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*!"
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