Sunday Night Radio

Eventually, Donna just put Jimmy's hand directly on her knee. But he was still distracted, and she watched, disappointed, as it slipped off again. "Jimmy," she said, "are you going to keep fidgeting with that contraption, or pay attention to the girl who is sitting here with you?"

His face turned back in her direction, that adorable goofy grin back on it, but she could tell his ears were still turned toward the radio. Other than the starlight, its dial was the only thing casting light over the porch: pale orange, spreading out like firelight. It was actually rather romantic, if only he would realize that.

"Sorry," he said. "It's just... it's some kind of astronomy report. Which is kind of a hobby for me. Have you ever looked through a telescope? Like, a really good one?"

She bit her lip and shook her head no, trying to embody the word "coquettish", which she only dimly understood from Mother's French romances, sometimes left lying around where Donna could sneak glances at the dogeared pages.

"Oh, you oughta sometime. I've seen the rings around Saturn, the moons of Jupiter..."

Donna sighed. The radio had been playing nice dance music for a while; why did they keep interrupting it with news reports? "Look, Jimmy," she said, shifting toward him, causing the porch swing to rock a little, "we don't have long to sit here, you know, alone. My dad's going to get tired of trying to listen to Edgar Bergen on the little set inside, and then he's going to want to come listen on this one. Mother said she can keep him distracted in there for a while, but he's going to storm out the front door soon. Now, isn't there anything you'd like to talk to me about before he does that?" Which, in Donna's mind was equally as brazen as asking, "Am I going to get kissed tonight or what?"

That seemed to bring the focus back into Jimmy's eyes. While the sounds of an orchestra playing "Stardust" drifted out of the speaker, he turned fully toward her. He had been trying to keep the swing still and quiet so he could hear what the newsmen were saying, but now he picked up his feet and let it sway. Donna felt the movement, a subtle pull, deep in her stomach.

Jimmy seemed to be reaching for something to say. "Why did your Pa bring the radio out on the porch anyway? Mine has his next to his chair and guards it with his life."

Finally, he was making an attempt at conversation. That was progress, anyway. "Well," Donna began, "he brought it out here back at the beginning of summer so he and his buddies could listen to Joe Louis knock out 'some Kraut' at Yankee Stadium -- that's what Father said. But after that, the evening news started getting filled with stories about that Hitler guy, who I suppose wants to take over all of Europe. Mother found it all too upsetting, and didn't want to listen to it herself, so she talked him into keeping it out here for a while. They listen on the little set inside most nights. She says that one's easier to ignore."

"Uh-huh," he said. He was only half-listening again, wasn't he? What was she going to have to do to get him to pay attention, flick up her skirt and flash her legs? The newsmen were back again, and she thought she heard someone mention Grover's Mill, which actually wasn't all that far away. Clearly, this competition for Jimmy's mental attention was "escalating" -- another term she heard used a lot on Father's news programs.

She shifted the slightest bit closer to the boy next to her, making the swing sway a little more. "I know you've got quite a walk home, Jimmy," she said, "and can't stay too long. But I'm really glad you did. How long will it take you, you reckon?" She hoped this sounded like a reminder of how short their time was as well as a vague threat.

He considered this a little longer than she thought he should have to. "Half hour or so. Your house is almost exactly halfway between my house and church. But it's okay. Long walks don't bother me none, even at night."

Finally, something that made her smile. She knew he didn't appreciate how hard it had been for her to get him here, alone on the porch with her. Father said that people who lived as far out from town as Jimmy's folks did were all "low-class", but Mother understood. She had been the one who had talked both Father and Jimmy's parents into letting him stop by for a little while after church. She had even volunteered to drive Jimmy the rest of the way home, knowing full well the courtesy would be refused. But it was okay. Walking two miles home in the dark was just the right amount of trouble for himto go to, if he really liked Donna the way she thought she liked him.

She reached up and put a hand on his cheek, rubbing her palm across the light down that was just starting to turn into stubble. "You know, I was looking at your hair all through evening service tonight."

"My... my hair?" he asked, a little stupefied that she was touching him.

"Mm-hm," she said, marveling at the way its white-straw color seemed to emanate its own faint light in the darkness. "I like the way you cut it. It really suits you... My family always sits a few pews behind yours, and I was actually imagining what it would be like to... run my fingers through it." Her fingers slid under his ear and around toward the back of his head, moving from the close crop on the sides and back, up toward the longer, floppier part on top...

She felt his body stiffen, but realized it was not because of her hand; the music had fallen away again. Now the news guys were in some field where a meteorite had crashed down. And just like that, she had lost him again. Without removing her fingers from the softness of his hair, she began to half-jokingly scold, "You know, Jimmy, it's one thing to have a hobby--"

The look of concern that was spreading across his face made her stop. Even though the light on the porch was dim, she was sure that she could see his skin turning pale. The voices in the news report had faded away, and a strange grinding noise had taken its place.

Jimmy whispered two words, and their sincerity and heaviness made Donna's blood run cold. "They're here."

For the first time, Donna took a moment to listen to what the men on the radio were saying. They weren't looking at a meteorite, they claimed, but some kind of metal cylinder. As they took turns describing what was happening, she caught something familiar in one of their voices.

There were men down in the pit that the thing had gouged into the ground when it fell, and one of them had a microphone that he was using to listen to the hissing, scraping sound of the thing. One of them said it might be because the thing was cooling off after its burning plunge from the sky. Why did his voice sound so familiar? Was he some local newsman, who she had maybe heard hundreds of times on Father's news shows without realizing it?

There was a loud thunk from the radio speaker. Someone yelped that an end had fallen off the metal cylinder, and that it was hollow inside. She realized that the porch swing had slowed to a stop, because she and Jimmy were sitting frozen still, holding hands. Just as Donna's brain was wondering how she had missed that happening, her body was registering it too, a warm flush that was creeping up her neck to her face. This was followed by a very different, plummeting feeling in her stomach as the man on the radio described what was coming out -- no, not just that, it was *crawling* out -- of the hollow thing in the pit. His words were fast and breathless, describing its rubbery appearance, some kind of heavy, tentacled brown horror...

Jimmy suddenly jammed his feet down on the porch's boards and bolted to his feet. His fingers remained entwined with Donna's, jerking her forward a little bit. "It's them!" he whisper-shouted. "They've finally come!"

The harsh sound of his voice, so astonishingly present, brought Donna out of her radio trance. She was suddenly back on the porch with him, and perilously close to losing what should have been the romantic high point of her life so far. She stood up next to him, so the tangle of their fingers could mesh properly. "Who, Jimmy?" she asked, wanting to hear that passionate tone of voice again, even if he wasn't talking about her.

"The Martians!" he said. "They shot these things out of some kind of space gun on their planet, and now they're landing all over the place!"

A sudden, piercing whine came from the radio, followed by a sound Donna had never heard in real life before... men screaming in terror, and then in pain as whatever ray the Martians were using set them all on fire. She suddenly felt lightheaded, and started to wobble on her feet. Even after the broadcast was abruptly cut off, she felt like that rising heat Jimmy had stirred in her was zipping up her spine and over the top of her head, making her muscles lose all their strength. She was slumping against Jimmy's skinny form...

And then she found herself wondering when they had started dancing. There was music playing again, and Jimmy's arms were around her, and she was leaning against him. When had that happened? Then, after a blissful second, her body went to ice and she remembered what was happening. She tilted her head back, and looked up into Jimmy's face. He was looking down at her with concern, as well as a new resolve she had never seen before.

In that moment, he suddenly wasn't just the gawky boy she had a crush on anymore. She felt she was glimpsing the man he would become, someone strong and decisive, someone who would be able to "protect her". Sometimes Mother would describe Father in this way, and told Donna that this was a quality she should look for.

"Are you all right?" Jimmy asked her, and Donna couldn't keep a comforted smile from spreading across her face.

The man on the radio was talking again. One of them, at least, had escaped the decimating fire, and was being interviewed about this new, horrific weapon the Martians were using on people less than twenty miles away.

Then, without warning, the timbre of the speaker's voice dropped into place. She knew exactly who it was. It was The Shadow. The one Father sometimes listened to on his police shows, the one who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

"Jimmy..." she said, trying to get her feet back under herself.

Jimmy continued to hold her tightly, and stroked her shoulder in a way he probably thought was reassuring. "It's okay," he was telling her. "We'll fight them. They're going be sorry they messed with us."

"I know who it is," she said. She was trying to straighten up fully, but he wasn't giving her balance back to her. "He's an *actor*. I don't think this is--"

"Listen!" Jimmy hissed through gritted teeth. More breathless reports were flowing from the radio, now describing other falling meteors, and the giant mechanical tripods that came from within them. The Martians were using these to march across the land in huge strides, destroying power lines and returning fire on the Army, which had apparently arrived in record time. For almost two full minutes, Donna allowed herself to be held fast in Jimmy's arms, and the more she listened, the funnier it became.

