Whitelodge 15.2

-15.2-

Bruce.

He wanted to keep his eyes closed, to let the dream play on.

Bruce. The voice, more insistent now.

His brow furrowed, the grass against his cheek prickling as he shifted. Why couldn't she understand that waking was an interruption of life as it should be?

Bruce... It wasn't going to stop.

He rolled onto his back, let his eyes flicker open onto the sunset sky hanging over him. Around the periphery of his vision, the tops of stones began to intrude. Faint colors emanated from them.

He sat up, hardly believing it. He was back in the circle, sitting on the grass, looking into the story forest he had been running through before. Somewhere in there, he had found his own little grove, the infinitesimal corner where a small collection of his own tales stood, living and breathing the deliciously perfumed air.

Bruce. The voice was getting impatient, and he turned to see where it was coming from. He had subconsciously recognized Theda's voice even before he had been fully awake, so seeing her was not a surprise. She appeared outside the circle of stones as she always did, watching him with her familiar intensity.

"What?" he asked, stretching out his limbs as best he could without getting up. "What am I doing here?" He turned toward her, and for the first time realized how much she really did look like Kerren. The image of his muse before him had been cobbled together from thoughts of Sarah when she was about the same age as her daughter was now, which just made the similarity that more apparent.

"There is something you need to do," she said. One hand was pointing at him, but the other was tucked behind her back, lost among all the slowly swirling robes that swam around her.

He sighed, and got to his feet, fully turning toward her. "No thanks," he said. "Every time I've tried to do something tonight, it's turned out horribly wrong. Those people are all going to walk away thinking I'm the worst person that ever lived."

Theda continued to speak, her mouth never opening. "Perhaps we can do something about that," she said. She produced her hidden hand, in which she grasped a large fruit. Bruce's stomach sank when he saw it, recognizing it as the one from his Qoloni-tree, the same one he had climbed and tried to retrieve, just before he fell back into the world of the Lodge. He remembered suggesting to the others that it would take the destruction of the Qoloni itself to bring it down off the tree...

"They did it?" he asked Theda. "They killed it?"

She nodded slowly. "By the means the dreaming men discovered, the means that you could not imagine in your dark days of creating it."

He winced, sensing the chastisement within her placid voice. So they had destroyed it with mirrors. "Good for them," he said. "The job is done, then."

"Not quite," Theda said. "They are still separate from their world, the one from which the whole story forest grows. You have to get them back, to reattach them, make the story whole."

He sighed. "I believe, in that world, I am currently lying on the lobby floor, bleeding out from the many holes that bastardly thing gored in me. I'm hardly in a position to..."

She extended the hand that held the fruit, pushing it fully into the circle, from between the stones she stood among. "Yes, you can," she said. "It is, after all, your story. You can't change everything, but perhaps there is something you can do. Take a look, and re-write what you can. But there is little time."

He thought it over, then stepped forward and took the fruit out of her hand. It was larger than he had seen it last, heftier, more important. Even though it had fallen from its tree, it still felt vital in its hand. Still alive, but Theda was right. There was little time.

He looked from the fruit to his muse and back, unsure of where to begin. A smile was breaking around the corners of her mouth, as if she were merely waiting for him to figure it out. He turned the ripe weight over and over in his hands, unsure of what to do with it, how to get into it. As he continued to stare, he thought he began to see beneath the skin of it, into its inner workings.

What he held was the events of the night since the avalanche, encapsulated, narratified. He could see into the minds of all those who had been carried into this bizarre journey with him. He saw their fears, their uncertainties, and saw how in their own individual ways they had taken those deficiencies and pushed through them, or converted them into actions that brought them all to this final endpoint. More importantly, he saw himself, and was horrified. In himself he saw precious little heroism, sheer cowardice, and more than a little madness. Now that he was out of that horrible Lodge, away from the paralyzing fear and paranoia, he could see it all clearly. This, he realized, was the final gift Theda was giving to him; the ability to look deeply into this story-begat-from-a-story and see if and how he could change it, perhaps alter the ending.

