Carlos didn't expect the mirror to fall off the wall, so its impact on the table jarred it out of his reach. He tried to lean forward, to get his hands back on its tines, but he couldn't move much with the way he had forced himself up against the wall, so that Kelly could lean on him. He felt the tips of his fingers graze it, but then the force that he and Kelly had been imparting into it made it start to roll. It made a strange, clock-like ticking sound as it started to walk itself across the tabletop, each tine tapping on the wood in turn.
Kelly, who had managed to keep partial hold of part of the heavy mirror, was trying to keep the metal object from getting away by twisting it to the side. Its march-like steps faltered and its heavy weight tilted, threatening to tip the whole thing off the side of the table and onto the hallway floor. Carlos was more desperate than ever to keep it from doing this, not knowing whether the carpet on the floor was enough to keep the glass from breaking and making this whole endeavor worthless.
He was still mostly pinned to the wall, though. Kelly was bracing herself against him, trying to counterbalance the tipping weight of the mirror. Her hip ground against his stomach, forcing the air out of his lungs. He grunted, and this might have been the distraction that made her finally lose her battle with gravity, and swivel the mirror off the table. It swung at the end of her arms like an overweighted pendulum, and he heard the tines rip through the fabric of the floor before she lost her grip entirely, and after she snatched her hands back, clearly fearing for their safety, the whole thing continued to roll farther out into the hallway, drunkenly wobbling like a huge, demented coin that's hasn't decided its heads-or-tails fate yet.
This motion sent reflected light bouncing off the walls, the mirror becoming a tiny lighthouse scanning all the dark corners of the hallway. Carlos found his eyes turning to the Qoloni, who was still on the other side of Bruce. The author had stepped in between the thing the three remaining occupants of the hallway; Carlos couldn't see where Manoj had gotten off to.
Bruce was still launching a verbal tirade at the thing. "I will send you back to the forest!" the author was saying firmly. "Now that I have been there, walked its paths and seen its secrets, I know how to put you back there! I've learned the true ending to your story, the one I should have seen from the beginning!" The writer's words broke off here, however, because his attention was being drawn toward the same place the Qoloni's was -- the large mirror slowly wobbling its way across the carpet past his feet.
The rolling object broke whatever stalemate Bruce had been able to broker with his creation; he no longer had the Qoloni's attention, nor the words to hold it at bay. The pair fell into fascinated silence as they watched the mirror's progress. Carlos noticed that while Kelly was reaching after it, she was not pulling away from him or the wall to pursue it, as if she were afraid to step too far toward the horned creature.
Carlos caught movement in the monumental rack of horns itself, realized that he was seeing a magnification of the Qoloni's act of glancing back and forth from Bruce to the mirror, as if calculating something. He dully wondered why the thing should have any interest in the rolling thing, and then it struck him, the thought springing into his mind as if it had been spoken aloud.
It knows what we want to do with that mirror. It knows we are going to try to get it in there.
For the third time that night, Carlos felt utterly helpless. The first had been when Benny had been buried under the snow that had piled in through the kitchen window, a microcosm of the avalanche outside. The second was when they had been pinned inside Harmon's tiny room, the Qoloni trying to press its way through the door, and Carlos sure that it would only be a matter of an instant before it broke through and devoured them both. In one case, he had been able to act, to do something to turn the situation away from tragedy, and in the other, he had no choice but to sit and wait. In the surreal vividness of this present moment, he didn't know whether he was seeing a new example of the first moment, or the second.
Without realizing it, he started to push away from the wall, throwing both himself and Kelly out into the center of the passage, chasing after the mirror. She stumbled along with him, her feet seeming to take up the pursuit before the rest of her was aware she wanted to. At the same time, a marked tilt in the overhanging cloud of antlers betrayed the Qoloni's sudden movement, and suddenly everyone in the hallway was watching the mirror's progress.
Carlos didn't know if the thing knew the supposed power this rolling object had over its existence, but when its hands reached out its intentions became clear; it was going after the mirror too. The thought of seeing anyone trapped and speared by that mass of thorny chitin was unbearable to him, so he used Kelly as a speed assist, pushing her to the side as he launched his feet forward. She spun off in a less effectual direction, and Carlos was just about to try to wedge his fingers into the spinning tines when the mirror hesitated, then swiveled and changed direction. Its motion was maddeningly random under the dictates of gravity and invisible texture changes in the carpet. This time, it headed straight for the Qoloni.
Carlos almost fell over trying to match his trajectory to the mirror's, but managed to keep his feet barely under his center of gravity and swerved close after it. His stretching fingers were just anticipating the buzz of the spinning tines against them -- and then the mirror changed again, coming to a sudden, absolute halt and springing up into the air.
