The Grand Tour

I have to admit, I was not made aware that you were going to be here this evening. In fact, I was just about to lock these massive doors for the night and proceed to my own modest home nearby. But let me think... yes, I think we might have time for one more, however abbreviated, tour before we turn out the lights and leave this place to whatever happens here during the night. Would that be agreeable? I would hate to turn you away after you've traveled so far out here into these blasted highlands. Yes? Well, then, enter and prepare to be amazed!

Firstly, watch the threshold as you step across it... the old flagstones may be heavy, but it's surprisingly easy to feel one shift under the weight of a single footfall, if one fails to be wary. Even if it doesn't move perceptibly, you might hear the scraping that it makes. I always find that sound to appear deceptively distant, as if the manor's very heart is issuing a warning, a hiss that perhaps you should heed. Does that not make you want to turn around? Well, then we shall proceed.

This entry hall has a maximum height of forty feet, which is the distance from the flagstones to the very apex of one of the five groin vaults that form its ceiling. Don't try to visually make them out from down here; even the sconces on our level cannot hope to illuminate something so high up. Besides that, the huge, heavy stones presently hanging directly over your tiny, crushable heads have been blackened by years of smoke damage, back from the decades when the sconces had not yet been electrified, and held only torches dipped in pitch. No one has ever ventured to get up there and clean them since their construction, and that may be just as well. I once heard that there are carved faces up there in the darkest corners, long-forgotten grotesqueries that have been glaring down on everyone who has come through the front doors -- just as you have this night! -- ever since the house was built. I have also heard a claim that same source that one man who procured the tallest ladder and attempted to clean up there, turned right back around and climbed down again -- even falling the last dozen feet or so -- because the first face he wiped the soot away from looked more familiar that he expected. In his delirium no doubt caused by height, he imagined he was looking at a stone facsimile of his own face...

But let's not worry about that. If you're of the more sensitive type, you might be able to actually feel the carven gaze of all those faces on high, their numbers and intentions unknown. Do the hairs on your nape not stand up? Then you are braver than most. If there is no objection, we will turn to our left and step into the smaller of the two grand parlors that this house presents to us.

I take it from your involuntary gasp as you passed into this room that you're beginning to appreciate the sheer luxury of this house. Yes, all these fabrics and colors are the very same as when the house was occupied. Not a stitch has been altered since the last Farberson trod these boards, merely maintained by the very generous endowment reserved for its preservation. It's not that difficult of a job, to be honest. I manage to handle the entire operation myself, and only once every five years do I deem it necessary to bring in an outside crew to give everything a professional turnover. It's something I enjoy, being able to preserve this estate in as close to pristine condition as I can make it. I consider it not only a privilege, but for the common good as well. I can't imagine what sort of rumblings we would hear if we were to let the place slide into squalor.

The central focus of this secondary parlor is, of course, the fireplace. Now, before you inevitably raise the question, you may sense that the floor is subtly sloped in its direction, but I can assure you that at every point, the boards are perfectly level. The wide stone hearth, which by design was built twice as long and deep as you would find in the average house of this period, has that sort of effect on people; it manifests its own sort of gravity. One feels *drawn*. And I have also heard many say that these twin spiral ornamentations here and here, near the edges of the mantel on either side, give the entire piece the unsettling appearance of a face, the hearth becoming a sort of gaping mouth, ready to swallow the unwary. And perhaps even the wary, as well...

The unusual size of the main aperture is actually a practical design, for if you look closely -- if you can lean its direction without inadvertently falling into its maw -- you can see long iron apparati along its insides, which can be rearranged to form a well-fortified spit. In some circumstances, this fireplace could and would be used as a roasting pit. Quite unusual to think of a whole carcass being cooked just feet from such a richly-appointed sitting room, but I think you'll find that the Farbersons had quite unorthodox thoughts, especially when it came to entertaining.

But this is only where drinks would be served after the lavish dinners held in the adjacent dining room, just through these doors here, which presently will lead us into the rearmost parts of the house. But let's just take a moment to linger here, shall we? Perhaps we should first take a look at the various pieces of art that the brothers Farberson chose to confront their guests with after their opulent, elegant dinners.

I can tell from your faces that you already understand the artworks' intent, for the brothers did enjoy a good joke. Imagine what it must have been like for those innocent dinner guests, after having their fill of slow-roasted meat, rich gravy and good red wine, only to have to then make pleasant conversation while having *these* apparitions hanging ever in your peripheral vision? This one here is my personal favorite. You know, there was so much cannibalism in early folklore, Greek gods devouring their children and such, but even if you have read these classics in their original form, as the brothers most certainly had, you are forced only consider it in the abstract, rarely stopping to think about what such a scene would actually look like... I think this artist had a preternatural eye for realism, don't you? His name has been lost to time, but his art has proved him immortal, in its own way.

I see you are also eyeing the larger painting on the opposite wall. It's certainly less subtle, but effective nonetheless. This one plays a certain kind of trick on the mind, for despite its garishness, all the exposed blood and bone, there is a certain familiarity to it. And it comes by this quality honestly, for in fact it does trigger something in the mind, although it often takes a few moments of scrabbling about in the dark to recall why. I assume that you, like nearly every cultured mind in the country, has seen Belmini's fanciful depiction of the interior of Noah's Ark, the prophet illuminated in a sunbeam as he walks among his rescued animals? Such an exquisite work, that one. Such a densely-packed masterwork of light and anatomy, containing no less than thirty-six pairs of distinctly different animals... Ah, now the light of recognition dawns in your eyes! Yes, this painting here bears identical composition as the one you have seen, albeit with a significantly different tact. Here, we see the inside of the Holy Ark turned into a butcher's house, slabs of thirty-six kinds of exotic meat piled on the floor, or hanging heavily on hooks, approximating their positions in the original. Even Noah is here as he appears in Belmini's original version, although in this one he has been caught in the act of being spontaneously flayed apart by a lightning-bolt that has replaced the original beatific sunshaft, a walking exploding autopsy of a man as he wanders rapturously through his decidedly unholy abattoir. In the moments I have spent contemplating this work -- and I assure you, I have tried to keep such a horrific pastime to a minimum -- I have wondered what color of wake such an Ark leaves behind itself as it aimlessly drifts across the surface of the drowned world.

At any rate, on we go to the dining room! Just through these tall swinging doors... yes, they move quite easily for their unusual height and thickness, don't they? It's only one of the many innovations that the Farbersons employed in their personalization of the house. Behind the walls -- which like everything else in this house, are unusually thick and sturdy -- there are massive counterweights, magnifying the movements so that even the little pressure one human can exert carries them wide open. You'll find that there are many such illusory flourishes throughout the house. This is yet another example of the brothers' playful nature. At times, one can be made to feel exceptionally strong, such as the case here, or the mind can be tricked into thinking that one is quite small, or even temporally disoriented.

No such trickery is employed in this room, however. Its magnificence speaks for itself. Your eyes immediately go to the chains, don't they? Yes, each of the three massive chandeliers is held aloft by exceptionally strong, specially-made chains that are affixed deeply into the stone ceiling, which arches some twenty-five feet over our heads. Such structural support is necessary, for each chandelier is a wonder of hundreds of pounds of glittering crystal. Like the rest of the house, these have been updated to include electric lights, but imagine the effect candlelight would have had, as it did when they were originally installed! I imagine it must have been like dining under a brilliant, otherworldly night sky, and the intertwining strands of star-shaped crystals that are strung between the chandeliers themselves must have made such a dining experience something beyond compare! But that, unfortunately, is not our purpose here tonight. In fact, there has not been a proper dinner party in this room since the death of the youngest Farberson, some thirty years ago now. But I like to think that the awe and wonder experienced by those fortunate enough to have spent an evening here are present, the light reflected off their vertiginous upward glances perhaps still caught in some of those amazing crystal wonderworks, forever bouncing and forth between millions of exquisitely carved facets.

Now, if I can bring your attention back down to less ethereal matters, I would like you to take a moment and count the number of chairs arranged around the long banquet table. One at each head for the brothers Farberson, of course, and six along each side for guests, which gives a grand total of fourteen. Curiously, they were almost never entirely filled. It would often be a topic discussed by those who did manage to be in attendance, that there invariably is at least one guest who never makes it to the table. Oh, I can assure you that the Farberson brothers shared a knowing glance across the entire length of the table when this topic arose!

Now, who here can guess where the servers came from to bring forth and carry away the dishes? Take a good look around, and bear in mind that these parties often took place after dark, the high windows dark, the chandeliers casting not only a general candle-powered glow, but also gently swirling constellations of crystal reflections, as the heat of the tiny flames caused the iron of the hanging chains to ever so slightly expand and shift... you can't see them, can you? I must admit, that even though I know precisely where the doors are, I still can't make them out even in this more powerful light.

Here, you see? Ever so cunningly situated to mimic the lines of the moulding, you can find the outlines of the hidden doors that would swing ever-so-silently to allow the servers ingress and egress to the banquet room. It's been recorded that they were always dressed in black to preserve the illusion that the meal was presenting itself of its own volition, but when at their most playful, the Farberson brothers would have the staff masked as well, silver suggestions of faces that would seem to float along above the similarly-colored platters. Those two did love their jests!

Ah! You have seen how easily, and how quietly, the doors can be activated. More of the brothers' architectural prowess on display. Does it not feel that one could open such portals simply by blowing on them? And do you see what lies beyond? Of course not! Escaping light would spoil the illusion. But yes, by all means let's see where they lead. No need to stumble into the dark all by yourself; I have my trusty torch with me. Follow closely, for the door will swing shut behind us, and then you will truly be in the dark if you do not stay close...

No need to raise your voice, I'm right here! It would be wise for you to take my suggestions to heart; I would hate to see you lost in further parts of the house that are not quite so... straightforward.

For you see, this hallway runs straight back to the kitchen just through the heavy velvet curtains, which is where we presently find ourselves. Take a moment to listen as I clap my hands... quite an acoustic wonderland, isn't it? Well, such a long galley, filled with tiled and stainless steel surfaces, was necessary for galas such as the ones the brothers held in their heyday. Their focus was to keep the proceedings as antiseptic and pristine as possible, not to mention that ever-recurring descriptor of the workings of this house, *silent*. It's astounding how self-conscious one can feel when every word spoken above a whisper can be heard as clearly as you can hear me now, even above the necessary hiss of gas stoves, bubbling of pots and cracklings of fires. I've heard that the most senior members of the cook staff had their own manner of hand signs that conveyed all necessary components of culinary communication. They rarely had the need to speak; there may have even been a few that lacked the facility entirely.

It's been many a year since any food has been prepared here. But one can get a sense of the major enterprises that this kitchen was once employed for, can't one? The long draining troughs, the extra-deep sinks ready to accept even the largest stock-pots. For here we confront the other theme of utmost significance to the Farbersons: scale. As in all other things, as we have already seen, there is very little that they did timidly. Their only operating mode was "all-in", as the saying goes.

Now, I want you to picture this space in its prime. Ignore the lingering occasional stain on the backsplashes, the faint coating of aerated fat adorning the highest cabinets. Imagine it as it was: tall white hats, spinning, caroming from station to station, chefs underneath wildly gesticulating with knives dangerously swiping the air, directing the occupants of shorter white hats along corridors of bustle between stove and prep table, sink and carving block... and the scents! Such rich aromas flowing through the chaotic air currents, meat and vegetable vying for supremacy, spices from every corner of the globe draping exotic veils across the air itself... only with none of the usual chatter and clatter of a kitchen, only the occasional rattle of a lid or swish of a whisk to break the near-total silence!

So there you have it... the majesty of a storied Farberson dinner. While brief, you have seen some aspects of the proceedings that those who attended never did. Of course, this was part of the plan, for the guests were not intended to even consider that anything outside of their personal experience existed on those nights.

What is that you say? It's not enough? I think I have been most forthcoming with my details. If you do not mind my saying so, I think it quite rude to burst onto the premises, demand access to the most intimate minutiae of the history of this place, and then insist that I still am withholding Farberson family secrets... You really intend to press the issue, don't you? Have you ever heard of the perils of too much curiosity? Well, if there's really no dissuading you, there might just be one more aspect of this manor's past that you will have interest in seeing. Just remember that I have warned you, when in the future you think about what you will be revealed to you in the next few minutes, which I daresay you will...

What you really want to see is behind this tiny door near the back of the kitchen proper, next to the pantry. No, it's not a door to a root cellar, what sort of establishment do you take this place for? It instead is by far the smallest room in the house, not to mention the coldest.

Of course, it's no longer used for its intended refrigerative purposes anymore, just as the rest of the kitchen has ended its run of serving up elegant banquets. But just take a moment, as you have before, and imagine it as it once was... These racks are sturdy enough to hold long sides of meat, these smaller compartments can hold fowl, or other objects the approximate size of fowl... Oh, the hooks along the back wall? Yes, those are specially reinforced to not only hold particularly large pieces of meat, but also to stand up under any side-to-side movement that their shifting weight might occur. Not that the meat itself would move -- butchers employed by the Farbersons would often carve up the meat as it hung here.

Come, let's step out of the refrigeration unit. If the door swings shut, you'll find there's absolutely no way to re-open it from the inside. And all the required insulation makes it quite sound-proof as well. I can't tell you how many scares the brothers had, with the occasional sous-chef becoming trapped, and it taking far too long for anyone's liking before the hapless individual was found.

Yes, I think this is where we shall finally end our tour, because I can see something beginning to dawn in your eyes... a dawning that I've seen before. Tell me, what suspicions are taking hold? I only ask because I am really eager to know, especially because, in a sort of personal experiment, I led you through the house in something of a reverse order. So when did that first tremulous inkling tickle your consciousness? It was the hooks, wasn't it? Or perhaps the grating I saw you notice underneath them, one designed to sluice liquids away as quickly as they are produced. I doubt it was even the dedicated empty seat at the table, when the occasional guest would finally piece together which of their recently-arrived group was missing...

It certainly couldn't have been as early as the oversized spit in the front parlor, which admittedly is the place where most guests finally realized the nature of the party they had just attended. The final key in the final lock most often turned when they spied the shape of the carcass still turning there... even the dimmest of the guests could not deny it then!

You have to admit, the Farbersons did enjoy their jests, evident in the manner which they revealed to their guests their implicit participation in the night's wicked transgressions. That, after all, is how the brothers managed to procure silence and continue their revelries, even as each person fortunate enough to depart at the end of the night knew exactly what had transpired... No amount of use of those oversized spittoons in the fireplace room could exorcise the evidence of what they had done in the dining room, that familiar roasting aroma continuing to fill the room even as the horror of truth sank in...

Ah, now I see you're quite eager to leave as well. I must say, you've lasted longer than most groups who have been given the full tour, and comprehended its secrets! I give a hearty congratulations to you all! But there's no need to leave here in a state of disarray. After all, how do you know that anything I've told you here tonight is true? Oh, I'm sure there are a few people in the surrounding villages that have managed to maintain some semblance of sanity despite being a guest at one of the Farbersons' parties. But they would all be quite old now, and if they had happened to see anything... untoward... I'm certain they would have long since forcibly erased it from their minds.

That is, if anything of the horrible things you suspect actually happened at all... I bid you a good night. Mind the flagstones on your way out.

Oubliette (a novel)

-1.1-

"The mountains have personalities. They're alive, in a way. But the valleys? Once you've been up here a while, you find that they're really all the same."

Sheryl had been sitting at the circular bar, listening to the grizzled, windburned ski pro talking from his spot near the fireplace on the far side for over twenty minutes, and that was the first thing of any real interest that had come from his mouth. He had amassed a sizeable retinue of fellow skiers, all of them apple-cheeked where he was leathery, limber in their youth while he sat stiffly upright on his stool. She already knew that his impeccable posture was the result of the multiple pins in his back, because the origin of every last one had been outlined by him in surgical detail. He had regaled them all of tales of his battles with Deertail Mountain, and it had earned him enough free drinks from the rapt crowd to make him start to slur. Sheryl wasn't impressed, not only because she was nowhere near considering herself a skier, but because she was still wondering where the hell Kerren was.

She had just needed a few more minutes to get ready, her wife had insisted, no more than ten, and then she would come down to meet Sheryl at the bar. They would then have a celebratory cocktail, and head into the adjacent restaurant for dinner. But almost twice that amount of time had now elapsed, and she had yet to see Kerren's overpriced boots coming down the rustic stairway of lacquered half-logs that she faced.

So Sheryl patiently kicked her crossed legs up and down, nursing her mojito and trying to soothe herself into nonchalance. There wasn't a TV nearby -- it was the first time she'd ever been in a bar without one, but then technology was nearly verboten in this place -- so she had no choice but to overhear the old pro continue to outline the times he had nearly been buried in sinkholes, menaced by black bears, and indulged in reckless downhill therapy off the marked slopes and trails (always late at night, with only the moonlight to keep him from barreling straight into trees that were huddled before him like stoic, needly monks, conspiring to step into his path and end his life).

She had to admit, even though she hadn't strapped a ski on herself, his perilous tales sounded a little too much like her own experience so far for comfort. Every moment with Kerren these days was fraught with peril. Emotional branches could reach out and snag her at any moment. Sheryl actually shook her head a little to fling the thought off, to keep it from sinking its passive-aggressive little talons into her brain. It was her part of their bargain, after all; she would let go of her suspicions and start to trust Kerren again, and Kerren would do everything she could to start to earn it back.

The fact that Kerren was taking so long didn't do much to set her mind at ease. But there was no way that Sheryl was going to give Kerren any reason to think that she had been even the least bit suspicious. She motioned to the bartender and ordered a second mojito. If Kerren came down and saw that Sheryl had already ordered a drink for her, wouldn't that indicate a modicum of trust?

Almost as soon as the drink arrived, Sheryl saw the recognizable black-and-purple of Kerren's boots clomping down the stairs on the far side of the lodge bar. Good. Let her see just how trusting Sheryl had been that she would arrive soon, the ice not even the slightest bit melted in her glass. She turned her head and marveled at the late-afternoon sun glistening on the slopes outside. The bar had impressive panoramic windows that looked down over the valley that the Lodge was poised on the brink of. The sun would be gone from the little town down there soon, and lights would start to wink on. It would be a romantic view for their dinner.

"Hi," Kerren said, sitting down on the stool next to her. She gestured to her hair, the tightly-curled blond fountain immaculately perched atop her head. "Worth the wait don't you think?"

"Always," Sheryl responded, only slightly having to force her smile.

Noticing that Sheryl had turned fully away from the bar to look out at the view, she asked, "Don't you want to sit over where we can look out on the mountain?"

"I was hoping to, but..." Sheryl gestured with her half-empty glass toward the group occupying the seats with the best view, the one that had gathered around the ski pro. Dressed in an almost unbearably loud sweater, he was still letting people buy him drinks, feeding him fuel to even more deeply mangle his tales of high adventure on the peaks that surrounded them.

"Eech," Kerren said, hearing just a fragment of the latest gruesome tale. "How long has that been going on?"

"Since before I got here," Sheryl responded, hoping her voice was jovial enough. She cleared her throat after the fact.

"Thanks for ordering," Kerren breathed, holding up her drink and shifting her bottom, getting more comfortable on her seat. She held it up, swiveled a little toward Sheryl. "Is it too late for me to make a toast?"

Sheryl shrugged a little. "Sure." She mirrored the position of Kerren's glass, suspended in the air between them. "I mean, of course not. Toast away."

"To eight wonderful years," Kerren said, cocking her elbow to lift the glass to the height of her forehead. "And I'm promising here and now to make the next eight even more wonderful."

"Me too," Sheryl said, hoping it sounded authentic, and was surprised to find that -- at least to her -- it really did. Their glasses clinked.

They sipped a moment in silence, the alcohol spreading that familiar illusion of warmth through their bodies. Sheryl had heard that what booze really did was pull the heat from one's extremities, which was exactly the opposite of what you wanted to do out in the cold. It was why the myth of St. Bernards with brandy kegs around their necks was just that. She was about to relate this anecdote to Kerren, but realized that it seemed completely the wrong note to strike at what was supposed to be not just their anniversary dinner, but a celebration of their reconnection as a couple.

She had meant to steer clear from the subject -- all the better to demonstrate her complete state of coolness and trust -- but it came out anyway. "How's your mom?" Sheryl asked, reaching back far enough to refer to the long conversation Kerren had before they entered radio silence for the weekend. At least, Sheryl assumed it was Kerren's mother on the other end of the line...

"She's good," Kerren said, averting her eyes. "Dad's being an ass, but what's new about that? They're having some big to-do about building that deck again. She wants to contract someone, he insists he can do it himself, even though he's almost sixty... the usual."

"He means well," Sheryl said, and immediately thought that maybe she shouldn't come to the defense of Kerren's father quite so quickly. She had wanted to keep the negativity out of this evening so badly, but just couldn't help it.

Fortunately, Kerren didn't take the bait. "I know he does, but then she overreacts, and I end up giving her a sympathetic ear. Let's not talk about them anymore," she said, shaking her mane decisively. "What I really want to focus on is having a lovely evening with my lady."

Sheryl's smile came easily at that one. She was so stupid. How could she even entertain the thought that Kerren was up to something shady? Right before their anniversary trip! How heartless could she be? Meanwhile, across from them, the ski pro said, "Listen! You can still hear my elbow pop when I turn it this way!"

"I'd kind of like to be like him, I think," Kerren mused a few minutes later, when they were both halfway through their appetizer plate of bacon-wrapped venison medallions. They had moved into the lodge's small restaurant, a series of dark-wood booths lit by candles and softened by muted jazz music.

"Him who?" Sheryl asked. They had each had drunk a full glass of wine already, and their conversation was flowing much more easily.

"That mangled old skier in the bar," Kerren said. "Not just like that, I mean, not actually scarred, but I'd like to -- I don't want to go through my life and have no wear and tear, you know what I mean?"

Sheryl grinned. "Well, in the morning we're going to run a good risk of getting some scars, aren't we?" Referring, of course, to their impending ski runs. They were both nervous, as neither had done anything to the scale of Deertail before.

Kerren giggled, and Sheryl marveled, much as she had the first time, at how lovely she was, lit mostly by the lazy fire that formed the centerpiece of the restaurant. Even lovelier now than the night they had met, in some ineffable way. Sheryl had been struck dumb even then. "No," Kerren continued, "I just want to have something to show for it all. I don't want to be unblemished, like I'd breezed through life, like it didn't take anything out of me."

"Sure," Sheryl answered. "I get it. We should have some kind of physical evidence that we fought the fight and won."

"Mm-hm," Kerren said, before swallowing the wine she had sipped while Sheryl had been talking. "I guess maybe that's why I thought about this place. When I was looking for places for us to go, I mean. It's so outside our real lives and a little dangerous. As much as I we want it to be, I guess."

"Which begs the question," Sheryl said, "how early do you want to get up in the morning to hit those slopes?"

Kerren traced her finger around the rim of her wine glass, making the liquid inside slosh slightly from side to side. "Well, it is our anniversary after all... Who knows? We might find some reason we want to sleep in late."

Sheryl arched an eyebrow at her. "Now, since when did you become a mind reader?"

They laughed together at that, and just for a moment all the uncertainty Sheryl had felt -- and had sensed Kerren was feeling too -- seemed to have been shed, peeled off like an ill-fitting costume, to be discarded and left to slide down the mountain into the village below.

Sheryl didn't notice until the shadow was standing right next to them, keeping the firelight from having its intoxicating gilding effect on Kerren's hair, but someone was standing next to their table. She looked up, expecting it to be their waiter asking them about dessert, which was sure to instigate another round of double-entendre hilarity, but it wasn't him. It was the grizzled ski pro, looking as if he had just left his post in the hotel bar to walk directly over to them.

