Whitelodge 13.4

Dale didn't know he was going to hit Bruce. On the contrary, he was fully prepared to restrain himself. Despite what Bruce had done, Dale had had time to assess that it had not been his intention to stab Glenda and subsequently cause her death. He had meant to stab Dale himself, but strangely, the security guard took that much less personally. The man had been raving, and had in fact just injured himself, when Kelly prevented him from drawing his knife cleanly.

Despite all this, Dale thought he was going to give Bruce a chance. But when the author burst through the door, spewing words, taking the state he had been in when he had turned violent before and intensifying it even further, Dale's instinct went into overdrive. Before the man could take more than a few steps into the room or finish his sentence, Dale struck him with the only thing he had available...

Dale had seen many movies where it looks like the hero is about to shoot the bad guy, rifle or shotgun pressed tightly against temple, and then in a fit of mercy swinging it around and knocking him unconscious with the stock instead. The sound was always an affirming Foley-crack in those movies, but clocking Bruce in the head with both of Glenda's feet -- the pivoting force of Dale's full body weight behind them -- was markedly less satisfying.

The end result wasn't similar, either. The author took a half-step to the side, his voice erupting into a yelp that might have been his next ten seconds of babbled words compressed, and then tottered over, slumping to the floor, his shoulder taking the brunt of the fall and just keeping him from breaking his head open on the boards.

Kelly's hands instinctively reached out to catch Bruce, but it all happened too fast. She was left with arms extended into empty air. She looked down, saw the what a mess of blood Bruce's back was, and slowly lowered them.

"Bastard," Dale hissed under his breath into the overwhelming silence that filled the room in the absence of the author's babbling. Carlos' eyes were fixed on the door, as if fearing it would spring open again. Dale couldn't help but notice that he was making no effort to keep it closed, however. There didn't seem to be a lock on their side of the door anyway.

Dale checked Glenda's feet. They seemed to be okay; if she had been alive, he would guess that she would be in for at least a painful bruise. Even so, he couldn't help but think she would have approved of his rash act. Actually, he visualized her giving him a high-five for some reason.

On the floor, the author groaned. "Where the hell have you been?" Carlos asked him, bending angrily over the fallen man. "I tackled that... whatever it was... to keep it from killing you, and then you just disappeared."

Bruce shook his head in apparent denial as he rolled fully onto his side. He took several labored breaths, then feebly turned his palms toward them. "Give me a chance to explain," he uttered, and then took even more breaths. Dale didn't believe that he needed them, not for a second.

Dale didn't feel like waiting. "Get on your feet, Mr. Casey. You have some apologizing to do."

Bruce's sense of indignation flared surprisingly quickly. "Me?" He pointed a finger up at Kelly. "She's the one who slashed me in the back!"

"To prevent you from stabbing someone," she jumped in. "Which you did anyway."

The author didn't have an answer for that. His eyes fell across Glenda at that moment, realizing that she was the shape Dale was carrying, and the one whose feet had had struck him, and he fell silent. Dale felt a small portion of satisfaction, seeing the author actually wither as the realization of her state began to dawn on him.

"That's right," the security guard said, affirming the suspicion. "Now, why should we listen to anything you have to say?"

The question seemed to galvanize Bruce, re-flooding him with energy, although he remained cowed on the ground. "But I've been there! I've seen the stories! You've got to listen to me!"

Carlos stepped in, clearly concerned that Bruce was about to get bludgeoned again. "Slow down, Mr. Casey. Was that thing really after you?" He cocked his thumb at the undistorted, closed door.

"Yes!" Bruce blurted. "Well, not *directly* after me, but it's out there! It's made its way inside the lodge--" and here he cocked an eyebrow at Dale "--because you let it, and it has almost free reign of the halls. But it's okay, I know how to defeat it, how to send it back!"

"Back to where?" Kelly asked, with genuine interest in her voice.

