneously throwing his arms out to pin its elbows close to it. He found it lighter than he had expected because it was already lunging, partly lifting its weight off the ground. He was able to take that momentum and divert it, swinging the thing to match his own trajectory, which took them both barreling right into the wall at the far side of the hallway.

Even before it was fully held in his grasp, Carlos was utterly repulsed by the feel of the thing's body. It was horribly dense, but felt as ill-defined as it looked; the unbidden image that immediately flashed through Carlos' mind was one of tackling a side of beef, one that was carpeted with buzzing flies. Then there was nothing else to think of but keeping his arms locked around the thing, not letting it slip away from him. It wasn't going to be easy.

He braced himself to hit the end of the hallway while locked together with the thing, but when the moment came the impact was surprisingly soft. In fact, his forearms -- the first part of his body to hit -- touched the wall, and then felt as if they pushed it away as he continued to stumble forward. Coupled with this was the sensation that his shoulder, forced up hard against where the thing's ribs should have been, was turning into rubber, bending in an unholy way that should have been breaking bones and rupturing muscle, but wasn't. Then Carlos remembered the way the thing interacted with the physical world, everything giving way to its space-warping presence. Was what was happening to him the same as he had seen happening to the door to Harmon's room?

He tried not to think about it, focused instead on keeping the thing from retaliating. Once he realized that the pair of them were creating a form-fitting dent in the wall of the hallway, Carlos hoped that maybe it would be easy enough to keep the thing pinned in it. The feel of the thing against his body, though... it felt absolutely horrible, like he was being painlessly twisted out of shape, and at the same time his skin trying to grip a non-solid surface, one that stung and flowed over him in a grotesquely molten way. Carlos hadn't thought about what the horned thing's intended target was since he had locked his arms around it, but then his head ended up facing down the broken end of the hallway.

The only thing that surprised Carlos when he saw the author Bruce Casey standing there, pinned back against the wall of debris with no place to go, was his own utter lack of surprise. After all, he had just figured out with Benny that this creature he was grappling with was remarkably similar to something in one of Casey's books, and he knew that the author was checked in this weekend.

Then his focus was back on keeping that very thing pinned to the wall, a maneuver that was quickly proving impossible. It seemed that the thing's inability to pass through material objects had an advantage to it; the thing was actually leaning into the wall, and too late Carlos realized that it was preparing to use its springiness to launch itself back against him, like a boxer throwing himself back against the ropes. It worked, and the Carlos was forced to stumble backward, just trying to stay on his feet. If he fell back and still managed to hang onto the thing, it would fall on top of him, pinning him to the floor, and Carlos didn't want to think about what state his body would find itself in if that happened (for that matter, why wasn't the thing sinking into the floor with every step it took?)

Instead, Carlos found himself forced to let go of the horned thing, which was starting to twist its torso in Carlos's grip. Its surface was so ill-defined, so hard to keep hold of, feeling simultaneously viscous and ephemeral against his skin. He really had no choice but to let go. He spun away, staying low because of the swinging horns, the terrible buzzing sound continuing to resonate in his bones.

He glanced one more time toward the author, hoping he would get some kind of help from that quarter, but instead found it hard to make out exactly what was happening at the end of the hall. Bruce Casey was getting down on the floor, looking as if he were about try to crawl past the combatants on his hands and knees. Instead, he started backing up against the wreckage of the former hallway. There was clearly no way for him to get through it, beams and broken pieces of wall everywhere... But then the retreating author just kept going.

If Carlos hadn't been facing off against this weird manifestation of that man's imagination, he would have been able to pay more attention to what was happening. But the author, still keeping one eye on the confrontation playing out in front of his, just kept moving back, and back, until the shadows that filled the miniscule gaps between the debris engulfed him entirely. It must have been a trick of the light, some gap that Carlos was too disoriented to see...

Carlos gathered his balance and prepared to flee, but realized that the horned figure didn't seem to be interested in him anymore. It swung its head so quickly that Carlos had to duck to keep from getting his head impaled on one of the viciously pointed tips of its myriad antlers. It was turning its attention to the end of the shattered corridor, where the author had vanished to... somewhere. Anyway, it didn't look like the thing could follow with all the stuff in the way. It was only going to take a second or two before it realized this, and focused its rage on the only other person still around.

Carlos had done what he came to, warning and protecting the person who had been making all that noise. Job done, he spun on his heel and tore off down the corridor, his feet pounding on the cracked boards and his labored breathing filling his ears, waiting to hear the bounding thuds as the creature began its loping strides after him.