The five of them stood in a tight knot around the doorknob, waiting. Sheryl looked pensively from one to the other, feeling how tightly their collective muscles were wound, how thick the air felt. They had no idea what was on the other side of the door, or if their plan had even the slightest chance to work.
She had laid down on the floor next to Kerren as the others were starting to scour the shelves for things they could throw at the Qoloni, hoping they might had a similar effect to what Carlos claimed. He had said that the heavy crystal vases had halted it temporarily, as its strange qualities of mass distortion affected its movement. Could the objects they were pulling out -- wrapped cakes of soap, spare bundles of cutlery, even a small paint can or two -- do the same? Did weight or size matter when it came to that thing? Apparently, not even Bruce knew the answers.
Sheryl tried to keep in her mind the resolute look that Kerren had given her as they lay side by side on the hard wood floor, pressing their foreheads together intimately. It was only because of this positioning that Sheryl could tell that Kerren was speaking to her amid the clamor of preparation: "Let me out. I can help." The words were thready, and still bore a rasp that made her not quite sound like herself, but Sheryl smiled at hearing her wife's true voice again.
"There's no time," she replied. "I didn't really think about how we were going to get you out of the rug when I was figuring out how to get you in." If they had more time, or a sharp enough cutting instrument, she might have given it a try.
Kerren thought about this, then nodded slowly, rubbing her skin against Sheryl's. "We're just going to get that mirror from the hallway, and then come right back," Sheryl repeated, hoping that it would give either one of them a bit more courage. "We've got ammunition. Kelly and Carlos are in charge of getting it down off the wall and carrying it back. I'm backup for them, really. That's all."
Kerren accepted this wordlessly as well, and then Manoj was calling to her to take her place with them by the door. Sheryl kissed Kerren once, as strongly as she dared, and then hopped up off the floor. They looked for one more moment into one another's eyes, and Sheryl turned to follow the others. On the way out, she ran her hand lightly across Dale's shoulders. He was sitting on the floor now, close to Kerren, still holding Glenda. He had turned her body against his, so her head leaned against his shoulder. It would have been an endearing pose, if Sheryl didn't know the tragic reality of what she was looking at. At this point, he was too deep into his grief to help, and Sheryl wondered just how long he was prepared to carry his love's burden. To the time when they lost this battle, and the two of them were reunited somewhere beyond?
The others -- Carlos, Manoj, Bruce, and Kelly -- were already in place, their tiny missiles clutched in their hands. On her way over to them, Sheryl scooped up a few of the extra randomly-strewn objects off the floor that had been deemed appropriate. She ended up with a heavy glass salt shaker and a tightly-rolled bath towel, bound with a thin rubber band.
She took her spot, and the quintet waited to see who was going to be the one to turn the doorknob. No one seemed eager to give themselves a free hand to open it, however. In a moment of exasperation, Sheryl lifted the towel to her mouth, snagged the rubber band with an incisor, and yanked. The rubber snapped audibly, and she felt the loose, whipping ends of the broken band feebly lash her gums. The towel loosened in her hand, and she shook it out before flipping it back over her shoulder like a short-order cook and grabbing for the cold metal knob.
She wrenched it to the side, and opened the door onto the dark hallway. Because of how the others were arranged around her, she only had to open it partway to see that the length of it was empty, although they could only see a little past halfway, where the faint light coming up from the lobby threw the shadow of the balcony railing against the wall.
"Can you see it?" Carlos whispered, but there was no need. Square in the middle of the lit section of corridor, facing the top of the lobby stairs, was the long end-table Carlos had snatched the vases from, and above it hung the circular mirror. It was perhaps three feet in diameter, judging by the amount of gray lobby light it reflected up onto the ceiling above it. They could also see the starburst frame around it, consisting of dozens of long wavy metal tines that radiated out from it for at least another foot.
"It looks heavy," Bruce muttered.
"I bet it is," Kelly said. "All that metal and glass. It'll take both of us to get it down, if it isn't fastened too solidly."
"It's not," Carlos insisted. "I almost knocked it down when I bumped it before."
"Just because it was loosened by the avalanche doesn't mean it'll be easy to pull off the wall," Kelly noted. "It's you and me, right, Carlos?"
The cook nodded. The roles were clear. The two of them would retrieve the mirror, and the other three would be ready to hurl projectiles to drive back -- or at least stall -- the stalking Qoloni if it turned up. Sheryl noticed how Manoj shifted one of his objects, a small paint can, into the crook of his arm in order to squeeze Kelly's wrist. She leaned against him momentarily, and Sheryl suddenly wished that Kerren hadn't been hurt, and they could storm out into the hallway together Butch-and-Sundance style, like this couple was about to.
"Ready?" Kelly said, then took three quick breaths and slipped through the doorway without a sound. Carlos followed as quickly as he could, with significantly less grace. Sheryl choked down the fear that was rising in her throat and followed, trying to slip through sideways like the decidedly more athletic woman did.
After the hard surfaces of the supply closet, the plush environs of the hallway was incredibly quiet. Sheryl was suddenly aware of the sound of her breath, strove to minimize it. They had all left behind whatever footwear had protected them in the snow; their bare footfalls were all but perfectly silent. As a group, they crept forward.
No one had been entirely sure that Bruce should come out there with them. The danger of him turning into a liability if the creature should show up was a real one, but leaving him behind would also include someone else staying to keep him restrained -- he was intent on facing his creation, and Dale was otherwise occupied keeping watch over Glenda and Kerren.