Could he prevent the Qoloni from being summoned at all? No, that part was integral, too near the stem that attached it to its parent story-tree to change. All the elements had already been there to bring the thing into the real world -- Bruce's and Jimmy Gough's inspiration, Benny and Harmon's knowledge of the tale, Kerren's physical presence... if Bruce had ever gone looking for a case to prove predestination, this could have been it. But at the moment he just wanted to find a new path for the story, something that made him not to be its only human villain.

Could he have stayed in his hotel room, so that when the avalanche came he could have just been obliterated, and never made it out to help and harm the rest of them? No, then they would never know what they were up against, because he wouldn't be there to tell them. He had to remind himself that he had saved Kerren before he had killed Glenda; the thought raised tears of self-hatred and frustration into his eyes, blurring the task he continued to explore in his hands. There must be something, must be something --

Could he have not stabbed Glenda? Could he change that piece? So that she would be alive, to triumphantly join in the final curtain call, and then either make the decision to stay with Dale, or go home to her family? Or had he deprived her utterly of that bittersweet decision? As he contemplated this, he could see the story paths deep inside the fruit that would change. So much of what the others had done, their determination and rage necessary to come out victorious, had stemmed from that tragedy. He couldn't change it.

He shook the fruit in rage, as if he could knock its elements loose and rearrange them by sheer force of will. Why could he not do as he had so many other times, sat down to edit, find what felt wrong in his stories and tailor them to fit his aesthetic sense? The more deeply he stared, the more he understood that he could not change any particular element he did not like, because each would have a cascading effect that would alter everything else, and the Qoloni would end up not being destroyed.

He was about to give up, to throw the terrible fruit out of the stone circle, to let it roll and rot under the infinitely stretching boughs of the story forest. Just as he felt the muscles of his arm tensing to do so, a thought came to him. And, as with any good idea while he was writing, he immediately knew it was the right one. If he ever had any kind of creative gift, it was knowing when the true solution crossed his mind. So he took the story in both hands, made his final change, and gave it back to Theda.

She peered into it, saw what he had done, and nodded. It then vanished from her hand, for this realm was no longer the one in which it belonged. She reached for him with the same hand. He stepped forward and took it, feeling the coolness of her skin, letting her lead him out of the circle of Sounding Stones, because like the tale he had just altered, he had arrived in his rightful place.

He felt the breeze as he left the circle of his Sounding Stones. He took a deep breath of its richness, and then the author and Death walked toward the dream-ocean together.

Whitelodge 15.1

-15.1-

The silence that fell across the lobby had the exact same quality as when the group had worked their way from the storeroom to where Sheryl now stood, looking down over the second floor railing. She had watched every second of Dale's attack, seen the Qoloni disappear by degrees until there was nothing left, but hadn't thought about whether she should have run down and join in. She kept looking at the other, smaller pieces of the mirror lying scattered around on the floor, and could have joined in at any time.

So she was surprised when she turned after the violence was done, and began walking back toward the storeroom, where Kerren was waiting for her. That call to action was stronger than anything the Qoloni's demise could summon in her. She walked slowly, steadily, quietly, as if in a trance.

She was very aware that she might be experiencing the last moments of her life, and needed to be with Kerren if and when that happened. The arguments the group had with Bruce before the madness truly started had taken root in her mind, and she knew that no one was really sure what would happen now that the Qoloni was vanquished. The horned creature very well might turn out to be the linchpin preventing their tiny, barely tethered world from spinning away altogether. The author's vision of the story-forest, as feverish and strange as it was, resonated with her in some inexplicable way. Against all logic she could articulate, it just *sounded* right, in the way that dreams sometimes do. And if he had fear that the end of his monster would mean the end of this place too, then there might be something to it.

If he did turn out to be right, she wanted to be looking into Kerren's eyes when the moment came.

The sensory change from hall carpet to cold storeroom wood was sharp against the soles of her feet, bringing her back to herself. Her pace picked up as she stepped through the second doorway, finally coming to kneel next to Kerren, who was still sifting her fingers through Glenda's hair. The desk clerk's face was even paler now than it had been against the snow in full moonlight, and Sheryl shivered with more than cold at the sight of it.