"Good evening, ladies," he said quietly, tilting his head to both Sheryl and Kerren in turn. He was leaning forward, his hands raised slightly in a don't-mind-me-I'm-just-passing-by gesture.

Neither of them responded immediately, because they assumed that if he were approaching them, it was because he had something he was ready to say. But for a long moment, they all just looked at each other. After flicking her eyes at Sheryl and measuring no sense of comprehension there, Kerren said, "Hi yourself. How are you doing tonight?"

He seemed unable to speak for a moment, and Sheryl found herself returning to the thought she had about him before Kerren had joined her: how such a man could be through so many harrowing experiences and still have so little visible damage. Despite everything he must have been through in his life, for the moment he seemed to have been struck mute.

"I..." he began, "I'm going to suggest that you two might want to make your way back down the mountain tonight."

Kerren, always the more defensive of the two, looked like she was about to jump up, immediately assuming that she knew exactly what the old man was insinuating. "Now hold on just a damn minute--" she started.

Sheryl put out a placating hand, but couldn't stop her in time. Kerren was able to turn on justified fury at the drop of a hat, something that had always both awed and frightened Sheryl. "I don't know what business you think it is of yours," Kerren began, her voice starting to smolder, "but the two of us are here for a perfectly legitimate--"

The ski pro was already stepping back, his raised hands now turning their palms to the women in surrender. "No, no," he pleaded, "it's nothing like that! Believe me!"

Sheryl couldn't help but snicker at that, which was enough to stay Kerren's tirade; she quieted down after only getting halfway up from her seat. “Yeah, I bet,” she huffed.

"I just thought... look, I'm telling you only so as not to cause a panic, but sometimes... Spend enough time on a mountain and sometimes you think you can hear it talking to you."

Kerren leaned back in her seat with arms crossed, fury defused for the moment, but still holding a sarcastic knife-edge in her voice. "And exactly what is the moutnain telling you on this lovely evening?"

The old man's brow furrowed. "I don't exactly know. She's... confused somehow. There's something strange happening. I just thought you should know."

"Something strange," Kerren repeated.

"Yes," the pro said.

"So says the mountain," she said.

"Mm-hm," he nodded.

"And you think we need to leave."

"That's right."

"So it has something to do with the two of us," Kerren said, both index fingers switching between pointing to herself and Sheryl.

"I can't exactly say how I know, but I think that might be right."

Kerren sat back in her seat, crossing her arms and letting out something like a "hmph". Oh God, Sheryl thought, she's only been biding her time. She's going to let him have it now. She'd start with how convenient it is that he's singled us out in the midst all the heterosexual pheromones being tossed around in this place, and move on to how if he thinks we should leave, then why is he not announcing it at the top of his lungs to the entire restaurant...

But Kerren didn't do that. Instead, she shrugged, "Well, sir, we'll have to take that under advisement, now won't we?"

The ski pro could tell that he wasn't being taken seriously. He already seemed defeated. "I'm only saying... my instincts haven't been much wrong in the past." He shrugged, then, seeing no sense of urgency from either of the women, turned to leave. Kerren's eyes burned a hole in his back all the way to the restaurant’s double doors, which opened back out into the bar.

When he was out of sight, Kerren's eyes rolled, and Sheryl was at least thankful that she wasn't the source of their scorn. "Boy," she said. "Can you believe that?"

Sheryl shook her head, but she was already distracted by the fact that she could hear the man clunking across the floor on the other side of the door. In exiting the restaurant, he had transitioned from carpeted floor to hard wood. And he had his ski boots on.

"It's weird," Sheryl said. "He seemed so lucid before."

"You must have caught him at the start of his night. It didn't look like he was having any trouble funding his binge."

Sheryl didn't recall anything more than a telltale hint of alcohol on his breath, though. She reached for the small note holder against the dark-paneled wall to change the subject, assisted by a devilish wink. She knew what would salvage this awkward moment, as long as it was accompanied by an erched eyebrow. "Now, how about some pre-dessert cheesecake?"

---

True to her word, Kerren did her best to make sure their anniversary was a memorable one, even after they got back to their room, and by the time the pair were finally settling into each other's arms and nodding off to sleep, the moon had just risen over the enormous bulk of the mountain, which stood outside their room's windows, behind the lodge. The white rays just happened to bounce off the glass of the low coffee table, in turn falling across one of Sheryl's eyelids, waking her.

When coincidences like this happened, her mind was always quick to run off into the wilds. Tonight she was forced to contemplate the history of a light particle that originated in the heart of the sun, working its way to the boiling surface over eons, then escaping into open space, flying millions of miles only to smack into the surface of the moon, then richochet off the glass of the table and into her eye, as if that had been its destiny all along. Inevitably, she began thinking of all the physical interactions of things going on around them all the time, and how they occurred even if there wasn't anyone there to notice them. The sheer volume of activity that the real world was cranking out every second. By this time, she was hopelessly awake.

Rolling onto her side, she noticed how beautiful the packed snow looked outside. Kerren's arm had become draped across her in their sleep; Sheryl tenderly lifted it away before getting up to take a better look out the window. Even though the room was warm, standing in front of their balcony window made her conscious of how cold a night it was. Frigid air fell in invisible cascades off the face of the glass to pool around her feet. She wrapped her arms around herself protectively, shivering in her t-shirt and lounge pants.

The scene outside was devastatingly stark and lovely. The moon and its light, depsite what she knew about it, appeared perfectly still as it hung slightly above the upward slope, its low angle causing every tree and rock to throw exaggerated shadows. Even the slightest depressions in the snow looked like craters, black void in the midst of all that pitiless pale illumination.

Slowly, the events of this evening with Kerren came back to her, and what it had all meant at the time collided with what it semeed to mean now. The overall feel of it was that she and Kerren were a fine facsimile of a relationship with no troubles. She had been very aware that if, at any point, she had really opened her mouth and talked to Kerren about how she felt, things would have gone very differently.

She sighed. She hadn't forgiven Kerren yet. There it was. She might have even convinced herself of it in the midst of the alcohol and warm flesh, but here, in the coldest hours of the night, there was no reason to hide it, even from herself.

She knew that she should go back to bed. Standing here, turning everything over in her head would lead to nothing good, no matter how beautiful the view. And it certainly wouldn't help her get back to sleep. From somewhere beyond the room's door, she could hear the ice maker down the hall whirring to life, dumping cold chunks into someone's bucket. It gave her a small amount of comfort; at least she wasn't the only one who was having a hard time sleeping tonight. She hoped their reason was better than hers.

She looked back up at the moon, turning her mind back to the light that it was reflecting off it from the sun, currently blazing on the other the side of the world. The shadows had shortened even in the brief amount of time that she had been standing there. The moon was continuing to rise, methodically erasing the shadows that it had caused as it rose higher above the top ridge of the mountain.

And then, strangely, in a matter of moments, it had set again.

-1.2-

Bruce hadn't really needed ice; he just had to get out of his room. He feared he was not going to be able to breathe if he had stayed in there a minute longer, so he left behind his notebook and meticulously lined-up pens and moved slowly along the hall, relishing the feel of the cool, thin carpet on his feet. He glided down the long space toward the end of the hall, the only sound the few remaining pieces of half-melted ice sloshing in the bucket under his arm. The sudden hush of this old-fashioned world should have been welcome relief.

He reached the little alcove, wondered obliquely if anybody in the nearby rooms was going to be awakened by the ice machine if he thumbed it on. Oh well, he reasoned, if you don't spring the few extra bucks for a suite at a better hotel, that's the risk you run. Besides, he had very faintly heard a few muffled, feverish sounds through the walls of his room before he left, so he doubted that the people next to him were overly concerned about getting a lot of sleep anyway.

As the ice tumbled out into the bucket, amid the roar of the titanic dynamo that must have been necessary to create such a wonder, he wondered if he was going to get to sleep at all that night, and whether it would matter if he did. So far this trip had yielded zero dreams that were of any use to him, anyway. He allowed himself only a few seconds to wonder if he was going to spend the rest of his life like this, always chasing after her elusive inspiration, but never having it pay off.

He wouldn't be able to face his editor at the end of the week without something to show for it, he was certain of that much. Ger had been so accommodating and so understanding of Bruce's writer's block (even if the younger man didn't really believe such a phenomenon existed), springing for half the tab to get Bruce up here, into the uncluttered air where, supposedly, the great writer would be able to think and get back in touch with his muse. But now the only thing that comforted him amid this wonderland of snow, rustic rafter beams, and down pillows was the white noise the ice machine made as it filled his dented, wooden bucket.

If Bruce hadn't been trying to work in this environment, he would really be enjoying himself. As the taxi had brought him up the long, winding ride up the lower slope until he was high above the world, he had felt the air around him growing lighter. He could hear Ger's half-joking advice in his head -- "The best thing about writers is their capacity for self-delusion... and how often they can actually make it come true" -- and up at the Deertail Lodge, he hoped, he could find the quiet and lack of distraction he needed to get back into that self-deluding frame of mind, and back into contact with Theda. The lodge's promotional material promised a place free of connectivity of every kind, where a person could untether themselves from the computers and pervasive communication that burdened them in the world down below. If there were a place he could be undistracted enough for his dream-self to find her, this would be it. Or so he had told Ger.

But that didn't seem to be the case. Bruce let the bucket overflow and the trough underneath fill a little bit with the crystalline cubes, so that the next patron likely wouldn't have to run the machine to get all they needed. It wasn't that he was an inherently thoughtful person, just that he wanted to stand in the wash of aural static for a little while longer... Contrary to the propaganda, he had found no solace in this place's silence. In fact, he found the random rush and thump of the ice machine preferable to thinking about the vast, hollow wind that had blown through that last dream, three weeks ago now. It had been horrible, a wind that he could feel slicing through him, chilling his insides as it passed. He knew that he should stop his mind from recalling it in this middle-of-the-night, half-awake trance he was still in, but could not resist...

---

It started with the same ring of towering stones he always stood inside. But now they were dull and gray, draped in dying vines, heart-shaped leaves now withering where they had once been lush to bursting with greenness. The landscape outside the ring had changed, too. The first time he had come, he had been able to see a sun-sparked, magical forest outside the ring of thirteen Sounding Stones (he had always known that was what they were called, even though he had never been told). But tonight, there was hardly a world beyond at all. It was as if whatever planet this makeshift temple stood on had shrunk to the size of a small city. The ground visibly curved away on all sides outside the ring, so sharply that all he could see beyond a few hundred yards was an omnipresent atmosphere that iridesced for what seemed like light-years in all directions. He was standing on a wide domed pedestal in the middle of a vast nothing.

The horror of it all would have been diminished if he had appeared someplace entirely different, instead of this corrupted version of a place he had never tired of visiting in his younger years. Back then, not only had the place been beautiful, *she* had been even more so, making his breath catch every time she stepped out of the forest; without fanfare, but commanding the attention of every living thing within it, even the plants, which all seemed to wave toward her at the direction of some unfelt wind, probably the same one that made her robes flutter and swirl in slow motion, as if she were underwater.

Theda, she had told him her name was on their heady first meeting. It was a name he had only later understood was a real one. For several years, that thought it had come from Somewhere Else, just as he grew to think that the things she told him -- the stories he would later write down in waking life, and be hailed as a genius for -- all came from the same Somewhere Else. There was just no way he could have been personally responsible for them all.

But night after night he had come, and night after night she had emerged to weave tales for him, speaking from a safe distance outside the stones into his willingly receptive ears. She almost dictated for him articles, stories, possible avenues of research... an endless font of thoughts and ideas. It was like he had been asked to write a wish list of things that a writer/blogger/journalist wants but hardly ever gets in terms of inspiration, and she was sent into his dreams to tick them off for him every night of the week. She had asked nothing in return, only a receptacle for her brilliance, which he was more than willing to provide, and benefit from.

He had loved to go to sleep back then. He looked forward to that drowsy feeling that told him he was about to really start getting things done, but now it had been months since he had found Theda among the Sounding Stones, striding out of the forest like a mystical story-telling nymph. He was starting to think she might never come back, and as he did, the surroundings seemed to be more and more infected with that attitude as well. The forest was drying up, the world it stood upon folding in on itself, and he didn't know if it was he or she that was making it happen. Would he one day close his eyes on the waking world to find himself floating alone in that limitless sky, which was no color and every color all at once? And if he did, would he ever be able to wake himself up? Would he want to?

---

Maybe he had done something to offend her. He never understood why he deserved her gifts in the first place. Now he wondered over and over what could cause her to pick up stakes and -- here he shuddered to think it -- perhaps decide to grace some other writer with her brilliance. Maybe the horrific decay was a symptom that she had walked away, leaving their shared dreamworld to shrink and collapse on itself. Or even worse, maybe that *thing* that had appeared the last time he saw her -- whatever it had been that came riding in on that unspeakable storm -- had frightened her away for good. Regardless, two things kept him from trying to stay awake for the rest of his life, undoubtedly driving himself crazy in the process.

First, as a writer, he still needed to produce. He had known since he was a little child that his job, his place in the world, was to take ideas from his head and shape them into words for others to read, no matter what form those words took. When he was a child, it seemed the only avenue would be to write books, but as he got older, the world expanded and more and more forms or written art were created. He tried to follow them all. His ideas, at first his own and then more and more supplanted by Theda's (which, he could somehow argue with himself even now, were his too), grew into pieces of art, reams of factual investigation, reportage on the strange corners of existence, deep rabbit-hole dives into his own psyche that left him shivering at his own unknowability, interviews with fascinating, overlooked people, which could have gone on forever if he hadn't had a deadline to meet. He didn't care what the subject was, or what form would eventually serve it best, the main thing was the words, and the idea driving those words.

Secondly -- and this was rapidly becoming the only thing he could take solace from now -- was that while his dreamworld was shrinking, the thirteen Sounding Stones were unchanged. They still stood taller than his head, thicker than his body, in their perfect, uniform ring, dark rock veined with minerals of different colors, all pointing up toward the sky. Those veins were dark now, whereas once they had pulsed with multicolored light and life, and the vines that clung to them protectively were dying, but the Stones themselves were still whole. Lately, the world had shrunk enough that those stones weren't all pointing straight up anymore. They were starting to tip back, away from each other, like the imperceptibly slow decay of a blossom cursed with an unlucky number of petals.

This was why he still overcame his fears of what he might find and lay his head on his pillow every night. The Stones persisted, and in the unknowable way that dream-logic often works, Bruce knew on the most fundamental level that the Stones were *him*. Even if there were eventually not be enough real estate left for them all to stand without touching, they would still exist, as would he, and that must mean something.

The clatter of ice on the floor brought him back to the real world. In his mental absence, he had filled the trough almost to its edge with a roughly pyramidal mound of cubes. A few of them were randomly bouncing over the edge and hitting the floor, making a sound reminiscent of chattering teeth. He let go of the button that kept the machine running. It rumbled to a stop... but the trembling sensation he felt in his feet continued. The ice cubes that had fallen on the floor were vibrating, skittering around as if alive.

-1.3-

The night desk had been unusually quiet so far, which Glenda thought was unusual. Dale had this weird theory about how people who find themselves in similar circumstances often get their internal clocks to line up. It was the reason the lodge sometimes had a inexplicably jam-packed, later-than-usual dinner shift, or why on some nights everyone slept like babies and no house phones rang until well into morning. The lodge tapped into some kind of collective biorhythm; that was his thought, anyway. Glenda was quick to point out, however, that this concept didn't seem to extend to Dale himself. He was always the one who would talk your ear off the most when things were quietest, the one up late when everyone else was snoozing away.

Currently standing alone at the front desk, Glenda repeatedly blew her bangs up in frustration. She really needed a haircut; they were periodically getting tangled up in her eyebrows. She could either cut the bangs or shave the eyebrows, and these seemed like equally viable options at this point. She should call home, she thought, because despite what Dale said, she imagined the lull at the front desk wouldn't last for much longer. She'd check in with Darryl, who she was sure would still be up, and make sure the boys had gotten to bed at a reasonable hour. Then she could finish her late shift with a clear conscience.

She looked at the sets of walkie-talkies Velcroed to the edge of the counter in front of her. If their black carapaces hadn't been there, with their intruding modernity, she would have been able to look out across the lobby and imagine that she was looking into a space that was a hundred years old, or maybe more. At times like this, late at night, she could forget that there was a flat screen monitor posted on the overhang directly above her, cycling through the lodge's amenities and the current weather conditions, and fantasize that she was witnessing the inaugural season of the Deertail Lodge. The wood, of which almost everything in her view was comprised, still gleamed with polish, the upholstery relatively new but still adorned with the original, faux-Native American patterns in cool blues and greens.

She had used to be able to recall when the lodge had been built; hadn't they covered that in orientation? But even that had been years ago. All the little minutiae and theories about how the place was supposed to run had been overturned by the practical knowledge she had since learned about how to keep the desk working smoothly. Still, that half-forgotten knowledge lay over everything like a waxy film. FOr example, she knew that the ruts in the floor -- caused by wear from some of the overstuffed lobby chairs -- prevented the rearranging of the furniture for fear of exposing them. Along with many other facts, it made the Deertail less of a historical artifact and more a wooden arrangement of Stuff She Had To Deal With.

Sometimes if seemed her entire life was similarly constructed, an elaborate, precarious arrangement of various categories of Stuff She Had To Deal With. Her job, Darryl, the boys, they were all parts of this vast network. She wouldn't give up any part of it, of course, but secretly she longed for a day when she could allow herself the luxury of kicking back and becoming part of Stuff Someone Else Had to Deal With. And an even deeper part acknowledged both how she would never allow that to happen. She secretly enjoyed her self-sacrifice, all in the name of making life even a little easier for those she loved.

Dale, of course, might have seen some of Glenda's secret levels if she let him. He overthought everything, and after all their night shifts together, she often wondered what would happen if she suddenly told him everything she thought, everything she dreamed. Would he be able to apply his particular brand of logic and attention to the untangling of her psyche? She kind of wanted to see if he could. Of course, she would never think of letting herself develop feelings for Dale (and true to form, that deepest part of her enjoyed the knowledge that she was actively withholding that from herself), but if there were anyone she knew who would be able to fully understand her, it would be him. He would probably be able to tell her things about herself that even she didn't know yet, but would immediately recognize.

Because she had been thinking about him, she almost jumped when he came through the lobby doors from the main entrance. Both inner and outer sets were closed at night to keep out the worst of the mountainside chill, but there was always a pocket of frigid air that drifted in alongside anyone who entered. Then Dale was scraping the snow off his boots on the wide swaths of carpet (which were replaced/cleaned three times a day, per regulations).

He looked up at her, smiling. She loved that smile. Dale dressed all in official blues when he was running perimeter checks, and seeing his face, wearing a smile that seemed different than the ones he gave anyone else, always made her night. He couldn't have been more different from Darryl, which was probably why she didn't even think to admit to herself that she had more than a passing fancy for the security guard. Tall where Darryl was almost exactly her height, strongly wide where Darryl had been farmer-scrawny his entire life, dark brown where Darryl was one of those pasty fellows who bleaches in sunlight. How could she have been attracted to this capable, confident man who was everything the one she had chosen as life partner was not?

Dale flipped his arm up, clicking his flashlight and zapping her accurately in the eyes with a double-flash, which was the sign for all-clear. Glenda half-heartedly threw up a hand to block the light. "I got it, Dale. No wolves, no storms. You've scared them all away. Good job."

He paused to scrape the snow off his boots a few more times as he crossed diagonally against the rug patterns to reach her at the desk. "No Harmon, either. Did he call in?"

Glenda shook her head. "Nope. I've been here with the walkies all along. Not a squawk."

"So we're guessing he made it down all right?" Dale had been in the lobby when Harmon had come out of the restaurant, a distracted, disturbed look on his face and his ski boots already on. The racket of plastic on wood had drawn Dale's attention, because Harmon had happened to pass by in the brief interval when the rugs had been taken up, but the fresh ones hadn't been laid down yet. When it became clear that the old ski pro was intending to grab his coat and head out the front door, Dale had stopped him.

"Hey, Harmon, it's getting late, you know," the security guard had said.

Harmon had nodded without looking at Dale. His gaze was already outside with the snow. "I know, I just... I was thinking I'll go down into town, that's all."

Dale sighed in half-feigned exasperation. "Well, you won't have time to come back up tonight. You want me to call Mrs. Handy at the boarding house and let her know to expect you?" This scenario had played out enough times for Dale to know the folly of offering the elderly man a ride down the mountain.

This comment actually drew Harmon's attention enough to get him to look at Dale. The ski pro was almost a full foot shorter than he. "Sure," he said, and tried to smile, but it looked thoroughly unconvincing.

Dale engulfed one of Harmon's shoulders with his hand. "Now, Harmon, we're not going to get reports of you trying to ski the backwoods again, are we?"

Harmon's brow furrowed, and he shook his head. Only a little less unconvincing, but it had been enough for Dale. It had been enough for Glenda, too, who had been watching the scene from her perpetual perch behind the front desk.

"Good," Dale said. "Enjoy your evening. But here." Dale pressed one of his walkie-talkies, which he always kept with him and now unhooked from his wide belt, into the ski pro's hand. "If you run into any trouble or need a hand, I'm right on the other end. Okay?"

This time Harmon's smile seemed genuine, if not still a little distracted. "All right, Dale. Thank you."

Dale clapped the older man on the shoulder. "No problem. Don't forget to fuck off, now."

Salty talk was guaranteed to get a chuckle out of the old man, Glenda knew, and Harmon didn't disappoint this time, laughing and shrugging as he turned to go out into the elements. Secretly, she loved hearing Dale say things like that, too.

Harmon snagged his coat -- the only one on the rickety wooden rack that otherwise stood forgotten in the far corner of the lobby -- and shrugged into it as he headed for the door. Neither Dale nor Glenda were really concerned about him; the man had been hanging around the Lodge longer than either of them had, holding his liquor admirably and bringing local character to the place. The owner had even kept a permanent room open for him. It was really just a converted maintenance closet under the massive main staircase, but it was free of charge, and this was the place Harmon seemed to want to be. The arrangement was was due to some shared history the two men had, although no one seemed to know exactly what that was.

Now, almost an hour after Harmon had left, Glenda said to Dale, "Yeah, he must have made it down. I tried to hail, but got nothing. He might have turned it off."

"I'll call Mrs. Handy and see if he checked in," Dale said. "I bet he just didn't want what Carlos and Benny were serving tonight. Decided to maybe have a slice of Mrs. Handy's pie instead."

Glenda couldn't help but giggle and blush, even though she knew no double entendre was intended. Mrs. Handy sold pies as a side business, along with running the town's boarding house. But something about the way Dale said it... She knew he was offering to track the old man down because he thought Glenda was overworked. He often commented about how dedicated and underappreciated she was. It was one of the many things she liked about him. "No, it's fine," she said. "I'll call down. He's probably had dinner and is all wrapped up in her warmest bed by now."

It was a half-hearted lobbing back of the innuendo, implying that Mrs. Handy and Harmon had some kind of geriatric romance going on, but Dale looked like he wanted to pounce on the desk phone, to keep her from dialing. "No, no, I'll... don't worry about..."

They had known each other far too long for her to play like she couldn't tell something was wrong. "Come on, Dale."

The big man licked his lips a bit, as if debating whether he was going to tell her, then gave up when he saw the steely look in her eye. "Okay. He didn't take the car down. I saw some boot tracks, so I followed them back to the equipment shed. He took his skis. Probably about ten minutes ago."

Glenda didn't get it right away. "He... he skied down into town? After he said he wouldn't?"

Dale nodded, leaning heavily against the front desk now that the charade was over. "Looks that way. I don't know why he did that. But then again, he was acting strangely before he left, wasn't he?"

