Now that Sheryl had switched places with Kelly, she could appreciate how hard it was to be the buffer between the snowmobile and the sledge. She had to recline between Kerren and Glenda (trying hard to drive from her mind the thought that one of the women was deceased), and brace her feet against the back of the snowmobile, right below where Manoj sat.
When she had been up on that seat herself, there hadn't felt like there were much change in the hybrid vehicle's downward velocity. Now, with nothing but her body making sure that the two pieces didn't collide with the slightest fluctuation in speed, it was getting harder. It was taking most of her strength and concentration to keep everything steady.
She decided to take a chance and throw a look back over her shoulder toward Kerren. The sight of her wife's face was pretty much the only thing that was keeping Sheryl going; it was the reason she had asked Kelly to trade places with her, so the two of them could be closer. When she looked back (which was as much a matter of tipping her head back as turning it to the side), the expression of incredulity on that lovely face was enough to get her to look down the mountain.
It was surprising how quickly she determined what she was looking at, what they were heading for. She had experienced that strange period of whiteness just as it seemed everyone else had, and it had so disoriented her that she wasn't particularly surprised to see the Deertail Lodge on the slope below them. It felt natural to her somehow, although she wasn't even close to being clear whether it had been relocated, or they had.
Regardless, it was there, and growing larger in Sheryl's view. It was kind of hard to see, because she was almost lying down on the sledge, and so close to the rear of the snowmobile that the vehicle obscured most of her field of vision. Before this catastrophe had occurred, she he had to admit that she had been nervous enough about hitting the ski slope the next morning that she had already imagined/dreaded seeing the building from the upslope side. It might be because of this that she recognized it so easily.
Sheryl braced her legs, sure that Dale was going to slow down so that they could at least reevaluate their journey. Were they going to go around its half-buried bulk and try again, or stop and go back inside? Was it just a fluke that they had looped back around above the Lodge, or would it happen every time they tried to get down to the town? She tried to shut her mind away from that thought; it brought up too many other thoughts, not the least of which was that it would mean that their imprisonment -- and maybe the avalanche itself -- had some kind of design to it. Once you opened that door, the question of a designer came up, and then things got *really* terrifying.
She realized that the change in pressure against her feet, which would happen every time the snowmobile slowed and the sledge started to catch up with it, wasn't happening yet. If anything, she felt as if the snowmobile were pulling away from her... which would mean that Dale was speeding up. Why would that be happening? She could chalk it up to his impatience, except for the fact that they were still heading toward the building. Not toward the center, between the two wings, but if they kept on this heading, they weren't going to avoid it.
Panic started to creep in around the edges of Sheryl's mind. What was Dale doing? She started to tap the heel of her boot against the back panel of the snowmobile to get the attention of someone of the vehicle, but got no reaction. She kicked a little harder, and then even harder. Soon she was drumming both feet against the smooth surface with as much force as she could, the continuing acceleration of the snowmobile making it difficult to make a truly loud noise, as the sledge kept trying to pull back from it.
She even tried to lift her foot enough to nudge Manoj's butt with it, but couldn't get her leg up that far without first gaining solid purchase on the sledge, which she just didn't have. There was nowhere to sit but the edges of the storage bags that had been laid over Glenda to keep the blowing snow away from her, and they slid around dangerously every time Sheryl tried to move her legs too much.
The building continued to draw closer, and their vantage point became higher as they rode the gradual rise of the snow that piled there during avalanche. Sheryl began to panic; she was becoming more and more convinced that Dale was not going to stop. They were going to ride up onto the roof and... then what?
From here, she couldn't see much of the roof, nor could she tell how flat it was. Could it be that he was waiting to slow to a stop until they were on some clear patch of roof? It would be easier than skidding to a stop on snow, but then shouldn't he at least be not accelerating?
Sheryl threw her head back to look at Kerren again, completely at a loss for what to do. She realized how much she was like Kerren, nearly immobile and unable to affect what was going on around her. Panic began to rise to the back of her throat when she saw the expression on her wife's face; clearly, she was thinking the same thing Sheryl was. This was all wrong.