Her sincerity seemed to give the author pause. His head still cocked up off the floor at what must have been an uncomfortable angle, he mused for a second. "I'm... not entirely sure. But what I can say is that it will be well away from us. Not only that, but I think that when we banish it, we'll snap ourselves out of this broken loop that we're in!"

Dale, Kelly, and Carlos all looked at each other, unsure of whether they were about to be presented with a bizarre solution to an even more bizarre situation, or if the man was just raving. Dale tended to think it was the latter, and he was fully aware that was because of the cold weight lying across his arms. He could already tell that he was never going to be able to forgive the man lying before him, no matter how mad he was, or how mad this terrible night had driven him.

"Okay," Carlos said. "Assume that we believe you. How do we destroy the thing?"

"The Qoloni," Bruce corrected offhandedly, before launching into another near-hysterical monologue. "The trees, the ones I saw in my dreams, they're actually *stories*, from all over the world, well, at least a tree-shaped representation of the human perception of them. For whatever reason, we've become trapped in some kind of version of one of the stories I created, as if this part of our world has split off and become a place for the creature from my book to grow...

"I thought I could climb the tree, pull that odd fruit off the branch, and maybe that would force us back into our real, waking world, but the closer I climbed toward it, it just seemed to be getting bigger, until it no longer seemed that I was moving toward it, but that it was pulling me in, encompassing me, growing larger and larger until I was falling into it, and it was bringing me back here... Then I was in the hallway, just outside this door. As if I had never left." At this point, his eyes became unfocused. "But *did* I ever leave? No, I must have..."

Dale had had enough. "Shut up!" he said to the author. "If you know how to end this, then tell us! If not, then we have other things to take care of." Even Dale didn't know if he was talking about killing the author in revenge or not.

"I do! I do!" Bruce Casey put his hands up, trying to placate the towering guard. "Just let me..." He froze, then tentatively put his hands on the floor, clearly trying to brace himself so he could get to his feet. He halted as his palms touched down, keeping an eye on Dale. When the big man did not move, Bruce pushed himself up, wincing in pain, and managed to get onto his knees. Then he sideshuffled over to the nearest wall, braced himself against it and slowly stood, wincing even more. His hands reflexively went toward the small of his back, but stopped short of actually touching it.

Kelly didn't step forward, but motioned to him. "Turn around. Let me see how bad it is."

The author pivoted slowly, rotating the wound in his lower back into view. It looked worse than it was; the vertical slit just parallel to the base of his spine was shallow, but a large amount of blood had soaked into his sleep pants and t-shirt, giving a horrific impression.

"You'll live," Kelly said, after giving it only the most cursory of glances. "Now turn around, but stay against the wall."

The author did, an earnestly contrite look on his face.

Dale spoke up again. "You said you know how to destroy that thing out there. So tell us."

"The Qoloni, yes," Bruce said. He had nothing else to do with his hands, so he started wringing them, as if he were obsessively washing blood from them. "You've seen the way it reacts when it touches physical objects, yes?"

"Not only seen, felt," Carlos said, shuddering at the memory of its buzzing, chaotic surface against his body.

"Well, I created it for the book when I was in a particularly... agitated state. I made it feel like I felt at the time, which was... I was thinking about what it happens when you touch a surface, because you know you never really *touch* a surface, you just get so close that the atoms in your hand start being electrically repulsed by the atoms in the thing you're touching, billions of these infinitesimally small interactions that keep you from passing through it altogether..."

Carlos jumped in. "So is that why, when I threw stuff at it, it seemed like it made the objects warp around itself instead of actually touching it?"

"That's right!" Bruce took a tentative step away from the wall, and toward the group. "It's made a completely different kind of stuff altogether. It can't touch anything in this world, not really."

Kelly spoke up. "So why are we so afraid of it, if it can't touch us?"

Carlos added, "Those horns certainly don't look harmless."