The thought that anyone, not to mention an elderly man, would start a trek down the mountain, away from the roads, at this late hour sent a chill through her, even if that person were as experienced as Harmon. Her only solace was that it was clear and the moon bright tonight, so it would be a relatively easy journey for a seasoned pro. "What do you think would possess him to do something like that?"

Dale shook his head. "Don't know. But I'm thinking I should hop in the car and start down the driveway, just to see." He meant the winding four-mile long downhill road from the Lodge to the tiny town below.

"Good idea," Glenda said, too concerned about Harmon to consider that would mean she would be deprived of Dale's company during the midnight hours. It was almost eleven-thirty already, wasn't it? She had sort of hoped that it would be one of those quiet nights when they could just hang around the desk chatting for hours.

She turned to glance at the grandfather clock, whose solid presence she always turned to, even when she was constantly working on a computer that had a digital clock right in the bottom corner. In some way, the time never seemed truly defined to her if it wasn't shown on the thick, filigreed hands of the ancient upright timepiece. Now, as she looked at it, she could see that the silently sweeping second hand looked... strange. She narrowed her eyes a little, and Dale followed her confused gaze to the clock facing them from alongside the main staircase.

That second hand... it was if it had widened to double its usual thickness. It wasn't until it overtook the minute hand that she realized what was happening; it was vibrating, being shaken into buzzing back and forth so quickly that it could barely be registered by the eye. And then she heard the chandelier overhead start to rattle. The sound of crystals clattering against each other, and the metal frame of the chandelier itself, almost formed a chord so complex that her stunned ear registered it as beautiful.

She and Dale looked at each other in comprehension for just a moment before the lights went out.

-1.4-

The silence between them was unbearable. Manoj had been trying to keep it under control, but already knew he was going to lose the battle. If he was going to say something, he knew from past experience that he should do it here, in the dining room, where he had to restrain himself, instead of later, when they were alone and he had given himself another half-hour to stew. Her eyes were boring into him from across the table, that pitying look as she realized that maybe she had made the wrong choice of boyfriend...

"What?!" he finally blurted out.

Kelly just looked at him innocently, as if she had no idea what she had been doing all evening. "What do you mean, what?" she repeated, her mouth full. "Is something wrong with the cheesecake?"

"No!" he said, lowering his voice so that only she could hear him, without losing the intensity. "You're giving me that look again."

She set down her fork before asking, "What look is that?" she asked calmly. He hated that tone. She was like a flight attendant in that way; the more stoic she became, the worse the situation was apt to be.

"You know," he fumed. "That disappointment. That wishing you were with someone else."

Kelly sighed the sigh of a long-suffering girlfriend, even though they had only been going out for shy of three months. "I never said anything like that, ‘Noj."

He shook his head, poking with his fork at his side of the single slice of cheesecake they were sharing. "I told you before, Kell, I'm just not this kind of person."

She had long stopped trying to smile and console him, instead just said, "I'm not expecting you to be someone else. I've told you a thousand times, this weekend is my way of telling you something about who *I* am."

"I saw the way you were looking at him," Manoj said, finally looking down. He didn't want to lift his head, but instead watched her blurred face as he looked up at her through his eyebrows.

"Who?" Kelly asked, dumbfounded.

"That old man in the bar."

"*What*?" Kelly said, a little louder than she should have. "How could you possibly think I could be attracted to--"

Manoj shook his head again, dropped his fork so that it rang against the china. "I'm not saying you're attracted to him directly. I can tell that you're attracted to his way of life."

She sat back now, crossing her arms. "So you're jealous of--"

"Rapt." Manoj said it flatly, with as much contempt as he could cram into it. "That's what you were. He was telling those stories about being chased by bears and zipping through raw forest by moonlight, and you couldn't get enough of it."

Kelly rolled her eyes. "I thought they were great stories, yes, but it doesn't mean that he's the kind of man I want to be with."

Manoj rested his elbows on the table, leaning forward to match the way she had moved back. "Of course you do. Kelly, you're an athlete, body and soul. I get that. But I'm just... not."

"And you don't have to be!" she responded, getting fed up. Manoj had to toe a bit of a line now, or she was apt to storm off. It was her secondary mode of defense. "I don't know why you can't accept the fact that I don't need you to even care about sports in order for me to find you interesting. I'm here with *you*, Manoj. I dragged you halfway up a mountain so that I could give you an introduction to who I am, what's important to me. Think about it from the other side... Do you think I'm jealous of the women at your office? That I assume you have to want them just because they're more like you than I am?"

Manoj looked up at her now, comprehension just starting to dawn. He had lost this argument before he had even started it. He should have known that. "No," he had to grumble.

"That's right," Kelly said. "I thought you and I liked each other because of our differences. You're more of the brain, I'm more of the body." She leaned forward again, so they were equally tilted forward over their dessert. "You find that intriguing. Don't say you don't. And I love that mind." She lifted a closely-clipped fingernail to hover tantalizingly before his third eye.

He found himself smiling, in spite of himself. "This mind can be quite stupid sometimes." He let his accent, which he had never really had but sometimes used as a charm crutch, creep the slightest bit back into his voice, knowing how she would react to it.

"It's not so bad," she said, smiling. "Now, I think we should finish our dessert, go upstairs, and see what else we can come up with when your mind and my body get together."

Even though he knew she was deflecting the argument in a direction that was in her favor, he couldn't resist. Was that the way all athletic people were, he wondered, always trying to resolve conflicts through some manner of physical acheivement? At this point, he didn't even care, which only sent his rational Vulcan undermind deeper into fury because it was bring ignored.

Deep down, though, he knew he was going to end up enjoying this weekend. If she continued to take these wedges he was passively-aggressively trying to drive into their relationship and turn them from log-splitters into tent pegs, they might even come down from the heights an even stronger couple than they had been coming up. And what was he going to do then?

---

Manoj was lucky, and he knew it. They had met when she was hired as a sport consultant at the game company he worked for. Their first meeting had been filled with a kind of chemistry he had never experienced before. The conversation had quickly turned away from the borderline-ludicrous extreme hang-gliding-on-Jupiter game he had been doing research for, into more personal territory.

She had been the one to launch the first playful volley: "You know, for a person who spends their time trying to replicate the way people move, you're a very still person."

"Still?" he asked, his pen hovering over the pad he had been taking aerodynamic notes on.

"Yeah," she said, smiling. "I tend to notice these things. You don't make any moves you don't have to."

He shrugged. "That's just economy, I guess."

"Even so," she continued, "still waters..." The silence between them drew out, and her eyes didn't leave him. Finally, she said, "Are you really into sports, or are you just interested in recreating them?"

With any other consultant, he would have felt threatened by such a question, but this woman was surprisingly easy to talk to. "I like the physics of motion, I guess. It's so simple, but so complex, trying to figure out how people are thinking by the way they move."

She nodded. "Huh. So you're, like, reverse engineering the player's brain. I like that."

He smiled back at her now, which just made hers intensify. His mouth got away from him. "It all figures into what I ultimately want to do," he said.

Her eyebrows perked up. "And what's that?"

"I want to take people's gaming instinct and turn it into social good," he said. "You remember that old online game where every time you played, a grain of rice was donated to a food supply charity?"

She shook her head. "Nope. But my gaming knowledge usually doesn't go past what's currently on my phone."

He felt his voice starting speed up, which always happened when he was given license to expound on his favorite topics. "When I think about the future of games, that’s what I think of. But it should go further than just getting people to trade gameplay for charity donations. I'd like to determine how online gaming can help people make moral decisions, like whether they're going to help others, even if they will never meet those people. That's what human interaction is going to be like, more and more, in the future. Or maybe I can make games for kids that kind of train them to think more altruistically toward others. I keep thinking, what if you could train kids to empathize at the same time as they're learning to read or do math?"

Kelly seemed impressed. "Or jump off Jovian space platforms on hang-gliders. That's lofty, Manoj. Very lofty. I like it."

Drinks had followed the evening after their bull session, and they actually ended up talking about the game at hand more then they had in their actual meeting. They debated the best way to display how the human body reacted to swinging in a harness while being buffeted by Earth-sized thermals (increasingly more innuendo passing between them the more they drank), and it took them several more meetings like this before either of them realized they were dating. When she had asked him to come with her for a weekend to Deertail Lodge in the mountains, he had of course agreed, admittedly thinking more about the idea of what stripping her out of multiple layers of fleecy clothing would be like, than hurtling through the snow with wooden sticks strapped to his feet.

---

But here they were, and he had started feeling inadequate ever since their rental car had pulled up to the front of the Lodge. That was when he started to realize how completely out of his element he was. For one thing, his grandparents had all grown up in New Delhi, which was the precisely opposite climate from where he was now. This weather was oppressive in a completely different way, and he could actually feel his genetic makeup rebelling against it. This was probably why he had taken such offense to the way Kelly had been listening to the grizzled ski pro holding court in front of the fireplace, impressing all the noobs with his daring war stories.

As always, he stopped thinking about these things -- and just about everything else -- once they got back up to their room. In bed with her was the only time when he didn't feel like he was competing, or that his general athletic failings meant anything. At these times, Like the sheets they fell onto, the playfield felt perfectly level. His precision and attention to details met with her pure awareness of physical space, and their talents complemented each other perfectly.

She snuggled up to him afterward, and just as he was about to drift off to sleep, she said, “You know what would make this moment even more perfect?”

He muttered some sort of noncommittal negative response, already sliding toward slumber.

She sat up suddenly. “Hot fudge sundaes! Are you in?”

The incongruity of it all woke him enough to ask, “What do you mean? Room service?”

“Yeah!” she said, as if he had just made her great idea even better. She immediately stretched an arm over to the nightstand and started rummaging around in the drawer. “Where’s that menu? I think I threw it in here, just to remove the temptation because everything’s so flipping expensive –- oh, hi Gideon -– but... desperate times, you know?”

Manoj sat up slowly, noticing how amazing her bare back looked in the moonlight as she hunched holding the menu in the patch of moonlight. There were times -- and it was usually at moments like this, when his mind was blessedly clear of other, distracting things -- that he became entirely unaware of how precipitous his place in her heart must be. This lack of worry never lasted too long, though. All too soon he was thinking that all it would take would be her meeting a man taller, more muscular than he, one who could confidently join her in snowboarding, rock climbing, and the dozen other outdoor activities she was into, and then the nerdy programmer would be shown the door.

To his credit, he had just now made her come so hard that dessert had suddenly become necessary, but wasn’t that really the only physical activity he could join her in with any degree of competency? He could conjure up an algorithm to visually replicate the mountain they were on from scratch in less than an hour, but was she ever going to convince him to actually get out there, climb to the top and go barreling down it? He still hadn’t given her a solid affirmation that he would. In the morning, she was going to expect him to put on a pair of skis and actually attempt to perform a few of the athletics that he typically spent his days replicating at his desk.

“I would like to have two hot fudge sundaes sent up, please,” Kelly was saying into the phone. Manoj noticed how she used the same tone with the anonymous person on the other end of the line as when she was speaking to him. Another crack appeared in the wall that held back his suspicions about how he was about to lose her. He should be thinking of something he could do to impress her, convince her that he was worth staying with, at least for a little while longer, but nothing came. Nothing but the idea that he had to get out on the slopes with her the next day and at least make an effort to live in the outside world that she was a full resident of. Maybe when he did, he would gain some sort of insight that no one back in the office had. It might reveal to him that one extra piece of mechanics that would turn his game into a true sport simulator.

Kelly had finalized the order, hung up, turned around, and started talking to him before he realized what was happening. “Now for phase two of my diabolical plan,” she said, “phase one being dragging you up to the room and getting you to make me crave sugar. I’m going to throw on one of those fluffy bathrobes and lounge in it so the room service guy doesn’t catch me in my starkers. You want one too, or are you just that much less modest than me?”

Manoj mustered a smile, hoped the room service guy, when he arrived, would be more of an out-of-shape slob than he. “Sure, count me in,” he said. “For anything.”

Fifteen minutes later they were carefully finishing their sundaes in bed, covered in terrycloth and only halfway caring if any got on the covers. Because there was no TV to watch ESPN on, Kelly was trying to interpret cricket highlights from the English-language Indian newspaper Manoj had brought along to pass for reading material.

“Every time I look at stuff like this,” he said absently, gesturing to the headlines spread out in front of them, “it makes me wonder what my life would be like if my grandparents hadn’t left.”

“What do you think you’d be doing?” Kelly asked, leaning back and resting her spoon elbow on his ribs. She continued to shovel ice cream into her mouth.

“Quite possibly the same thing I am now,” Manoj said. He meant professionally, but as soon as it was out of his mouth he guessed she meant personally. He gave himself a tiny mental kick.

“Is there lots of skiing in India?” she asked, after giving a comic glance at their surroundings.

Manoj smiled. “Not so near the equator, not really. Some in the northern mountains. But I meant programming. There’s probably even more job opportunities there, in fact. Nothing I’d really want to do, of course.” Certainly not better than eating ice cream in the middle of the night with someone like you, he thought but didn’t say.

Kelly tipped her dish to scoop up the last of the melted sundae from the bottom –- not that they’d given their desserts much time to produce any –- and spooned it into her mouth. Manoj was looking at a smudge of chocolate just beyond the corner of her mouth.

“You’ve got a little –-“ he said, motioning toward the corner of his own mouth.

She mimicked his movements. He had meant to indicate the corner of his mouth that was pointing the same way as hers, as if he were her mirror, but she reached up and dabbed at the opposite side. It wasn’t the first time this mental schism had happened. She claimed it was because she thought from others’ points of view before her own (classic extrovert, he thought). Instead of switching tactics and tapping the other corner of his mouth, he instead leaned forward and kissed the spot, removing the chocolate with a kiss and a tiny swipe of the tip of his tongue. Kelly watched him the whole way, her eyes slightly crossing in surprise.

“Well now,” she murmured, as he sat back. She didn’t resist, either, when he reached down and began unfastening the loose knot that held her white bathrobe together. “I’m telling ya, it’s the mountain air...” she said as he parted the fabric and slid his hands into the warm envelope of air she had created between it and her skin. “It gets the blood pumping, definitely. And speaking of which...” She had by this time opened his bathrobe as well.

They kept their robes on this time, wrapping themselves up in a double-cocoon of softness that only accented the solidity of their bodies as they moved together. Being the second time, Manoj felt more in control, his body’s natural resistance to stimulation married with Kelly’s relaxed muscles. He gloried in the feeling of her, and his own prowess, feeling like he could go on forever. When the bedframe began to rattle against the wall, he assumed that it was his doing.

Kelly’s fingernails dug into his shoulders. He wasn’t stopping for anything, not now. He was master of the world, so concentrated on pleasing her, and thereby pleasing himself, that he didn’t even notice when the room when went suddenly, ultimately dark.

Their bathrobes managed to keep the worst of the flying glass shards away from their skin when the patio doors blew in.

-1.5-

The trouble had started in his pins, three hours ago. He could always tell an upcoming event’s degree of severity, depending on how badly they ached. When it was as mild as a nearby argument, it was more like an insinuation than a real, tactile sensation. If particularly bad wind shear was about to bear down on the Lodge, Harmon might actually feel the pins in his spine gently jangling his bones like windchimes, loud enough to make him start to wonder if anyone else could hear them. This time, however, his backbone was actually wobbling, as if his head were one of those plates spinning on the top of a long stick, like he had seen on the Ed Sullivan Show as a boy.

He had received the pins -- pure titanium, or so the doctors had told him -- courtesy of Murphy General, fifteen years ago. Harmon had clipped the particularly springy edge of one tree's bough, and skidded sidelong into another’s trunk. This had been the very event that ended his off-trail days, even though from time to time he still liked to careen down the more informal paths, well away from the tourist slopes. When he did, he could at least for a few moments convince himself that he was still young, still "blazing trails and nailing tails" as his cruder friends used to say. Well, there hadn't been much opportunity for the latter in a long time, but he could at least pretend to still do the first part. At the moment, however, he was just trying to keep his head from vibrating off his shoulders as he bent to make sure his skis were firmly attached to his boots.

He felt bad about not warning Dale, and knew the regret would grow sharper later on. The big guy had always done right by him, had understood and respected Harmon’s established relationship with the Lodge manager. But what, exactly, would Harmon have said by way of explanation? That the pins in his spine told him that something bad -– something gigantically, unfathomably bad -– was coming? And that he had no idea exactly what it was? No, Dale would have followed protocol, because that was why it was valuable to have Dale around, and the head of security could have done nothing until he precisely knew the nature of the threat, and what procedure to follow. So Harmon had hastily decided that the only person he could save was himself.

People could call it cowardly and selfish if that suited them, but those two gals he tried to talk to in the restaurant had clinched it. That blonde, pale-skinned one, the one that didn't get immediately belligerent with him, reminded him so much of of Sara that he couldn't stop himself from trying to warn her. It wasn't just the shape of her face, it was something in her eyes; he'd noticed it as she and her friend sat across the bar from him earlier in the evening. It was like looking at an old picture, one that was moving, and talking, and laughing. He couldn't help but try to tell her of the impending whatever, and yet she had turned him away.

It was the story of his life now. He was too old to be useful, in the eyes of everyone around him. He wasn’t able to trick himself into thinking that anyone he talked to in the bar thought he was more than just an addled old pro trying to hang onto his last scraps of glory and youth, a jukebox of old stories you could pour a drink into and see what kind of bullshit came out.

In his spare time at the Lodge, Harmon liked to read vampire novels. It wasn’t because he lived some kind of fantasy with all those nubile virgins succumbing to the ancient, gnarled creature who came to them in the middle of the night, although he knew that’s what everyone who saw him reading one would think. No, Harmon consumed the stories compulsively for something else entirely, the singular idea hidden behind the words that made the vampire the saddest monster there was. They were immortal, timeless, and utterly alone... just as Harmon secretly felt he was too. The best vampire novels addressed how the true curse of being a vampire is not the forced bloodletting, but the reality of staying eternally alive.

Creatures like them (and he, in his darkest nighttime thoughts) had no choice but to stick around, to see all their mortal friends and loved ones wither and die, the world around them evolving into something new, alien and incomprehensible while they were incapable of anything but staying the same. That’s what Harmon feltwhenever he wandered into the bar -– as he inevitably did most nights, despite his best intentions –- and started unspooling his tales of daring and adventure to the kids (and even when they were in their forties, Harmon still thought of them as kids).

Old though he may be, Harmon had enough faculties to realize that he didn't *literally* believe in his own immortality. What he was acutely aware of was that at some point there's enough emotional truth in the illusion that it really makes no difference whether it's reality or not. And he felt it in every one of his reconstructed bones. He was ancient enough to see the world he had grown up in, and everyone in it, fall away like autumn leaves. Only he was left hanging onto the branch, tenaciously clinging in the breeze.

Until tonight, that was. Tonight, he was letting himself blow away, and it hurt.

The night wind bit his cheeks as he started down, that familiar, continuous slap that had once been the onl thing he lived for. He didn’t know exactly what he was running from, but he felt as if he was deserting everyone left back in the Lodge. Just walking out forever, with his dinner still warm on the table. He tried to tell himself that the wetness of his cheeks was because of the wind. It was far from the first time in his life he'd had to convince himself of this.

When his pins started their singing to him -- and right now they were fixing to turn into a full-blown choir -- he wondered if colliding with that tree all those years ago had done something more than physical to him. What he mused to himself in his weakest moments was horrifying; that maybe it had knocked his soul right out of his body. Perhaps his ineffable essence had kept right on cruising down the mountain that day, and was light-years away over the hills now, leaving his eternally-aging body behind to stagnate in a fog of easy downhill runs and liquor hazes before the Deertail Lodge’s stone fireplace. No matter how the snow bunnies oohed and ahhed, he never really felt like those experiences were really his anymore. More and more, they seemed like someone else's victories.

Right now, though, on this midnight run, he had to admit he was starting to feel the old thrill, remembering how the mountain had always provided for him. It wasn't him, either, it was *her*. She was alive tonight, just as alive as he was starting to feel, for the first time in a long time. Maybe that was why he hadn’t told Dale (or anyone at all) of his premonition. Some part of him, long ossified, coudl sense that it was being shaken into wakefulness, and didn't want to spoil the adventure by sharing it. This knowledge made the air's bite harder, the crunching of snow under his skis crisper. And always that premonitory feeling behind it all, like a gigantic predatory bird wheeling high above.

He had started out racing down the auxiliary slope that ran alongside the service road. It led straight down into town, which appeared as a warm blanket of lights spreading out before him as he began lowering himself down to its level. But now he veered away from it, heading for the tree line. It was time to go back into the woods, if for no other reason than his pins were making his muscles tense, prepping him for the moment when unknown talons would sink into the back of his neck and yank him off the ground.

He skirted the edge of the foliage, not quite daring to enter yet. Gravity was such a tease, one he had been chasing his whole life; she kept pulling him downhill, ever closer to her deep, hidden heart, only to throw the entire world in his way every time. He came close enough to a bough -- stuck out like a swiping hand -- to remind him of his long-ago injury. He swerved away from the edge of the forest, then swept back just as quickly. She wasn't going to deny him, not on this night. Not when he had some unnamed doom bearing down on his back, and a ringing in his bones that was sounding more and more like an alarm clock, waking up the sleeping hero that was still there, under the wind-blasted wrinkles.

He had no way of knowing it, but he was going downhill faster than he had in more than two dozen years.

-2.1-

Sheryl took a step back, hit with a sudden sense of vertigo. The moon had been rising a few moments ago, and now had sunk below the horizon again, so the first thing her mind interpreted this to mean was that her entire side of the landscape was tipping backward. She instinctively reached out and grabbed the patio door handle. It seemed like the only thing that felt like it would keep her from falling back onto the thin but ornate rug that covered the wooden floor.

She kept looking up at where the moon had been, irrationally thinking that if she kept watching, it would reappear as the world righted itself. But it wasn’t happening. And the next thing her mind interpreted this to mean was that the whole top of the mountain above her was starting to turn over, preparing to throw its entire bulk down on the puny matchstick lodge below, and that she and Kerren were about to be crushed. No fanfare, no explanations, just this one inexplicable, brutal event. And then darkness.

Through the hand that rested on the cold metal of the door handle, she started to feel a vibration, starting faintly, but building with frightening speed. It was not rhythmic, in fact it was the physical equivalent of static. She yanked her hand away, immediately disliking the way it felt, that manifestation of chaotic motion. It felt utterly wrong. She turned back to the room, which appeared blessedly stable in spite of the weird, churning motion of the world outside, and dashed over to the bed. She hopped up on it, because she had opted for the side closest to the window. Kerren was always doing that these days, she thought obliquely, ceding the more preferable option to Sheryl in every instance. Which side of the bed do you want, what restaurant do you feel like tonight, you pick the movie... Did Kerren realize she was doing that, or was it some innate sense of penance that she was still paying?

Kerren was surprisingly hard to wake, snuffling and snorting before realizing that Sheryl was shaking her bare shoulder. “Hmm? Hmm?” she kept asking, her brow furrowing, as if wanting a complete explanation before she decided if she was going to open her eyes or not.

“Kerren!” Sheryl whispered harshly. “Something’s happening! Wake up!”

Kerren’s eyebrows raised, although her eyes still didn’t open. “Whass?” she slurred. Then, surprisingly clearly: "She's here?"

Sheryl had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t know, but you’ve got to wake up!” Sheryl hissed.

Instead of jerking awake, Kerren arched her back and stretched like a cat, as if she had all the time in the world. Sheryl knew there was no point in trying to impress upon her wife the urgency of the situation; at any other time she would have enjoyed watching this feline motion as Kerren rose up out of sleep. But there was utter madness going on just outside their window, and Sheryl needed to not be the only one seeing it.