As she sat there, content to be part of this quiet tableau while that horrible night's inevitable ending played out elsewhere, she looked down at her wife with changed eyes. After learning what she had about her mother-in-law's history with this place, she had no choice to, and what she found was astonishing...

Kerren had been horribly injured in the avalanche, and had spent the rest of her time immobilized, being ferried from place to place, carried and wrapped and hauled through the snow and laid across sledges like so much freight, forced through proximity to witness the slow death of the woman who still lay beside her. Sheryl realized she would never have been able to handle everything Kerren had and still be able to lie there, a sympathetic look on her face, stroking the deceased woman's hair. Her wife possessed more strength than she could ever hope to have.

Then Kerren turned her gaze up, as if just now realizing that Sheryl was there. Her hand stopped its motion, and for a moment the two looked at each other. Kerren's hand slowly rose through the cool air, rested its back against Sheryl's cheek. It was still warm, despite everything she had been through that night. That gesture, so simple, broke Sheryl's heart, and filled it at the same time. There was a hesitancy about it, an unspoken "Is it all right if I...?" quality that puzzled her.

She closed her eyes as she pressed the soft hand against her cheek, then looked back down at her wife, and almost gasped. There was a new, wholly unguarded look in Kerren's eyes, one that made every time Sheryl had looked before, by comparison, seem like she had been merely staring at a painting. It was as if they were seeing each other as they truly were now, instead of just a projection of what they wanted each other to be. She could plainly see the love and the frailty in Kerren's face, the fear and strength and uncertainty and wholeness. At the same time, she was aware that this was Kerren in her glorious entirety, the way Sheryl should have been seeing her all along, the way any who loved another ultimately should.

A thought flashed through her mind -- was this something like the connection that she had witnessed Kerren make with Harmon? Although neither of them moved, the question definitively formed in her mind -- yes. As Sheryl watched, the strength in Kerren's face dissolved, and she began to sob, tears spilling out from the corners of her eyes to roll back across her temples and into her own hair.

She felt her own facade of strength crumble just as quickly. She clasped that warm hand and held it fast against her, more sure than ever that she never wanted to let it go, marveling at how she could have been considering that option as recently as the evening before this. Soon they were lying together on the floor next to the dead woman, crying over everything the night had brought to them, all the things that had been lost forever, and the bond that had once been broken, now reforged.

Whitelodge 14.9, 14.10 & 14.11

-14.9-

Dale barreled down the hall, not caring how much noise he made. Everything he had been holding inside himself -- the rage over what had happened to Glenda, his frustration at not being able to get everyone trapped in the Lodge away to safety, the pain in his chest from trying to hold himself together, when every impulse was telling him to fly apart -- it was all coming out at once, forcing his feet to pound ever harder down the hallway, pushing himself faster and faster through the cold, still air. And he still couldn't make his body go fast enough to outrun it all.

Even though he had seen when Kerren had gently rested her hand on Glenda's still head, he almost jumped out of his skin when she then moved it to his arm. He had just reached a place where he had managed to clear out his mind to the bare walls, and if he was being honest with himself, it was the happiest he had been since he had first felt the mountain shifting under his feet. Maybe it was the fact that this was the first time he had allowed himself to stand still, and the world around him had appeared to follow suit. There was no longer any imperative to move, to help, to lead. He had time just to sit, and be with Glenda. He was keenly aware that she was no longer there; it was actually his attempts to feel the peace she might be experiencing now that had led him to that strange sense of inner silence.

Kerren's hand had brought him out of all that. It had lighted as softly as a butterfly on his exposed forearm, but by comparison to the nothing he had been experiencing, it felt like a punch. It forced him to shift his focus to her, to see the urgency in her eyes. Then she began to speak, and the messages she conveyed to him were impossible. At least, it seemed that way at first. But in her urgent whispers, he began to realize that they really were coming from the seemingly vanished soul in his arms. He held no illusion that they would find a way to bring her back; he became as convinced as Kerren herself that what she had heard was the last spark of Glenda's life departing. Still, it gave Dale back something he had lost. If he allowed himself to believe, she was actually said a proper goodbye to him, instead of quietly slipping away on the back of an improvised sled while he wasn't paying attention, rocketing downhill on a futile errand.