Carlos fell forward, having put too much stock in the idea that the mirror would soon be taking a bit of his weight, and his stomach and groin simultaneously hit the carpeted floor with a loud smack. His head came down hard, landing on his right temple, and the strength immediately left his arms. His eyes insensibly registered what was happening, as the Qoloni straightened up, two of its horns wedged in between the mirror's radiating tines.
It lifted the flat object up into the air, exposing it to more light from the lobby. It appeared to be trying to look up at it, fascinated by its shine, but this only caused its horns -- and the mirror imprisoned by them -- to tilt farther up, causing its head to tip back even more. Carlos abstractly marveled at how the thing seemed to be unconscious of its own body, as if it were still figuring out how it worked.
There was no breath in Carlos' lungs now, and answers to the question of whether he could still move his legs were slow in coming. He was able to see Kelly's feet as she bounded over him, returning from the detour he had sent her on. She ran straight to the Qoloni and jumped up, reaching for the raised mirror, arms held apart to catch onto either side of it, looking very much like a gymnast about to launch into an uneven bar routine. She landed precisely where she intended, gripping tines on each side and swinging her legs up underneath her.
The resulting kick she effected would have taken off the Qoloni's head, if it were any kind of physically sane material. Instead, both of her bare feet plunged into the massed darkness of its face, the fleshy color of them immediately spreading across its surface and nudging the creature backward. From his vantage point on the floor, Carlos could see how the thing's stance faltered and it began to stagger backward toward the railing it had initially sprung up over.
He could also see the way Kelly's arms tensed, and he coudl tell that her original intention had been to push off of the thing's face, throwing herself and the mirror backwards, away from the swaying spikes. Having grappled with the creature himself, however, Carlos knew that this tactic, which would have worked with a real foe, was doomed to fail. Kelly was not able to give herself any backward propulsion off the thing's blank countenance. Instead, she swung listlessly with it as it stumbled back.
A howling shape vaulted at the Qoloni from the darkness, coming in at a low angle to intersect the thing's middle. Carlos recognized it as the way that he himself had chosen to assault the thing, and at almost the exact same moment saw that the attacker was the only person who had witnessed him do it -- Bruce.
The author rammed his shoulder into the Qoloni, with apparently no other motive than to knock it over. If he had, he no doubt would have realized how close his creation was getting to the railing. Carlos knew exactly what the author was feeling on impact: that slippery buzzing feeling against the skin, the utterly alien feeling of one's own flesh changing shape, stretching, flattening at the molecular level while utterly retaining its integrity, the mind cringing with anticipated pain that never comes.
The trio of them -- the Qoloni, Bruce, and Kelly still swinging from the captive mirror -- took one step too many back toward the railing, and then the whole top-heavy conglomeration was tipping even further back, Carlos powerless to move but watching every centimeter being lost to momentum and gravity. He saw the tipping point passed, witnessed the way the Qoloni's legs passed seamlessly through the slats of the railing, and the way Bruce's came up hard against them, sending the author that would not let go of his prey flipping up. He also saw Kelly try to bring her flailing feet down on the railing, for anything to prevent her from going over the edge with the black thing, but finally being able to bring them down on nothing at all.
The three of them went over/through the railing and disappeared from sight. Immobilized on the floor, Carlos saw it all.
-14.6-
When Bruce grabbed the creature he had brought into this world, he could feel its sense of betrayal. The way its skin, the vibrating pieces of horrible thoughts stitched together, buzzed in a way that almost seemed like a language. The tighter he grabbed it, the clearer the message became... This is what you brought me here to be, it said. Why are you trying to stop me?
The author made no attempt to answer, only knew that he had to prevent this blasphemous creation from hurting anyone else. Bruce was keenly aware that he had done more physical damage to the inhabitants of the Deertail Lodge that night than even this dark antagonist, and wanted it to stop. If that meant he had to do all he could to throw his Qoloni back into the fictional world it came from, then he was going to figure out a way to do just that.
Watching first Carlos and then Kelly fail in their attempts to gain control of the mirror, Bruce had felt he now been forced into a singular course of action, one where the words that served him every day were no longer sufficient. He had seen Carlos physically attack the thing as a delay tactic, and it had saved his own life. Now, he had to do the same for the others. What he had not prepared for was the utter revulsion he felt at being so close to the creature, to feel its distored reality against his hands, shoulder, and face; more importantly, to feel the way it changed *him*. It was warping him, taking him out of rational three-dimensional space and pulling him with peculiar, dark gravity into becoming more like itself. He could feel his body changing, yielding more than he thought possible --
His legs and hip hit wood. He had managed to push the creature through the slats of the balcony railing and out the other side, and now its unfathomable weight was pulling him into the dimly-lit void on the other side. At the last instant, he tried to pull back, to let go of his creation and let it fall on its own... but his hands were sunk too deeply into its weird flesh. They had too far to come back from the amorphous state they clung to. He was carried forward with it, helpless.