“Okay,” Kerren said, smacking her dry lips a little, her eyes opening and coming into focus, “what is it that’s so--?”

Sheryl actually saw Kerren’s eyes widen as the shadow fell across them. Even though the moon had already been eclipsed, there had still been some light coming in, ambience still radiating from the blanket of snow that lay over everything. But now even that was being sucked away, and Sheryl’s back was turned to whatever was causing it. Then there was a horrific locomotive sound, a world-smashing crash, and the bed slewed a few feet sideways, almost tossing her off.

Kerren, closer to the far edge, was thrown off ahead of it, awkwardly becoming twisted up in the sheet because Sheryl’s weight was still holding her part of it down. Sheryl couldn't hear Kerren thud against the floor an instant after she dropped out of sight over the edge, for all sound was drowned out by that awful rush of static, which now was exploding the very air around her. She had seen footage of houses in earthquakes, and was familiar with how furniture would slide back and forth during them, first one way, then the other as the seismic waves passed. This wasn’t like that. This was just one-way pressure, a long, relentless push away from the window. Away from the mountain.

The darkness in the room was suddenly almost total, and Sheryl couldn’t even pinpoint where the remaining feeble illumination was coming from. It wasn’t until she turned her head and fell over that she realized what she could still see of their room was only an afterimage, a retinal imprint of the last instant there had been light. It remained suspended in front of her, just as it had been, while her body went sprawling toward the edge of the bed.

That terrible pressure was still in the air, and she thought she could feel the entire room continuing to shift in fits and starts, threatening to be blown away by whatever was bearing down on them. She could hear wooden beams in the walls, big ones, cracking, pausing, and cracking again as torque was piled on torque. It had to end soon, it just had to. Whatever this force was, as strong as it was, it couldn’t continue. But it kept going. She felt the bed still sliding across the floor too, even though it was starting to meet with some sort of resistance the farther it went.

The strangest part of the whole experience was the sheer immediacy of it. There was room for nothing in Sheryl’s mind save for the torrents of sensory input that were threatening to crush her mind. She had forgotten about Kerren almost as soon as her wife had disappeared from view, never mind that the heavy wooden bed was now sliding over the area she had fallen into. Even when Sheryl realized that they were being pushed toward the narrow hallway that led past the room’s bathroom and toward the door into the hall, she couldn’t project far enough into the future to think that she should brace herself for when the bed jammed itself diagonally against it.

So when the bulk of the bed hit the corner of that hallway, cracking both its own frame and the wall's wood beams at the corner in equal measure, Sheryl was thrown forward, and it was only because she had been on the far end of the bed that she wasn't thrown past the edge just as Kerren had been. Instead, she was dropped roughly down onto the covers, bounced slightly, and came to rest. The oncoming rush of pressure and static continued for a few seconds more, and then stopped.

For just a moment, she sighed, relieved. It was over, and she was still alive. There was no future, and the past was done. She had survived, and that was all that mattered. At least, until she recognized that something was hurting her ears. She had been sensing it for several seconds, but it took reorienting herself mentally before she could parse what the sound actually was. And when she did, cognitive thought snapped back into the front of her mind, supplanting the reptilian survival mode she had been in. Determining its source, her mind suddenly filled with a nuanced list of everything she still had to fear, and everything she had to do next.

Because Kerren was screaming from somewhere under the broken bed.

-2.2-

Bruce, ice bucket under his arm, stumbled out of the vestibule and into the hallway. The way he lurched around felt like an amazing simulation of being drunk, which he had been on the verge of anyway before he had left his room. All that was missing was the righteous rage that his blurred mind always had for the world around him, fully knowing that he was impaired, simultaneously frustrated that the laws of nature wouldn’t respectfully conspire to keep him upright. It felt even more like an abyss was opening beneath his feet than usual, because he *knew* this time was different. It was the world that was going wrong this time, not he, and he was still sober enough to know it.

He watched as the upright rectangle of the receding hallway skewed, at first imperceptibly, and then more and more severely into a parallelogram. This was remarkably similar to slipping into a dream, which was something he had been paying a lot of attention to lately, in his fruitless pursuit of Theda. As a child, he had always marveled at how the mind, no matter how alert, couldn’t determine or recall the instant that it crossed from the waking state into slumber. He had even tried experiments, playing random spoken words in his headphones, and then the next morning trying to pinpoint exactly where he stopped recalling hearing them, but he could never really find the moment it occurred. He ended up positing that waking and sleeping were parts of a continuum, and that had made it easier for him to learn how to access the places he needed to in order to meet his dream-muse.

He was feeling a similar sense of dislocation right now. There was a deep rumbling under his feet that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, as he watched the beams and walls start to slide out of true. Had it finally happened? he wondered. Were his waking and dreaming lives merging into one? He could vividly picture the entire Lodge twisting and turning itself into a new shape, like a puzzle box, as his consciousnesses appeared to collide with each other.

Then the hallway lights went out, as if refusing to show him what was happening next, or offer any kind of resolution.

Fueled by pure creative desire, his mind's eye saw his Sounding Stones bursting up through the floor and walls, their pressure wrecking the mortal structure around him. They had finally come to him, he thought, which surely meant she would follow, apologizing for abandoning him, saying that she would do anything to make it up to him. She would willingly volunteer the secret to the source of all the ideas she had been feeding him for the last few years, and he would spend the next months in a manic state, astounding everyone around him with his new explosion of productivity...

Somehow, he had ended up on the floor, bits of ice from the bucket spilled across him, starting to melt through his shirt. Boards in the dark walls were splitting and popping, sending chips of wood raining down on him, but there were no stones. Just more wood underneath, pale after being hidden within all those years, wreckage upon wreckage. Pieces of it were scratching and cutting him as they flew, and he began to wonder if any of this were really happening after all.

He thought that maybe he should just let go. Let the darkness claim him. If he had lost Theda, lost her forever, then what was the point of continuing the search? The Stones weren't her power, after all. If the last few dreams had proved anything, it was that the Stones -- an extension of himself, he suspected -- were just a cheap background for her. Just as he, Bruce, meant nothing without her, they too meant nothing in and of themselves.

There was still some light remaining, though... He could see it far ahead as his eyes adjusted. It made little sense because of the new shape the hallway had bent itself into, but there was definitely illumination there. His mental map of the building told him that it was most likely coming from the lobby, around the corner at the far end of the hall. And from somewhere between him and that light, he could hear a woman screaming. It was close but muffled, as if on the other side of a wall.

Recognition flooded his system with chill. It was Theda. He knew it must be, because he had heard her scream before. In his most recent dream -- the last time he had seen her -- he had known something was wrong even before his dream-eyes had fallen across the scene. The Sounding Stones had been flat gray against the sky, the colors that usually glowed in their depths muted with the silvery light of the clouds that were billowing up from all sides, converging on where he stood inside the ring.

She had come out from behind one of them, her eyes wild like a roped horse, trying to look up and around in all directions at once. He reached out for her, tried to hold her arm, or at least touch the gauzy robes that floated around her like a tattered shroud. But, as always in dreams, he was not allowed to touch her. No matter where he reached, she was always just beyond his fingertips.

"What is it?" he had asked her. "What's going on?"

She didn't take her eyes off the swirling, boiling sky, but addressed him. "I don't know," she had said. "It's never been like this. It must be--" As she spoke, her gaze had finally swiveled down to him, and when she did, a look had crossed her face that he had never seen before. The way she looked at him had always, up until this moment, given him a feeling of confidence, and for just a few fleeting moments would make him feel like the kind of man who deserved the gifts she was presenting to him. This look, though, had been entirely different.

She was looking at something above and behind him, and her eyes were so wide, the stormlight so pervasive in this shadowy world, that he thought he could see in them something looming behind him, something curving upward, pointed and sharp among this landscape of gentle, natural curves. He spun around to catch a glimpse of it, but could see nothing behind him but more storm clouds, rushing down toward them, their speed unnervingly rapid.

When he turned back to her, his mouth opening to ask her what she saw, he found her to be looking directly at him. The same fear was in her expression, and when he had opened his mouth to ask her what she had seen and where it had gone, she screamed. The very same scream he was hearing now. Then she turned and soared off into the forest that lay far beyond the circle of Sounding Stones, shrieking in terror all the way. He had seen his own arm extending, reaching after her, but he was just as unable to catch her.

And now, months later, he was hearing her again, but in the real world for the first time. She was somewhere ahead of him, behind a canted, splitting wall, and in dire need of help. The sound of her screams pierced his skull just as he knew the massive splinters surrounding him could have, had he fallen down in a slightly different place. The fact that he hadn't was all the sign he needed that he was supposed to find her, to crawl through the wreckage of both worlds if necessary, and save her.

He swung the ice bucket from side to side in front of him, making sure the path was free of large chunks of debris, and began to find safe places toward which to pull himself.

-2.3-

Dale’s arms were around her before her eyes could adjust to the sudden darkness. There was still diffuse, gray-blue light coming in through the huge front windows, but all it did was outline the window-ward edges of everything in dim lines. The lobby that she spent nearly all her working hours in, which she knew down to the knot in every board in the walls, had instantly become a kind of shadow-world inversion of itself, all the more alien and forbidding for taking on the form of things that were so familiar. Then everything shifted in some fundamental way that she couldn’t quite place; she suddenly felt as if she had been displaced several inches to the right, and the world under her feet was belatedly making a poor attempt to keep up with her.

Now Dale’s bulk was pushing her back from the desk, they were toppling back through the doorway to the office together, and she didn't have to look at that forbidding tableau anymore. She worried about being crushed under him, because he had a good hundred pounds on her, but he clipped the doorframe on the way down and didn’t follow her all the way to the floor. A rush of air that took the form of a grunt lurched out of him, and he slumped down next to her legs. She reached for him instinctively -– and then the brittle, ripping sound came.

Her eyes flew up to the spot she had just vacated behind the desk, and saw a huge, flat form like a black bird come swooping down. It was the overhead television screen, swinging like a scythe from the wires that the tremor had pulled out of the wall along with it. Glenda marveled at the way it came down so neatly, perfectly arcing through the spot where her face had recently been.

After two long swings back and forth, the wires gave out and the screen crashed down onto the desk itself, a flat thump and a spidery ice-crack sound coming out of it before it slid off onto the floor at her feet. It landed squarely on the carpet pad that Glenda had put down to keep her soles from getting too sore during long shifts. All this had happened before she could place her hand on Dale. For a moment, she wasn’t even sure where she was touching him, but then he groaned and turned a little, and she realized she had instinctively found his elbow.

The vibration she had seen in the grandfather clock’s second hand was everywhere now, as if the building itself had become a tuning fork. There were also vast cracking and splintering sounds coming from out in the lobby, as if the whole place were being slowly ground between gargantuan teeth. But she felt strangely safe with her hand on Dale’s arm. She didn’t hear any sounds of destruction coming from the small warren of offices behind her, so she knew he had gotten her away from the immediate threat, and now she was going to be okay.

All of a sudden, she realized how quickly he must have moved. She had been blinded by the darkness for only two or three seconds; he would have had to run down to the end of the counter, dash through the gap between it and the wall, and make the return trip in order to tackle her like he had. She wouldn't have guessed that he could move so fast, especially in the dark, but apparently something had motivated him to. She distantly wondered if it was the fact that it was she who was in danger. Would he have moved that quickly for the first shift desk manager?

Dale's breathing was heavy and harsh, but she didn’t feel like she could ask him if he was all right yet. The rumbling made the idea of speaking aloud ineffective; any lesser vibrations in the air would just be swallowed up. This whole thing felt enough like a dream to make her not want to risk opening her mouth and having nothing come out -– a staple of her nightmares since she had been a girl, and something she definitely did not want to experience in the waking world.

Dale put his hand over hers, and it felt like it completely dwarfed her fingers. She couldn’t help but break into a smile, there in the dark.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and the pained quality of his voice suddenly made her concerned for his state than her own.

"I think so," she said, found less breath in her lungs that she thought there should be. "You?"

"Yeah," he said, shifting around so he could sit next to her. She almost giggled at the ludicrousness of it; she had never considered the idea that the spot directly behind her work station could be sat in, much less with Dale right there on the floor next to her. "What the hell?" he mused to the quaking universe in general.

She answered anyway. "Some kind of earthquake?" She'd never been in one before, but if she had to imagine what one was like, it would have been almost exactly like what they had just gone through.

"Maybe," he mused, still sounding pained. "I should go check it out." He started to stand up, but she didn't want him to go just yet. She tightened her grip on his hand.

"Hold on," she said.

"You hear something?" he asked.

"No," she said after a slight pause. She hoped that maybe he would take her cue, that what she really wanted was for him to stay here with her a little longer, just so she could keep smelling his cologne and feeling his body heat, so that she wouldn't have to be the one in charge of this mess for a few seconds more.

He did give her about ten more seconds before he said, "I've got to get up, Glenda. If this was bad through the whole Lodge, I've got to make sure everyone's okay."

She sighed a little, knowing that she had to give him up for the greater good, at least for now. "Yeah," she said, releasing his hand from hers. "Go make sure everyone's safe."

He got up, following his calling. Secure the area. Save those who need saving. Deal with all the Stuff You Have to Deal With. She felt guilty that she couldn't take as much pride and drive from those thoughts as he did.

He picked up his flashlight from where it had rolled up against the wall beside them, got to his feet, and looked around. Glenda didn't look at the way the beam played around the lobby, checking for damage or danger, but the way its light threw his strong sihouette into relief. She sat there on the floor behind the desk and watched him, observing as he did his job.

-2.4-

Later on, Manoj would marvel at the fact that he and Kelly had actually continued having sex, even when it seemed like the world was literally crashing down around them. As a blast of artic air accompanied by blowing snow and pieces of ice rained down on them, their bodies kept moving. She had been so close when it happened; he knew her body well enough by now to know the signs, and they had all been flashing at him in tandem, with just moments to go. He was right there with her, too, and despite the noise and pressure drop it was pure animal instinct to keep going. In that moment, the seeming implosion of their room was just more sensory input.

Their bodies rocked, began the process of slowing down, and then Kelly breathlessly whispered, “Noj, what the fuck just happened?”

Somehow his head found its way out of the tangle of terrycloth and flesh that they were mutually buried in, and he felt fully just how cold the room had suddenly become. It had nothing to do with how warm he had been inside the bathrobe-cocoon with Kelly; it was as if they had suddenly found themselves thrown outside. And as he looked around the room, he realized that estimation wasn’t too far off. The patio doors no longer existed, filled from top to bottom with a long, white landslide that extended halfway across the room and fanned out near the bottom, until it covered nearly the whole floor in six inches of whiteness. A haze of pulverized snow hung in the air, instantly melting on his overheated face as it began to settle. The only reason he could still see was because one corner of the window on the far wall was only partially blanked out by the same white mass.

“I don’t -–“ he began, but then he found that he knew exactly what had happened. There was only one way that much snow could become piled in their room that quickly. And considering that their room was on the second floor, it must have been a big one.

Kelly’s head came up out of the pile, craning around like his. “Wow,” she breathed. “Are we good, or what?”

Manoj laughed a little in spite of the disorienting situation, and rolled off Kelly. He couldn't help but note that she didn't close up her bathrobe before sitting up and surveying the damage. He started to dismount on the side of the bed furthest from the patio doors, but she put out an arm to stop him. "Watch out, baby," she said. "All the broken glass must still be down there somewhere."

"Good point," he murmured, and looked over the edge of the bed. His slippers were sitting exactly where they had been as if they hadn't noticed anything was amiss, perpendicular to the bed and parallel to each other. He swung his feet into them and then stood. He realized that the jumble of long shapes against the far wall was the combined mass of the patio door frames, twisted beyond recognition. They must have caught against the footboard and flipped over on their way across the room, he mused. So it was a good thing that he had been focused on pushing Kelly up through the headboard at the time, or he might now have found himself missing both his feet.

He squinted down at the snow piled around him, trying to pick out any jagged shapes that might be sticking out of it, but didn't see any. "I think it's okay. It was probably safety glass."

"It's still sharp, though," she said, putting out her arm to him again. "Watch out."

He tenderly stepped around the foot of the bed, found himself facing down the huge, angled slope of snow that had invaded their romanti getaway. He frowned at it, surprised that it seemed so neatly shaped, as if it had been extruded through the space the doors had previously occupied. He mused that, if this had been a movie, it would have been the fornicating couple that bought it at the moment of disaster. But here they were, seemingly unscathed. He turned back to Kelly, and despite the cold he was disappointed to see that she had fully re-encased her body in terrycloth.

"Our luggage is under there, isn't it?" she asked. And she was right. Every other piece of clothing they owned was separated from them by a chest-deep pile of snow that might very well have jagged chunks of sliding-door glass churned throughout it. So they were stuck with just their bathrobes for now. At least they weren't going to need to divide up the sheets in order to cover themselves. If this had happened before the sundaes, that's what they would be doing.

"It's some kind of snowslide, isn't it?" she asked. "An avalanche?"

"Yeah, I guess," he said. He had known the word, of course, but for some reason his mind couldn't put together his idea of such a phenomenon with what had just happened. He couldn't stop looking at the room, his disbelieving head slowly swiveling back and forth like a security camera, trying to collect as much data as he could.

"Should we go out into the hall?" Kelly asked. "See if there's anyone else out there?"

Manoj frowned. In spite of the fact that clearly something sort of horrible had happened, some fiercely stubborn part of him acknowledged that he didn't want to entirely let go of this first weekend alone with Kelly. Not yet. "Maybe we should just stay put. Isn't that what they say you should do in an emergency?"

Kelly was up off the bed in an instant, heading for the door. "I'm cold, though. let me just stick my head out and see." Manoj reached for her arm, but she was already out of reach. She had to tug on the door a few times -- Manoj could see even in the dim light that it was just the slightest bit askew -- but then it burst open with a loud squawk of protesting wood. He cursed himself for not being the first one to act.

When he came up behind her, she was standing halfway out in the hall, one arm hooked around the vaguely-canted jamb. She was pointing down the hall, toward where the stairway from the lobby joined their hall. Things looked almost normal from where they stood, although he knew that was probably because all the lights were off, their minds filling in the shapes as they remembered them from before, as they wanted them to still be. Past the end of her finger, a vague, jittery light was growing brighter about halfway down, starting to coalesce. As it swept around jumpily, it revealed the reality of the hallway, which became more and more full of corners and angles that shouldn't have been there.

The beam finally gathered itself together into a tight beam, and the shape of a man propelled itself up from the main stairs into the hallway. He swung his flashlight up and down the hall. It stung the couple's eyes as it found and stayed on them.

"You folks all right down there?" he said, loudly enough to be heard clearly in the strange stillness.

Kelly was quick to answer, "Yes. What just happened?", only to be eclipsed by a different man's voice, farther away than the flashlight bearer's, calling "We need help down here!" Its tone didn't convey panic, but there definitely was a sense of urgency to it.

The man behind the flashlight turned away, and in silhouette Manoj could now comprehend his shape fully; he was a tall, broad man, exactly the kind that his mind's eye expected to see when Kelly was inevitably stolen away from him. The guy was in some kind of official uniform as well, although he couldn't make out the kind. His insecurity shields went up immediately.

Kelly was away and trotting down the hall toward the human beacon before Manoj could even think to stop her. Her bathrobe was swinging loosely around her body, slippered feet -- when had she managed to put those on? -- barely slowed by the shifted terrain under the hall rug. As she receded from Manoj, the flashlight man turned toward the calling voice, taking off at almost the same speed the other way down the hall. Manoj sighed, and followed them.

-2.5-

Harmon could hear it chasing him. His head was ringing, the vibrations starting at the base of his spine and rising like a whip about to crack, threatening to spin his head clean off. His vision was blurring, and he became vaguely aware of a darkening around its periphery as he swept down the mountain. At first he had thought it was a result of his coming closer and closer to passing out from exhaustion, but the shade held its relative position when he turned his head. He knew what it was, and it was taking every bit of his will to not stop and turn around. A huge snow-shadow was rising up to blot out the mountain, its deceptively cloud-like bulk coursing after him.

He had never seen it happen himself, but he had heard stories too many times to underestimate its power and speed. At one point or another, most of his skiing friends had talked about avalanches as if they were normal parts of life (and he supposed for some, they were). He understood from these tales that the romance and majesty of them was seductive, and it was very easy to forget that a solid wall of white death was bearing down on you at eighty miles an hour when it was so goddamned beautiful. He had lost too many of those friends who thought they could stop at a distance long enough to take a picture, or just to enjoy the devastation from safe ground, completely forgetting that when that cascade, solid as the ground under your feet, started turning its frozen bulk in your direction, it was already moving ten times faster than you ever could.

He wouldn't make the mistakes they did. He sped as fast as the skis could carry him, barely feeling the familiar sting of wind and icy spray on hsi weathered cheeks. He was ready to pass through the tree line on his left, but knew it wouldn’t make him any safer once he did. At least he would feel less exposed than he did now, while he was racing down and away in the open air. A few hundred yards farther upslope, the service road had finally angled away from him for good, and that logically insignificant change had left him feeling more like a squashable bug crawling across an expanse of white tablecloth.

But there was a part of all this that was exhilarating, too. Part of him felt much like he had on his best downhill runs, back in his day, when the wind seemed to sweep away everything in his brain as he sliced through the air, until he was nothing but the avatar of movement, propelling himself forward for no other reason than that was what he had been designed for. At these moments, he was pure instinct and momentum, adrenaline and cold fire and hurtling speed --

An unseen rock cracked against the underside of his left rail. It might have been sitting there on the side of this mountain for hundreds of years, waiting until this moment to make its presence known. He could feel the shock of the hit reverberate up his leg, immediately sending him slightly off course. The error quickly magnified, and because his sense of balance was already precarious, he could tell he was in serious trouble. The grid of town lights below him slowed in its process of rising up to meet him, as he unwillingly traded some of his downward motion for lateral. His right ankle, never the strong point of his body even in his heyday, was starting to wedge itself against the outside of his boot with the addition of weight and pressure that his left used to share. The way the rock had kicked him up onto one leg, he wasn't going to be able to get both skis back down safely on the snow without the raised one first coming up a few more degrees, and he didn't know if his supporting ankle could take that.

He slewed even more to the side, thankful that at least he was heading closer to the road. If he fell -- and it was becoming increasingly more apparent that he would, it was just a matter of when -- being far from the road might meant that not being found until well into spring. Numbed by adrenaline and freezing wind, he witnessed everything happening in his ankle with fascination. He had broken plenty of bones before, but never had he been able to see it coming with such surprisingly clarity. He distinctly felt the kicked-up leg still angling upward off the snow, felt his right rail sinking ever so slightly into the hardpack as it bore the extra weight, his ankle beginning to tip over, then felt -- but didn't hear -- it snap over the rush of the wind.

He tipped over before the old, familiar pain could even reach his brain. Then he was tumbling end over end across the snow, throwing divots and showers of it up into the air. He was still a good quarter-mile above the point where the tree line would change direction and cut across his downward path. He closed his eyes and wondered if the ice crystals lashing his face were ones his wipeout had thrown up, or the vanguard of the onrushing avalanche, which he could still hear roaring somewhere above, rushing forward to engulf him.

At one point in the early seventies, Harmon had tried his hand at surfing. He had been visiting a friend in Hawaii, and since there was no skiing to be had, he had allowed himself to be talked into it. How much different could it be?, he rationalized. His friend had instructed him to think of surfing as skiing a living mountain.