What made it worse was that she could tell Jimmy believed every bit of it. She could feel his hands tightening on her as the radio play became more and more harrowing. She didn't know why she wasn't prying herself away from him -- was it because this was almost exactly the scenario she had hoped to be in this evening, just without the alien invasion?

She could feel the muscles of Jimmy's chest tighten, hear his jaw creak as his teeth gritted in resolve. "I'm going to get my father's gun," he said, low and meaningful, and Donna had to fight to stifle a giggle. "Then I'll come back, and we'll barricade your house... in case they decide to come this way." He sounded like he was ready to run off to war.

She gathered her composure, and then breathed, trying to sound as small as possible, "But what about your own house? Don't your parents need you?"

Jimmy's eyes turned up, scanned the horizon intently. "My brothers are there. They'll do what they have to. But tonight, your family needs me more."

Donna was biting the insides of her cheeks so hard that she thought she was beginning to taste blood. Part of her kept expecting Jimmy to break up and reveal that he was in on the joke, but the longer she looked up at him, the more she became that it wasn't going to happen. Her amusement began to slide into concern.

"I've got to go, Donna," Jimmy said -- was he intentionally trying to sound like some movie serial hero? "But I'll return with protection for you and your family. We'll make our stand here... when the Martians come."

Then she was pressing her hands against his chest, feeling how hard his heart was beating under her palms. It hurt a bit to know that it wasn't acting that way because of her, but it wasn't all that bad either.

As sonic Armageddon continued to play out in the air around them, the couple turned away from the house, facing the rough farmland on the other side of Donna's street. They had been outside for long enough now that the moonless night's stars seemed particularly numerous, and she could even see their shadows dimly fanning out across the entire length of the lawn, cast by the radio set's light.

The sound of artillery reverberated around them, and Donna suddenly knew what she wanted. She allowed herself to believe that they really were in the middle of an attack, that the world as they knew it was about to end. The adrenaline of coming battle thundered through her, and the beat of Jimmy's heart was matching hers, hot and fast.

"Jimmy," she said, and had to physically take his chin in her hand and turn it toward her, away from the fearful sounds of battle. There was an intensity in his eyes that she had never seen before. "I think you're one of the bravest men I've ever met. I want you to go now, do what you have to do. Then come back to me. Please don't let them hurt my family. I'll be waiting here for you."

She was gazing deeply into his eyes, and he into hers, his face huge, so unbearably close. They were coming together amid the crash and boom of the huge guns... Their lips touched, pressed tightly, and Donna felt her knees wobble again as that internal heat set her entirely alight. For a moment she was acutely aware of everything around her, the light breeze that wafted the scent of imaginary Martian smoke, the firmness/softness of Jimmy's lips, the warmth of the orange-yellow radio light washing over them. It was perfect.

After a timeless moment, Donna pushed her hands against his chest, breaking off their kiss, long before she wanted it to be over. "Now go," she said, summoning all the drama she could. "Then hurry back, and save me."

Jimmy's features hardened in resolve, his pale cheeks flushed, and he broke off from her at a dead run. His church shoes slammed down on the boards, then launched him down to the ground without touching a single porch step. He thumped away at full speed.

Donna watched him go, the air around her suddenly feeling colder. By the time he got home, she figured, the truth would be revealed. He'd probably get swatted by the his older brothers for falling for such an obvious trick so close to Halloween. Oh, well. Her lips still burned from his kiss, and she licked them to attempt to preserve his heat, to keep the memory fresh for as long as she could.

A long pause came from the radio behind her, as poison gas finally engulfed New York and the gunners succumbed. Then a voice: "You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air, in an original dramatization of 'The War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission."

Donna switched the set off and wandered inside, a big grin on her face.

The Drive Home

They should have been able to make it home by midnight. Connor was just as tired as the rest of his family, but he had assured everyone that he was fine to drive the rest of the way. And he honestly felt that he was; there was a part of him that wanted to hold onto the relaxed-adrenalized vacation feeling the weekend had given him, for as long as he could. So, as the sun started its downward dive off to their right, he threw back the rest of his caffeinated iced tea and settled in behind the wheel.

The kids were fine in the back; he hadn't heard a sound from them since just after dinner. Through glances in the rear-view mirror, he watched them settle in, noting the stages: from talking to each other, to gravitating toward their phones, then only listening via earbuds, finally falling asleep with their heads resting on propped-up pillows. The final step was the phones darkening to sleep as well.

Connor and his Miranda had talked in the front seats all through this time, taking advantage of the hissing white noise of the highway, and the fact that they didn't have to look at each other as they spoke. It always seemed that conversation with a spouse was easier and more truthful when you didn't have to look them in the eyes when you did it. But a little while ago she too had reclined her seat a little, and nodded off. Connor kept stealing glances over at her. The sun was coming closer and closer to setting in the window just beyond her, and it was kind of mesmerizing the way the angled light made her hair and blouse glow around the edges, as if she were an astral projection being beamed in from somewhere far away.

It made him smile to see her so relaxed and peaceful. The camping trip had made her less tense than he had seen her in a long while. Even though this alone would be enough to make him feel triumphant, it was sweetened by this fact: he had pushed the idea of the trip saying that it would help her unwind, and here was proof he was proven right. It was petty, he knew, but he couldn't deny that it was there.

As the sunlight deepened through the rainbow and eventually disappeared, leaving twilight behind it, the reddish-gold nimbus around Miranda's form dissipated too, although he found he was just as content to have the ungilded, real live woman nestled in the car's bucket seat next to him. He reckoned they must be about halfway home, and turned his full attention back to the winking yellow line at the center of the two-lane highway as it wound through the lightly wooden northern stretches of the state. That line was the brightest thing in the world now, the moon nowhere to be seen, and the lights of passing towns still infrequent and fleeting.

He wasn't quite sure when the fog started. By the time he noticed that he could see the edges of the cones of light emanating from the car's headlights, they were already well into it. It wasn't that he hadn't been paying attention; in fact, he chalked it up to the fact that he was paying too much careful attention to that center line. He had never actually felt distracted, but its near-hypnotic winking had certainly chased all other thoughts out of his head. He took a new look around, realizing that he and his family were now cruising through full dark, with a fair percentage of their forward-pointing lights being thrown back at them as they sped down an illusory tunnel bounded by mist.

Connor found that he wanted to turn on the radio, to hear something other than his own thoughts as they continued to slide forward through the dark. Any sign of the world beyond the grayness would have been a comfort. But the volume needed to ease his gently-jingling nerves (thanks, iced tea) would have woken up at least one member of his family, which would be followed by questions about how far they were from home, what's the deal with all this fog, and why didn't he slow down a little bit... all of which were questions he didn't have answers to. He just wanted to push through and get clear of the obscurity as soon as possible. It felt imperative that his family not lose their relaxed vacation-glow, and if he had to go through some tense minutes alone as they slumbered, he would.

There was a flash of light off to to his left, a tiny glint that hit the corner of his vision. At first he wasn't even sure that it was real. It could have been a dashboard light momentarily refracting off the inside of his window, or any number of other things. He shifted his head around experimentally, to see if he could replicate it, but it wasn't until he stopped trying that it happened again. Not only that, but this time it had some kind of movement that Connor's mind somehow attached *swivel* the word to, as if the beam of a tiny lighthouse had swung across him. Again, it disappeared before he could find where it came from.

The air in the car suddenly felt stuffy, heavy with warm, exhaled sleep-breaths. They had rolled up the windows after the sun stopped adding heat to the car's interior, but he hadn't yet turned on the fans to bring in outside air. Now he felt tiny beads of sweat erupting on his forehead, and wanted cool air. He flicked the switch to the lowest setting, and heard the reassuring whoosh of fresh air entering the car. His hand froze halfway back to its spot on the steering wheel.

Smoke, he thought immediately. This isn't fog. It's smoke. The smell was unmistakable. It wasn't a cultured smell, either. Connor had learned long ago that the only smoke that smells good is the kind created by controlled fires. Bonfires, fireplaces, and barbecue smokers all were cautious and pleasant compared to this. Within the few seconds of outside he had breathed before he flicked the fan back off, Connor had smelled raw nature in the smoke: leaves, scorched earth, and what he imagined might have been animal hair. It was caustic and dangerously wild, stirring some primal fear deep inside his bones.

His eyes flicked to Miranda, and then the rear-view to check on the kids. Was their sleep being turned over by the smell of smoke? None of them stirred, and even as Connor vowed to get them through this undisturbed, he found he was relieving his foot's pressure on the accelerator. Was it possible that he was driving his family right into a forest fire? His eyes tried to scan everything before him at once. There was no reddish light coming from anywhere (although he had to admit he didn't know just how much he should expect to see through the encroaching smoke), nor had there been any kind of roadblock to warn him. Again, he barely resisted the urge to turn on the radio to see if there was any kind of news being broadcast.

Another flash of light, this time off to the right, just above Miranda's shoulder. This time his nerves were enough on edge that he could whip his head around and catch a glimpse of what caused it... and immediately wished he hadn't. He now could tell that what appeared to be a single flash was, in actuality, two. And below and between the pair of tiny, perfect circles, was a lean triangular nose.

