Harmon was sitting right next to him, but was not there. The man had only said a few distracted words of reassurance -- "Hold on, I'll be right back, she needs help" -- before pulling his presence out of Benny's mind altogether. It wasn't until he was gone that Benny was able to grasp how much Harmon's presence had helped him hold his own brain together; keeping his thoughts ordered had grown exponentially harder, proving how vital his friend's presence had been.
Now Benny was alone in his own head again, and increasingly unsure that he would be able to function for long. Thoughts seemed to skitter away from him, like marbles spilling across a table. In trying to gather up as many as he could, he was losing nearly all of them. The only thing that remained constant was the polished metal logo in his crabbed hand, its smooth surface and familiar shape grounding him.
He was dimly aware of some kind of commotion going on outside Harmon's small room: first a faint creaking of the upstairs floorboards, then shouting, followed by an erratic, violent series of bumps and bangs that traveled across the slanted ceiling of Harmon's room (even in his compromised state he could tell that something heavy had just been knocked down the stairs), ending in a series of upstairs thumps of a widely varied and pitched array. And, just when Benny thought it was all over, a horrific crunching crash seemed to explode just outside the door. It wasn't until Benny heard the scream, close, desperate, and male, that he decided he had to act.
There was no way he could make it all the way to the door without Carlos around to help prop him up, so he decided he would have to crawl. Using Harmon's currently-vacant body as a launching point, Benny started to artfully angle himself so that he could fall to the floor with as little damage as possible. It took every ounce of mental effort he had to do this, and he was mostly successful -- meaning that he ended up facing the door, with the Deertail sigil still firmly gripped in his hand, and Harmon still sitting upright on the cot. Benny counted this as a major victory.
He then began the process of dragging himself toward the door, which meant thrusting the logo forward, thunking it against the floor, and using its weight to pull himself in the direction he wanted to travel. If he had currently owned the capacity to think about it, Benny might have realized that the metal shape was not heavy or hook-shaped enough to really aid him, and that his progress was more due to his ability to envision its help than anything else. But through whatever means, the door drew closer.
He was almost there when he heard another crash, and a tinkle of glass. The sound seemed out of place to Benny; he couldn't imagine that after so many windows had been shattered that night, that there were any glass in the world left to break. It made him all the more obsessed with glancing outside to see what was happening, regardless of the possible danger, and what helped him levitate his free hand up to the knob, to grasp and turn.
The weight of his hanging body was enough to ease the door open a few inches, and his misaligned eyes struggled to make sense of what was happening mere feet from him. On the familiar floor of the lobby lay what seemed to be a huge black mass of pointed branches, and a man lay on his back atop them, facing the ceilng, supported and run through in places by them. He was making smaller versions of the scream that had galvanized Benny's trek across the floor, and he seemed to be simultaneously trying to get up and hold as still as possible.
Both of these goals were hard to attain, however, because the mass of branches was also shifting under him, as if they themselves were struggling to rise up off the floor. Benny only gradually became aware of a dark shape lying in their midst, and it physically hurt his mind when recognition of the thing snapped into focus. It was the dark figure with the crazily massed antlers; The Qoloni from Harmon's book. It had pursued him and Carlos into the very room in which he still lay. If he had the strength or the leverage to pull the door back closed in that moment, he would have. But in his current state, all he could do was watch.
There was a woman on the other side of the dark body lying on the floor. She was hunched over, as if she were in the process of trying to back away but couldn't quite do it. She kept scooting forward, darting her hands forward to snatch at the thing, and then retreating in reluctance. Meanwhile, the Qoloni was using one of its hands to ward her off, wagging its elongated fingers at her each time she came near. Benny had no idea why she was taunting the creature this way, until she managed to grab onto the thing that clearly was her goal.
It had been hidden from Benny's view because he was lying on the floor like the Qoloni was, but the woman managed to grab it without letting the dark thing touch her, and pulled the object up as she stepped back. It was immediately familiar to Benny, a gray stellation of metal that was almost as big as the span of her arms. She picked it up and, once she had gotten a safe distance from the dark rocking creature, examined it. Benny could see that where there had once been a mirror filling one side of the central portion of it, it had been shattered in the fall he had heard, and only jagged pieces remained around the edge. She appeared to be incredibly upset by this, knuckles whitening around the tines as she shook it in frustration. Then she was looking at the twitching Qoloni on the ground, beyond action and only watching as it struggled to lift itself off the ground, its grasping hand still reaching for the mirror, or maybe for her. It would succeed, Benny suddenly realized. It would lift itself up, the extra weight of the man stuck on its horns or not, and then it would get her.