This is what came to his mind as the snow refused to let his body fully come to a halt; it picked him up and carried him even farther downhill. Through the haze of pain both general (from his tumbling) and specific (from his ankle), he only understood this from the change in the world around him. At first the trees spinning around his aching head were merely trunks whipping by, missing him by inches on all sides; then thick lower branches scraped at his face and legs, their needles already shorn of comforting snow by the oncoming rumbling; then lighter branches that reminded him of the switches he had experienced in Catholic school. They lashed with at least as much ferocity.

And then he reached a place where there were no trees at all. He felt the ground underneath lifting him up like a sea of hands, always turning itself over to reveal new upthrusting force underneath, tossing and twisting him in ways his body hadn't attempted in decades.

Up ahead, he saw a thicket of denser tree population, and obliquely wondered if it were even possible that the downrushing waves might allow him to pass above them... what if it never stopped, kept lifting him higher and higher, a wave of snow passing over and above the whole world?

But he wasn't high enough. The branches were back, whipping at him harder than ever. He was passing through the thicket, and all but the hardiest pines were snapping like matchsticks around him. He could hear their trunks detonating far below him as they were torn in half by the ground-hugging lead edge of the thundering white mass.

There were enough that withstood the onslaught, however, that the white wave began to lose momentum, and Harmon with it. He felt a tightening in his stomach as he started to be lowered down, seeing trunks filling more and more of his vision. Somehow, he missed them all, was able to keep his eyes open long enough to see the strongest ones start to bend, which seemed to slow the flow of the mountain, and to lower him even closer to the ground.

In Hawaii, the most exciting and frightening part of his surfing experience had come on the third day of practice, when he managed to catch a wave large enough to break over his head. He remembered seeing the spray above him as it blocked out the sun, and he spent a glorious moment in a tunnel of pure light. Then he was down, being dragged under and spun by the most powerful force of nature he had ever encountered... until this day. This time, the wave was made of something he couldn't pass through. How different would it feel, he wondered, when the thick cloud of ice that surrounded him suddenly solidified, filling his lungs and throat?

The air grew heavier around him until he could not see the trees any longer. The sound of crunching branches, limbs, and trunks filled the world. Everything bled into pure white, then darkness, and then he stopped thinking altogether.

-2.6-

Carlos had been the first to hear the glassware chattering. Benny probably hadn't heard because he was a half-hour deep into his dishwashing meditation, and was playing his music besides. Carlos had been on the other side of the lodge's spacious kitchen, wrapping up the prep for the next day, peeling and dicing. That season's resident chef -- some guy named Rene that neither he nor Benny particularly liked -- had long since gone home, leaving the pair to man the room service phone through the night and get things ready for the next day. If they both kept at it, they could be done and in bed within the hour.

Carlos was rushing to do just this, but had recently been interrupted by an order for hot fudge sundaes, which had just come in under the order deadline. He had delivered them to the giddily smug, bathrobed pair on the second floor, and then rushed back to finish making the next day's stock in the giant pot on the stove.

That was when the dishes had started talking to him. He listened to it for a full ten seconds before he realized what it was, and at first thought it was because some high note in Benny's squealy guitar solo had hit a particularly resonant tone. That happened sometimes, and more than anything else it was a testament to the quality of dinnerware at the Deertail. Only the best china picked up on tones that finely. But when the wailing notes ended and the vibration didn't subside, Carlos started to wonder what was going on. He looked up from his knifework and examined the shelves above him.

It wasn't just the plates, it was the glass in the frames of the cabinet doors, too. He could see the reflection of the overhead lights shimmering that disgusting yellow LED color that Rene insisted on replacing all the bulbs with, because according to him you couldn't tell how food really looked under fluorescents. As far as Carlos was concerned, making it look like everything had been lightly glazed in bile wasn't much better.

"Benny," he called over the noise, "can the music for a second, will ya?"

Benny complied, cutting off his classic rock mid-riff with a well-placed elbow to the boom box's power button. "Que?" he asked, hands dripping hot water into the sink. It was the only Spanish word he knew, even though several times he had asked Carlos to teach him more. Carlos had gotten tired of telling him that he didn't know any more either.

Now that the music was gone, Carlos didn't have to point out why he had asked for silence. Every item in the kitchen that rested atop another was producing a rattling sound, like a spontaneous round of applause coming from every direction.

"What the hell is that?" Benny asked. Carlos turned to answer, and what he saw would stay burned in his mind for the rest of his life. It was an utterly mundane scene, Benny standing there in the apron and hair net he wasn't required to wear but did anyway, his hands slightly held away from his sides, glistening with wash water, an amazed look on his face as his eyes roamed around an entire kitchen that seemed to have suddenly acquired an unintelligible, buzzing voice. That horrible sound grew louder and louder, until--

Benny's head turned almost imperceptibly toward the window above the sink, as if something had caught his eye, and an instant later the whole thing exploded inward. For a moment Carlos thought a giant, bone-white tentacle had punched it in, and was now pouring its gleaming length horizontally into the kitchen. It appeared not just content to blast the side of Benny's head with splintered wood and shards of glass, but it also seemed sentient and intent on knocking the man across the room, which is just where his assistant ended up.

Carlos instinctively leapt forward to help, but drew back when he saw the intense speed of the white length that had invaded their familiar workplace. It was growing thicker, too; as it forced its way into the kitchen, it was pulling more and more of the window frame in along with it, until it was nibbling away bits of the surrounding wall too. He could still see Benny's legs sticking out from under the pile the white thing was now accumulating on the far side of the floor, and when he realized his co-worker was about to be buried entirely, Carlos ducked into the freezing spray and lunged for them.

His hands came down on the ankles of Benny's high-end work boots the older man always wore on his kitchen shifts, claiming that they were the best to stand for long periods in. As he started to pull on them, Carlos realized the true substance of the white presence that was still filling the room... snow. It was powdery and white, spreading to settle on everything, but Benny had taken the brunt of the first blast that had burst through the window. Carlos worked against the increasing weight of the growing pile, and started to get some traction, slowly inching Benny out from under the mound of whiteness that now covered half the floor and filled most of the air, spreading across the counters like time-lapse films of invading mold.

Carlos drew encouragement from watching Benny's form become more visible as he pulled him out from under the snow. First the man's pants became visible, then his belt -- his apron must be rucked up somewhere underneath -- then a little bit of pale, middle-aged belly before the bottom of Benny's shirt emerged...

When Carlos had his co-worker pulled out from under the snow almost to the level of Benny's chest, he noticed some color on the white mound, right on the spot where he imagined Benny's head should be. A vague pinkness grew there, and then suddenly blossomed into a patch of bright warning red. At the same time, the mound began to gather and collapse, as the redness of Benny's warm blood began to melt the snow form underneath.

Carlos, panic suddenly grabbing his throat like a pale hand, began to pull harder. He could see that the apron had flipped up and over Benny's face, and was scared beyond belief to think what was left underneath, even as he knew he had no choice but to find out. The expensive, sickly overhead lights stuttered twice, then failed altogether.

-3.1-

"Kerren, where are you?" Sheryl asked, blindly feeling for the edge of the bed. She had seen her wife go over, but her mind hadn't yet pieced together that Kerren could be pinned under the cracked bedframe, against the shattered corner of the wall, or both.

The screaming didn't stop. Sheryl's question probably hadn't even been heard. Ahead of her, felt by her hands but unseen, there were huge splinters spattered across the sheets. She feared that the convex corner of the wall, against which the bed had come to rest, had been turned into a dangerous stellation of wooden spikes between her and Kerren. She inched forward as fearlessly as she dared, but couldn't shake the thought of a nasty, invisible spike lying stiffly in wait for her eyeball or her nostril as she moved.

In a way, she was thankful for the pained, frantic sounds Kerren was making, because it had become her only point of reference in the darkness. God, if Kerren were to fall quiet... But Sheryl couldn't tell if the screams were starting to lose intensity because Kerren was losing the strength to make them, or if she was becoming accustomed to whatever circumstance was causing them. In any event, they seemed to be coming from directly beneath her now, and she still hadn't found the edge of the bed.

"Kerren!" Sheryl called. "Calm down, honey! I'm trying to find you. Are you underneath the bed?"

Sheryl felt a feeble hand thumping against the underside of the bed, punctuated by breathy hitches in the unending -- but quieting -- wail that Kerren was producing.

"Okay!" Sheryl said, "I feel that! I'm coming closer. Just... baby, can you take a deep breath and say my name?"

The screaming tapered off, although it seemed to take more effort to stop than it would have to continue. "Sh-- Sh-- Sheryl?" Kerren's voice was finally bordering on being recognizable again.

"Right!" Sheryl said. "I'm going to figure out how to get to you... can you move out from under the bed?"

"I..." Kerren began, as if she were endangering herself even more by speaking coherently. "I don't know. I'm afraid to move. My legs hurt so bad..."

"Okay!" Sheryl said, as professionally as she could manage. "Then don't move. Let me come down to you, and we'll figure out what's going on. Maybe I can get to a flashlight or something. But you should just hold still until I can figure it out. All right?"

"All right." Kerren was clearly trying to mimic her wife's tone, as well as the words. Sheryl hoped that meant Kerren was finding something reassuring in it. Then she set about trying to figure out what to do next.

The only time she had been in a darkness so pure was when she had visited a local set of caves in elementary school. When they had reached the deepest part of the tour, the guide had demonstrated to the class what the place looked like to its original explorers by turning the installed lights off for a few seconds. Sheryl had been totally unprepared for the sensation she felt when the utter blackness descended on the class.

Despite the sounds of her classmates taking the opportunity to yell, scream, and pinch each other with abandon, Sheryl had felt the space around her open up, as if the cave walls had suddenly been pulled back away from her at an alarming speed, yanking her breath away with them to fill the sudden, yawning vacuum. On the way back to school, Sheryl had been in a bus seat behind a pair of girls talking conspiratorially about how they had felt at that same moment. Sheryl had been surprised to find that they had felt the exact opposite of what she had; the instant the blackness engulfed them, they had both felt like the cave walls were closing in, had shrunk to fill all but the smallest of margins around their bodies, and that if they were to try moving, they would have found themselves unable to.

At the time, Sheryl hadn't known that a sample size of two girls her age wasn't big enough to extrapolate from. So her mind had been free to wonder... In that cave, had she been feeling the perfect opposite from everyone else? And if so, in what other parts of her life was the same thing happening? She felt a similar sensation years later, when she began to understand that the reason she pored over lingerie catalogs and loitered in swimsuit departments wasn't for the same reason other girls did. Again, her mind had revealed to her that it was wired differently, and there was a long, lonely stretch of time before she realized that there were people other than her who felt the same way.

During the time she had been recalling her former encounters with blinding darkness, she had been creeping forward, her ears focused on nothing but the sound of her hands and knees sliding across the sheets, and any others that Kerren might produce from underneath the bed, which is why she physically jumped when a jarring series of loud thumps came from about ten feet in front of her. It startled Kerren, too; from somewhere below, she let loose an additional fraction of the screams she had been producing.

Sheryl was so stunned at the sudden intrusion into the silence that she couldn't respond. It wasn't until after the first flurry of thumps died away that she realized what was going on, and it was only after consulting her mental geography as to where the bed was now located in the room. Someone was pounding on the hotel room door.

She opened her mouth to respond, but the quiet turned out to merely be a pause between volleys of knocks. Her initial "Hey!" was entirely drowned out. She closed her mouth and waited until silence fell again before calling, "Who's out there?"

-3.2-

Bruce crawled his way up the pitch-black hallway, following the sound of Theda's screams. He had quickly found that by keeping on the strip of rug that somehow still ran straight down the center of the hallway, he could stay relatively safe. He could feel the rise and fall of the broken wood underneath, but there didn't seem to be enough damage to push anything sharp up through the thick material. He still clubbed at any suspect protuberances he found with the heavy wooden ice bucket; he didn't want to put his weight down, only to have his own weight impale both the rug and himself on anything lurking beneath.

Through it all, Theda's desperate screams had continued. The sound had gotten closer more quickly than he had anticipated; the unrelenting surreality of the scene had somehow convinced him that she would recede as quickly as he moved toward her. But he soon found himself drawing up alongside the source, and his blood ran colder the closer he got. He could more clearly hear the restrained panic in her shrieks, and there was another voice now. He couldn’t tell exactly what it was saying, but the tones seemed to make at attempt at being reassuring, overly calm in order to balance out the frenzy of the screams. It was asking Theda to identify her as Sheryl. A quick flash of jealousy coursed through him… was this Sheryl the reason Theda had abandoned him, and the now-empty world they had shared?

The only way he would ever know would be to reach her. Theda was quieting down, speaking with the woman in a more and more conversational tone. He didn’t pay much attention to the content of what was being said; he was turning his head side to side, crudely trying to triangulate her exact location. He found a particularly cruel part of his mind wishing she would start screaming again. The thought that she should be punished for leaving him, as well as the fact that it would make her location easier to determine, crashed unbidden into his mind.

He pushed those thoughts aside. He had reached the door, and even though she had fallen silent, he knew it was the right one. There was a bit of shuffling going on behind this one, and the thought that there might be other people still inhabiting the Lodge didn’t even enter his mind.

Being a little closer to -- but still around a corner from -- the lobby, there was a fraction more light here. Combined with the way his eyes were adjusting to the darkness, this made things clear enough that he didn’t have to sweep the area with the ice bucket before pulling himself into a kneeling position before the door. He knocked on it with the side of his fist, hard, five times in succession. When he heard nothing in the pause that came after, he slammed another volley against the door. This time, in the quiet that anteceded it, he heard a patient female voice – not Theda’s – say, “Who’s out there?”

"It… it’s Bruce,” he said, positive that Theda would recognize him immediately. He would be the first person she would think to find, now that the walls between his dreams and reality had been forcibly torn down, wouldn’t he? He was going to save her, and then she was going to owe him. Big time. He couldn't wait to hear the stockpile of stories she must have to tell him. He didn't know it, but he looked forward to that receptive moment in much the same way that an addict looks toward the bliss of his next high.

There was a long pause, and the voice that still wasn’t Theda’s came back through the wood. “H—hi, Bruce,” she said. “I’m Sheryl… and Kerren’s here too.” The voice sounded hesitant, as if unsure whether polite introductions were really apropos, so soon after half the world had collapsed. But Bruce knew she must be leaving someone out.

“And Theda?” he asked, the sound of her name sounding strange on his lips. He only realized at that moment that had never spoken it aloud, outside of his dreams.

“I'm sorry?” the woman who called herself Sheryl asked, as if confused. She followed quickly with, “She's hurt. Can you get through the door?”

That made the situation clear to Bruce. Theda wasn’t unwilling to respond, but unable. His resolve swelled inside him, and he suddenly felt as brave as he ever had. This was his chance to turn the tables, to be her savior in the physical world when she couldn’t be his in the mental. The one bright spot of the door provided by the feeble light was the crescent of the sculpted brass doorknob. He reached up gingerly, wanting to see if it would turn, even though he knew the women inside the room had most likely locked the door before retiring. It turned only an eighth of an inch or so before stopping. “The door’s locked,” he said. “Can you reach it?”

“I don’t think so,” Sheryl called back. “The bed’s wedged in the little hallway to the door somehow, and it’s completely black. I don’t know what’s going on between here and there.”

Bruce nodded to himself, sizing up the door itself now. It was a good point; for all they knew, there might be no floor at all between the door and where the women were. After thinking a moment, he said, “Hold on, I’m gonna try to…” He raised the ice bucket and swung it back, aiming for the doorknob. He hoped that this rustic lodge was about to prove its authenticity by providing ice buckets that were sturdier than the lockplates of its doors.

Two screams erupted from the other side of the door the first time the bucket hit the doorknob. When neither collided object seemed affected, Bruce realized he didn’t have the leverage he needed to see which one would break first. He took a second to brace himself against the doorframe, and stood as best he could. He hadn’t been able to tell from his crawl down the carpet runner, but there really was a cant to the hallway floor. He recalibrated, swung his arm in a bigger arc and gave it a downward trajectory. The ice bucket came down on the doorknob from above this time, and while the effect was just as negligible, it sounded better and felt more satisfying as the shock traveled up his arm. And there were no more screams from within the room.

After a few more hits (and the beginnings of cracking, scraping, barely-holding-together sounds from the ice bucket), Bruce realized that he was going to need even more force. He braced himself sideways against the door jamb, raised his foot, and hoped that the padded sole of his hotel slipper would be enough to protect his foot from whatever was going to happen next. For Theda, he would have risked it even in bare feet. The pain of the first kick against the knob went from the sole of his foot straight to his hip, sharply reminding him of his age, and general paucity of activity in the second half of his life. But he kept at it, the kicks picking up pace so that he wouldn’t have time to consider how each made him feel before he landed another.

It took at least a dozen kicks before he felt anything other than metal, solid as bedrock, beneath his heel, and by then his ankle was burning, furious with him for this gross misappropriation of what little strength it had. First he heard the knob rattling a little in its lockplate, then heard it rattling a lot. Then it was wobbling, and finally, just when his foot started feeling like there was a blowtorch being applied to his instep, the knob fell off, letting out a surprisingly quiet thump as it hit a bunched-up section of the carpet runner and rolled away a few inches.

Bruce bent down to where the knob had been, probed with his fingers to see if the mechanism had been dislocated. It had, a little bit. But he still couldn’t get it to move much, and now there wasn’t even the knob to grab onto. “Hey in there,” he called, surprisingly loudly now that the thudding kicks had ceased. “I’m not sure if this is helping… can you get to the door and see if it’s unlocked now?”

There was a long pause, deep within the room beyond the door. “Um, I don’t think so,” a voice said. “There’s seriously no light in here. I’m not going to leave my wife here alone.”

Bruce’s brow furrowed, confused by their lack of concern for the injured person in the room with them. “What about Theda? Is she going to be okay?”

Another pause, even longer this time. The two women who had announced themselves seemed to be having some kind of whispered conversation. Bruce strained to hear, until the one who called herself Sheryl responded at full voice, “She can’t get to the door either. Is there anyone else who can help?” Bruce stared at the door a moment longer, then turned his head toward where he knew the lobby was. It had seemed so far away when he had fallen to the floor in the hallway, but in his efforts to find where Theda was, he found that he had made it most of the way to the bend in the corridor that led toward the main stairs. And now there was some sort of movement down there. He squinted his eyes in the dimness, until he found that there were shadows subtly shifting around. A light source was moving around somewhere outside of his field of vision, maybe a flashlight or lantern swinging around. “Hold on in there, ladies,” Bruce said, still looking toward the light. “I’m going to get help. Sit tight.”

“Okay,” came the voice from inside the room, although it did not sound very sure.

-3.3-

"There are people up there," Glenda whispered. She had heard a few screams after the lingering vibrations of the building had died away, and after those she thought she could hear the same voices more faintly, speaking in lower tones to each other. She started to get up, but Dale's hand touched her arm.

"Let me first," he muttered, out of breath. She felt him shifting around to get his legs under himself, and then he was standing over her, blocking out even more light. He stood still, and she imagined she could see him inclining his head to the side, listening for the voices she claimed to have heard, or any other telltale signs from the building. After a few seconds, he seemed satisfied and turned partially back to her, extended a hand. "Come on up," he said, not an order but a suggestion.

Glenda took his hand and allowed herself to be lifted to her feet, which he seemed to be able to do without expending any extra effort. She looked around at the lobby, noting how everything had shifted subtly to the left, the heavy chairs rucking up the rugs into uneasy waves, the lines of the walls not quite matching up the way they should. It made her feel a slight swell of vertigo.

"Stay here," Dale was saying as he moved away from her, stepping around the edge of the counter and out into the new territory that the lobby had worked itself into. She was relieved that he didn't see the way her hand was still reaching out for his. He had unclipped his flashlight from his belt and held it up alongside his face, paralleling his eyes as he looked around.

Now that he was separated from her, she realized how much his nearby breathing had covered the ambient sounds of the hotel. The voices from upstairs were much clearer now; a male voice asked questions, a much farther away female voice answered. Were they a couple, trying to find their way back to each other in the dark? At least their conversation seemed to have some kind of positive effect... the woman had stopped screaming, and they were now having an almost rational conversation. It was just one more layer of strangeness to lay on top of this world that she thought she had known, up until mere moments ago.

As she Watched Dale picking his way across the bunched rugs and warped floorboards on his way to the stairs, Glenda found herself yearning to occupy her usual spot behind the desk. Somehow, her mind was half-convinced that if she were to stand in that familiar spot, all the curved and crooked lines would suddenly snap back into true, as if it were only her current perspective that was off. But she found her way barred by the shattered TV screen, shards of plastic crunching under her sneakers before she even got within a few steps of where it had fallen.

Dale was panning his flashlight around as he approached the bottom of the stairs, and Glenda could tell by the way it was zipping from spot to spot that he was on full alert, instinctively checking out every odd corner or unexpected reflection of his light. She wanted to go with him, to steady his arm with her own, to explore this new country together. But for now she stayed where she was.

As he began to ascend, and as it became clearer that the ceiling wasn't going to finish its collapse any time soon, Glenda turned her eyes toward the wide, high windows at the front of the building. There was still a lot of light coming in; it just was a paltry amount compared to how much there usually was. On bright days, with the sun gleaming off the snow, you could almost feel like you really were outside. There were certain parts of the ski season when she would actually put sunblock and lightly-tinted sunglasses on before reporting to work, knowing that she would be receiving so much second-hand glare.

Tonight, there was only a dim outline of the terrain downhill from the Lodge. Around the edges of the view, it looked like the ground had risen a noticeable amount. She knew that this was surely the new snow that had cascaded around and over the Lodge like a wave. Or more like a fist; it had managed to twist the entire structure a little toward the downhill side. How much longer could the building hold up against the continuous pressure of all that whiteness?

As if in answer, a block of snow the size of a charter bus suddenly came straight down off the roof, falling in front of the doors and tall plate-glass windows with a surprisingly dim whump, blocking them to almost half their height. Glenda managed to demote her startled scream to a grunt before it escaped her throat.

Dale, halfway up the stairs, had turned to her in an instant and was shining the flashlight first at the obscured windows, then to her face. She squinted as she turned away from the front of the building. "Sorry," she said, her shoulders shuddering.

From behind the glare, she could feel Dale assessing her, making sure she was okay. Finally he said, "I'm going to check the second floor. See if anyone needs help. Stay there, okay?"

Glenda nodded, and the light swung away. She wished he would have waited a second before continuing, so her eyes could have adjusted back to the gloom and she could have seen his face again before he finished his ascent, but he didn't. He was up and over the top step before she could even make out his shape in the dark.

Then she was alone. She looked behind her, at the doorway he had shoved her into as it had happened. She realized that, even though the lights had gone out -- which had probably meant the phone lines as well -- there was still a way for her to contact the outside world. Without taking time to consider whether it was a good idea, she turned from her post and headed into the back offices.

The hallway was almost entirely dark, and within a few steps she was forced to work off of memory, finding it overlaid with an indefinable, vague sense of place. Was she seeing faint outlines of things, or was she somehow echolocating with her own terrified breathing? Whatever the reason, she was able to avoid a decorative wooden pilaster that had come loose from the wall and now cut a diagonal across the space she had to walk through. She ducked under it and made her way to the very end of the hall. She stepped to the left, through a door she had never entered without being summoned from the other side.

She couldn't quite make out the black stenciled letters on the door's pane, but she knew perfectly well what they said -- James Gough, Executive Lodge Director -- and imagined she could feel the sign watching her as she inched past it. Inside the office, things weren't in terrible disarray; Jim ran an unusually tidy office, every scrap of paper in a binder or file drawer, every picture framed and double-tacked to the wall, so that even the shaking they had endured couldn't dislodge them. In fact, it looked like the only items in the room that had moved were the loose ones on his desk: a pair of small picture frames, now tipped on their faces, a pencil holder, and the antiquated Rolodex that he insisted on continuing to use.