It was a face, perched only about twenty feet away from the car.

As soon as Connor saw it, it was gone, obscured by Miranda's shoulder, and then the body of the car. Connor almost jerked sideways in his seat trying to look back and get another glimpse. It looked like whatever it was had been just off to the side of the road, but even as close as the face had appeared, it was just too dark and foggy (smoky, he corrected himself) to see.

When he sat back in his seat and firmly reestablished his hands on the wheel, Connor realized that the craning of his neck had turned the car slightly as well. The headlights were now angled just off the side of the road, but even before he straightened the car out, he saw four more of the little white lights, almost directly ahead of his skewed headlights.

This new pair of faces were turned toward him, their hunched bodies beside them. Connor blinked when he recognized the shapes. Gray wolves. There were wolves standing by the side of the road. Not moving, just standing there. Watching.

He kept a close eye on them as the car drifted past, going barely over twenty miles an hour now. Their heads turned to follow, their perfect circles of their eyes casting unwavering light directly into his.

Connor tipped the wheel so the car was heading straight again, and as he did he saw several more of those glowing eyes up ahead. At least five sets of them, randomly placed on either side of the street. His fingers audibly tightened around the wheel. Weren't animals supposed to run from a forest fire? So why were they just standing there, watching him drive by? They made no threatening moves, in fact had no menace in their features at all. He seemed to be drawing attention only because he was the only moving object in the still, smoky night.

Connor heard a barely-stifled gasp from the back seat. Julie. He instinctively held his finger up to his lips, making a silent shh, turning his head slightly to the side, hoping she could see the gesture from directly behind him. He looked in the rear view mirror to see her, and his heart dropped into his stomach. While he saw his daughter, her eyes wide as she looked forward out of the windshield, he also saw what was behind her.

In the middle of the road behind the car stood a pair of wolves, their eyes glowing red from the tail lights. They hadn't been there a mere second before, when the car had passed through the space they now occupied.

"Dad?" Julie whispered, her voice just on the near side of panic. "What are those?"

She clearly knew what they were. Connor knew she was asking the same thing he had been asking himself: *why* were they there? "I don't know," he whispered back in as even a tone as he could. "I'm going to just keep going, and pass them by."

"Should we wake them?" Julie asked, looking over at her brother, still asleep and leaning against a pillow stood on end and wedged against the duffel of future laundry.

Connor shook his head. "It's okay," he said. "Let them sleep. Nothing's going to happen." And he neglected to add, just don't look behind you, honey, and definitely don't think about how fast those things must have moved.

The ground was subtly rising on either side of the road. Connor kept looking ahead, continually hoping that the each tiny pair of bright eyes that appeared at the boundary where the road was lost in smoke would be the last, but there was always another pair beyond, and sometimes there were two. As the car drove deeper into a gulley that was slowly transforming into a ravine, the number of wolves visible by the side of the road continued to grow. And as much as he wanted to look in the rear view mirror to comfort his daughter, Connor couldn't. He could only imagine how many of the red-eyed things were behind them now, motionless and staring. The only safe place he could look was the flickering center line of the road, the only bit of color in this world of gray smoke, asphalt, and wolves.

He kept driving forward. There had to be an end to this, he kept thinking. They would have to come out the other side at some point. There was no major fire, no unnatural explanation for any of this. His family had only chosen the road home where a wolf pack had found the road as an easy means of escape from a smoldering lightning strike somewhere nearby. That's all. If he just kept following the yellow line, they would come out of it.

"I don't like this," Julie whispered from behind him. "Why are they just standing there?"

"It's okay," Connor replied, surprised at how calm and level his voice sounded. "It'll be over in a minute."

"Are you sure?" she asked, her voice starting to tremble. Nearly half the rising ground on either side of the car was now occupied by clusters of stoic, placid wolves, whose only movement was the turning of their heads as the family went by.

At some point, a rumbling had started underneath the car. It had started so subtly that Connor had missed it. The sound and feel was as if the ground were slowly turning to cobblestone underneath them. At the same time, he was noticing that the road itself was changing, too. The yellow line was become less distinct, the sudden new texture of the asphalt making its solid, predictable lines waver out of focus. There was more color creeping in too, a pinkish red that gave the edges of the road a disquieting meaty tone. On the shoulders of the road, in front of the ever-growing press of creatures, there now were low, yellow-white stones at periodic intervals, like markers. Where they appeared, it looked as if they were pushing up the pinkish, softer edges of the asphalt.

"What the hell are those?" he murmured to himself. He felt Julie's hand on his shoulder, gripping progressively tighter. And now he could see a general lightening, something far ahead through the smoke that was casting a strong, hellish light. Was that what was causing the pinkish appearance of--

Julie drew a sharp intake of breath and her fingernails dug deeply into Connor's shoulder, as if she had just figured out something. The road ahead had now taken on a full, undulating pinkness, the center line entirely lost. The stones poking up through the soil by the sides of the road, which formed a boundary the wolves seemed to not dare cross, grew taller and more triangular. The light ahead was starting to take form, a hazy, swirling ball that was always just a bit beyond the point where the smoke made it lose coherence, constantly threatening to rush forward and resolve its true form.

"Dad," Julie hissed, the words clearly requiring great effort not to be screamed. "We don't want to go there. You can turn us around."

Connor didn't respond, but kept the car moving forward. At some point he understood what she was seeing, too. The wolves with the glowing eyes continued to accumulate on the raised banks beside the road, the bumpy road vibrating the car growing more pink and more alive, the rows of sharp white rocks becoming taller and closer together, and a awareness was growing of the ridged red ceiling that was lowering down from above them... It would all close in on them when they reached that burning light, still straight ahead of them and rendering him powerless to turn his eyes away from it...

"Dad," he heard Julie's voice, very close and strained, speaking almost directly into his ear, "You. Don't. Have. To."

Her words made his eyes blink, and in that moment the spell was broken. He was no longer hypnotized by the fire lying ahead, did not feel compelled to drive directly down the burning throat of the biggest wolf that could ever exist. Connor wrenched the wheel to the right, aiming the driver's side of the car at edge of the narrow gap between the two nearest teeth, praying that there was enough of a gap for the car to slip through. He took one last, fleeting look over at Miranda, whose head had rolled to the side with the change of direction but still had not awakened, and then into the blazing eyes of the wolves that lay on the other side of the gap--

The car was wrenched upward on the right side, throwing him back in his seat, Julie's hand yanked from his shoulder, taking more of his strength than he expected with it. Then the car was bumping and rocking every direction at once, thumping and shuddering, the wheels spinning in air one instant, and churning through dirt and rock the next. The view through the windshield yielded nothing but gray smoke and gray fur.

After a few seconds they came to a stop, and Miranda was awake, yelling, "Jesus Christ, Conn, what the *hell*?" and Bryan was yelping incoherently from the backseat. It was a glorious, welcome sound, until he realized that Julie was silent.

There was less smoke ahead of them. Instead he could see trees, the tops of some of them, because the ground dropped away sharply before them. His headlights threw the leaves and needles into sharp relief, as well as the way the smoke drifted in front of them in pulsing waves. He called out his daughter's name and tried to turn around within his seat belt, painfully wrenching his shoulder as he did. But there was a familiar long-haired shape there, the eyes as wide and deep as her mother's, looking back at him.

Connor turned to his wife. "There's a fire ahead," he said, trying to soothe her continued shouts of incredulity. "I was just now able to see. We've got to turn around."

"And you had to run us off the road--?" Miranda began at the top of her voice, but stopped. She was now fully awake, looking at him clearly, and seeing the subtle way the burning forest beyond him was turning his silhouette into a frightening, wavering thing. She quieted.

Connor looked around, trying to determine where the wolves were. His eyes scanned the ground around the car, found nothing. Whether they had taken advantage of their speed, or had never existed at all, there was not a single glowing eye to be seen now. He checked the rearview, and there was the road behind them, solid and flat as it had always been. A broken wooden mile marker, which the car had hit as it left the road, was snapped off about a foot off the ground, pulsing red like a broken fang in the tail lights.

Connor took one more look at his family, noting the safety and preciousness of each and every one, Julie last of all. There seemed to be something that passed in a long look between the two of them, an understanding and a secret that they tacitly agreed to carry the rest of their lives. Connor put the car in reverse, backed onto the road, and headed back the way they had come. They would have to find another way home.

The smoke and light lessened the farther away they got, until the air was once again clear, but Connor did not turn the fan on.

Black Stairs

The stairs are made of black glass, thick and sturdy, but clear enough to reveal what lies beyond, which is more stairs. Flight after flight crisscross each other ad infinitum, stretching out in myriad profusion toward every horizon, and an unknown distance above and below. There are no railings to protect her from the empty spaces that lie between them, however they are so densely packed together that there really is no need. All that exists in this dim world are the stairs.

