They were going to have to get out of the room, which at the moment seemed like a pretty tall order. They were two old men, broken in different ways, and it was unclear just how far from this rickety old cot they could manage to get. But they had the fire of knowledge, and they would just have to hope that was enough.
Harmon withdrew from Benny's fractured brain slowly, carefully, not wanting to cause any more damage than had already been done to it. He wasn't even sure he had such power, but he didn't want to risk it. He opened his eyes and he was back, Benny sitting next to him slumped back against the wooden wall of Harmon's small understairs room. Looking at the broken man, he marveled at how incredibly complex and beautiful the human mind was, even in such a compromised state. It was a depressing shock, going from such a sense of limitless potential and space, to being trapped inside a tiny box of bone. It was no wonder that people expected so little of themselves, and each other.
As disappointing as the physical world was compared to that of the mental, he had to fully return. Things needed to be done. The look in Benny's eyes when Harmon spoke to him meant that the kitchen worker knew this grim fact too, but with nearly infinite regret he knew he wasn't going to be much help.
"No worries," Harmon said to him, cautiously patting him on the knee. "We'll figure this out. I guess I can walk a little more, since I've made it this far. Maybe I can lure the thing out from wherever it is, get it to come to us..." The fear in Benny's eyes was growing more intense, so Harmon stopped his vocal spitballing. It was belatedly starting to dawn on him that if the two of them were going to defeat the Qoloni, they'd need more than one working body between the two of them.
It was his longing for the sense of weightlessness that came from being inside another's mind that made him think of Kerren again. Even while he admitted that the feeling could possibly be addictive and he should be careful, he knew that it was their only means of getting additional help. Out on the snow, he thought he had heard the distant sound of one of the lodge's snowmobiles heading down toward the village, and if that were true, the blonde woman (who looked so much like Sarah) was most likely one of the passengers. If they had made it all the way down, they might be able to send assistance. Of course, how he could possibly explain what the Qoloni was, and how it would have to be fought, was something he would have to work out later.
Turning to Benny again (and feeling a flare in the broken ankle he had almost forgotten about in his inner travels), Harmon said, "I'm going to try to reach Kerren. Maybe she can send help to us." He didn't feel like explaining that Kerren was dealing with some mental and physical trauma of her own, because Benny seemed to be in a particularly emotionally vulnerable state. "Hold on," he said, "I'm going to see where she is, and get a message to her if I can."
Surprisingly, as he closed his eyes and prepared to reach out -- a process that seemed to get a little easier each time he did it -- Harmon felt a shaky, hesitant hand slip into his own. It was Benny, trying to hold onto him, as he would a lifeline. "Don't worry," Harmon said without trying to shake off the hand, "I'll be right back. And right here." It was true; where he was going next, his body would necessarily stay behind.
He felt that unique sense of dislocation again as he expanded his thoughts to outside his own body, pushing into the feeling of anti-world that he now understood existed everywhere, between all spaces and times. Almost immediately, he was distracted by something else, something fascinating: the presence of Kerren, less than a hundred feet away. She was high above him, much higher than he thought she should be, and far enough away that he had to wonder whether she was still in the Lodge or not. So she hadn't been on the snowmobile after all...
Harmon drew his disembodied presence back, trying to get a better overall look at the surroundings. He backed through the lobby, trying not to look at the disturbing, fading traces of life in the blood stains across the floor and up the stairs. He tried to keep his attention high, but he kept having to raise it, up above the Deertail's second floor, up above the thin attic space that lay on top of it...
He actually heard himself say aloud, "The roof, goddamnit. She's on the roof," and dimly felt Benny's hand clench a little too hard against his, back in his tiny room under the stairs.
They were *all* up there, in fact. Well, five of them were... no, six, but one of them... dear God, one of them felt vacant, a complete shell, nothing left... what had happened? As if he had willed it -- and maybe he had -- Harmon felt his consciousness slip inside that silent, still mind, and then just as quickly retreat. One phrase was all he could sum up about that vast, unlit space -- *There was nothing left.* They were the only possible words to describe what he had seen and felt in that eons-long instant he had been inside Glenda's mind. Until that moment, he hadn't even realized it was her, the person he had interacted with more than anyone else at the Lodge, because she was so unrecognizable in that form. He didn't feel the tears that spontaneously ran down his corporeal cheeks.
The only thing that gave him solace was Kerren. She was right there, next to the darkened form, so luminous she almost blinded his vision, forming a perfect counterpoint. How could one person be so incredibly *alive* while another, less than two feet away, was utterly, irrevocably absent?
He forced himself to turn away from this unsolvable dilemma, to turn to more pressing matters. How had they gotten up on the roof? A quick survey of the area seemed to answer this: the avalanche had piled snow up to and over the roof line at the back of the Lodge, so they must have driven right up onto it. But why?
Now he became aware of movement elsewhere on the roof. Dale (he had come to recognize the man's particularly warm energy signature, but now it seemed strangely ragged and dim, and Harmon thought he could understand why) came over and knelt down next to Glenda's former self. Harmon watched as the security guard gingerly picked her up and turned to walk away. Harmon followed, watching as he carried her into one of the little cupolas, which he always assumed were merely ornamental, at the front corners of the Lodge. Now, he could see that there was a hatch there that led down into the attic space. A young couple had just finished prying it up, and now leaned it against the inner wall of the cupola, standing back as far as they could to make room when they finished.