Per Lodge policy, there was exactly one wireless point of contact with the outside world, although in emergencies there always were select house phones that could still access the underground lines that ran to the town below. Wireless would do no good anyway, reception being virtually non-existent this far from town. But Mr. Gough prided himself on the whole "unplugging" aspect of their circumstances, and actually advertised it in a way that guests seemed to appreciate. Or, they at least tolerated it when they were asked to leave their phones at the guardhouse at the bottom of the mountain.

With the landlines dead, however, there was only one way for the Lodge to communicate with the outside world, and she was currently in the same room as it. Despite the sense of order, there was still a sense of wrongness about the room, and she couldn't tell if it was because of the dim light filtering through the snow-covered windows (which she could tell were littered with cracks, although they seemed to be holding together), or the fact that she was alone in a place she'd never been alone in before. In any event, she knew what she had to do next.

She moved over to the credenza that had been backed up under the windows on the far side of the office, and knelt down cautiously on the floor next to it. She felt the cold air spilling down from the windows and shivered for the first time that night. She reached for the little knobs that would open the accordion doors that lined the front of the credenza, and pulled.

They didn't open. She tugged, harder, but they still wouldn't budge. She could tell from the way the doors wobbled that whatever mechanism was keeping them shut wasn't particularly robust, but it was doing its job nonetheless. She sat back on her haunches, wondering if she should wait for Dale to come back so they could break it open together. She hovered there for a moment, worrying, staring at the knobs that were so tiny but stood in her way of reporting this emergency.

She stood, took the two steps to Jim's desk, and looked for the most valuable thing she could find. She decided on the crystal Customer Service Award they had won from the Greater Rockies Tourism Board three years previously, just before she had come to work here. It had barely moved from its usual spot on Jim's desk, where its heft had sat in full view of anyone sitting before him. She hoisted the award from its spot and walked back to the credenza, feeling its weight swinging at the end of her arm.

She crouched back down, raised the award as high as she could, and brought it down toward the smug little knobs that were holding the doors shut. She missed them, but when the award hit the of the door instead, she heard what she hoped was a significant crack from inside. The second blow came down straighter, breaking off one of the little ceramic knobs and a sizeable chunk of the door too. Its splintered edges crackled, and the doors swung partly open.

Glenda tossed aside the award now that it had done its job. The adrenaline burning through her arm caused it to fly farther than she expected, cracking against something on the wall. The sound was unexpected, so she threw a look that way, and noted that she had hit the corner of a picture frame she'd only tagentially noticed when she was in the office before. Of course she hadn't checked it closely; on the rare occasions she had been in the office, she'd been looking at her boss, not behind herself.

In the dim light that managed to sneak in through the disaster outside, she could see that the picture was clearly too large to be just a generic piece of art on an office wall. It was a painting of a woman -- Glenda immediately thought of as ancient Roman -- wearing what appeared to be a toga, and had a crown of tiny white flowers woven through her blonde hair. She was walking forward, toward the window of the frame with a mysterious smile on her face. Her robes were blowing as if there were a wind, and she seemed to be stepping through an ivy-covered stone doorway. There was a familiar squiggle down in the corner of the canvas, and it wasn't until later that she would realize that it also graced the opposing corner of her paycheck every other week. She frowned at it, then turned back to the task at hand.

Taking care not to spear her hand on the fractured wooden edge, she peeled away the folding doors on the credenza's front. She could just barely see the block of electronics sitting on the tallest shelf, antiquated but built like a tiny tank. She was counting on that resilience now. There was a small white box on the shelf as well, partially in front of the equipment. She hastily shoved it aside and, surprised by its lightness, didn't think about it again after it fell on the floor and bounced away.

She reached for the tall broadcast microphone on its satisfyingly solid stand, and slid the thumb of her other hand across the front of the thing for the power button. What she found was an honest-to-goodness switch, a miniature metal rod with a tiny ball on the end. She gave it an upward shove, and it flipped to the ON position with a satisfying click.

Nothing happened. No lights flicked on, no needles swung up into green arcs, no satisfying hum found her in the overwhelming stillness. She flipped the power switch a few more times, more for the feeling that she was physically doing something more than of an expectation that something different would occur. She toggled it faster, faster, back and forth, until she was yelling obscenities at it each time it flipped between the only two states it could occupy.

Finally she threw the microphone at the box it was supposed to communicate with and slumped back against the side of Jim's desk. There were so many things that could have gone wrong between that switch and the speaker that someone at the ranger station could listen to, but for the moment she was choosing to blame Jim for whatever disrepair he had let it fall into. She thumped the back of her head against the side of the desk, the shocking sound of bone on wood temporarily allaying the pain the action caused her.

She wanted to be with her kids. They were sleeping in the world out there somewhere, with no idea that their mother was trapped high up in a snow cave that used to be the place she worked. She wanted Dale to get to know them. She wanted him to come back from taking care of others, put her arms around her, and reassuringly kiss her. Deeply, for a long time...

She shook her head, stopped thumping it against the desk again. This wasn't the time. She stood up, wiped her hot, frustrated eyes with the heels of her hands, flipped off the woman smiling at her from the sunny, warm depths of the painting, and went back to the front desk.

The trip was easier this time, since she had traversed the short hallway once before. There was a rhytmic bumping going on somewhere else the building, the sound of Dale helping others, certainly. And why not? It was what he did. She gingerly stepped around the shattered hulk of the flatscreen that had almost decapitated her, and tried to stand as close to her usual spot behind the desk as she could.

She looked over at the front doors, sighing. There was easily ten feet of snow blocking them, and of course they usually swung outward. It would likely take the strength of a plow to get them to budge at all. She let herself stand there a little longer, attempting to will everything back to the way it was. Gradually, she became aware of a tapping sound, one that wasn't as far away as Dale breaking down doors, but something nearby, soft.

She looked down at the row of walkie-talkies velcroed to the underside of the desk's overhang. They weren't any good for contacting the outside world; it was a strictly closed-circuit arrangement, and during the work day most employees would have them as they moved around the premises. Now they were all hung up here, save for the one that Dale had on him... and the one the security guard had handed to Harmon when he left.

One of the walkies on the bank before her was clicking, slowly, methodically. At first, she thought it was a random representation of discharges, a sputtering of static. Of course, she had been trained to listen for the tell-tale SOS code: Three dots, three dashes, three dots. Pause. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. This wasn't what she was hearing, though. There didn't seem to be a pattern, but it seemed rhythmic anyway.

Just as she was reaching for the walkie, a flicker of movement caught her eye. She turned her eyes up to the main staircase, and her heart leapt into her throat as she saw a white shape gliding down it, spectral in the blue-filtered snow light.

-3.4-

Manoj tried to focus on the receding white of Kelly's bathrobe as he plodded down the hall. Unlike her, he hadn't managed to keep his slippers on through their second bedroom encounter, and now was falling behind rapidly as she made her way down the hall. It didn't occur to him that his feet might need some kind of protection until he started to feel odd risings and fallings of the thin carpet under his feet. The perturbations grew worse the farther he moved down the hall, and eventually he stopped, watching Kelly turn from a patch of lighter darkness into a vague silhouette against the bobbing light that led the way even farther ahead, then to nothing.

He picked his way along tentatively after that, wondering if he should turn back to find his own slippers. He couldn't quite remember where they had fallen off, but if they hadn't been sheltered on Kelly's side of the bed, they were surely buried under feet of snow now. He pressed on.

Had the hallway been so narrow before? Manoj had never enjoyed being in enclosed spaces, which was ironic for a game programmer. He had worked in the spatial equivalents of janitor's closets before, and hadn't minded. Then, he was often in a flow state, the code seeming to drip like oil from his fingertips without his consciously thinking about it, the closeness of the walls didn't seem to matter. At those moments, his mind was effectively inside the computer, sharing its thoughts and weaving them into shape.

Here, however, there was nothing to occupy his mind but awareness of the space around him. The uncertainty of whether it had subtly changed or not began to pick at his brain, and he found himself thinking he was going to bump into first one wall on his left, then the other on his right, even though he knew at least one of those impressions had to be wrong.

Finally, light once again began to grow ahead of him, and a sense of his surroundings started to come back. There was a thumping sound coming from far ahead, but he couldn't figure out what it was. Was it someone trying call for help, pounding on the walls to alert someone else they were trapped?

His heart leaped in his chest when the wall to his left suddenly fell away, and a sudden sense of vertigo grabbed him. He had been instantly transported high in the air, a deep void opening up right next to him. Before he could lose his balance, he realized that what he was looking at was actually familiar; he was at the top of the lodge's main staircase, looking down over a shadow-representation of the room he and Kelly had first entered on their arrival to the Lodge. He gripped the bannister at the top of the stairs, and tried to relax.

Down below, there was something clicking, a messy, staticky sound. It took his mind a moment to realize that it was pulsing in a measured rhythm, a gridwork of information. His mind locked onto it, and he sighed when he felt that sense of familiarity. Something in this tilted, dark madness had suddenly become a known quantity, and its sense of comfort it gave him seemed all out of reasonable proportion.

He recognized the code before he had descended three steps toward level ground. It was coming from somewhere near the front desk, which looked worse than most other places he had seen in the lodge so far. A mess of long wires hung down from above it, and broken plastic was scattered everywhere. The pounding from above had stopped, after it had briefly devolved into a short series of crunching sounds, and Manoj began to make out some of the letters he was hearing, for that was what they were. R. I. E. D., the flashes of static spelled out in Morse code. A pause, then a lone W preceded another pause. O. F. Pause. S. E. R. V.

A form glided out from a dark doorway beyond the desk, almost making Manoj jump out of his skin. It was a woman, walking slowly, steadily, right up to the remains of the desk. He found he recognized her. She was the woman who had checked them in when they arrived that afternoon. Or at least, it was an anti-world version of her; she appeared ghostly in the diffused light thatbarly came in through the grayed-out front windows of the lobby. The woman and he were now facing each other in circumstances that couldn't have been more different than their previous encounter, even though it was occurring in the same place.

She took no notice of him, however. She was looking at the desk itself, as if that were the clicking sound's origin. The closer he got, he realized that it really was. But he couldn't make sense of that; the Lodge's power had clearly gone out, and the desk itself looked pretty well broken. What could be making that sound?

The woman suddenly looked up at Manoj and rocked back a little, noticing him for the first time. He paused in his descent, lifting up his palms, not wanting to scare her further. For a long moment they regarded each other, the clicks punctuating the air, acclimating to the other's presence.

"Service road," Manoj finally said, barely above a whisper.

"What?" the woman asked. He couldn't read her expression in the dim light.

"It's spelling out 'service road'."

"You can tell what he's saying?"

"Sure. It's Morse code. My friends and I used to send secret messages to each other that way in class, using the Caps Lock lights on our keyboards."

"What?"

"Not important," Manoj said. "Who is that?"

"I think it's Harmon," Glenda replied, ripping a walkie-talkie -- clearly the source of the sputtering sound -- off its Velcro perch behind the lip of the counter. She stretched out her arm toward Manoj, who was now standing on the bottommost stair. "Can you tell me what else he's saying?"

Manoj moved forward cautiously. He had missed a few letters while they had been talking. "Um... " He listened again, realized he was coming around to the beginning of text loop he had already heard. "Buried!" he barked, excited at this fact, and then quieted down when he realized the content was conveying something dire. "West of the service road, is what he's saying. He says he's been buried." His gaze drifted to the front windows of the lobby, belatedly realizing that the darkness keeping most of the light out was the same powdery thickness that had invaded his hotel room.

The desk attendant's free hand rose to her mouth instinctively, not quite blocking the gasp from escaping her mouth. "Oh, God," she moaned from behind it once it was in place. "We've got to get him out!" Then her eyes turned toward the front of the building as well, and he imagined he could see her face paling as she realized the magnitude of what she was saying.

Manoj didn't feel he had anything to add to her revelation, so he kept listening to the clicking code, to see if the message changed, or was being augmented in any way. It wasn't, just the same repeating phrase, benign until you thought about it... "Buried w of serv road."

"Is he an employee?" was all he could think of to ask.

The desk attendant's wide, horrified eyes swiveled back to him. "No," she said as if her mouth were numb from cold already, "sort of a permanent resident. I've got to get Dale." Still holding the walkie-talkie out in front of her, she began to walk around the end of the desk. Manoj had since crossed about half the distance from the bottom of the stairs to the desk, and as she passed, the attendant pressed the rattling object into his hand. "Excuse me," she said.

Without actually looking at him, she passed by and headed up the first few steps of the creaky wooden staircase. The sound unnerved Manoj; he remembered how solid it had felt when he walked up it earlier in the day, as if it had been carved whole from the trunk of one titanic tree. Now he wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't collapse under her.

"Dale?" the woman was calling up the stairs. The sound seemed sacrilegiously loud in the hushed space, and didn't echo as much as it seemed like it should have. She waited only a few seconds before calling again: "Dale!!"

For just a moment, Manoj felt like he should turn down the walkie's volume so she didn't miss whatever response might come, but then realized that there was likely a dying human being trying to communicate on the other end, and stayed his hand. A man's voice came floating down the hall, far away but deep and strong. "Kind of got a situation here, Glenda! Hang on."

"Harmon's calling in!" she belted, as if volume could convey importance in this situation. "He's in trouble!"

Another few seconds, and the voice repeated, considerably more strained, "Hang on, honey... I'll be there in a minute!"

Glenda, whose name Manoj now knew, actually stepped backward as if she had been slapped by this response, her heel almost faltering as she forgot she was on the stairs. When she turned around toward Manoj and started back down, she had the strangest look on her face, a combination of a smile and utter puzzlement. It was one that Manoj had seen before. It was the look of a gamer who has solved a tricky onscreen puzzle, but wasn't entirely sure how they had done it.

She came back down the stairs slowly, mildly stunned, and then started heading back to the check-in desk. Then she changed direction and started moving toward the front doors, picking up speed as she went. Manoj had no idea what she had in mind, but found his feet following her. She pushed on the inner pair of front doors, and almost walked right into them when they didn't give with the same ease that she was used to. She pushed harder, even leaned her shoulder against the heavy-polished grain, but they wouldn't give. Manoj was relieved; he hadn't had to time to think about what he would have done if she had gotten through, and then had tried to break through the outer doors, which were currently managing to hold back the metric tons of snow piled against them.

He reached her as Glenda began pounding on the door, growls of frustration coming from deep within her throat. He was just about to step forward, to warn her about the tension the glass must be under if the inner door were twisted enough to be unopenable, but then she hit the frame with just a little more force than it could handle, and the huge panel in the center of it shattered. Glenda's frustrated growls turned to a yelp as bits of shattered glass fell down around her feet. Manoj jumped back at least three feet, thinking of the bare state of his own feet.

Once she had let out that one surprised bark, Glenda turned from the door and stumbled toward the long, plush couch against the wall opposite the lobby desk. She threw herself down on it, hammered one fist against the cushion next to her head, then buried her face and lay still.

Manoj stood there, not knowing what to do, and looked up the stairs to the second floor, willing someone to come help. There were at least two people up there who were better equipped than he to deal with the situation: Kelly and that Dale person, whoever he was.

The only thing he felt adequately able to deal with was the Morse code still snapping away in his hand. The walkie hadn't stopped sending its message, but Manoj knew something about it that no one else listening would. It was too subtle to be noticed yet, but his own expertise made it plain to his ear.

The clicks were starting to slow down.

-3.5-

The pain was incredible. Harmon felt like everything was broken. He believed his head had come to rest a little higher than his legs, which was a good thing, survival-wise, but other than that he couldn't tell much. The cold had already crept into his legs enough that he only had the vaguest sense that they were still attached to him.

His arms seemed to be spread out away from his body, which was bad in terms of keeping warm. He felt as if he had been suspended in the snow enveloping him, hung like a forgotten marionette somewhere between hard ground and breathable air. How far he was from either, he couldn't tell.

Despite the general ache and the audible grating of joints, he began trying to move. Except for his left leg. That one, he knew, was toast. Even thinking about trying to move it hurt. Not as badly as the ankle itself had when it snapped, but then again he had no idea how long he had been lying in the snow, stunned and losing body heat, before he had come fully back into consciousness. He tried moving his right leg experimentally, without much success. His left arm could hardly move. But the right...

It took a good thirty seconds of experimental movements before began to entertain the possibility that his right hand might actually be above the snow. It could move about freely, and sometimes a flex of its muscles would cause a slight trickle of snow to slide up his sleeve. He thought that meant he was scooping up snow that was loose enough to be scooped, which wouldn't have happened if he were deeply buried.

And then there was the matter of breathing, and the fact that it was actually happening. Ten feet down and packed in snow, you're not going to find any more breathable oxygen after a few seconds. But he seemed to be doing okay. There was no noticeable pressure when he tried to expand his lungs. That was a good sign of shallow burial, too. After putting the inevitable off for a little longer, he knew he had to try turning his head. Of course, this was the riskiest proposition of all. He might make matters much worse, snapping an already strained spine, or causing a small cascade that could fill his nose and mouth. But the alternative to action was to continue just as he was now, slowly losing more heat every second.

Harmon slowly rotated his neck, and a faint, pale light pounded against one closed eyelid. He let out something between a horrified shriek and a triumphant laugh, because in his precarious situation, light meant life. He tried every few seconds to fully open that eye, and the prospect became less and less preposterous each time. Eventually, he was able to blink enough melting particles out of his lashes to form a more coherent picture of where he was.

He was lying on the floor of a miniature cathedral where all the overhead arches and buttresses were formed by branches: thick, knobby, evergreen branches. They stretched in every direction he could manage to rotate his vision, the packed bristles acting like webbing to hold back the crushing force of snow that he could beyond them. And now that he was partially oriented, he could see that a tree trunk was nearby, lying roughly parallel alongside him.

The irony of his being saved by a tree falling on top of him was not lost, even less so due to the way he had obtained his titanium spine pins (which, by the way, had mostly stopped making their vibratory presence known, although whether that was because the rest of his body was in comparatively more excruciating pain was yet to be seen). However, he now had a slightly more serious problem. In addition to his surely broken ankle, he still had a blanket of snow between him and the world above, one that was deep enough to bury half the width of a full-grown pine. The breathing room was good in the short term, not good in the long.

Just as Harmon began to wonder how talented Dale was at wielding a shovel, he remembered his last interchange with the burly security guard. Dale had thrust a walkie-talkie at Harmon, which he had dutifully tucked into the front inside pocket of the coat he was still wearing. He could feel the device lying there now, and from the lack of plastic splinters stinging his ribs, he judged it was likely still intact. Getting to it would be a bit of a problem given his prone position, but he'd do his best.

Unfortunately, every movement sent pain shooting through all his limbs. His torso seemed to be the most intact thing about him, and he vaguely wondered if it were the metallic reinforcements that had kept it that way. As he pulled his hand out from its glove and started attempting to snake it under himself to get the walkie, he had time to look up at the dim beauty of the tree surrounding him.

The way the overarching branches were bent under the weight of the snow lying on top of them, they managed to interlock tightly enough to not let the snow come through in more than powdery trickles. It was a custom-made air pocket that wasn't really as large as he had estimated originally. His breath would run out in an hour, maybe a little less. He had to get word back to the Lodge that he was out here... but how to tell them where to look? For all he knew, the avalanche had toppled whole square miles of trees; although enough moonlight was filtering through for him to see -- barely -- he would just have to hope that his tree was close enough to the surface to be found.

His hand managed to produce the walkie, which was a step in the right direction. The bad news was that it wasn't entirely undamaged; the plastic housing around the microphone hole was punched in, and he had no way of knowing whether it would work. He tried it a few times anyway, speaking in as calm a voice as he could that he needed help. But something about the sound of his own voice, sounding so desperate and cracked and closed in by surrounding branches and snow, made him feel closer to panic than anything that had happened up until that point. He decided it would be better to shut up.

Instead, he would use clicks, tapping the activation button in Morse code. He already knew that a good old S.O.S. wasn't going to cut it, so he was going to have to dig deep to remember more letters and give more usable information. He thought about it for a while (tapping out "SOS" to get his rhythm set before while he worked it out), and eventually settled on "buried w of serv rd". He realized that Dale or Glenda were the only people who might understand the message, since they were the only people who knew he had left the Lodge. But they'd be the most likely to hear it, anyway.

He tapped and tapped and tapped, giving a few seconds' pause between each repetition of the message. For a long time, it was only him and the hushed silence, and the tensing of his hand as he clicked, over and over again. After a while, he stopped expecting anyone to respond. He tried to imagine that he was a rabbit, safe in his underground warren, that this was the place he actually wanted to be. He didn't fully believe it, even after what seemed like hours of repetitive tapping, but it helped.

Just as he was starting to consider stopping his message, that it was pointless and he should save even the small amount of energy his task sapped from him, the walkie started speaking back.

-3.6-

Carlos wished he could get to the sinks. Then he would have been able to wet some towels and clean up some of the mess that Benny had been turned into, but the basins had been the first things ripped apart by the snow's violent invasion of the kitchen.

The first thing Carlos had done when the lights went out was to leave Benny momentarily, run to the pair of large refrigerators, and throw open both doors. The surreal scene was now side-lit, thanks to the self-contained batteries that the fridges both held in case of such power outages, although Carlos had never envisioned one happening like this. Now he looked down at all he could stand to witness of Benny.

The older man's head, still covered by the apron which had flipped up over it in the deluge, was clearly bleeding profusely underneath. The fabric was entirely soaked through with the impossibly red stuff, and orderly scarlet lines were radiating away from his head along the grout patterns in the floor, spreading like an obscene geometric nimbus. Priority one, Carlos had to do something to stop that. One of his strong suits as a sous chef was his ability to quantify tasks and arrange them like blocks in his head, maximizing time, minimizing effort. Right now, he thought, there were three things he needed for his friend: pressure on the wound, cold to slow the bleeding, and clean materials for sterilization.

Carlos closed his eyes and allowed himself one slow breath. Then he pressed his hand to the spot on the apron that seemed to be diretly over the source of the bleeding (and telling himself that the sickening *give* he felt in Benny's skull underneath was just his imagination) while he scanned his surroundings. That ticked "pressure" off his mental list, but to obtain the other two objectives he was going to have to give it up, at least momentarily. He found that he was still talking to Benny under his breath without even thinking as he looked around -- "Hang in there, buddy. Gonna clean this up, get you somewhere safe..." -- and was surprised at how rational and sane his words sounded.

Cold was next on the list. They suddenly had that item in spades here in the kitchen. The melting effect that the relatively warm tile floor had on the fringes of the snow pile was slowly revealing bits of glass, wood, shattered tile, and who knew what else embedded in it. Carlos looked for the most pristine area he could see, and gathered a big scoop of it in his free hand. He gently pressed it against the most blood-sodden spot on the apron. The cold sent slow needles into his palm, but he grimaced and kept pressing. The snow didn't melt immediately, but it was clear that it wasn't going to last long. He packed on a few subsequent handfuls, watching as each gathered lump turned into a small mound of dark pink slush. It would have to do until he thought of something better.

Carlos spun around, realized that he did have a source of clean water after all. The stock pot he had been prepping was still sitting on the burner, which had not yet gone out, since it was a gas stove. Underneath his subconsciously-spoken words, he could still hear it boiling away. The only thing he had managed to throw into it so far was the mirepoix. Since he had thoroughly cleaned the onions, celery, and carrots before adding them, he figured the water was the most sterile thing in the kitchen. He took a moment to mentally focus on what he needed to do, as not to leave Benny unattended for any longer than he had to, and jumped to his feet.