Knowing that the lovely woman in his arms had made that final effort -- that any of her last thoughts had been of him -- helped. It unlocked the well-fortified door behind which he had been shoving all of the things he couldn't allow himself to feel. Of course, now that that door had been opened, *everything* was coming out, and he could stay still no longer. It had taken all the fortitude he could gather to linger long enough to whisper "thank you"s to both Glenda and Kerren, to tenderly set his love's body down next to the immobilized woman, and then to stand up.

He had no plan, grabbed no items off the floor. Tears of seemingly every kind of emotion he had ever felt made hot tracks down his cheeks. His mind was full again, but still clear. Forces had come into his life and taken almost everything he treasured away from him, and now it was his turn to take something from them. The creature, its author -- he didn't care at this point -- but someone was going to pay for what had happened at the Deertail that night. All accounts would now be reckoned.

The hall outside the supply room was empty, or at least it seemed that way at first. As Dale's thundering steps neared the lit portion of it, he became aware of two human shapes there. They were both near the balcony railing. One of them, a woman, stood; another, a man lay on his stomach next to her, as if he had pulled himself over to the edge of the landing. They might have originally been looking over the edge and down into the lobby before he had appeared, but now they were looking only at him. His mind registered them perfunctorily -- Sheryl and Carlos -- then immediately recalibrated. What they had been looking at in the vast open space beyond the railing was what was most important.

He didn't stop his feet from slamming against the floor, merely changed direction. He blew right by the two at the top of the stairs and charged at an angle down the first three steps of the lobby stairway, only stopping when the banister railing blocked him. He looked down at the melee on the floor below him: the Qoloni was pinned under Bruce, Manoj, and Kelly -- by body weight, forked metal object, and mirror frame, respectively. He watched as the thing struggled to get itself up off the floor, discarding the author as a flailing, bloody mess that flopped across its free arm as it did. It was immediately clear that the dark thing was stronger than the two remaining combatants.

In the moment before he threw himself over the railing, he thought of Glenda again. He should have said something to her, some eloquent, heartfelt farewell that would have imparted back to her a small part of the comfort her final message had given to him. He hadn't, though. Why not? He let that uncertainty fuel him enough to overcome any lingering fear he might have, and hurled himself out into open space.

The thing saw him falling, tried to turn its horns in his directions, to make him suffer the same fate as Bruce, its author and creator. Manoj and Kelly managed to hold in place enough, however. His booted feet came down hard, satisfyingly solid, on either side of its buzzing, hazy torso. Once he had his balance, he dropped to his knees, in a move that would have pinned a mortal's body and stopped its breathing, the security guard's groin and legs crushing it beneath their weight. In this case, however, Dale felt the horrible, painless wrenching as the parts of his body that touched it were pulled through its distortion field. He felt himself spreading out across its surface, as if he were partly liquid, being spilled out across it.

Dale's fists clenched, hearing the ecstatic/concerned cries of the pair in reaction to his entrance. He raised his hands, brought them down on where the thing's face should have been. His hands felt some resistance, but then splashed outward, spreading deep brown skin color across the creature's no-color non-features. The Qoloni did not react, but continued its efforts to rise, almost oblivious to the way Dale's hands were punching into it like loose dough. He could even feel its body starting to rise, despite him being in its way; more and more of him was being twisted into another dimension as its torso lifted up off the floor by increments. Even Manoj and Kelly would not be able to hold it in place with their reflective weapons for much longer.

Off to his left, the Qoloni was trying to lift its other arm, but it was blocked by Bruce's crumpled body. The thing could warp the author and effectively pass its arm up through him, but it seemed to be having trouble, as if the distortion necessary to affect this motion made it incredibly weak or inaccurate. The end result was that the arm only managed to shuffle Bruce's otherwise still form around, remaining wholly uncoordinated.

Kelly's voice, barely two feet from Dale's head, was repeating a word at him. Only when he fully comprehended that he would not be able to smash the thing flat under his weight or the blows of his fists did he realize what it was she was saying to him. "Shards!" she was calling. "The shards!"