Lorianne walks up and down these frequently, after almost every day she spends deep in her research. She knows the dream is her mind's way of reconciling the rafts of information she has gathered, assembling all the abstract facts into some construct she can more easily process and contextualize. This doesn't stop the experience from being entirely bewildering, but it at least tries. There is no wind, and no sound. She is neither hot nor cold, but she does occupy a body. There is a simultaneous sense of vast space and near-claustrophobic closeness as she glides up and down flight after flight, exploring the many platforms that are the only other structures in this world, and what the stairs connect.

On each of these stand a pair of figures, facing each other. They are the male and female halves of a dynasty's beginning. Surrounding them, playing around their legs and chasing each other like little orbiting solar systems, are the children that resulted from their union. Sometimes there is only one, sometimes as many as twenty. And whether the parents loved each other, or even knew each other, is irrelevant; the children are theirs only biologically, and Lorianne is very aware that there are stories going untold here, other loves and other arrangements left out by the cold impartiality of genetics.

More often than one would expect, there are multiple spouses and intersecting clouds of progeny from different parental pairs, all of which occupy the same platform. It can make things pretty crowded, and hard for Lorianne to pick her way across to get to the stairs that will lead higher into the spreading tangle of black glass. This is almost always her goal, because the parents at the bottom of the stairs also are represented as children at the top of their own particular set, being displayed also as part of the generation that came before.

This mental representation of her family has been growing for years, ever since her interest in genealogy was first piqued by her grandmother. The woman had already been very elderly when Lorianne was a small child, and claimed that their family was descended from "the bluest of bloods". Nan was always the one who could point at old photos made of thick cardboard and easily recognize old relatives regardless of the point in their lives, and she often would pull a then child-sized Lorianne up into her lap and turn the heavy yellowing page and introduce her to everyone. When the pictures devolved further back in the books, turning into little rectangles of metal, Nan would go on to describe the parents and grandparents of each increasingly distant, fading relative, going back centuries to when they all lived in castles -- or so Nan would have her believe. Nan to wanted to make sure that Lorianne never forget that was the product of multiple long processions of kings and queens. And ever since then, Lorianne's slow, incremental studies had shown that this was true.

So, on these nights, she walks the stairs of her heritage. She has found that, if she walks up to a particular ancestor -- which more often than not shares at least one facial feature the what she will see in the mirror upon waking -- they will notice her, turn toward her and smile. Then the stairway that leads up to their parents' platform will become illuminated. Not brightly, but strong enough so that it is made visible even if there are multiple black stairways blocking it from view. Then the parents' ancestral stairs will light as well, and the grandparents', the branches multiplying in a dizzying fashion as they spread ever upward and outward, from two to four to eight to sixteen to thirty-two to sixty-four, off into the increasingly hazy distance of nothing but stairways upon stairways. This gives Lorianne comfort.

More unpredictable is what happens when she bends down and touches one of the unceasingly dashing children. The child will stop for a moment, distracted from his or her play, and look up into Lorianne's face with the same beatific smile, and stairways below -- those of their direct descendants -- will begin to illuminate. Sometimes the light will explode downward like a burning cataract, because while every person has exactly two biological parents -- no more, no less -- they might have dozens of children. Or, again more often than one might think, no stairways light up at all, and Lorianne realizes she is interacting with the last of a genetic line never to be replicated. It may be a child who didn't reach maturity, dying of plague, or battle, or possibly became a nun or monk. She has tried to spot differences between tumbling children who go on to be parents and those who do not, but can find no easy pattern.

This gets her thinking. If Lorianne were to follow the right stairways all the way down to the bottom, she would find her own platform, and the Lorianne that stands there alone. She has not yet done this in her dreams, mainly because of what she might learn... Will there be stairs beyond hers, or will there be a dead end? And what would either possibility even mean? Maybe there will be nothing but endless void below her spot, and she doesn't particularly want to witness that either. She consciously knows she walks through a dream, a construct her mind has invented, but she also realizes that there many more stairs, far in the distance above and to the sides, that represent people she doesn't consciously know exist yet. And if they are already there, then maybe this knowledge isn't exclusively hers... perhaps she's tapping into some kind of ultimate accumulation of genetic memory. In any event, she always puts off finding out anything that might lead her toward an answer. Maybe the next time I dream this, she thinks, even as she understands that she will always be better off not knowing.

While she spends a lot of time along the thin (as in, mildly-incestuous) upward spiral of her royal ancestry, she's aware that it is because her inner vision is clearest there. She knows enough about these people, their histories fleshed out enough, to appear as what are probably fairly accurate portraits of themselves. They wear fine clothing that softly runs under her fingers when she makes contact with them, and their rougher features have been smoothed by painter's brushes to appear just as they do on castle walls and in art galleries. In other, less verified lines, features become hazier, less distinct. In some obscure places they all but fade out, until they are transparent, faceless shades, mere placeholders for people and lives that she does not know.

Sometimes this is not the fault of the ancestors themselves. Beyond one particular set of grandparents there is a particularly dark and amorphous section, and Lorianne is forced to acknowledge it will always remain that way. That particular pair came from a country horribly ravaged in war, all findable evidence of their heritage erased. Not only this, but they have themselves passed away, so any other information they might have been able to tell her in waking life is forever beyond reach. This is when the inability to interact with the specters on the stairs is most infuriating. Her grandparents seem perfectly real and clear, and she can approach them as easily as she did when she was a child. But all she can do is put her hand on their shoulders and accept their mute smiles. When she does this, the branching lightning that outlines their ancestry appears, but every flight of stairs is vague and barely existent. They are only there because of logic -- after all, her grandparents had to descend from *someone*.

Sometimes it strikes Lorianne that, although her stairs are full of people both present and past, and the whole experience feels intensely personal, it isn't uniquely hers. As time goes on, she becomes intensely aware that everyone is part of their own vast web of relations, and not only this, but all these disparately vast networks are ultimately the same one. She always awakes from the dream with the sense that she could pick out the person she has least in common with in the world -- ideologically, ethically, ethnically, physically-- and whether she knows how or not, that person is somewhere on her stairs, and she on theirs. Inside this titanic web of black glass, the idea that anyone in the world could *not* be related to every other person is revealed as utterly ridiculous. She imagines that, somewhere up near the top, the widening web narrows to the very beginning of human existence, and she's almost as reluctant to see what lies at the very top as she is about the very bottom.

Part of Loiranne's protective melancholy about this place is because what comes next. Just as a person wakes up convinced that they will be able to recall the details of the dream they've just left, she always wakes with the thought that if only she could share this vision with others, so much could be solved: wars ended, families mended and reunited, misunderstandings resolved. But just as dreams unfailingly evaporate, this conviction disappears as well. How can the vividness, the importance, the sheer *size* of what she has experienced be transferred to anyone else? In wakefulness, the impossibilities of the real world inevitably drag these lofty thoughts to the ground.

And so, Lorianne invariably spends the next day walking in and among countless family members she does not -- and probably cannot -- know. She watches them being cruel and indifferent to each other, actively alienating themselves from each other when they could be helping. They fight over trivialities, never knowing what they truly mean to each other. And so she trudges on, passing through a perpetual family reunion that its participants do not even realize they're attending.

Scrap

Josh never noticed how loud the sound of opening his locker was, until he did it with no one around. In all the activity surrounding graduation ("the clangor and the fury", as Mr. Ridlack would have said), cleaning it out had been an activity that got continually pushed down to the very bottom of his list. He hadn't even been down this hall since before his English final, the last one before he was free to kick back for the summer. Now he had returned to it, on the last possible day before the doors would be locked, the hall feeling huge and empty now that it wasn't full of people he knew, all of whom were glad to see him and wanted to talk to him.

His only companion now was his backpack, sitting on the floor beside him with a gaping open mouth, ready for the piling in of eight months of stratified books and papers. He did so without looking at what he was pulling out, or bothering to sort the trash from the stuff he meant to keep. He was in a hurry; a bunch of his friends were going to head to the local Mexican restaurant to push too many tables together and make too much noise.

He almost didn't notice the tight little packet of paper that fell out and bounced off the toe of his shoe. It was clear right away that it wasn't his. The paper was purple, for one thing; he'd never owned anything other than standard ruled white in his whole life. Not only that, but it had been folded over a few times and tucked in on itself at one end, much more effort than he would have put into anything.

He stared at it for a second, puzzled, then bent down and picked it up. It even felt different than all the other paper he had been pulling out his locker. This was softer, and Josh thought maybe it was so old it had stared to disintegrate, but then realized it was just made that way. Inspecting it, he saw that he could see faintly dark, curving lines through the paper.

Handwritten lines. A note. Someone had written him a note on purple paper and stuck it in his locker.

He unfolded it as quickly as he could, the tight origami folds taking more than a little effort to get undone. The packet apparently had to be thin enough to be shoved through the tiny vent slats at the top of the locker. As he spread it out into one layer, he could see that it was a complete page, a few inches on a side, clearly ripped out of some girl's mini-journal. The words were written in distinctly feminine swirls and loops, in purple gel pen.

