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.
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