Bruce's fevered gaze flew between them. "That's the one place where it can at least partly intersect this world, at least that's how it was in the book..." In reaction to the disturbed glares he was getting, he continued, "It's the monster in the story! I had to give it at least some teeth... so to speak."

Kelly sighed in frustration. "So how do we do whatever you said... banish it?"

Bruce's attitude went from cowering to enthusiastic inside of a second. "Yes! That's the ending. In my book, the Qoloni first appears to Princess Ynarra by attempting to push its way through from the *back* of a mirror." His eyes went far away, deep inside his own invention. "She was looking into it, and saw her face begin to distort, only to find that the mirror is actually bulging toward her. Funny thing, that was something that happened to me during that time too--"

Dale spoke absently. "Like Sheryl claimed that it was trying to get through the back of her closet..."

Bruce continued as if he hadn't heard. "So the princess does just the reverse at the story's climax, luring it into the other side, the reflecting surface of the mirror. It's fitting, don't you think?"

His look of creative glee was met with utterly blank stares. Finally, Carlos said to him. "Come into the other room with us. You need to help us make an attack plan."

Our Divided States: Division #2 -- Fear vs. Anger

There were two main driving forces behind the presidential race of 2016, and frankly, neither of them served the country very well. While one side took the route of playing upon the fears of the nation, the other was seduced by the lure of righteous anger.

The Republican side, as I'm sure we can all remember, was largely informed by Trump's insistence (reinforced by Fox News, Breitbart and other right-wing news outlets) that the country was on the verge of literally going to hell, slowly being invaded by outsiders who might have either malicious intent or wanted to bring us Skittles -- I hope I'm recalling this right. In any event, I heard him say on several occasions that if Hillary won, the United States of America as a nation was effectively over. You can't cram much more mongering of fear into a sentence than that.

This isn't a new tactic: simultaneously predicting doomsday and presenting oneself as humanity's sole savior is a political gambit as old as the hills. And in this case, it came close to swaying the majority: almost half the country was able to overlook most aspects of one of the most odious personalities ever to enter the political arena, and cast its vote based on the fear of what would happen if they didn't.

On the other side, just *over* half the country was collectively stunned that such a person could even be considered a serious contender for the country's highest leadership role. Every new revelation -- from old interview tapes to up-to-the-second Twitter rants, not to mention campaign promises about literal wall-building, threats of mass deportations and explicit prosecution of opponents -- sparked new flurries of outrage. Friends were unfriended, vast swaths of Americans were called "deplorable", and the established media news mostly wrote off the opposition and its support base as a tasteless joke. I mean, this was someone that even other *Republicans* could barely stand. How could this end in anything other than a Democratic landslide?

And yet, somehow, here we are. As you can probably tell, I have my own opinions about the way it all played out, and I don't have the energy for the mental acrobatics required to be evenhanded about it. What I see the main difference as being (barring the now-accepted interference by foreign powers) is that the Republican party knowingly played on the fear of average Americans and got it to stick. The Democratic party allowed its moral outrage to blind it to the concerns of almost half the country. In my mind, intent is the key here.

But let me elaborate on the latter half of that previous statement. One thing that I've come to understand through my own experience of this upheaval is just how invigorating and passion-stoking that anger can be. I'll be the first to admit, I quickly unfriended pretty much anyone who would post anything on my social media feed that was pro-Trump or anti-Muslim (I didn't see anything anti-Semitic or anti-LGBT, which I read as a reflection of my inherently excellent taste in friends). I did this mostly because these sorts of things would make me angry, to the point of distraction. I found myself zoning out of things I should be paying attention to in order to dissect the utter wrongness of something I had come across, and to mentally compose the perfect withering counter-argument.

However, I sometimes would knowingly find an article or click-bait designed to be offensive, and instead of just dismissing it, I would dive into it. Holy cow, I would even sometimes *read* *the* *comments*, something I promised myself years ago that I would utterly and completely resist. It took me a while -- and a healthy heaping of self-actualization -- to realize that the reason I was doing this was that I was actually getting a rush from it. Dammit, it felt *good* to be so obviously right.