Its message was short, consisting only of the words "I wish you had."

Josh stood there, staring at them, as if more of the thought might magically appear after a few seconds. But none came, and the period at the end of the sentence seemed to make it clear that no more were coming. He looked up and around, instinctively searching the far ends of a hallway he already knew was empty. What did he expect to see? Half a face peeking at him around a corner? He heard Mr. Ridlack in his head again, a quote from an old poem read aloud in class, that stuck in his head for some reason: "Darkness there, and nothing more."

Just to be absolutely sure, Josh flipped the note over in his hands. The back was blank. His brow furrowed, and then he tossed the note aside. After all, there wasn't anything else he could learn from it. The creased curves of the paper caused it to tumble end over end in the still air, gliding right back into Josh's locker. It landed on the remaining layers of detritus, as if reminding him where it had come from. He sighed, exasperated.

He saw messages like this all the time online, half-formed thoughts that weren't really intended for anyone specific, just words that people threw out into the world to get them out of their own heads.

That's why it should have been so easy for him to ignore it. He was actually reaching for the note again, ready to ball it up this time before throwing it as far down the hall as he could, when something else his English teacher had said came to him. "Every word is put there for a reason, and an author makes the conscious decision to use each one that way. If you really want to understand the written words, you have to think about why those particular words were used, in that particular order."

It was funny. On any other day, after taking any other test, Mr. Ridlack's disposable wisdom wouldn't have been so clear in Josh's head. He knew that as soon as he was done cleaning out his locker, he could go meet his regular friends, order his usual food, and see what kind of typically stupid stuff they were all going to do that evening. But once that purple paper was in his hand again, he lost his hurry. He found himself going over it again, searching it for more clues.

"I wish you had." This wasn't someone fishing for attention. This was a note, written in actual handwriting, and put specifically into his locker, so only he would see it. It was anonymous, too... either the person assumed he would know who wrote it, or they didn't want him to know. He didn't recognize the handwriting at all, although to be honest he probably had never seen anything physically written down by over half of his friends. So he had no way of figuring this out.

Or did he? One of the upper layers of excavation in his locker had contained his yearbook, which had been in there ever since they had become available. There had been a mad scramble that day to get everyone's signature, which monopolized almost an entire school day. But he now had handwriting samples from everyone in his circle. He dug it out of his backpack and now started flipping through it.

Most of the signatures were on the inside front and back covers, since it was the place that had the most blank space, and in Josh's both areas were filled with handwriting of all sizes and orientations. Some were heartfelt (he noted the nice things Tanya had said about him, even though she had been seeming to avoid him lately), and other friends went out of their way to write the most comically offensive things they could, notably the classic epithet from Brandon that began "I love you dearly..."

But Josh wasn't looking for content, he was looking for form. He held the note next to the pages so that he could compare the swirly loops. He even noted that the "i" in "wish" was an incomplete circle. But he couldn't find any sampled handwriting that even came close. No purple gel pen, either. So unless one of his friends had an unusual talent for disguising their handwriting, it wasn't any of them.

And then there were the words themselves. "I wish you had"... had what? He had just been thinking, as he had started cleaning out his locker, about how great the last few months had been. Everything about high school had been reaching its high point and ending at the same time, which gave everything an extra layer of importance. He felt like he had been on an adrenaline high for two months. But here was someone who was pointing out that he had somehow forgotten something.

If he knew who had written it, he'd have some idea of what that thing was. He knew he should just ignore it and carry on. So, what, some girl he didn't even know put a random note in his locker, and he was supposed to devote time to solving the puzzle? But he couldn't put it down, either to throw it into his backpack for later contemplation, or to chuck it into a corner where the school's summer janitorial crew would take it away forever.

Until this moment, Josh had pretty much known what was going to happen, tonight, tomorrow, this summer, next fall, next year. He was going to go hang out with his friends when he wasn't working his crappy part-time job, then go to college in the fall, make new friends, and then just keep going. The path was clear, and not only was he fine with that, he hadn't even stopped to consider if it was really what he wanted. But here he was, staring at this maddeningly vague piece of paper. He couldn't shake the feeling that the message was explicitly designed to trigger something in *him*, and once it did he would know what this mystery girl was talking about.

What was it he hadn't he thought to do? He could almost picture this young woman he had clearly overlooked, watching him all year from somewhere nearby but infinitely removed, looking on in silent pain as Josh missed some opportunity, fretfully chewing her lip but unable to speak... until now, when she felt she couldn't stand by any more. What was it she knew that he didn't?

Now that he was being forced to think about it, Josh realized he had never consciously decided whether the path he was following was the one he should be on, or if it were even really the one he wanted. There was someone out there who didn't think so, so why did he? The books he had studied in Mr. Ridlack's class had been full of characters making choices about the path of their life. "The Raven", The Great Gatsby, Things Fall Apart, Crime and Punishment... Josh realized it had secretly been the theme of the whole semester. Mr. Ridlack said it point-blank one time: "Do you take hold of your life, and control it yourself? Or do you let others make the choice for you?"

It suddenly struck Josh that, in the guise of a few purple words on a scrap of purple paper, he was being asked the question again. And this time it wasn't in a book, where some old person who had never really existed in the first place was having an existential crisis, this was about *him* and his life. The whole rest of his life.

He suddenly thought about tonight, the Mexican restaurant, and the whole stretch of thousands upon thousands upon tens of thousands of days that would follow. When had he given up on trying to change the course of it all? Did he even really want to go to college at all? It was his parents that did. It was even their alma mater he was enrolled in.

He didn't even want a summer full of hours at a shitty, minimum-wage job he only had so he could make enough money to spend in the evenings, hanging out with the same people in the same places over and over again.

Was it too late to change it? Any of it? To bend his future into anything other than what he was supposed to do next, the things hat everyone expected him to do? All of a sudden, it seemed vitally important that he find out. He dragged the rest of his stuff out of his locker, crammed it into his backpack, and left the school at a dead run.

---

Maria was sprawled across her bed, adding another entry to her little purple journal. She gave a sigh, then wrote a few more lines, loving how easily the purple gel slid out in exaggerated swirls and loops under her fingers:

"I didn't hear from her today either. Oh well, who cares really? When she doesn't see me this summer, she'll know how disappointed I was. Funny thing... For just a second after I slipped the note into the vent, I thought I accidentally put it in the locker next to hers. But then I realized I got it right. At least, I'm pretty sure I did."

"Whitelodge": The Wrap-Up

About a year and half ago, I looked back over the short stories I had been writing and decided to give writing a novel another try. There were a couple of factors that played into that decision, but the biggest one was the sense of confidence I'd gained from the 30-odd stories I'd just finished.

I had always been the kind of writer who waited until a good idea came up, and then worked it around in my head until I deemed it complete enough to write down. This was how just about every one of the stories in my first collection, Dream Escapes, came to be, and it also explains why more than a few of them are described as "dreamstories"; on the rare occurrence that a nighttime dream would stick around into the next day and still make narrative sense, I felt the need to capture it somehow, as if my own mind had thrown me a creative freebie.

It wasn't until I took an adult creative writing class (during my unemployed period, after Borders closed down) that I realized I was going about my process all wrong. I surprised myself with what I was able to come up with when we did our free-writing exercises, in which we took a random item from a box and had ten minutes to make up a story about it on the spot (several of these are now listed as the first few "Fast Fiction" items on this very blog). I began to realize that when I showed up to the page and trusted myself, more often than not inspiration would meet me there, and automatically start taking on forms that I would never come up with if I left it to my rational mind.

After the class ended, I experimented with just grabbing any random image that hit me the right way (and, in the process, learned to recognize that when it happened) and making a story out of it. Over the next year or so, I imposed quick-turnaround deadlines on myself and ended up with what are now my eight "We're All Light" mini-ebook collections. I was almost uniformly pleased with results, but I also started wondering what else I could do if I applied myself to it with the same discipline.

I had tried writing novels before, but my still-underdeveloped writing muscles felt like they needed a pre-made structure to follow, a safety net to fall back on if I lost my way or my drive. That's why my first few semi-finished original works are based on other works that I admired: the general tone and shape of my screenplay "Syzygy" (which is actually posted below) was based on Tom Waits' Bone Machine album, although it changed a lot along the way; my novella "28 IF" is based on -- and fully incorporates -- the Beatles' Abbey Road; and my unfinished Wizard-of-Oz-in-Hell novel "Nadir" is clearly superimposed on Botticelli's map of Dante's Inferno.

With a few dozen short stories under my belt, however, I felt like I should give a bigger, more original, project a try. And it was an intriguing experiment... could I take the make-it-up-on-the-fly ethos I was using for short stories and spin it out into a novel? The results are the 150,000 words I've just finished. And now that it's over, and I know what happened to everyone, I've come up with what I think is a fitting title... which I will reveal in just a minute.

