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."
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