It's true. There's something so comforting and belief-reinforcing to hear someone voice an opinion bone-headedly opposite of yours, one where you feel absolutely no reserve or remorse in unmercifully railing against their stupidity, how their grandchildren will be ashamed of them, and celebrating the coming day when their brand of paranoid, antiquated mentality will soon be thrown smoldering upon the scrap heap of wrong history. (See? I'm doing it right now and I don't even have a specific issue in mind!)

The only reason I could come up with for my behavior is that, in general, I try to think critically and skeptically. I'm very aware that for most arguments, there are two sides who are equally convinced that they are right, and in most cases their convictions are utterly rational, based on their own particular points of view (I haven't forgotten what Obi-wan Kenobi said about that sort of thing). Here's the catch, though: this objectivity that I try to have often hamstrings my utter delight in being unreservedly bone-deep sure that I am right, while the other person is just all kinds of stupefying wrongity-wrong-wrong. Apparently, it's only when I'm up against the current level of anti-intellectual, anti-human demagoguery that I can let go of the reins and really let my hostility gallop.

So during this election run-up, when I saw climate denial, when I saw not just racist pandering but utter bullshit tribalism, or an instinctive mistrust of anything other than the white/straight/male/Christian status quo, it offended my bedrock beliefs so much that I couldn't help it. This is where I think the Democrats (and I among them) fell down this time around, because there are two rules of public debate: 1) don't feed the trolls, and 2) you're not going to convince anyone to change sides by insulting them. We broke both of these.

Have you ever been told that not only does your favorite band suck, but also that you're stupid for liking them? Did it make you stop and consider whether they really do? Or did it maybe even make you like them a little bit more, simply because you felt like you had more in common by being marginalized right along with them? Well, I'm afraid that's what we Democrats did this time around. We spent too much time enjoying ourselves, saying "Do you not *see* how horrible and unqualified this guy is, you idiots?!" and not enough time figuring out just how he kept right on steamrolling through every hurdle that was being thrown at him.

The only solace I can take right now is that if there was ever a case for a President being forcibly removed from office, it would be now. He's legitimized white supremacy, advocated sexual assault, publicly mocked such people as the press, immigrants the military and their families, civil rights heroes, and the disabled. Not only that, but the volumes of known conflicts of interests -- and likely even more that we don't know about yet -- should be more than enough to do the trick. If we can't force someone like him out of power, then I guess he was partly right after all. America -- as a nation we can be proud of -- is effectively over.

Whitelodge 13.2 & 13.3

-13.2-

Bruce couldn't remember a time when he felt so alive. He was bounding – literally *bounding* -- through the story-forest, hearing the whispers all around him, deliberately spurning literally millions of opportunities to stop and listen to the trees. Part of him longed to stop forever, however, to spend the rest of his life hearing the tales they had to tell. As much as he wanted that, there was also something pulling him along, a force that came as much from him as his destination, inexorably drawing the two together.

He had learned at some point in the past that lightning doesn't originate in the clouds. It partly does, but it also reaches up from the ground -- or whatever it is that is going to be struck -- simultaneously, a pair of possibilities seeking each other. Only when the connection is made does the bolt flow, linking the energies of heaven and earth. Now, barreling among trunk after massive trunk, barely missing them with uncanny accuracy, Bruce similarly felt what he was searching for ahead of him.

His stories were there, in the depths of the forest, beckoning him on.

Would they be strong, hardy growths? He knew of at least three that would be, if any of them were. These were the novels that had been made into films or television shows. They had been cemented in more people's minds (and presented more uniformly, which was something he intuitively knew was important in this forest) than any of his unadapted works could ever be. He imagined that triad as a grove unto themselves, with his more minor works surrounding them. It was this urge he was following, a burning need to see how his thoughts and dreams represented themselves in this world.