Before that, a side note here: Let's not fool ourselves. Short stories are fun, but in today's writing game, novels are where it's at. For a long time we could claim that internet attention spans would make people tend to gravitate toward short stories, and ebook portability would favor any length of work evenly. But unfortunately, the trend that literature has been following for the last forty years hasn't changed much: novel-length books are the fuel that stoke the fires of bigger business. Take a look at the biggest media-spanning hits these days, and you'll find that almost none of them sprang to life originally as film and/or television. Nearly everything is based on a book, a story, a comic book, etc. But I am confident in saying that the reasons I think this project has been successful (and in my mind, "successful" can be equated with "not given up on") never included the thought of making money off of it. If I had gone in with that mindset, I would have quit a long time ago. Nor would I have posted the first draft in its entirety here on this site -- a move that I did to keep myself on task and to not overthink things, which is another metric by which I think I was successful.

So, as for the title. I've got this weird penchant for wanting to name my big works after obscure words that most people don't know (opposed to my short stories, where for some reason I'm content to use rather nondescript words and short phrases). I've got some kind of half-formed idea that it's a way of taking a tiny piece of the language and kind of owning it -- I suspect that if I really investigated it, probably as many people are alienated as intrigued. But I can't seem to turn away from the practice, much as I couldn't turn away from many of the plot twists in this story as soon as they sprang into my head, as if I had merely unearthed them instead of invented them. And to that end... I've decided to call this novel "Oubliette".

Ever since I saw Jim Henson's movie Labyrinth when I was 14 I always liked the sound of that word... and the fact that it was always so hard for me to figure out whether it was a real or fabricated word in the pre-Internet age kind of fascinated me. Now I know that it derives from the French verb oublier -- "to forget" -- and is an underground prison cell with the only door being in the ceiling, out of reach of the prisoner, which is what the word is used for in that movie. I've always pictured the pocket universe containing the Deertail Lodge as being something like a cosmic snow globe, which in turn triggers images of the all-purpose magical crystal balls that the Goblin King juggles... it's an intriguing cricross of impressions in my mind, and the fact that it's a little known, cool-sounding word just cements it, and convinces me that I'd never be satisfied with any other title.

The story itself didn't start with an image, but instead, a song lyric from Harry Connick Jr. In his song "Just Like Me" (from his criminally underrated mid-90s funk albums), he muses "The world keeps spinning/Mountains vary, but the valleys [are] the same". I modified this into Harmon's first line of dialogue. I quickly found I had a ski lodge setting in mind -- a kind of place I personally know nothing about, but that's where my mind goes when thinking about mountains and valleys. I had no idea where the story was going to go, how many characters there were going to be, what the conflict was going to be or how it was all going to resolve, but I was off and running.

In reality, it was a process no more magical than the short stories that came before; it was a matter of showing up to the page every day and trying to push things forward. Some days were very productive, on others I gave up in frustration. The only difference was that I couldn't say "The End" and leave things hanging anytime I wanted to. It's part of the beauty of the short story that you can do this, and sometimes it's even the point. But at the Deertail, I was responsible for every choice, and only in the rarest instances could I decide not to follow up on something weird that I threw into the mix when I couldn't think of anything else.

In the end, every character met an end. Whether what happened was right or fair, satisfying or not, isn't really mine to decide now.

So now all that's left is to go back and revise. I've already got a short list of continuity items that I need to correct: the inconsistent placement of the moon in the sky, the incorrect name I gave to Kerren's mother in Chapter 1.1 before I truly knew who she was, etc. And I'm sure I'll come across threads that I never followed through on and can scrap, or ones I can expand on, or clarify better. Most importantly, now that I know the end of the story, I can properly tell the beginning. But in general, I don't see any major structural changes; I think this one is pretty much done.

So what's next? I have a handful of kernels for new short stories, and when they're comlete they might serve as the catalyst to put out a physical collection of stories from my ebooks, something a person can put on their shelf. There are also a few unfinished novels from years ago that I just might have the confidence and tools to finish now. Whatever the answer turns out to be, the results will end up on this page first, one way or another. And as always, I thank you for showing up. I'd be doing this anyway, but knowing that someone's paying attention just makes it all that much more fun.

Whitelodge 15.5 & 15.6

-15.5-

Carlos had seen it all as it happened. After his fall onto the second story balcony carpet had knocked the wind out of him, harder than anything he had felt in years -- and most likely cracked a rib or two -- he thought he was out of the battle for good. It took everything he had left to drag himself to the railing, and peer down through the slats at the melee taking place on the floor below.

Once he did, he wished he had breath to cheer when he saw how Kelly had ridden the Qoloni's horns all the way down the floor and kept right on fighting, or when Dale took that first chunk out of the Qoloni, or when Manoj had come into view around the end of the stairway, staggering back into the fray. And when he saw Benny's struggling hand fling the Deertail logo across to aid him? He wished he could be a part of it, but also realized how important it was to have someone to bear witness to it all, from a distance, so that they could then tell the tale objectively, even if that meant just telling those who participated in it the parts they had been too distracted by other things to notice. So Carlos lay there, taking it in and gradually getting control of his lungs back.

He didn't try to rise until after Sheryl had left his side. He needed no explanation from her; he knew precisely where she was going. She seemed to know the point when it was all but over, and then turned her attention toward getting back to the one who now needed her most.

Getting on his feet was rough. His arms and legs felt oxygen-starved, a deep burning ache that only started to dissipate once he got them moving. The pins and needles set in after that, and for a few agonizing moments he thought all his limbs were going to lock up in cramps, but then the feeling dissipated. He finally managed to draw himself up fully, using the balcony railing, and then he moved toward the stairs, only starting down them when he thought he could be trusted to balance properly.

By the time he began to descend, the alarms were gently roaring in the far distance, and their presence seemed to make his breath come even more easily. He patted Dale on the shoulder, the way you would silently congratulate the quarterback after a winning game, but Carlos wasn't sure the man even saw him. There was clearly more to be done, and the security guard wasn't going to stand around waiting for someone else to do it. It gave Carlos a little pang of guilt, for having to the sit out the last fight against the Qoloni.

At the bottom of the stairs, the mood was much lighter.

Manoj had realized what was on the threshold of the door to Harmon's room, pushed only slightly ajar by Benny's mangled body. Manoj was just stepping over the author's sprawled form to get to him, letting out an incoherent yell of shared triumph.

Carlos saw Manoj recoil at the full sight of Benny, and understood. At first look (not to mention second and third), Benny was in horrific condition, his head a mess of dried blood and scorch marks, eyes unfocused, and his lower lip hanging down ponderously. It was hard to believe that he could have aided the fight at all, much less throw the Deertail sigil accurately to Manoj when the time came. Luck must have played more than a small role in that.

Nevertheless, Manoj was bending down to see if Benny was okay, and as he did his injured knee gave way under him. Fortunately, instead of falling against the door and crushing Benny, he twisted so that he ended up slamming his shoulder hard against the wall on the other side, and slide to the floor. He ended up half-sitting next to the injured man down on the floor.

Kelly was halfway over to him before he landed, and Carlos could see that she would have thrown herself in the path of his fall if she had time. As it was, she could only drop to her knees close to the fallen men. She took a look at them, and said, "You must be Benny."

The fallen wreck of a man managed to raise his hand and turn it on its side, clearly meaning to extend a hearty handshake. This charmed Kelly enough to make her laugh.

Carlos came up to the little group, cautiously eyeing Bruce's body as he went by it. It looked even more forlorn now, lying out in the middle of the lobby rug alone, all evidence of what it had been through erased. He thought that he had never seen anything so entirely still, and that sent a cold flash through his arms and legs. Unnerved, he quickly turned his attention back to his comrades.

Kelly had just finished gingerly shaking Benny's hand, and she then reached out for Carlos with the same one, this time turning her palm down, as if urging him to take it so she could ease herself to the floor with the rest of them. He did just that, and was soon in a small, informal group of four sitting just outside the door of Harmon's room.

Carlos nodded back toward the front windows, where the sounds of the avalanche sirens seemed to be coming from. "Sounds like the cavalry's finally on the way."

Manoj looked behind them, at Bruce's body, pondering. "I don't know if it was destroying the Qoloni, or Bruce dying, but it appears we've reattached to our... home world." There was something about the way he said it, that made Carlos wonder if Manoj was hedging his bets on just how many such worlds he thought there were.

Instead of pursuing this, Carlos turned to something that had been on his mind. "When they do get here, what do we say?" He made an expansive gesture around him, one that encompassed the Deertail and everything in it. There were at least two people dead, random handheld objects strewn about, a broken mirror from the second floor...

Kelly took a quick look, and then said, "You know, I don't think we need to say much of anything. You and Benny were in the kitchen when it happened, Benny got hurt, you triaged him and brought him out here. That's easy enough."

The sound of voices upstairs were becoming more apparent. It seemed that Dale was coaxing people out of their rooms, finding out if anyone else was hurt (a couple of pained cries evinced that some were), and the upper hallway was starting to fill. Kelly looked at Manoj when she said, "Noj and I can blend in. Our room was half destroyed. We got lucky. If you think about it, the person with the hardest job is going to be the investigator who finds the snowmobile on the roof."