They were there, lying right next to where he was trying to pin down the Qoloni. The mirror Kelly now held had broken, and its pieces glittered in a sparse mosaic across the lobby rug that he had walked across thousands of times, never suspecting that he would one day be kneeling on it, in some looped no-time pocket universe, battling a creature from another man's imagination. He snatched up the biggest shard and tucked it into his fist, feeling the way the corners and edges bit securely into his flesh, making sure that there was a generous curved blade-like part sticking out from between his fingers.

He raised his hands, thought *for you, Glenda*, and began punching downward again.

-14.10-

Harmon could see it all. Not only could his expanded vision encompass what each member of their haggard party was doing, but he could see inside them, and through them as well. The only entity whose nature remained blank to him was the Qoloni itself, and he had no desire to see what lay beneath its indistinct surface.

He watched as Dale's clenched fist, a wicked curve of mirror sticking out from its bleeding flesh, began to rain down on what should have been the Qoloni's face. Harmon could get as close as he wanted, could have examined in minute detail the way the glass shard was doing the same thing that the broken mirror pieces in Kelly's hands, drawing in the thing's flesh, drawing it back into the anti-world that it had come from.

But where Kelly's mirror was trapping the thing, not allowing it to thrash its hand about, Dale was yanking back, immediately cocking his fist for another blow, ripping away the part of the dark creature that had become trapped in the mirror shard. The dark skin pulled up like taffy, and at the apex of Dale's arm swing snapped, a chunk permanently disappearing out of the Qolini's head. He could see the thing trying to flow its substance into the missing part like water, to reconstitute its shape, but just as it did Dale's fist came down and pulled back again, removing another chunk, sending more of its substance back through the mirror's surface and into the reversed lodge on the other side.

He could see the fascinated looks on both Kelly and Manoj's faces as they watched this happen, still using every ounce of their combined strength to hold the dark thing in place. Kelly's power had never been more evident to Harmon than it was now, as she struggled to push her own portion of the broken mirror down the length of the Qoloni's arm. She knew what it could do to Dale if it managed to gain its control again, could drive its fingers like spikes into the side of him, latching on and perhaps dragging him back through the mirror with it. She struggled to keep that from happening, to keep the pathway for Dale's revenge opened as wide as she could, the familiar burning of effort in the muscles in her legs as she continued to press forward while the thing pulled away. She would not let it escape again.

He could feel Manoj's awe of the energy that seemed to flow like crackling magnetism through the sigil he held in his hand, the forged symbol of this place that had brought them all together, which Benny had recognized the importance of, and passed on. He felt the pain too, the multiple cracked and bruised places from where the stairs had battered Manoj on his way down. As for Benny himself, Harmon saw what the man -- whose body and mind the events of the evening had treated even more cruelly -- had done, the sheer gulf of space and effort he had crossed without help from anyone, and silently cheered for him.

He examined the body of the author, and was unsurprised to see the life quickly leaving it. He was aware that he was coming to the process much earlier than he had seen occurring with Glenda, when he had provided assistance to Kerren, and it frightened him. He was conscious of the wild silent thrashing happening within the confines of Bruce Casey's mind, and wondered if it were the same with all souls who feels unfairly torn from their worldly existence. The righteous anger, the fear, the sense of unfairness -- it was all writ large in solar flares of chemical electricity, which were starting to gutter in the still body even as Harmon watched, unable to give any aid or succor. Bruce had simply been run through too deeply, in too many places, and now had to go into the dim beyond knowing that he had not helped. He had brought darkness into this world, and despite his efforts had only worsened it the harder he tried.

The author's death was not like Glenda's, which had been a graceful slipping away. Bruce's brain was throwing out desperate lines of light as it fell away and receded, hoping that they might catch onto anything to stop this from happening, but none did. The whole brainworks flared like a flashbulb, then froze and faded. Harmon wondered if he would ever find the ability to sympathize with the man. He might, one day, but not now.

Above battlegrounds both seen and unseen, Cheryl and Carlos looked down, each having contributed in their particular ways to bring the group to this junction of time and space, embodying bravery of two similar stripes as they shepherded the injured to safety. They watched every rise and fall of Dale's fist with animalistic glee that they could be forgiven for, the same that all feel when the interloping antagonist is brought down from its pinnacle of otherworldly power.