He imagined that as the pressure of his hand came off his friend's head, the fallen man let out a little groan, which gave Carlos's feet further impetus to hurry. He dashed across the kitchen -- making sure to keep his body's weight directly over his feet, balancing on the slick blood and water on the floor, the volume of which was increasing every second -- and grabbed first for the pile of fresh towels at the end of the counter. He swept up as many as he could in the crook of his arm, then reached for the oversize stock pot. Taking it by its silicone-wrapped handles, he slid it off the blue gas flame. He staggered a little under its weight and the added awkwardness of a cocked arm full of towels, but managed to stay upright. He didn't think until afterward that it was fortunate that the water didn't splash and douse the flame, because with the power out he wouldn't be able to spark it into life again. He stumbled toward the snow bank.

He picked a level spot and lowered the pot into it, trying to keep it from spilling. He twisted the handles back and forth like a steering wheel, letting the pot's own heat and weight sink it down into the snow bank. Hopefully, that would cool it significantly faster than just setting it on the floor. Carlos paused just a second, to take a deep breath of the aromatics coming from the pot, an oasis of familiarity in this bizarre situation he suddenly found himself in, and took the towels out from under his arm. One by one, he started to dunk them in the water, making sure that there was enough of the corners hanging over the edge to not let them get pulled into the pot entirely as they soaked up the still-boiling water. Carlos immersed about half of the towels this way, then turned back to Benny, still holding the rest.

This was going to be the hard part. He was going to have to pull away the apron and see what was underneath. The snow he had packed onto his friend's head was all but melted away, and Carlos grimaced, realizing that as it melted and soaked into the apron covering his face, he may have been slowly drowning his friend. This, more than anything else, gave him enough strength to pull away the sodden, clinging fabric.

At first all he saw underneath was blood, but after his mind began to quell its own panic, he saw that there really was still a face underneath. Benny's countenance lay still, almost placid, the most disconcerting part being that his eyes were half-open and totally glazed over red, filled with blood. The melting snow had run up and back into Benny's hair, pulling his too-long graying bangs away from his forehead, and it was there that the actual wound began. Carlos had no idea how far up over his scalp it went, but it was pretty far, and it was still visible pulsing fresh blood in weak spurts.

Carlos steeled himself again, reminding himself of two things he knew: that head wounds always bleed a lot, looking worse than they really are; and that blood mixed with a lot of water looks like a lot of blood. It seemed there was no other fluid in sight here, but Carlos had to reassure himself with these facts so he wouldn't worry that Benny was already bleeding out.

Carlos set the remaining stack of towels down on the floor, sacrificing the bottom one to soak up dirty water and blood so the others could stay dry. Taking one of the upper towels, he wrapped up a couple handfuls of clean-ish snow in it, then pressed the impromptu icepack onto the bleeding stripe atop Benny's head. He put as much weight on it as he dared, and then reached back to the stock pot, which was now only simmering a bit thanks to the snowbank it had been placed in. He grabbed the corner of one of the towels hanging over the rim and pulled it out of the water, watching it steam as he lifted it into the air.

Carlos adjusted his grip on it, then furiously swung it around and around over his head, as if he were preparing to throw it like a lasso. Beads of boiling water flew across the kitchen in a circle, both wringing out and cooling the towel at the same time. When he thought it was safe, Carlos brought it down and pressed it against his own face. It was still hot, but with a soothing kind of heat, like the warm towel he had been offered on the flight out to take this job.

He looked down, and realized already that the towel on Benny's head would already need changing. That was fine; he had a small stack at the ready. He was going to keep one hand on the cold towel on the wound, and use the warm towels to first clean Benny's face, then the wound itself once the bleeding had slowed.

His list of tasks continued to unspool before him. He knew that, at some point, obvious courses of action would run out. He was too terrified to think beyond that point, but for now he was focused, his mind clear.

-4.1-

The man trying to break down the door had scared them both. Even after they had heard him moving away down the hall, saying that he was going to get help, neither of them spoke or moved for a long time. It was finally Kerren's voice from under the bed, sounding both amazed and disturbingly distracted: "Was he asking about someone named Theda?"

It was the tone of her voice that made Sheryl finally, after all that had happened, begin to panic. For the first time Sheryl was quite aware that her wife was probably going into shock, losing a lot of blood somewhere underneath the bed. She couldn't just wait for the cavalry to come breaking through the door. She was going to have to rescue Kerren herself.

She steeled her nerves and pressed forward, knowing that no avoided injury would make her feel better if greater harm came to her wife because of her inaction. "Kerren," she called, wanting to keep hearing her more than having anything to say, "keep talking so I can follow your voice... How are you doing down there? I know you hurt your leg..."

"It's not so bad, now that I've gotten used to it," Kerren said, her voice regaining not an ounce of vitality. It almost sounded to Sheryl like those times when she would mumble in her sleep, only slightly more articulate. "I should have told that guy it's okay. That the stones are going to be okay."

Sheryl was so intent on finding her way over the edge of the bed that she wasn't paying attention to the content of Kerren's words. That distant tone was just damn unnerving...

"Ow, ow ow ow!" Kerren suddenly said from beneath her. "Not so tight!" she said, her voice that of the petulant child she sometimes claimed she used to be. Sheryl realized what was happening, almost immediately. In her progress toward the edge of the bed that Kerren had slid over, she was putting more of her weight on the covers that Kerren was wrapped up in. In doing this, she must have been tightening the fabric, making it close on Kerren's surely-broken leg.

Sheryl backed up, sputtering, "Sorry, sorry sorry. I'm just trying to get to you, honey." Kerren's pained cries tapered off into a low moan, and Sheryl suddenly realized there was another, safer way to get down there. She backed up as far as she could, returning to her side of the bed, and lowered one foot down tentatively. Long before it should have touched the floor, her foot dipped into a stabbing cold pile of snow. She winced, yanked it back up, then took a deep, preparatory breath and plunged in again.

She spent the next fifteen seconds sliding her leg back and forth along the frame of the bed, trying to figure out where the snow was the shallowest. It appeared to have piled up highest near the foot when it came blasting in through the patio doors, which explained why the that end of the bed had skewed the most, and become jammed against the convex corner of the wall. She scooted up as far toward the headboard as she could, and then backed off the bed with both feet, wincing as she still sank ankle-deep into snow.

It felt totally incongruous to have her feet touch down on polished hard wood under three inches of powdery snow, but that thought was soon superseded by the numbing cold that pressed in on them like needles. Sheryl didn't take the time to think about how painful it was, decided to only take notice of it. It's just sensory data, she kept telling herself as she bent down to kneel in the snow. Just nerve impulses reporting something that doesn't matter right now. Just get done what you need to.

She bent down and began scraping away snow from her side of the bed, trying to make enough room underneath the bed so that she could crawl under and get to Kerren that way. By the time she had cleared enough that her knuckles were starting to scrape against the wooden floorboards, she could barely feel the cold at all.

A sudden thought made her yank her hand back. If this torrent of snow had blasted through the patio door on its way to their bed, where was all the glass? She didn't know if it had broken into millions of tiny safety cubes, or if there were huge jagged pieces waiting for her somewhere down there. Now she was afraid to even bring her heels down on the floor. She shook some of the near-freezing water off her hands and gingerly felt around behind her.

After a quick, light-fingered sweep revealed nothing, she realized she hadn't heard from Kerren ever since she had gotten down from the bed. Getting her head as close to the floor as possible, she tried to get her to respond. "Kerr?" she called, trying hard not to sound terrified. "How are you holding up down there?"

No reply came, and it made Sheryl's fingers, shaking from equal parts cold and fear, widen their search... until the back of one of her hands brushed against something hard. She yanked it back, then realized this might be the very thing she was looking for. She reached for the shape again, and this time her fingers touched something amazingly smooth and rounded among all the rough textures. The object spun a little, responding to her brief touch, and she realized that she had come across a sizeable chunk of the base of the ceramic lamp that had been on the nightstand.

She felt tenderly for the sharp edges that she knew it must have, and found them. When she determined what felt like the least harmful place to take hold, she picked it up. It wasn't exactly in the shape of a blade, but it would work for what she had in mind. The next part was steeling herself to lie flat against the floor and shimmying under the bed.

"Kerren? Honey? I'm coming to get you. Hold on." She had realized mid-thought that she didn't want to ask a direct question, because if there were no answer she would be wondering if it were by Kerren's choice, or because she couldn't anymore. So Sheryl issued her pair of declarative, proactive statements and dropped onto her stomach.

What was left of the snow on the floor immediately melted under the body heat she had suspected she no longer possessed, and it actually seemed to aid her slide underneath the heavy wooden boards of the bed frame. She was so cold, and working her way inch by inch across to where Kerren was lying encased in a cotton cocoon, unable to move... the thought of how similarly claustrophobic their situations were getting made Sheryl's throat clench in fear, but she choked down the imaginary blockage and continued.

Her non-weapon-wielding hand found the taut pouch of blanket that held her wife. She had hoped to get a reaction from Kerren when she touched it, but aside from the weight and warmth she could feel through it, there was no response. Sheryl tried to work as quickly as she could in the confined space. She slid alongside the bundle, as closely as possible, and then used both hands to guide the sharpest edge of the broken lamp along the slats on the underside of the bed. She wanted to cut through the blanket and sheet as far from the ground as she could, taking the least risk in cutting Kerren as she set her free.

She began working the lamp piece back and forth, hoping she was making some progress. At first, it didn't seem like she was, and the longer she slashed at it, the more convinced she became that this was a mistake. Either the improvised blade wasn't sharp enough, or it was going to punch through and lacerate Kerren's arms, which for all Sheryl knew were raised up over her head, right on the other side of the cloth Sheryl was trying to cut. If Kerren were unconscious, Sheryl might cut halfway through her wife's arm before she even knew what she was doing.

But she had to get her out of there. The best thing to do now was to get Kerren out and then re-evaluate the situation. Nothing was going to improve as long as she was in there. Sheryl's arm, beginning to tire, kept dragging the sharpness across the blanket -- which had felt so comforting and warm when they were lying together underneath it -- and willed it to split.

In her desperation, the anger she felt at the material flew off in unexpected directions. She found herself hating the snow, the lamp piece, her own foolishness for choosing this godforsaken place to celebrate their anniversary, and even... Kerren. As much as Sheryl tried to push it aside, none of this would have happened if Kerren had kept her vow. Suddenly, she was faced with the inescapable facts she had been pushing aside all weekend. Kerren had lied to her, multiple times, with full intent of doing so, in order to sleep with someone else.

Was Sheryl foolish, she wondered, for staying? Maybe. There were friends that had told her yes, some that had told her no. That was the trouble with coming together as a couple from a vast pool of mutual friends; a split between them would have sent awkward ripples and backbiting all through their shared community. The fact that she didn't want to be the cause of such upheaval was initially the reason she hadn't packed and moved out the very day she found out. And that, after all else that had happened, was what troubled her the most. But what would leaving have proven? The same chaos would have resulted, she'd be just as alone, and she would be left with the thought that she had only left as an exercise in self-assertion. There would be an equal measure of regret either way.

Could she keep this up, though? To look into those green eyes and, from now on, pretend that she didn't wonder if Kerren was looking at her the same way she had looked at that other woman? After all this time, she didn't even know her real name. The texts were labeled only "ScarletHarlot" (a cartoony porn name if there ever was one). And she had only caught a glimpse of her that one time, the day after the conflagration of Sheryl's discovery of the evidence. She had waited while Kerren had met the woman in the neutral territory of a coffee shop, watching their break-up from afar, with less glee than she had hoped for. Kerren had always maintained that what Sheryl had seen really was their final communication, but Sheryl had never been entirely sure about that...

Somewhere, a seam began to rip. Sheryl's arm, growing more and more forceful the longer she thought about her wife's infidelity, was starting to find less taut resistance in the blanket, and Kerren's weight was starting to aid in pulling the torn fabric apart.

Sheryl threw aside the lamp shard and thrust her hands into the breach, working them in opposite directions, hearing the satisfying sound of frayed, strained material splitting. A wash of hot air that had been repeatedly breathed in and out hit her, instantly melting bits of snow that had lingered in her hair during the struggle. The upper half of Kerren's body slid out into Sheryl's arms, and suddenly the wetness on her face wasn't all melted snow. Sheryl cradled her wife as best she could and thanked whoever needed to be thanked that they were together again.

-4.2-

Bruce was heading for the bouncing light at the far end of the hall when he heard another scream. This one wasn't urgent, but more like a startled scream from the back of a darkened movie theater than a cry of real human pain. It happened almost in perfect synchronicity with a crackly thud, like something big and plastic falling from a height. Even at its apparent distance, it was the loudest sound since... well, whatever the hell it was that had happened to this building and all the souls inside it.

He moved along in a crouch now, compromising between the belly-crawl from before and the heedless sprinting run that he wanted to adopt, now that he had a clear goal in mind. He had to get help for Theda, as quickly as possible. The ice bucket had been forgotten, but its fractured parts still rattled in his grip, sounding as loose as the rest of the building felt. Now that he had grown used to it, he felt more sure of the way every angle was canted, every smooth surface churned and buckled away from the way it had intended to be. Corners, both convex and concave, had popped from mechanical stress, and were now full of thick, long splinters.

He kept his focus on the light. It was moving, playing around some far corner of the hall -- he wasn't sure if it was his own self-involvement or structural damage that made it impossible for him to recall the lodge's floor plan, and where the rest of it was in relation to his room -- and the pattern it swung around in told Bruce that it likely belonged to someone who was accustomed to using it professionally. In a hotel, that meant staff.

The beam seemed to narrow the closer he got to the corner, and he hoped that meant that the flashlight's wielder was headed in his direction. "Hey," he called, not wanting to pop out on anyone in this already heightened atmosphere.

The beam paused. "Are you the one who called for help?" a voice deeper than his own called back. "Who is it?"

Bruce nodded, then remembered he couldn't be seen by this person yet. "Bruce Casey," he replied, then winced when he remembered that he had signed in under another name. He heard a brief, quiet chuckle from around the corner, and then silence. It was no wonder; his real name often produced much the same reaction in the general populous as if he were to call out "Stephen King" or "Benjamin Franklin".

The deep voice replied, having full regained full composure, "Stay where you are, Mr. Casey. I'm in the process of making sure this corridor is secure before we try to extract anyone. Is it you that needs help?"

The man holding the flashlight came around the corner as he asked this. It was a sturdily built security guard, his wide shoulders and bald head conveying a sense of assuredness that Bruce hoped the man actually had.

Before Bruce could tell him about the trapped women, the man said, "Holy shit. You really are Bruce Casey." Bruce responded with an apologetic shrug. "Now, who's in trouble?"

Thankful that the recognition phase of their relationship had passed quickly, Bruce pointed back down the twisted hall. "There are women trapped in one of the rooms. I tried to open the door, but everything's tilted and I couldn't open it." He held up the cracked ice bucket, as if that explained anything about the situation.

"Which room?" the security man asked.

Bruce replied, "Back here. I... I didn't see the room number. It was too dark back there."

The security guard nodded, swung the flashlight past Bruce to illuminate the hall the writer had just come down. Bruce's breath caught when he saw the gauntlet he had unwittingly passed through. Beyond a certain point, fractured beams chaotically crisscrossed a space that could no longer be defined as a hallway. The only space that appeared even close to being unaffected was the area before the door with the broken doorknob. Past that was mostly destruction. Bruce couldn't figure out how he had crawled so far down the hallway without being stopped by wreckage.

"I managed to break the doorknob," Bruce indicated, pointing. The security guard played his flashlight across it, sizing it up, while Bruce continued to marvel at how he had come through the mess that his part of the hotel had turned into. Wouldn't he have noticed if--

"Stand back, please, Mr. Casey," the guard was saying, guiding him back toward the less-broken wing of the Lodge with an arm as thick as a tree limb. He played the light around the perimeter of the door, as if sizing it up, leaning down a little to peer into the mechanism, nakedly visible now that the knob was gone. "You say there are people in there?"

"Yes," Bruce said. "Women."

"Don't hear anyone," the security guard mused, although it didn't sound like he was doubtful, only stating a fact. He further stated, "I haven't knocked down one of these doors before... haven't had to. They're built pretty sturdy."

Bruce felt he should just let the man figure this out. He'd done all he could.

After a few moments of checking around the doorjamb, the security man stepped forward and rapped on it, as casually as if there were nothing wrong. "Excuse me?" he called into the room. "If you're near the door, you might want to stand back."

As the guard took two steps back and prepared to rush at the door, Bruce realized that he really had no idea what was on the other side. If the hall he had somehow managed to travel down was apparently impassable, how could he be sure there was anything at all beyond this particular door? There might be anything behind it, even a sheer thirty-foot drop to the mountain below--

"Wait!" Bruce said, but the guard was already in motion, rounding his shoulder and barreling at the hinge side of the door. He hit it hard, high on the outside, and the resounding thump and sharp crack changed the air pressure in the narrow hall like a double-barrel gunshot.

When the guard's body fell away from the door, it was clear what kind of damage had been done; the upper left corner of the door had bent inward, the hinge behind that section presumably having shot into the room like a rocket. The rest of the door had cracked down the middle, but other than that hadn't moved much. The guard went down on a knee, hunching over and grabbing his battering shoulder. Bruce ran over to him and put a hand on what was clearly now his good shoulder. "You all right, Mister...?"

"Dale," the guard said, not looking up. "I'll be fine, but I guess there are some things that just don't want to get broken, huh?"

Bruce chuckled a little, and looking up, saw that there was now a two-inch gap between the bent upper corner of the door and the jamb. He stepped up to it, went up on his tiptoes, and called in. "Sheryl? Are you still there?"

The voice that came back was forced but half-whispered, as if she were trying to yell, but also not trying to wake someone. "We're still here. We need a doctor, though."

"I know," Bruce called. "We're working on that. I think--" he tested the rest of the door by pushing on it with his slippered foot, and found that the crack down the middle allowed the wood to give considerably with just a little pressure. He indicated this to Dale by saying, "I think you did more damage than you thought."

"Hope so," came the pained voice. Dale took one long, deep breath as he knelt there, posed somewhat like Atlas, before slowly standing up again. He strode over to Bruce, who ceded his place at the door. Dale slid his fingers up into the gap near the bent top of the door, tensed his arms enough to make his muscles stretch the arms of his uniform, and pushed it in. With satisfying rips and pops, the top corner of the door split along the crease his shoulder had created, and tipped even further into the room beyond. "Anyone in there?" he called.

A woman's voice -- the one that wasn't Theda, Bruce noted with a pang -- called back, as if she had just noticed that the door was in the process of being broken down. "Yes! We're here! I can see some light!"

Dale took this moment to lift his booted foot and plant three hard kicks right in the center of the increasingly-splintered door, which completely gave way with the last. The two halves split as if they had been designed to be bat-wing doors to a saloon. The one not still connected to the frame by hinges fell to the floor with a loud clatter.

Dale immediately swung his flashlight into the dark space that had opened beyond. Bruce stepped up behind him to benefit from the angle of illumination. With the amount of glittering snow that had piled up in the room, it was almost as if another flashlight was being turned back upon them, but it was just a frigid refraction of the LED. All that was visible was the short hall leading into the sleeping area, a shape that might have once been a bed jammed into the mouth of the hallway, and an immense heap of snow beyond. Air rushed past them into the slightly warmer hallway, cold and forbidding.

"Where are you?" Dale asked, because there were no women to be seen.

"Under here!" not-Theda's voice came again. "My wife's hurt! Please help us!"

The tangle of sheet and blanket that hung over the leading edge of the sideways bed twitched and shifted.

"Dear Jesus," Dale breathed. His beam played across the broken flooring that filled the distance between the doorway and the bed. Boards had been pressed so hard they had sprung up out of place, exposing the cobwebby subflooring in multiple places.

"Hold this," Dale said, handing his flashlight to Bruce. "I think I can see a clear path across--"

The flashlight fell to the floor, Bruce's fingers refusing to take it. Instead, the writer jumped through the now-open doorway, like a racehorse bolting from the gate. The light turned away as the flashlight rolled on the floor, once again dropping the room beyond the door into utter blackness. The author was yelling out a name that belonged to no one present.

-4.3-

Glenda wanted Dale. Desperately, with a passion and immediacy she had never felt before. What was worse, she almost said it aloud, as she threw her body down on the couch in frustration. The words had been piled up behind her teeth, ready to burst out as he disappeared at the top of the dark stairs, but she hadn't let them. Now, her face buried in the soft fabric of one of the lobby's sizeable throw pillows, they burst free, straining between her lips as one unintelligible ululation. She hated freaking out in front of a guest like this. She hated for anybody, customer or staff, to see her at anything less than her best: her biggest smile, her most helpful attitude. But in this moment, with two people she deeply cared about out of her reach, one upstairs in the hall and one buried out in the snow, she just couldn't hang on another second. She lost it.

She felt terrible as this forbidden thought formed in her mind. In a moment like this, her first instinct should have been to call out for her husband. Or her kids. Or even a simple "I want to go home!" would have been more appropriately pitiful. But more than anything else, she had wanted to summon the burly security guard who was, at that moment, upstairs helping people who were surely in much more dire circumstances than she was. So selfish.

She took a deep breath of the sofa pillow's dusty surface, trying to breathe in particles of the world as it used to be through its fibers, and allowed herself one sob, a hard, potentially rib-cracking one. The pillow did its job well, letting her vent her frustrated sadness at this revelation that it took a literal avalanche for her to admit to herself. Then her moment of weakness passed. She turned her focus toward pulling herself together.

Glenda lifted her head up as quickly as she had thrown it down, and looked at the man standing with the walkie in his hand, which was still clicking out its desperate message in measured rhythm. She hoped that the tears she could feel burning the corners of her eyes wouldn't choose that moment to spill down her cheeks.

"I want Dale," she said, and almost drew her head back and clamped her hand on her mouth like a cartoon character, before she realized that the words had actually sounded more like, "We've got to help him." Exactly like that, in fact.

"Yeah," the man said, his brow furrowing as he half-concentrated on the clicks coming from the walkie. He appeared to be choosing his words very carefully. "I don't think he's going to last long out there."

Glenda nodded, wishing he would turn away so she could swipe the back of her hand over her eyes and keep them from betraying her vulnerability. He didn't. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, to make a proclamation about their next course of action. She didn't have any, so she said, "My name's Glenda. And you're--" She pointed at him, trying to match her memory of his checking in with some blonde girl that afternoon to the name he had given...

"Manoj," he said. "I'm here with my girlfriend Kelly." Glenda nodded at this, as if it had just been on the tip of her mind, and then the two of them stared at each other a little longer. The clicks continued.

Manoj managed to say, "And the person on the other end of this is..." He swiveled the walkie in her direction.

"Harmon," she said. "He's not a guest, he's... well, he's sort of a resident. It's a long story. One that I don't know much of. He was acting weird tonight. Actually, he walked out suddenly a little while ago..." She hadn't even had the following thought until it was coming out of her mouth. "Do you think he knew, somehow?"

Manoj shrugged. She sighed, knowing this man had no idea who Harmon was, or what she was even talking about. Why couldn't Dale still be here?

"Is there any way to get outside?" Manoj asked, nodding at the broken front door. "If there's someone out there, we need to try to get to him as soon as we can."

Glenda followed his gaze, trying to think. Dale might be able to break through that door, get out to the equipment building, or at least hold her tightly enough that she might feel safe and warm again. "There's a pair of snowmobiles out in the shed, but I don't know how--" She threw a hand in the direction of the snow piled up against the huge windows, only now noticing that it had creeped even higher up while she'd been exploring the office and having her tantrum. Only about two feet of moonlight showed through now, and there were periodic small cascades still coming down over the roof. In a matter of minutes, the lobby might be entirely dark. "If Harmon's telling us he's next to the service road... that thing's miles long. It goes all the way down into town. But of course you know that, you drove up it earlier."