Although the lower half of his body had stopped, the top part refused. The Qoloni continued moving out and downward, and Bruce felt his entire body pivoting, his feet leaving the ground and being flung up behind him. He was dimly aware of Kelly next to him, her arms outstretched and clinging to the mirror, riding the plunging beast through the air right next to him. Bruce went upside down, feeling as if he were plummeting upward, spinning through the cool air of the lobby, feeling it against his face--
Then the spearing pain. Both legs were neatly impaled in various places with the horns of the thing he had designed. When it hit the floor, the Qoloni fell on its back, with Bruce's body most of the way through the process of flipping up over its head. It took him several seconds of stunned agony to realize that there were horns sticking into his back too, though not as deeply. He was basically looking up at the lobby ceiling, inverted, suspended about three feet above his personal Frankenstein's monster, on the rack of its razor-sharp horns.
Had he heard a crashing somewhere nearby? Through the horrific pain, he wondered if the mirror had survived the fall along with himself, the Qoloni, and Kelly. Was it still intact, and would it still serve its intended purpose even if it wasn't? Then the Qoloni began to stir, and Bruce couldn't help but let loose a scream as the slight movement threatened to rip his legs in half. He could feel the grooved antlers scraping against bone in multiple places. It continued to try to right itself, to rise from where it had fallen. Blood pounded in Bruce's head, just as much from the agony as the fact that his flayed legs were now above his head.
From out of the corner of his inverted eye, Bruce caught some motion. It was Kelly, standing upright far above him, apparently hardly the worse for wear after swinging down to the lobby floor along with the tangled mass of man, mirror, and beast. She was had adjusted her grip on the spiked metal frame, trying to wrench it from where it was stuck -- like Bruce himself -- on the Qoloni's antlers. It was this tugging that was causing him such unbearable pain. His scream did not seem to deter her, because it seemed that she had almost gotten the mirror loose.
Bruce tried to speak, no longer caring if she got the mirror free or not, only wanting for the ripping feeling deep in the muscles of his legs to *stop*. But he could only let out a guttural exhalation, conveying nothing. His eyes filled with tears of pain and horror. He wondered if Glenda felt had anything akin to this after he accidentally stabbed her. And yes, he did consider it an accident, because Dale had been his intended target. Action with intent and action without were defined with perfect, separate clarity in his pinwheeling mind. The only thing the two actions had in common was that he wished his only experience with them had stayed in the pages of his books, not out here where there were consequences... so many consequences.
Tears spilled up his forehead, catching in his eyebrows. His throat gasped for air, but there seemed to be none left around him, as if the plunge off the balcony had thrown him out into airless space. He tried to lift his hand, to wave it and get Kelly's attention, so she could help him, but found his arm stuck, similarly impaled in a way that he hadn't even noticed yet. Thus, he had no means of warning Kelly that the Qoloni was, just outside her peripheral vision, reaching up from where it lay on the floor and extending its dark fingers toward her...
The mirror finally came loose, and Kelly stumbled to the side, unwittingly bringing herself even closer to the rising black arm. A smile spread across her face, but as she began to turn toward Bruce, it fell away just as quickly as it came. He was only marginally aware that he was seeing her reaction to the state he had fallen into. The mirror in her hands lowered in her distraction.
Two things happened in rapid succession. He saw the tips of two of the Qoloni's fingers touch the surface of the mirror in its feeble attempt to grab it. When they did, they immediately extended, as if being forcibly pulled through the mirror to some unseen point far beyond. It was an effect that Bruce had considered when writing his story, but never put in the book: while the Qoloni was able to reshape physical objects, mirrors were the only thing that would reshape its own body, drawing it in as dirty water swirls down a drain.
Secondly, the thing felt what was happening too, and yanked its hand away. It was just able to retract its fingers from the powerful pull of the mirror, and doing so seemed to cause some kind of drag on the mirror itself. It shifted in Kelly's grip, and her distraction tipped it almost out of her hand. She felt the change just in time, and stepped back, but when the Qoloni's fingers left the surface of the mirror completely, the resistance was gone and she suddenly was pulling too hard. She overcompensated and lost her grip entirely, the mirror spilling out of her grip. It fell, and when it landed face-down on the wooden area of floor they had come to rest on, a loud, crystalline crack filled the otherwise silent lobby.
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