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.
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