Sheryl tried to call back to her "It's okay!" and then went back to kicking the back of the snowmobile, digging in with her boot heels. She watched the panel buckle under the force, twisting the moonlight and shaping it into crazy arcs. She threw out her arms and tried to grab the edges of the sled, giving herself as much purchase as she could. She could only reach one of them, on Kerren's side, although it might have been that she felt weird about reaching across Glenda's body to grip the farther side.
She started yelling, trying to get someone's attention. As far as she could tell, no one on the snowmobile had changed position... did they know what was going on? Whatever Dale's plan could be, was it possible that they were going along with it? That was the only thing her mind had to cling to now; that there was something in front of them that she couldn't see, something that made sense for them to speed onto the Lodge's roof.
She kept kicking, kept yelling, although when she felt the transition of the snowmobile's skis and treads go from churning through snow to grinding across roof shingles, she closed her eyes.
-12.2-
Bruce looked at the spot Theda had disappeared from, acutely aware that this time he was not asleep. It wasn't all that different experience, he found; things that before had been kind of hazy and wavery were just in sharper focus. Colors were sharper, and there was a vital sense of place that had been lacking before. Of course, when he had visited this place in dreams he had been waiting for her, eager to hear the ideas she would always impart to him. But now that she had left, he had nothing to do but analyze his surroundings more closely, and strive to figure out how to get back.
He found himself turning around and around inside the circle of Sounding Stones, trying to determine which direction was most likely to provide escape. The first gap he tried was the one Theda had been standing at, opposite her usual direction of approach from the nearby forest. But when he stepped into the space between the stone columns, he felt the same invisible backward pressure he always had, the one that kept him from moving between the stones.
He turned around one more time, facing back toward the forest. Was there some coded message in her coming to him from the other direction? He walked across the circle, approaching her usual spot, and stopped. Yes, the world was different here somehow. He just had to figure out what it was. He stood there for a few moments, looking back and forth between the opposing directions, and literally felt the answer lock into place inside his head.
Before, on those nights he had come and there had been no Theda, he had noted that his dreamworld had been shrinking. And it still was; in the nights that had passed since he had last been here, the horizon had gotten appreciably closer... but only in the direction he had just seen her in. When he looked instead at the forest, he could see that it was just as it had always been. If anything, it had grown more lush with foliage. Perhaps that was why Theda had forced him to turn around the other way -- she wanted him to notice this.
He drew close to the two Sounding Stones that he was accustomed to seeing Theda between. Before he got too close, he noticed the change. There was an openness that hadn't been here before, a lack of pressure that allowed him to feel, probably for the first time, what the air was like outside the deceptively open-appearing circle. He passed between the stones with no resistance.
He took a deep breath, only now realizing how rich and oxygenated the air was, compared to inside the circle. It was like being relieved of an asthma attack he didn't even know he was having. The air outside was so deliciously dense, and he realized that if had been wearing flowing robes, they very well might be doing that underwater-floating thing that he always noticed Theda's doing. He turned his bare feet -- luxuriating in the feel of the velvety soil on his soles -- onto the path she had always come down on those imaginatively fertile nights.
The forest ahead was singing. He could hear it calling to him, and as he drew closer he could see more of those faint, lazily whirling lights in its interior. They beckoned him forward, drifting along branches, jumping the span between closely-packed trunks, as if the tiny lights were searching for something, or carrying important messages. Bruce couldn't deny that they seemed to have a sense of purpose. And through it all, a low hum permeated the thickened air, voices in thousands of languages that seemed to have no real source. The only thing they had in common was their shared sense of eagerness. They had something to say, these voices, and took great delight in speaking it, even if those voices were heard by no one in particular.
He passed into the vague shadow of the trees, his feet crossing the boundary between the forest and the rest of the dreamworld. The air inside was cooler, but thrummed with energy. The voices grew in volume, replacing the sound of brushing leaves and creaking branches that he would have expected if he had been in an earthly place. His breath caught as he heard a fragment of phrase in English. At least he thought it was English; the accent was unlike any he'd ever heard, although at times it came close to complete recognition.