Without planning it, the group fanned out across the entire width of the hall, Manoj along the wall that would end at the stairway, Sheryl and Bruce in the middle, and Kelly and Carlos heading for the spot where the mirror hung. They all held their projectiles cocked at shoulder height, ready to throw them at the first sign of anything otherworldly. Sheryl focused on the very end of the hall, past the mirror and into the darkness beyond. Something told her that if the thing were going to come, that was where it would be from.
She crouched slightly, trying to keep her head perfectly level as she stepped down the hallway, keeping her center of balance squarely between her feet. Her senses felt sharper than she could ever remember them being; she swore she could hear the tendons in her companions' feet as the muscles flexed and shifted weight.
Her thought that the thing would come from the far end of the hallway was proven wrong. She momentarily looked away from Kelly and Carlos, who had started to head for opposite sides of the end table, flanking the round sun-mirror that hung over it. Because of that, she only perceived a dimming of the wash of gray light that invaded the upper hallway from the lobby. The thing leapt up over the railing, making it appear that it had come up directly from the lobby floor fifteen feet below, dragging along with it the chilled air that the large broken window had allowed to flood in.
It rose up like a horrible, giant bird, horns and arms spread in greeting, blocking the light. -14.2-
Manoj hesitated. Not for long, perhaps at most three seconds. His progress down the hall had been even with everyone else's until the moment he passed the open door, but he could not resist the pull of his curiosity and he looked in. It was the room where they had found the oddly humped, empty coverlet on the bed, and he had realized they were the only souls left in the Deertail Lodge.
Beyond, the view out the large patio glass was unchanged. It was this he was most interested in, to see if anything had changed about the frozen world beyond this small, toroidally-looped section of the mountain. From this distance, it looked like nothing had.
It was this hesitation, however, that put him at a safer distance than anyone else when the thing appeared. The horns came first, rocking forward as the Qoloni leaped up from the lobby below, silently arcing up and over the railing that ran from the top of the stairs to the wall opposite. Manoj had fallen a good eight feet behind everyone else, and thus was the only one who didn't have to turn their heads as the dark shape rose into view.
Even before it cleared the balcony railing and landed lightly on the floor, missiles were already on the way to meet it. Manoj watched them arcing through the air, noting that they had probably come from Sheryl and Bruce, because Carlos and Kelly were in the process of setting their tiny burdens down on the end table, needing free hands to lower the mirror from the wall.
Manoj felt an electric burn of fear shoot through his body at the sight of the thing's shadow, falling across Kelly. She was intent on putting down her mini-weapons and focused on the mirror on the wall opposite, so she didn't react right away. When her head whipped around -- her shortish hair flipping outward with the moment -- it appeared to Manoj to move in slow-motion, as if everything were suddenly underwater. His inability to breathe perpetuated the illusion. He was sure that she was not going to have time to grab her missiles and throw them in her own defense.
He prepared to throw his own projectiles -- he had opted for objects with extra weight when he had picked a small can of paint and a wooden rolling pin -- and took a few extra steps forward to catch up with the others. He hadn't counted on how that heaviness would affect his feet, though, and found himself stumbling forward as he tried to fling them. He stepped out into the light as the paint can left his right hand, and while it was an accurate throw, he was getting too close to the horned thing for his comfort. He tried to get his feet back under himself, to pull up short -- and then the can hit its target.
It wasn't the first thing to hit the Qoloni, but it was the largest, and Manoj was fascinated by what happened when it did. Instead of impacting the thing's shoulder and knocking it away, the can seemed to instantly liquefy, wrapping itself into a flat shape that slid across the thing's shoulder blade and disappeared around its back.
Manoj had precisely one instant to remember Carlos's description of what would happen to objects that came into contact with the thing; because it could not interact with material objects, anything touching it would appear to change its shape, but be unaffected in terms of weight and momentum. And true to form, the Qoloni was wrenched to the side, wheeling it around toward Manoj's direction. One of Sheryl's missiles -- a salt shaker -- hit it in the face, and made it turn even more sharply.
That turn, coupled with the forced downward tilt of the Qoloni's head, caused its horns to swing down and back the way it had come, and Manoj realized too late that he had stepped out between their crazy branch-like network and the top step of the lobby stairs. The curved backs of those forward-pointed antlers were coming at him, looking decidedly more solid than the body of the Qoloni itself.
At the moment of collision, his mind split in two. At the same time that he felt space distorting where they touched him, bending his body around their humped shapes, he also felt an insistent push from within them, as if he and they were opposing magnets being forced toward each other. If he had been properly balanced, he might have been able to withstand their repulsive power, but in this case, he had no way to get his feet back under himself, and stepped backward.
His eyes caught Kelly's as his foot came down on nothing. It dropped farther than he thought it would, onto the penultimate step of the lobby stairs, before coming to a stop. But it was too late by then; his momentum wasn't allowing him to stop, and he had to draw back his other foot and try to get it down on a lower step. The horns were still against him, pushing him farther back, and Kelly's shocked, horrified expression was suddenly eclipsed by the top of the first step as Manoj tipped back and fell even farther below the level of the second floor.
He reached out for the banister, being the only thing within grabbing distance of his pinwheeling left arm, and found his hand already wrapped around a thick piece of wood -- the rolling pin, which he had neglected to hurl at the Qoloni when he had the chance. Even if there had been time to release it and take hold of the banister rail instead, he wouldn't have been able to convince his hand to let go of the only thing that was secure about his position. He realized this as his body tipped back, and back, beyond horizontal, until the wide windows at the front of the lobby were starting to enter his field of vision from above...
His falling body hit the stairs in six places, hard: twice on his legs, three along his spine, once on the back of his head. More light than he had seen since re-entering the lodge exploded in his skull, and then he was tumbling down the rest of the long flight, which seemed to stretch out to infinity, pummeling him at every point on the way down.
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