There was a vague groaning sound from somewhere farther in the lobby. The woman's eyes flicked toward it, focusing on something beyond the imminent threat in front of her, and Benny saw them widen in surprise, and when she saw it the look on her face was so conflicted and genuine that Benny just had to see what she was reacting to. He turned his tortured eyes up to his hand, which was still wrapped in a death-like grip around the metal of the doorknob, and pulled. He managed to lift his upper body a little off the floor and a little forward, and when he lowered himself back down it levered the door a few more inches farther open. Now his eyes were almost level with the doorjamb, and he could see what -- or rather, who -- the young woman was reacting to.
A dark-skinned young man was stumbling toward her, apparently having been the one who loudly thumped down the stairs only moments before. Lit from behind by the broken lobby windows, he didn't look much better than Benny felt. He limped as he progressed slowly, but with purpose. How he had managed to get himself upright after a such a tumble, Benny couldn't imagine, but it was doubtful that he was going to be able to stay that way for long.
He walked cautiously, with gritted teeth, skirting around the bramble tangles of horns, arcing toward the woman who was still watching him with dropped jaw, mortal concern furrowing her forehead. The young man, for his part, was getting closer to the grasping hand of the Qoloni, although whether he realized this was not clear; He never looked away from the woman as he went to her.
He stopped before her, just as she swung the mirror in her hands to the side so he would not be in danger of its glittering points. Swaying, he stepped up to her and did not stop until his lips were pressed against hers. Benny noted that the young man's cheek had been split in his fall, and blood dripped off his chin. In that, Benny saw kinship, his own battered head hanging heavily from his neck as he lay there in the doorway.
His exhausted eyes sinking toward the floor, Benny noticed that the arm of the Qoloni had crept dangerously close to the couple. It seemed to be reaching for the now-forgotten mirror at the woman's side...
Benny thumped the metal logo in his hand against the floor, hard. Twice, then twice more. The couple broke off their kiss and looked his way. The man found Benny's gaze quickly, but the woman first noted the creature's extended reach and started to back away from it. On the floor, the Qoloni began to sit up, the man impaled on its horns crying out anew as his weight redistributed and he began to be turned upside-down. The dark thing's torso was rising up from the ground, hinging upright like Nosferatu rising from his sarcophagus in the hold of a doomed cargo ship.
Benny did the only thing he could, with the only weapon he had. He lifted his hand as quickly as he could and hurled the Deertail logo in the direction of the young man, who was looking at him. Benny watched, fascinated, as the thing he had clung so tightly to flew out of his grasp so easily, spinning end over end as it sailed away, flinging off random sparks of midnight illumination. The young man reached for it and, as if by the collected will of the two men at either end of its journey, snatched it out of the air.
Then he was diving on the dark horror, slashing down at it like a divining rod, the fork at the top of the triangular piece of metal catching on the ends of a few of its horns. The young man let the weight of his downward thrust carry him to his knees right next to it, pinning that side of the creature's horn rack back down to the floor. He looked right into its eyeless face as he did, his and the monster's countenances not more than a foot apart.
This tilting motion brought renewed screams of pain and rage from the man stuck on the Qoloni's horns, who had been in the process of being crucified upside down as its body rose from the floor. Now with the additional twisting of its head under the weight of the logo, he was pivoted atop it and thrown off, landing gracelessly in a rubberized heap near the creature.
Meanwhile, the woman holding the broken mirror was dealing with the grasping arm, swatting at it with the frame. On the third or fourth attempt, some shard lodged in the corner must have snagged the Qoloni's skin, because its arm became attached, stuck fast as the reflective material began to draw it in. Encouraged, the woman began pushing forward as if the mirror frame were a shield, trying to bring more of the Qoloni in contact with it.
Benny reached his now-empty hands out toward the couple; they had stalled the thing for a moment, but he knew there was no way they could stop it. It was eventually going to turn its horns the other way, and overpower the weight of the metal logo, or it was going to snatch its hand back from the mirror and slash at them both with it. And he had already expended every last ounce of energy with the actions he had taken so far; he couldn't even turn his head to look away. One person already lay broken and bleeding across the floor in front of him, and two more would soon follow...
Then a downrushing of air came, a blur of motion falling vertically down onto the struggling mass, accompanied by a howl of rage so loud and pained that Benny wished he had the strength to clap his hands over his ears. The blur solidified as soon as it hit the floor, transforming into a hulk of dark security outfit rooted to the ground by two battered work boots, topped with a feral rictus of flashing teeth.
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