Dale moved slowly, reverently, as if enacting a ritual, and the others patiently waited while he descended into the Lodge with infinite care. Once he was out of sight, Manoj and Kelly moved out of the cupola, coming over to help Sheryl and Kerren -- it surprised him only a little that he knew all their names, having picked them up tangentially through his previous time in Kerren's mind. They seemed to know exactly what to do without speaking, and picked up the injured woman, who had been wrapped in a rug around a thick piece of board that acted as a sort of stretcher. They moved without outward or inward communication, following Dale's pilgrimage into the cupola.
Harmon prepared himself, whispered an apology for intruding again, and dipped into Kerren's blazing mind for a second time.
-12.6-
The door slammed shut, and immediately warped as the dark thing impacted it from the other side. Carlos watched, fascinated, as it twisted and struggled, bending the door, its jamb, and the surrounding walls in ways that shouldn't have been possible. Before, when he had been down in Benny's room, he had been too terrified that the thing was going to break through to appreciate the phenomenon, but now that he was reasonably sure it couldn't, his feet became rooted to the spot where he stood, and he just observed it happening.
The blank face of the creature, until now, had lent it a kind of detachment. At least, that's how Carlos had thought about it; when your pursuer didn't have an expression to be read, you could never be sure of its motives. Was it angry at Carlos? Was it hungry? Was it insane? He would have been able to tell if it had a mouth, or eyes to look at. But its mere approximation of a human face made it hard to read. Carlos guessed from the way it was contorting its body, its hands blindly grasping in his direction through the membrane its strange physics made of the door, that at least two of his guesses were true.
Now that he was out of immediate danger, Carlos was able to inspect his shoulder, which had taken so much force when he slammed into the door that he feared it might be broken, or at least dislocated. He touched it gingerly with his free hand, then rubbed it. It would be quite bruised, but it seemed intact. He was able to rotate it most of the way around in its socket, with nothing stronger than the expected ache. He had lucked out on that count.
He watched the ripples and thrashes from the other side of the door until they started to subside. There was one final flurry of slashing activity from the other side, and then the thing retreated slowly, stealthily. The tips of the antlers were the last thing to disappear, the hard points receding high up on the wall above the door. It wasn't until it had entirely withdrawn that a long, deep shiver passed up the full length of Carlos's spine. He tried not to think too hard about what he had just escaped from. The most unnerving thing, he realized, was that it was so silent. Not even the twisting of reality itself as the walls and vases and doors wrapped around the thing's lean, horrible shape had made any sound. The ambience it left in its absence was almost as frightening as when it was snapping at his heels, which just lent even more surreality to the experience.
It was in this silence, however, that Carlos was able to discern a totally new sound. It was nearby, but muffled, a kind of hollow stepping and scraping, as if several people were walking slowly, methodically, in another room, over resonant wooden boards. For some reason, he was almost as afraid of this sound as he had been of the silence of the dark thing that, for all he knew, could still be waiting just outside the door. There was something ominous in its order. All that was missing was the deep tones of a dirge being played underneath them.
Carlos's eyes drifted to the back corner of the room, where he saw a door he hadn't noticed before. It was unusually wide. He'd never been in this part of the Lodge before, but he assumed what lay beyond was more storage. Maybe some of the larger maintenance equipment? He stepped lightly over to it, listened to the steps as they continued their heavy treads. Some of them seemed weirdly synchronized, as if there were some kind of marching maneuver taking place inside. He tested the doorknob, found that it turned silently. He returned the knob to its resting position and backed away, not knowing whether he should risk going back into the hall, or seeing if the procession would try to gain access to his new hiding place.
All of a sudden, Carlos found himself filled with anger, which he hadn't been able to bring himself to feel against the dark creature he had been grappling with. Maybe it was the residual adrenaline from that encounter, but he found that he didn't want to spend the rest of his time in the Lodge running and hiding. He reached for the knob again, decisively turned it and threw the door open.
On the other side was another, longer storage room, lined with plastic storage racks, all of which were filled with every manner of things needed for the upkeep of a large, wooden building: cans of paint, stains, and varnish; boxes of nails, assorted woodworking supplies and equipment. But in the center of it, a long, shallow-grade staircase with open slats descended from a large rectangular gap in the ceiling, which let the moonlight hinted at through the window in the outer room shine down directly.
Next to this stairway -- which started almost over Carlos's head and descended to the far side of the room -- stood Dale, the Lodge's head of security, with a limp female form draped across his arms. He turned to look at Carlos as the door opened, and the expression on his face was confusing. It took a little longer for Carlos to realize what was coming down the stairs: three people together, one in front and two in back of a long, cylindrical shape as they stepped down the stairs as a unit. Carlos could only see the backs of their legs through the thick slats of the stairs, so he couldn't determine any more facts than that.
"What... what's happening?" Carlos's excitement about finding other able-bodied people in the Lodge was tempered by his uncertainty about what they were doing. "Is she all right?" He was speaking to Dale now, nodding his head at the woman in his arms. As soon as he had said the words, he realized that it was Glenda, the desk clerk who always had a warm smile for him -- and, he assumed, for everybody -- whenever he would venture out from his work in the kitchen. Dale only shook his head gravely.
Now the group was hitting the bottom of the stairs, and turning in his direction. Once all three of the group carrying the long shape had pivoted around his way, everyone stopped and looked at each other. It became clear to Carlos that what they were holding between them was a woman, wrapped in a rug. She surprised him by tilting her head his way, her bright eyes regarding him coolly. This made him assume that Glenda, despite the knife stuck high in her chest, was merely injured as well.
He broke the silence by saying, "It's outside the door. It chased me in here. But it can't go through solid objects. So we're safe for now."
The best feeling Carlos had that night, aside from when he realized that Benny was still alive, was the collective shudder of relative relief that went through the group when he spoke those words.
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