There they were, just ahead. The little drifting lights that illuminated even the darkest part of the forest -- which Bruce still didn't understand the purpose of -- seemed to grow more numerous around them. When he reached his own particular piece of the imagination grove, he instinctively slowed. The soul has a way of recognizing its own creations, no matter what form they may take, and his breathing became easier as he was able to stop and see his life's work in physical form.

He sighed. As humbling as it was to see his entire career distilled into a sizeable grouping of trees, he couldn't deny the pride he felt in being able to encompass it all in one look. He was right; the three major works (Trench City; Eyes of Malevolence; and The Unpaved Road) formed the boundaries of his area, whispering their familiar tales to the heavy air. In between, ranging in size from small seedlings to close rivals to the mighty trunks of the main three, were his other works, from essays and think pieces all the way to novellas and short stories, all of which must have sparked the interest of more than a few people, judging by how large they had grown.

He was surprised to see a few of them that he hadn't known had acquired such a following. Some of his stories seemed to have found quite an audience, but others that had done well for him financially looked particularly slim and even withered. He didn't know if this was because they had fallen out of favor, or maybe his creator's bias (not to mention all that money) had blinded him to the fact that they weren't that well regarded.

There was one in particular that was on the bigger side, and seemed to have more floating lights clustered around it than the others. As he grew closer to it, carefully stepping through the verdant grove without disturbing any of his other works, he suddenly realized which one it was, and his blood ran cold... He heard the name "Ynarra" coming from its gently whispering leaves. The Qoloni. Shit.

The book itself had been a quick cash grab, typed out in a three-week fever dream that may have been the result of particularly rancid batch of cocaine. The idea of the creature itself, that horrible dark thing with massive stag horns, had come to him so quickly and forcefully that he knew he wasn't going to be able to get rid of it until he purged it onto the page, and so he had. It wasn't his fault, entirely, that the result was a slim novel he had shipped off to his publisher and made a nice chunk of cash from without even remembering much about doing it.

The little lights were circling this particular story-tree in what, to them and their usually languid pace, looked like a kind of feeding frenzy. They circled and spun around the trunk in both upward and downward helices, as if hunting for a place to land. Watching their restless movement, Bruce dimly grasped that the lights were some kind of conveyance method for human thought. It might even be that the lights were what made the trees grow, their warming light and attention coaxing the creative works to rise even higher and stronger.

Bruce looked up the length of the trunk, watching as the story-tree strove upward, toward the overarching canopy that his major works were creating. Was it possible, he wondered, that The Qoloni could rival them, given the proper time and care? And, quick on the heels of that thought... Did he want it to?

The work itself didn't seem to care what its creator thought. It was growing dangerously close to punching through the canopy despite its relative slimness, and now that he was really inspecting it, he began to see how it was unlike all his other works. Even though the thought-lights were abnormally present at the base, Bruce could see that they were even more concentrated higher up, where there seemed to see some kind of secondary growth, a large protuberance hanging from its upper reaches. He squinted up at it, trying to figure out what it was. There certainly was nothing else like it up at that level, a sort of offshoot that was attracting a lot of the drifting lights...

In one of those wordless transactions that the brain sometimes makes when it fully realizes a concept all at once, Bruce understood. That thing up there, that not-quite-natural fruit high on the Qoloni-tree... what could cause such a thing? Did it have something to do with Theda -- or her conspicuous absence in his recent life? During the cataclysmic dream-storm so long ago, he was sure that she had been scared off by the Qoloni, as it somehow made its presence known here in this sacred grove-world. There were so many things he didn't know, but at least now he thought he understood what was happening, despite the reason.

Somehow, his fictional work had manifested itself in and around the Deertail Lodge. The side of the mountain became an offshoot, a pocket Universe splitting off from the main, taking Bruce's proximity (plus the Qoloni's own story elements) and dragging part of the core "real" world along with it. This dislocation had caused an avalanche, setting off the chain of events that led to him returning to his dreamworld and reaching this revelation.