He could even see the two women lying silent in the storeroom, a world away from the horror and fury happening elsewhere. He could see the dark void of what had once been Glenda, and the way Kerren's free hand was still extended, stroking the desk clerk's hair with tenderness and a purity of heart that seemed strangely familiar. It was the same way Sarah had done to him, on those too-few nights so many years ago. He was struck again by how much of Sarah he could see in her, could trace clear genetic lines from this woman with the broken legs back to her mother, the spirit who had been to this place long before, inspiring all she met in one way or another... she had caused Bruce to write a book, Jimmy to paint some sort of nature goddess, and for Harmon himself to pine away in the understairs room his body occupied even at this very moment...

That was the moment he knew. It had already been a wisp of suspicion in his mind, of course. Just weighing the span of years against Kerren's age had been enough to make him wonder. But looking at her now, he could see that her gaze of empathy was almost the same as the one he sometimes saw in the mirror, the one that made him wonder if it were the true key to the gift that had kept him here for all these years. Was it in the eyes?, he would wonder on those occasions he would allow himself to examine himself. Was it something in the heart?

Here was his answer. It was all these things. And not only those, but it was also in the soul. And the blood.

-14.11-

Dale's fist kept going, a piston with infinite reserves, doggedly punching into the Qoloni's face again and again, each time pulling away a little more of its substance. As much as the creature struggled to rise, Manoj kept the lodge's silver logo wedged into its horns, all but propping himself up on it, putting as much of his body weight as he could manage to keep the dark thing down on the floor.

The thing kept trying to fill in the missing parts of its face as they were ripped away, as if keeping its almost-human shape was essential to maintaining its structural integrity. Against Dale's continued assault, though, this was a losing battle. Its head was pockmarked with sections it simply wasn't being given time to refill. Dale was perhaps the last to realize what was happening to the Qoloni's overall form, because he was being fueled by equal parts rage and horror, watching as the blood seeping between his lacerated fingers ran down the curved piece of mirrorglass and dripped onto its body, each drop spreading outward in crimson ripples to encompass nearly all of the Qoloni's shape before disappearing beneath it.

Dale had been missing the effect that his taking away bits of the thing was having. He finally became aware that his inner thighs were almost entirely free of the space-twisting force that enveloped the creature's body, and that this meant that it was shrinking. A few more seconds, and it was clear; in trying to maintain its essential shape with less material, the Qoloni was diminishing. It seemed to realize this too, and intensified its struggle. Its strength was shrinking along with its volume, however, and its thrashing became more and more feeble as Dale's hand relentlessly continued its bloody work. It was no longer a question of whether Dale would be able to finish the job.

With every blow, he thought of those who had been most hurt by this thing underneath him: Glenda... Benny... Kerren... he even threw in some for the other missing guests of the Deertail, because he did not know what had happened to them, other than that they had disappeared when the avalanche happened. And the black shape continued to shrink.

He noticed that Manoj was continually having to adjust himself as the horns began to shrink as well. Whatever dark material they were made of, the Qoloni was drawing from them as well to keep itself in one piece. Dale felt the burning deep in the overworked muscles of his arm, and finally let it stay at the lowest point in its arc. He left the mirror shard embedded in the Qoloni's head, and watched as it was pulled into even the small, blood-flecked reflective surface, as if being drawn down a drain.

His body was finally free of its receding shape, then he was struggling to keep the shard turned and keep it in contact with the thing's body, then he was watching the vast network of horns narrowing to non-existence, much like the heavy icicles that hung from the lodge's eaves and withered away every spring. Finally, there was nothing under him at all. Manoj, on his side, breathing heavily, had sunk to rest with his metal sigil on the bloodied rug. Kelly was setting down the mirror's heavy frame with a clunk on the floor.

Dale closed his eyes, tossing away the piece of mirror, hearing it clatter, and eventually come to rest, in the corner of the lodge's lobby, turned his eyes up to the wooden-beamed ceiling, and drew in a long, shuddering gasp.