This prompted her to laugh cautiously, and the others picked it up. At that moment, any future problems they might have seemed trivial. That they had all managed to survive, for the moment, trumped the fact that so much else had been destroyed. Carlos wondered how much of this night was purely coincidental, and how much had been fated. They didn't even know how much of their misfortune Bruce was directly to blame for. So many people here knew the fabled Sarah, including Bruce, although he had used her as the protagonist in a book that at least two of them had gone on to read. Kerren's presence seemed to have somehow triggered them all to bring aspects of that book to life, including its horrifying villain.

But that brought him back to the quartet he was currently celebrating/commiserating with. Why had they remained here, in the Deertail, when they had no discernible connection to Sarah? Why hadn't they temporarily winked out of existence like others, and missed the whole thing? He would be considering this for a long time after this night, and the best he would ever come up with was simply this... they were all there because they had to be. The story wouldn't have ended correctly if they hadn't been.

Not only this, but in the darkest hours of future nights, he would not even be able to discount that other, random inhabitants of the Lodge could have done the things they did. No one but him could have been able to keep Benny from bleeding out on the kitchen floor -- and probably wouldn't have been stupid enough to tackle the Qoloni when he did. None but Manoj's outsider thinking could have figured out what was happening to them, and Kelly's leadership had kept the group together and made crucial decisions at the right times. Even Benny had played his role. Speaking of which...

His coworker and friend was actually turning around on the floor, sliding his back up against the doorframe and determinedly pushing himself up into a sitting position. It was an amazing feat, considering everything the man had been through. He still looked like a horror show, but the amount of muscular control he was exhibiting was kind of miraculous.

"Benny," Carlos asked, "are you feeling better?"

All heads turned toward the injured man, and he responded by tremulously lifting his hand in a thumbs-up. With his other hand, he pointed to something inside the room he sat on the edge of, and Carlos realized he knew what that something was. Harmon was still in there, sitting on the cot.

-15.6-

Harmon's body had remained still throughout his travels. After he had tried to help Glenda, and came back with only a message for the man she loved, he was distraught. What good was this power if he couldn't use it to help people? He needed to see whether he really could enact any kind of positive change. So he turned to the next person who required the most help.

Benny's mind was still in a state of near-total disarray as he entered, but he felt welcomed there. He couldn't tell if this was something Benny himself was doing, or if Harmon was merely going becoming familiar with foreign ground he had already tread upon. Either way, the tangle of misshapen, planet-sized electric storms and vast mental continents cracked down their centers didn't seem quite as intimidating. Harmon did a quick search, found a place that didn't seem quite as bad as others.

To his surprise, when he focused all his attention on it, the places that had become disconnected began to fuse. He wasn't entirely sure what he was doing to them, but he watched as he eased them close, and became fascinated with the way they began to reach for each other, as if by will they were able to complete the job of returning to their original configuration. He guessed that Benny was making just as much effort in this process as he was.

So he could help a small portion of Benny's mind to heal. It wasn't much, but it was a start. He began to think that if the two of them could work together, given enough time, he might be able to completely restore Benny's mind to the way it was before its trauma. He hoped that this suddenly, intensely intimate friend of his would be willing to help him find out. The possibility of using his abilities this way was so heady that Harmon immediately began to wonder about what more wonder might lay beyond... could he help heal other parts of the body? More specifically, could he help Kerren?

His mind was unable to keep from returning to her. The connection they had was now irrefutable. His mind had accepted it readily as fact with no effort at all. It made perfect sense. The idea was still frightening, though, with its own measures of guilt and awe. He felt such a sudden sense of responsibility...

He pushed the thought away again, refusing to deal with it for the moment. Instead, he convinced himself that he needed to take one more tour of his surroundings before returning to his body. This state of projection, as he was starting to think of it as, allowed him to see the world at all its scales, or so it seemed -- he hadn't found the boundaries of the ability yet. So he drew back from Benny and took a long sweep through the Deertail. Rescue crews were definitely on the way, assembling now down in the village, and would take only a few hours to excavate a path up the road to the Lodge. Harmon felt that, considering the strangeness of all that happened in the missing hours, he was obliged to assess what they would find when they arrived.

The group in the lobby had fared the best. Harmon already knew he could help Benny, and the others were relatively unharmed. He was mildly amused by the bright filaments of affection, the bond of affection bonding Manoj and Kelly together, which were multiplying even as he watched; it was clear that they were going to be part of each other's lives for a long time. He also noted that, once the adrenaline dropped off, Manoj was going to find out that he was much more injured than he currently thought. He would need all the help Kelly could give him then, and Harmon had no doubt that she would do so, without a second thought.

Carlos had an entirely different aura about him. There was a strength inside him that he hadn't been aware of before this night, but now that he had made contact with it, Harmon saw the way it had changed his focus entirely. What the man would do with this newfound purpose remained to be seen, but Harmon guessed that it would manifest in some undeniably positive way. Perhaps he would return to his kitchen and nourish people from the inside; perhaps he would run for office and do the same from without. There were a multiplicity of possible paths emanating from him, and every single one was open.

As for Bruce, the author? Bruce was gone. Harmon truly wanted to spare some kindness for the man, who had disappeared so far into the enchantment of his own mind that he no longer understood the difference between reality and his fantasies. Harmon was quite sure that this, more than anything else, had been the original source of the great discontinuity they had witnessed tonight. Either Bruce had caused the avalanche, or the avalanche had been what triggered Bruce. Regardless of the true origin, Harmon doubted that it was the sort of thing that could never happen again. Such things likely happened every day, and only if they were deemed good or ill did they take on names such as "fate" or "miracles".

He rose up, up to the second floor, where Dale was rounding up the survivors. He did so solemnly, for Harmon could feel what the head of security was already sensing -- that there were going to be more victims found amid the wreckage. Only Glenda and her knowledge of the room assignments would have known for sure, but it seemed inescapable that Bruce was not the only occupant of the wing that had collapsed. Harmon recalled the group of young people he had spoken to in the restaurant earlier in the evening, all of whom presumably were here somewhere, either being roused by Dale or forever trapped beneath the wreckage. Either way, Dale would not rest until they were all accounted for, all karmic ledgers balanced. It was just the kind of person he was. There was grief powering him now, but Harmon could see that when that dark force faded -- as eventually, it would -- the gears of his compassion would be gilded with fierce courage, and nearly unbreakable.

With a slight reluctance, he moved farther down the hall, passing faces that he remembered from the day before. Then, it had been his job to surreptitiously scan them all, to take the measure of their intents and report them all back to Jimmy Gough. Now, with the practice he had gained over the course of their collective ordeal, he saw every person differently, still as human beings, but as so much more as well, their spiritual selves all origamied open, infinitely regressive layers of heart and mind. It was hard to resist diving into each one and immediately learning more about human nature than most can learn in a lifetime. But for now, Harmon had to move on. The room at the end of the hall was his ultimate destination.

He passed through the first room, into the open chill of the next. Three women were there, and among he could number his greatest failure and his greatest achievement. Between them was Sheryl, a woman who had come here looking to renew her belief in love. This was the glow that was radiating from her, a new understanding of her place in the lives of others, and theirs in hers. It was funny; in all his years of watching and studying people, Harmon had never found the level of self-awareness that Sheryl had gained in one night. It was clear she would emerge from this nightmare with her soul renewed, having discovered that it had not originated in her beloved at all.

Finally he came to those last two women, one with light hair, the other dark, both laid down and motionless under the cool moonlight that speared in through the open hole in the roof. Looking at the latter, he sighed with grief. He had done all he could for Glenda, and he could only hope that in the end it was enough, that he brought her and Dale some kind of comfort. It was a small comfort, but he would take all he could get.

Kerren was the most difficult to look upon. Now, as he gazed down from his vantage point somewhere below the ceiling, he couldn't help but smile. He could continually study her face, finding pieces of Sarah, pieces of himself; the angle of an eyelid, the swept-back ear. In a few moments he was going to return to his body, and would rise and greet his friends anew. Then he was going to walk up the grand stairs of the Deertail Lobby and into this room, and together he and his daughter would begin to work toward understanding this unusual world they had managed to unlock together.

Kerren opened her eyes as she lay with her head in Sheryl's lap, and looked directly up at him.

Whitelodge 15.3 & 15.4

-15.3-

Manoj couldn't allow himself to accept that it was all over. He wasn't even entirely convinced that he had survived the tumble down the stairs; every part of him that he wasn't sure was broken, ached. It was only the unnatural coldness of the metal logo in his hand that kept him upright and conscious. Though as still as the air around him, it seemed to hum in his hand, as if the force with which he had jammed it against the Qoloni's horns still resonated within it imperceptibly. In turn, he felt his body was humming as well.