But something extraordinary must have happened in the world that birthed it to create such weird fruit. Works of fiction didn't just spin off their own little mini-Universes all over the place... did they? He tried to marry this thought to what he had already learned about the AllStory. Given that concentrations of focused human imagination could combine to create a sort of reality out of fictional people and places, perhaps sometimes those things could infiltrate the commonly-experienced real world. It was like when Bruce had briefly seen one of his own characters outside the movie premiere party. It had been on all the revelers' minds, and they had all been picturing the vision they had just shared in the theater. Could there have been a similarly high concentration of thought being enacted in the Deertail for some reason?

Bruce had an inkling of why. He had seen it in Jimmy Gough's office, and on the face of the injured woman he'd carried out of her hotel room. Both times, he was looking at a woman that looked like Theda... but then again, Theda in turn looked like someone else, didn't she? Was it possible that this woman, the original muse for the story of the Qoloni, was somehow involved in all this? If so, she could be the connecting point of what must have been a colossal intersection of imaginations.

He had to get back to that tiny Universe, the one he could see represented by the ponderous weight hanging high in the Qoloni-tree above him. He could see now that the fault was his, and the people who had been trapped along with him -- although they must have their own parts to play -- had done nothing wrong. He was the one who had attacked them, stabbed one of them. His mind, gradually clearing of fear and panic, began to see how badly he had handled all of this. He had to return to what he had created, and end it.

Bruce moved to the base of the tree, reached out a hand and pressed it against the thin trunk. The thought-lights parted for him like water, altering their courses to spiral up and down uninterrupted. The trunk felt sturdy, unyielding under his hand. Bruce stepped forward and ran his hands across the bark, looking for any little protuberances of subtext he could find. There were enough to give him confidence, and he closed the gap, putting both arms around this manifestation of his creation. The lights enveloped him, giving him space to touch the tree while continuing their unending circling.

Bruce looked up the length of his story, judged what the best route was to reaching the fruit he had unwittingly formed, and started climbing.

-13.3-

Manoj felt that he had been holding together admirably. He had accepted things that were so far beyond his normal worldview that mentally, he was almost unrecognizable to himself as the man who had arrived at the Deertail Lodge with his girlfriend the day before. So he fully accepted it when Sheryl bent down and began listening to the words that Kerren was whispering, something that seemed to be about the blonde woman's mother.

After a few exchanges, Kerren's voice began to fade out, and Manoj found that Sheryl was leaning so far forward to hear that she was obscuring her wife's face with her head. "What was that?" he couldn't help but ask. "What's that about her mother?"

Sheryl listened a little more, her ear all but pressed against Kerren's mouth, and then straightened up a little, looking at the group standing around her, bewildered. "I can't tell. It's something about her mom. Kerren called her last night, actually, right before dinner, just a few hours... before the avalanche. But I don't understand what she's trying to say about her."

Manoj moved forward instinctively, wanting to help. "May I give it a try?" He looked down at Kerren, who was still lightly mouthing words, her eyes closed, speaking from the edge of consciousness, as if dictating a message from some other place.

Kelly nudged his shoulder. "Try it, Noj," she said.

Sheryl instinctively put her hand out over Kerren, palm down, as if by doing so she were putting an impenetrable barrier between the couple and her wife lying on the floor. "No, it should be me." She seemed disheartened, however, her eyes turning toward Kerren with a dismayed look.

Manoj was just about to back off and respect her wishes, when Kelly spoke up. "Let him try, Sheryl. You might not be understanding her because you're expecting to hear *her*. And I don't think that's what's happening here."