It was hard to parse out every word over the general low-level cacophony, but every now and then there were words he recognized, mostly because they were unique and linked by a common thread. He first heard "hurly-burly", then "Dunsinane" and "Birnam wood". Bruce stood, swiveling his head from one side to the other, trying to triangulate where these particular words were coming from. With each recognition, he took a few steps toward where they seemed to originate. Eventually, he could hear entire lines from the tale he was so familiar with: "Show his eyes, and grieve his heart; Come like shadows, so depart!"
Somewhere, Shakespeare's Macbeth was being recited, the first scene where the future king encounters three witches that prophesy his future. The play had always been one of Bruce's favorites, in his mind the perfect literary encapsulation of man's unending drive for power, and how it inevitably causes his downfall. The words themselves seemed to be emanating from the yards-thick tree in front of him. How was this possible? And were all the other voices surrounding him also coming from the millions of trees? This particular one did seem to be sturdier that the others, Its bark dark and thickly grooved. It had seen many years of healthy growth, and even its lower branches overhead were heartier than the trunks of many of those around it. As an organism, it was unutterably beautiful.
For the briefest of instants, Bruce caught a flash of the memory he had experienced earlier, when he had seen one of his invented characters apparently conjured out of thin air near an unusually effective movie premiere. He had that same electric feeling now, that he was seeing a story spontaneously made into something alive. Then, it had been a person; now, it was a tree. But the similarity was undeniable...
A realization hit him with almost physical force. He was standing in a forest that was also what he, for lack of a better name, had been calling the AllStory. Since the night of that premiere, he had tried to find out more about this unusual concept. The awareness of it had been around long before Bruce came to learn of it, but had been hidden well, its secret details discussed and discreetly passed along only by a select few. Over the years he had found tangential bits of it, and felt he knew a little of its nature, if not its true name.
The secret, he learned, was this: stories, in their own way, are alive. And not in the sense that they live in our hearts and minds. No, that night in the alley had been his first glimpse into the possibility that when stories are loved, when they are felt in human hearts and turned around and around in human minds, as they are told and retold over years, that process of imagination weaves some kind of alchemy that begins to shape and bend reality.
At first, his mind rebelled against the concept. But the more he pulled at the thread, finding tiny mentions of it in secret literary circles by authors who had similar inklings of the nature of thing, it began to make more sense. He began to think of all the characters he had read about, and how the best ones had become ingrained in him, a part of his soul. These experiences formed some of the deepest human connections he had ever known. And now he was aware that there were many others who had read those same books and conjured those same people out of their own thoughts... the same words forming a common neural path in the vast network of human minds, ones that were continually reinforced, by the exact same words, the exact same conveyance of thought. Couldn't the argument be made that a character like Lady Macbeth, or Huckleberry Finn, or Gilgamesh, was more fully realized, more shared, more *real*, than just about anyone else in the history of the world?
The hardest part to accept in all this -- that the world of humanity was the jumping-off points for countless other worlds, ones that had started out imaginary but had evolved into their own little universes, where heroes and villains lived and breathed, where anything from fantastic epics to tiny scraps of fancy had a chance of being made flesh, tangentially weaving themselves into the tapestry of reality?
Bruce was now faced with the idea that what he had been chasing all these years was real. All of it. The author wondered what all these other trees clustered around Macbeth were. Where had they come from, what language emanated from their cores, how were they affected by the stories whose branches and roots entwined with theirs? And, his sharper-than-average ego spoke from the back of his head, where were *his* trees? What worlds had he dreamed, that now grew in this impossibly fertile place?
He was starting to run through the forest, his bare feet pounding through the lush underbrush. His mind had suddenly become ravenous to see more of this forest, to try in some meager way to grasp its breadth and its inner connections. He sprinted through lush, green chapels formed by arching trunks, whispering voices urging him on, deeper into the heart of the story-forest, faster and faster, until it seemed to be rushing toward him more quickly than he was moving toward it, denser and darker and denser and darker...
No comments:
Post a Comment