The three of them hovered, still in position over the spot where the Qoloni had dissolved, for much longer than necessary. Dale still knelt on the rug, looking down at the spot he had punched repeatedly, and Kelly still stood nearby, shattered mirror held before her like a shield. The utter silence and stillness after all the violence seemed to make the perfect moment for one final jump scare, just to make them walk away wondering if sleep could really come easy from then on... Manoj vowed to hold as long the others did;

Finally, he felt that he would be unable to keep from collapsing if they waited any longer. "Is it over?" he asked. He finally dared to look over at Bruce's collapsed body, realizing that for the author, it definitely was. The arms and legs were unbroken, but bent at rag-doll angles. Blood flowed in thick streams from clearly-defined holes to form a spreading pool underneath. Its edge had just spilled over the edge of the rug and now sped away along the miniscule cracks between the floorboards.

"Shouldn't something be happening?" Manoj asked, his throat feeling thick and swollen. He was thinking back to the movies he had seen as a child, all those parent-approved G-rated cartoons. In them, the defeat of the enemy almost always resulted in a transformation, usually of the entire environment, a glorious wave of sparkling light that turned everything it touched back to The-Way-It-Was. It was surprising that, after everything life had taught since then, he still expected it, and felt cheated when it didn't come.

His vague question made Dale lift his gaze from the spot on the floor he had been so focused on. The security guard looked around as if emerging from a dream, then lifted his hand. It was still balled tightly into a fist around the curved piece of broken mirror, and blood was forming a much smaller pool where it dropped off the sharp tip and onto the rug. He tossed the shard aside and gave his hand a cursory examination, inspecting the lacerations across the fingers and palm, and shaking it as pain began to creep in with the receding of fury-driven adrenaline.

Manoj took Dale's putting down his weapon to mean that he could, too. He let his arms (so tired, and there was something faintly grating deep within one of them) relax, and straightened his spine. It seemed reluctant to re-align, but it eventually did. Manoj turned toward Kelly, and saw that she hadn't dropped her warrior stance yet, her knuckles still white around the long tines of the mirror frame. He walked over to her, trying to ignore the protesting ligaments of his ankles, and put his hands next to hers on the metal.

"Kelly," he said softly. It took two more repetitions of her name before she looked at him. Her eyes were still in attack mode, but then she swallowed and blinked, and they cleared. She tossed the frame aside -- causing an unbelievable noise in the silent lobby -- and grabbed him with ferocity. He winced in pain, but it was worth it.

"I think it's really gone," she whispered against his neck, as if wary of jinxing the victory. He nodded in response, marveling at how she had stood so strong, even more at how *he* had stood so strong against the enemy. They had taken the darkness on side by side, as true equals.

Their third partner hadn't risen, but he had been looking around the scene. "Guys," Dale murmured, and drew their attention. He was looking at the body of the author.

The blood had been there, Manoj was sure of it. He couldn't have hallucinated the sheer volume of it. Now Bruce Casey's form was clean and ungored, though still in the same position, as if he had tripped and awkwardly fallen there.

"He's healed," Kelly said in wonder.

Dale looked a little longer, then shook his head. "Still dead, though. Maybe the thing took the damage it caused along with it." A long pause, and then, pointing at the body, "I don't think the damage *he* caused will be undone, though." Resigned, he held up his lacerated hand as evidence.

Manoj and Kelly, tightly pressed together, sighed as one. Of course not. They had been able to prevent the Qoloni from physically harming anyone else. The author would not have to pay for his crime against Glenda now. But then again... Manoj tried to give voice to the pure, nonverbal thought that sprang into his mind: "It makes sense, though. If the authorities find him -- provided they're able to get to us after all -- we won't have to explain anything."

Kelly, still pressed tightly against him, backed off a little. "What's that, Noj?"

He reluctantly left her arms, and limped over toward the body. "If the Qoloni was the thing that created this little... universe, or whatever it is we're in, then we might just be reconnected to our own world now. We'll need to look down on the lights of the town to be sure..."

As if on cue, a sound drifted into the lobby, a single tone that at first just seemed like the wind picking up and hitting the wooden eaves at a different angle. But as it rose, it became clear that it was something man-made...

"An alarm!" Kelly exclaimed.

Dale nodded. "Avalanche warning. Better late than never, I guess."

Manoj asked, a cautious tone in his voice, "Dale, where exactly are those horns?"

Dale didn't look up, but thought about it for a moment, then answered, "Down in town."

"So we're back," Manoj said. "Back in the world." It was strange how saying it didn't make him feel as good as he thought it would. The words themselves brought no relief, but then he looked over at Kelly, whose face broke into a grin that seemed to supercharge all his emotions. The sense that he was going to get to return to rational, sane life, and that he was going to do it side by side with Kelly, flooded over him. For a long moment, the two of them just stood there, looking at each other and listening to the most lovely mechanical whine either of them had ever heard.

-15.4-

It was all Dale could do to keep himself from pitching forward onto the rug. There seemed to be no strength left in him. It wasn't that he didn't hear Manoj and Kelly's words of celebration, or couldn't appreciate their joy at seeming to have participated in the vanquishing of the enemy; he just didn't feel able to share it. The stinging in his hand was really the only thing he was able to feel at the moment.

The muscles in his legs, which for now managed to keep him suspended over the spot in the floor where the thing had been, were starting to quiver with fatigue. He didn't know if it were from their prolonged awkward position, or if they were feeling the aftereffects of being twisted out of their usual spatial dimensions, but he had to move. He didn't want to. He wanted to stay right there, until he could be absolutely sure that he wasn't going to see that horrible shape trying to push its way back up through the floorboards.

There was no choice, however. In any event, there was somewhere else he wanted to be, only one other person that he wanted to share the victory with, and she wasn't where he was. To be with her, he had to leave where he was. So he did. He drew his legs underneath him, heaved himself up to a standing position, clenched his still-dripping fist as hard as he was able, and began walking. He may have tangentially kicked the author's body once as he passed by.

He left the couple behind and ascended the wide lobby stairs, one heavy step at a time. Most of the way up, he met Carlos, who was gingerly making his way down, keeping firm hold of the inner railing. He was hailing those below, apparently wanting to see if Benny was still alive. The cook clapped Dale on the shoulder in a solemn, congratulatory fashion as they passed each other. Dale couldn't meet his gaze, but nodded as he walked on.

The relieved laughter and general merriment increased below him as he reached the top of the stairs. What he was going to do next was clearly formed in his mind; He would go back to Glenda, gently pick her up, and climb the storeroom stairs back up to the roof, where he would sit with her in his arms and watch the world below, waiting for the rescue teams to arrive, to catalog the damage, and blame him as they saw fit for failing in his job protecting the inhabitants of the Deertail Lodge. He turned the corner to begin the long hallway plod back to her side --

And ran into a pair of people he barely recognized. They were standing just outside an open room door, around the corner from the top of the stairs. The man was taller, thin, with a long neck that housed a prominent Adam's apple. He looked like the kind of man who wore a fedora, anytime other than the middle of the night. The woman with him was markedly shorter than he, her hair jet black, cut in surgically straight bangs across her forehead.

"What happened?" the man asked Dale, his eyes already registering something dangerously close to panic. "Was there an explosion or something?"

Dale just stared at him for a moment. Then he realized that this was the room that he had been in when Manoj had looked down at the down and realized the full extent of their situation. He had noticed two arched lumps in the bedspread, as if a couple had just slipped out. Dale wondered if, when these two had reappeared, they had exactly refilled the spaces they had vacated.

After taking a moment to carefully consider his words, he said, calmly, "There was an avalanche. We're determining the extent of the damages right now, and the authorities are on their way. Would you mind staying in your room while we try to figure out the status of everyone in the Lodge?"

Dale had no idea if any of what he said was true, but it seemed to be exactly what the couple needed to hear; that the danger was over, and help was coming. They both nodded, thanked him, and retreated into their room. After the door closed, Dale continued to stand there, looking at it.

He sighed, knowing even before he consciously decided, that his plan had changed. It was like he had often heard Glenda say; it was in his nature to help people. And now that it seemed the other inhabitants of the Lodge were back, and unaware that any time had passed without them -- and it very well might be that none had -- the old familiar instincts were beginning to kick in.

Much to his bewilderment, it brought a strange feeling that he couldn't think of in any way other than comfort. Despite the fact that there were most likely people who were injured, or had even been killed, in the rooms around him, he knew that he had the capacity to help them as much as he could. Following close on the heels of this was guilt that actually physically hurt, knowing that he was putting aside the snowy vigil that he felt Glenda deserved, all because he couldn't turn away from others who needed his help.

The pain was dispelled quickly, however, when he realized that Glenda would have understood. Not just that, but she would have watched him go about his job with pride, knowing that she was witnessing what he had been put on Earth to do. If she had been next to him, she would probably even chastise him for standing there, brooding, as long as he had. He silently promised her that, when it was all over, and he had done everything he could for those around him, he would see to it that she went home. He would personally take her back to the family that loved her. He could ask nothing less of himself. And she deserved nothing less.

So, instead of going back to the storeroom, he began knocking on doors.