Manoj managed to say, "I'm often on long-distance conference calls with horrible connections. Please, Sheryl. Let me try to interpret her." When Sheryl didn't move, he assumed that meant her acquiescence, and carefully knelt down next to Kerren. He adjusted his ill-fitting hat to keep his ear clear, cupped a hand to it, leaned in, and began to focus on nothing other than the sounds that were being whispered through her lips, making no assumptions about their content, only concentrating on faithfully conveying them.

He consciously forced himself to relax, recalling when a colleague would call from across the world, dictating code for a particularly tricky patch that Manoj had to manually type into whatever project he was working on. He opened his mouth and repeated the whispered sounds he heard, barely taking time to think about them:

"Her name was Sarah. She arrived at the Deertail Lodge for the first time twenty-five years ago. I don't need to describe her for you, because you're looking at her right now; apparently, it takes a mother and daughter to look find two people so much alike. But the one thing I can't describe to you is the energy she carried with her. It was like you could tell she was about to enter a room. The air would turn electric, and you would start picking up a vibration that you couldn't quite pinpoint. And then you'd turn around, and she would be just walking in.

"I can't vouch for anyone but myself, but others must have been inspired by her too. They each tried to capture whatever kind of essence she brought, in their own ways, whether it was writing or painting. Jimmy Gough clearly never forgot the blonde woman, and apparently neither did Bruce Casey. Then there were others -- myself included -- that didn't have their kind of creativity. So I did what I could... I visualized her as the constant heroine of the books I read obsessively. I didn't even notice when I had stumbled across the very book that she was the real inspiration for.

"But I'm starting to understand what kind of mental connection something like that can have, especially when there are others nearby that feel the same way. I know how I felt when I saw Kerren yesterday... like time had frozen, that somehow I had gotten old while she stayed exactly the same. Now I'm wondering if that sense of dislocation has anything to do with what has happened to us here tonight.

"I also can't help but wonder if this never would have happened, had Benny and I not both read Casey's book. This thing that's hunting us, this Qoloni, has come to life, right out of those pages, just as this woman who looks like Sarah has walked right back into our lives. I don't know, is it possible that when four people who have been so inspired by the same woman all read the same book...? I can't even begin to figure it out. And honestly, I'm too old and broken and tired right now to try to figure that part out.

"But that's the thing. Even if Benny and me don't know why, at least we know *how*. It's right there; the answer is in the book itself--"

Heads turned at the sound of the storage room's outer door behind hit by something, hard. They all immediately knew it wasn't the Qoloni; its interactions with the physical world had never been anything other than perfectly silent. Manoj's eyes widened, as if waking from a dream.

"Let me in!" a voice called three inches of metal and wood away. "It's coming!" Bruce's voice had lost none of the panicked edge from the last time they had seen him, when he stabbed Glenda and ran bleeding up the stairs. Manoj might have imagined hearing Dale's jaw clench audibly, in between the bangs.

Kerren's voice continued, but with such external noise there was no hope of Manoj relaying the information. There was suddenly movement around him; three people immediately headed for the source of the sound. Kelly was the first into the other room; Carlos was a close second, and Dale, of all people, was the last. He still held Glenda's body in that classic movie pose -- judging by the man's posture, it was clear that she was a burden that he was prepared to carry as long as necessary, and possibly beyond. He was last through the doorway, taking care not to bump Glenda into anything as he did, calm and self-assured.

The banging from the storage room door continued, a hammering of fists that was escalating into a continuous drumroll. Manoj was still bent over Kerren, trying in vain to decipher her continued monologue over the sound of shuffling feet and creaking floorboards, but it was a lost cause. Then came the sound of the door opening, followed by stumbling, then that of the door closing and a hysterical barrage of words from the author: "Thank you God thank you now please hear me out I think I understand what's--" There was a strange whacking sound, followed by a startled yelp, and the thud of a body on the floor.

Then, silence. Manoj could no longer see what was going on in the outer room, but the sudden absence of motion and noise was jarring, so much so that he almost missed the last few words Kerren was saying:

"--the mirror on the cover. Do you understand? It's the *mirror*!"