Manoj nodded gravely. He appeared to be thinking hard, so quietly and for so long that Glenda thought he had gone back to analyzing Harmon's desperate stream of clicks. Or maybe he was just freaking out in his own quiet way. Whatever... she just knew that she wanted someone to come along and relieve her of all her Stuff She Had To Deal With right now, and she knew exactly who she wanted that someone to be.

A mental light went on, and Manoj came back from wherever he had gone. "Does this place have roof access?" he asked her.

For a moment, she honestly didn't know. But then she remembered that there was a place in second-floor storage that looked like those one of those pull-down attic doors. "I think so... I've never been up there, but I think I know where. If the door isn't too damaged, that is."

The young man nodded thoughtfully a few more moments, and for a second Glenda could tell just by looking at him that he was really smart. Like, amazingly so, in a way she never could be. She bet that blonde girl -- Kelly -- appreciated him for that. Glenda saw flashes of that same esoteric brilliance in her husband sometimes, but right now the only thing that would make her feel better was someone like Dale, who was just *him*, physically strong and down-to-earth...

"If we can get onto the roof," Manoj was musing, "we might be able to get down somehow. The snow didn't entirely block our second-floor windows on the back side, so there might be a clear way. Like you said, if the roof held up..." Manoj looked like he was going to lapse into another fugue, but then he made a mad dash for the stairs. "Come on, then! Who knows if there'll be another avalanche, so we've got to hurry!"

Glad to have a course of action to take -- any action at all -- Glenda ran up the stairs toward Dale just as fervently as Manoj ran toward Kelly. Still wrapped in only his white bathrobe, he turned left at the top of the stairs. Before Glenda followed she turned, and looked down at her lobby from up above. Even though her eyes should have been adjusting to the low light, the added snow piling against the windows counterbalanced it with new darkness. The place looked no more familiar now than it had in those first instants.

She wondered if she was looking at this little arena of her life for the last time. Quickly on the heels of this was the thought that, as long as Dale was ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, she didn't care if it was the last time. She turned and ran after the white shape that was already blurring into the gloom ahead of her.

-4.4-

Kelly was focused solely on the light dancing far ahead. It had tumbled around a little, as if the flashlight had been dropped, but it had been quickly recovered. The man carrying it had turned a corner, but she could still see the way it flickered as he swept it around, and she could hear vague sounds of several people calling to each other over the slap of her slippers against the uneven hall carpet. Their voices seemed strangely distant, however; sound didn't seem to be carrying the way you'd think it should in this jumbled, wooden funhouse. Kelly pushed that thought aside. Everything but one goal fell away; to reach the source of that wavering light. She assumed that Manoj was still following behind her.

This was something that had always been easy for her, to slip into this state of concentration. She had been told this was why she was always so good at whatever she tried; she had a innate sense of determination, a way of shutting out the world and seeing only the thing she was trying to accomplish. To her, it wasn't even a matter of getting her body to move faster, or push it harder. It was seeing the place she needed to get to, and not getting distracted until she was there.

She knew Manoj didn't have the same outlook. If a person were to examine their relationship, there were many places in which that statement would apply. It was a fact she didn't pay much attention to, although she knew he did, enough for the both of them. She was still trying to get him to realize that their differences didn't mean anything negative to her, but it was hard for him to not analyze everything six ways to Sunday. She knew this, and forgave him for it... most of the time.

She was actually grinning as she ran down the hall, and realized the reason why shortly after: when she was young, she and a childhood friend sometimes would run up and down the hall when they got into late-night giggling fits during sleepovers. Her friend's explanation for why such an activity was good for stopping a raucous gale of laughter: "Because there isn't anything funny about running down the hall". There might not be, but sometimes it just felt good. And in this case, it was good at stopped you from being scared too.

This was more her speed, action over cognition. She actually was running a little faster than she knew she should be; without the direct beam of the flashlight before her, she was almost running blind. There was an increase in light as she passed by a wide opening in the wall that she knew led down the main stairs to the lobby, but once she was past that illumination, she was only going by faint impressions of what was in front of her. She didn't care, was only concerned with her own forward motion.

She came to the corner, only slowing down when she was worried that her sudden eruption out of nowhere would startle the security guard, which is who she assumed the big guy with the light was. She moved forward, and peeked around the corner, assessing the situation. What she saw was odd; he was alone in the corridor, totally unmoving, shining his light through a severely broken door into one of the lodge's rooms. Now she wished she had paid more attention to what the voices were saying as she had run down the hall toward them.

A voice called out from somewhere far behind Kelly. "Dale? ... Dale!!"

Kelly saw the security guard wince, shifting his weight as if he wanted to drop the flashlight and run toward the sound, but couldn't. He braced the flashlight in both hands, straining to keep it focused inside the doorway. Finally, after working his lips with silent agitation, he called back, "Kind of got a situation here, Glenda! Hang on."

"Harmon's calling in!" came the voice again, and this time the guard actually looked away from his task, and by coincidence directly at her. Kelly instinctively ducked back, behind the corner. There was no reason she didn't want to be seen. Her body had just reacted before her mind. More words came drifting up. "He's in trouble!"

Kelly couldn't see the man, but she knew he was even more troubled by this. "Hang on, honey..." he said finally, through clenched jaw muscles. "I'll be there in a minute!"

As she puzzled on what this exchange could mean, she noticed that beyond the guard, the corridor quickly devolved into a jagged, roof-high pile of heaped timbers and insulation, from which the slightest whiff of outside air emanated. She started hearing new sounds coming from inside the room. There was a scraping of wood against wood, a half-screamed woman's voice -- "Hey!" -- and then the sounds of large quantities of cloth being dragged across each other.

"No!" the voice barked. "Let go of her!" Then, sounding a little defeated, the same voice: "Please, watch her legs..." More sliding and scraping followed. There was something on the floor down by the guard's foot, and it took Kelly a few moments of study before she realized what it was: a doorknob, presumably from the shattered portal he was now shining his light into. It dawned on her that he was holding it steady for the benefit of the people inside the room, although exactly who that was remained unclear. For the moment, they were quiet.

She took this break in the action to step out into the corridor. She made sure to step heavily, hoping to draw attention without startling a man who might have a weapon of some sort. Fortunately, the floor underneath her creaked, and the guard's head managed to whip toward her without changing the position of the flashlight.

"It's just me," she said, raising her hands.

"Hey," he said, nodding to her before looking back into the room. He continued speaking to her as he focused his attention there: "You okay? You should have stayed in your room."

"Sure, we're..." She looked around, just noticing that Manoj was nowhere to be found. "We're okay. What's going on in there? I'm Kelly, by the way."

The security guard nodded, absently intoned, "Dale."

A woman's bare legs came into view, floating horizontally out of the door at about waist height, and Kelly almost screamed. The flashlight brutally revealed that those limbs were bloody, and slightly twisted in a way they shouldn't have been. Her hands flew to her mouth, mind reeling in the bizarrity of the scene, but then the woman came a little farther out of the room and it all made sense.

She was being carried in a man's arms, gingerly moving through the broken frame of the doorway. He stepped over the threshold sideways, with his back to Kelly. He was wearing a plain white t-shirt and a pair of dark lounge pants. She could tell from the love handles and balding head that he was well into middle age, even though she couldn't see his face. He came slowly through the door, taking long careful steps. His arms didn't look particularly muscular, but he must have been strong, because he moved as steadily if he weren't carrying anything.

His cargo's face was the last thing to come into view, her head and shoulders lolling back over her savior's other arm. Her hair, long and curled in the way Kelly wished hers could be, trailed down toward the floor, relfecting enough of the flashlight's beam that it acted as a secondary light source for the dark hallway. The security guard backed up, allowing the man/woman pair enough space to turn once they were in the open.

"That doesn't look good," Dale exhaled.

A third form drifted through the door. It was another woman, darker than the pale, beatific form that had just been carried over the threshold like a bride. This one walked carefully, palms out, evenly balanced as if she were partially responsible for the steadiness of the man holding the unconscious woman, her face drawn with fear. "Careful..." she breathed, which could have been a plea to any of them there. "Be careful with her..."

"She's fine," the older man breathed, his voice being the first thing to provide evidence that he didn't do this sort of thing professionally. His teeth were gritted tightly.

Kelly couldn't help but speak, just as much as she couldn't take her eyes off those broken legs. "What happened?"

"Damned avalanche," the older man said as if Kelly were only speaking generally, turning a little in her direction. This movement elicited two gasps, one from the woman behind him, worried that he was going to lose his grip on what he was carrying, and one from Kelly, who suddenly recognized the man. "Bruce Casey?" she blurted.

He seemed to give a little sigh, his shoulders somehow drooping without lowering the woman in his arms, and nodded to the general populous. No one seemed to think this was an unusual coincidence, save for Kelly. "What are you--?" she began.

Dale jumped in, keeping the focus where it should be. "Here," he said, motioning with his free hand. "Pass her to me. I can get her down to the lobby. There's not as much structural damage down there." There would be time to gush over the celebrity later, Kelly realized. Right now there was an injured woman to tend to.

Bruce looked at him for a long moment, as if he were reluctant to give up this burden to anyone else, albeit someone much more qualified to handle it. "It's okay. I'm afraid we'll hurt her in the transfer. I can make it, I think. "

The fragile-looking woman behind them spoke up. "Let's just get her somewhere safe. Hurry! We don't know if all this is over yet."

She was right. Kelly instinctively moved forward and took one of the shaken woman's hands. After nearly recoiling in shock, those wild eyes grew a little calmer and her palm relaxed against Kelly's. At least a little. "It'll be okay. I'm Kelly."

"Sheryl."

"We'll get her out of here. All of us together. Let's go." She said this more loudly, to make sure that everyone knew she was speaking to them all.

The five of them, led by Dale's flashlight, started moving down the hallway back to the lobby. Bruce led the way, the others ready to jump forward if they saw his arms start to tremble from the weight he carried.

-4.5-

Harmon stopped clicking the walkie's button, realizing that he might be drowning out the response to his distress signal with its hypnotic repetition. His hand froze -- not literally, not yet -- as from the white background he caught just the tail end of a return message, "--ccess... stay... warm". A pause, and then the message started again. "trapd... in... lodge... seeking... roof... access... stay... warm".

Easy for them to say. Harmon listened to the sequence several times through before he thought to question exactly who it was that was responding to him. Not that he'd never had a walkie exchange with either Dale or Glenda before, but it seemed a little, well, sophisticated for them. This seemed to be a message from someone who was well-acquainted with Morse code. Unless those two had been studying up on ancient communication forms without him noticing.

But that was ridiculous. He would have known about it if they had. He had a better idea of what was going on at the Lodge than anyone else conceivably could. That was most of the reason Jimmy kept him on, to be the Deertail's eyes and ears, so to speak. Or maybe Jimmy Gough knew more about what was going on at his Lodge than he let on. Was it mere coincidence that the director had taken this particular weekend to head off for Florida?

Harmon sighed. It would be an interesting question to ponder while he was waiting to be rescued, or while his internal clock wound down to final stillness, whichever was going to happen now. But he should at least acknowledge that he had received the response. He tapped a flurry of arrhythmic clicks during the pause between messages until the person on the other end stopped transmitting, and then sent back a simple "OK". The letter pair was parroted back to him, followed by "5 min".

So they were telling Harmon that he didn't need to continuously send out his original message, but that he should send updates every five minutes. Like he had a watch to time these things...

The more he shook off his initial sense of confusion and pain, the more of his situation he was able to come to grips with. He was half-buried in snow, with at least a broken ankle, in the protective shelter of a fallen tree that was buried under more snow. Could be worse, he supposed. But the issue of figuring out where he was remained. A possible solution to this problem had been in the back of his mind ever since he regained consciousness, but he had been reluctant to consider it.

Truthfully, he had been thinking about it ever since his pins had started talking to him that evening. The only time they had ever rung as badly was a few days before Jimmy had called him into the director's office and asked him to take a seat.

Harmon had sat there for a long time -- this had been what, close to ten years ago? -- watching Jimmy shuffling papers around on his desk and in general making him sweat. He had been sure that the next words out of the tidy man's mouth would be that Harmon had to clear out and leave, that he'd had enough of him bumming a ride from someone up the mountain every morning and hanging around, practically begging for handouts of drinks, food, company, whatever was offered from the paying customers (even the occasional surreptitious bong hit in some snowboarder's room). It was too good of an arrangement to last, of course, and Harmon was already starting to wonder where else he could go. He wasn't going to stay down in Mrs. Handy's boardinghouse all day, that was for sure, waiting for his savings to dry up.

Jimmy Gough finally spoke. "You enjoy it here, don't you, Harmon?"

Harmon nodded, willing to go through the patronizing rigmarole if that was what it took to get this over with amicably. "Sure. Lovely place."

Jimmy tented his fingers and looked over the desk at him. The man was dressed as usual, like an accountant at his waterfront house on the weekend, but acted like a Fortune 500 CEO. "I want to discuss last week's incident with the lift."

Harmon tensed. "Oh, that," he said. "I was heading back from the slope, and I heard this noise coming from the mechanism housing. I told Terry he should look at it, that's all."

Jimmy leaned forward a little. "That's the thing, though. Did Terry tell you what he found when he looked at the motor?"

Harmon shook his head. "No, sir." Didn't know why he felt the need to be so deferential to this guy who was at least twenty years younger than he, but that was something to be considered later.

"One of the belts had been mostly chewed through by some kind of animal," Jimmy said, never taking his eyes off Harmon's. "It was only a matter of hours away from snapping altogether. We could have lost partial tension in the cables; people could have been hurt. Or at least stranded up on the wires for hours until we got the belt fixed."

Harmon allowed himself a little smile, thinking for the first time that this meeting might not end with his being thrown out on his ass after all. "Oh, well, since it was making an awful sound as that, I'm sure Terry would have heard it soon anyway."

"That's the thing, though," Jimmy said. "He told me it was one of the free belts. They don't rub up against anything, and thus make no sound."

"Well, I could hear it clear as day," Harmon said. "It hurt my spine, actually."

"And that's my point, Harmon," Jimmy continued. He leaned back in his chair, adjusting his meant-to-be-casual tie so that it lay straight down over the buttons of his shirt. "You hear things like that at other times, don't you?"

Harmon nodded. "Sometimes. Mostly it's not a hearing sort of thing, just a feeling. I've wondered if it's something like a dog whistle, except more like a Harmon whistle." He chuckled a little, unsure of what kind of tone he should be taking.

"This is really interesting, Harmon," Jimmy said, and for the first time his face conveyed genuine warmth toward the old man. "Because I've been keeping track of you. How you react toward different people. And at first it was only because you're the one person here at the Lodge who casually interacts with all the customers. The other staff -- well, some of them do, but strictly on a professional level. You actually *talk* to just about everyone here at one time during their stay or another. And I've learned that I can tell who the problem children are going to be on a given day... by watching you."

Harmon was puzzled. "Me? What do I do?"

"You react to people, Harmon. I don't even know if you're aware that you do it. But when you get near certain people, you instinctively flinch or move away. Sometimes it even happens when they're behind you, where you can't see them. And I know that if you do, I should keep my eye on them. You remember our friend The Maestro?"

What could have been the biggest scandal in the Deertail Lodge's history had been narrowly averted a few months earlier. A well-known high-school orchestra conductor had invited select female members of his ensemble on a weekend ski trip, with what Jimmy would later describe as "unwholesome intentions". Interception by the resident security force (not Dale, but the man who had come before him) revealed certain, shall we say, *items* in The Maestro's luggage that proved these intentions beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Jimmy continued, "Do you know how I knew that he was bad news, and what made me so confident that I rang the police even before we made that search?" To Harmon's silence, he said, "It was you. You instinctively shied away from that man the way a horse will shy from someone who's been beating him for years. I don't think you even noticed it... or if you had, you quickly forgot it."

He was right. Harmon didn't remember any of that. All he recalled was that he was glad not to be caught up in the furor that went on when the police did arrive, ready to slap the cuffs on The Maestro and escort the bewildered young ladies home.

"So I've learned from experience," Jimmy was saying, "that it's valuable to have you along, sir." He was extending a neatly-manicured hand across the desk toward Harmon. Not knowing what else to do, the old athlete shook it. But Jimmy wasn't ready to let go. Still holding Harmon's hand in his sure grip, he said, "And that's why this incident with the ski lift has prompted me to do what I've been considering since back then. I'd like to bring you on board full time, Harmon."

Snow-white eyebrows rose incredulously. "What's that now?"

"Not as part of the staff, in the most legitimate sense. But I'd like you to stay here as a kind of permanent guest. I can fix up a space for you -- not one of the paid rooms, you understand, but a place of your own -- to keep your stuff. As well as provide a small per diem."

"That sounds... great," Harmon said, speaking slowly to give himself time to turn this over in his mind, if there was a down side. "And I would have to..." Harmon began, and Jimmy chortled at the way the grizzled skier was leading him along.

"Just what you always do," the director said. "Talk with the people. I'm not going to tell you to turn down drinks or anything like that. Just make yourself available to feel whatever you feel. My bet is that there are more disasters to avert. And who knows? Together we might figure out a way to hone this particular skill of yours."

The rest was history. Harmon moved in under the stairs, stocked it with horror novels and warm blankets. He spent his evenings talking to folks in the bar and waiting for his pins to tingle. It was what he wanted to do anyway, and he suddenly found himself being paid for it. An old skier who was barely able to ski could do a lot worse for himself.

And he did find things to report to Jimmy. Sometimes they panned out, and sometimes they didn't. But Jimmy seemed fine to follow any lead, and never spoke harshly to Harmon when he was wrong. As the seasons passed, with Harmon inhabiting the summer months down in town and the rest of the year up at the Deertail, he did start to learn how to tune into, as Jimmy had called it, "this particular skill".

And, although he hadn't revealed it to Jimmy or anyone else yet, he had even learned how to go beyond just sensing trouble. No, that wasn't quite right... the skill was being *replaced* with something else. He hadn't considered it until that moment, but it might have been the reason he hadn't seen the avalanche coming sooner. The pins still tingled when trouble was afoot, of course, but now there was something else too. Harmon had only started to understand the nature of this new power, but it frightened him. He also knew that in his current situation it might prove to be the thing that saved his life.

Harmon closed his eyes, concentrated his focus, and felt himself tapping into this power. It had been hard at first, but each time he attempted it, results came easier. Tonight, it was like a needle slipping into a vein.

-4.6-

Carlos was on his sixth towel, and he wasn't sure if the bleeding was slowing or not. Benny's face looked almost serene, now that it had been mostly cleaned off, but this only unnerved Carlos more. His skin color was good, but other than that there was no clear reason why Benny shouldn't be declared dead on the spot. Carlos held the towel tightly against the head wound for as long as he could stand the texture of it, then tossed the blood-soaked fabric away and reached for another.

Things seemed quieter now. There was a little cold air sighing in around the ragged edges of the recently-enlarged window and the snowslide that still choked it, and there was still the hiss of the gas burner that was still running, but other than that the lodge kitchen was tomb-silent. The stillness of the atmosphere made Carlos think that he could just keep do what he was doing forever. Grab towel, press towel, toss towel, reach for towel.

He blinked his eyes hard to shock himself out of complacency. He hadn't been worried about Benny's lack of blood before, but if the increasing heap of scarlet rags strewn across the snowbank were any indication, the situation wasn't improving. He had to try something else, fast.

His eyes kept being drawn to the gas stove, its blue ring as faithfully consistent as it always was, and realized that it was his solution. It would be harder than anything he had done so far, but it might be Benny's only hope. He looked at his friend's barely closed eyes, finding ways to reassure himself that his co-worker really was out. Unconscious, if not already in shock or a coma. Carlos pulled the latest towel away, and hissed through his teeth when the flow of blood didn't look any slower than it had five minutes before. He couldn't even tell himself that the rhythmic pulsing he had seen before, denoting Benny's weakening heartbeat, was just his imagination now.

Strength flooded his tired limbs as he realized there was no choice. He took a moment to assess the situation, figuring out how best to do what needed to be done. Then he spun around and sat down in the bloody slush, along Benny's left side. He slid an arm under his friend's shoulders, and slowly brought the unconscious man up into a similar sitting position. Holding Benny like that, Carlos drew his legs under him until he was in a crouching position. This was going to be the tough part; getting all of Benny's dead weight (a phrase Carlos hated to use, even inside his own mind, but couldn't think of a better one) off the floor and into motion.

Carlos threw Benny's left arm across his own shoulders, and tucked his right arm into the man's right armpit. He hoped to push hard enough with his legs to get the both of them upright. Done right, they would end up looking like a pair of drunken friends propping each other up on their staggering way home. He took a few deep breaths, held the last one, and tried to straighten his legs. The pair rose up three inches, then settled back down to the floor. Benny's drenched pants hit the wet tile with a flat, sickening plop.

Carlos grimaced, hoping his back would be able to handle another attempt. He spread his feet a little farther apart, took an even deeper breath, and tried again. This time he got a little higher, and then reached some kind of tipping point where the job got easier. Soon he was standing mostly upright, but Benny had swung around mostly in front of him, so it was hard for Carlos to keep him from slipping away. Carlos kept telling himself it was okay; all he needed was to keep his friend from hitting the floor for about fifteen feet of distance and thirty seconds of time. It could be done.

Carlos slid one of his feet forward, afraid to take an actual step, which would force him to try balancing all their combined weight on one leg. Once that was done, he dragged his other leg (and Benny) forward, thus establishing a process.

It wasn't until they were halfway to the stove that Carlos started to realize that there wasn't as much weight pushing him down anymore. Benny's bleeding head lolled against him in a way that didn't seem entirely dictated by gravity, and he realized that one of Benny's feet was actually planted flat on the floor.

"'Los?" Benny's voice came, sludgy and faint. "Wha'?"

Carlos squinted his eyes. As much as he was glad that Benny was able to assist in carrying himself across the kitchen, he desperately didn't want the man to be awake for this. But he had to keep going. At this point, stopping would be more dangerous than continuing.

"It's okay, man," Carlos said, no louder than necessary for Benny to hear. "Gonna get you..." He didn't know how to finish the sentence. He kept moving.

The bright blue ring of flame grew closer. It was strangely advantageous that Benny was still slumped halfway around to Carlos's front. It would make aiming him that much easier. Benny was actually clutching Carlos's shoulders now, bearing a few more pounds on his own legs.

If Carlos had any doubts about what needed doing, they were gone when he looked down at Benny's scalp, which now was just a few inches below and to the side of his own face. The wide, bleeding gouge looked like a canyon up close, and couldn't possibly have gone any deeper without exposing bone. Carlos took the final step to the front of the stove and dipped his friend in what might have looked from elsewhere like a graceful dance move. Benny's torn scalp lowered down into the blue flame, and a sizzling sound started immediately.

Carlos forced himself to keep watching, to make sure that Benny was aimed correctly. Not only that, but he had to tip them both forward, to make sure that the cauterizing fire spread back far enough to cover the whole wound. The smell of Benny's flesh burning was not as bad as he had expected it to be, but the sound... the crackling as flesh crisped and fine gray hairs lit up like a thousand tiny fuses...

It took a good two seconds before Benny began screaming. Carlos managed to hold his friend in the flames for one additional one -- the longest of his entire life -- and then threw them both backward into the melting snow.

-5.1-

Sheryl walked along behind the group, stunned. Kerren, unconscious, was being carried by someone who she now recognized as a famous author. Her own hand was being held tightly by a blonde woman who was a perfect stranger to her. She had never felt less in control of a situation, or more relieved that it was turning out this way, that her responsibility being lifted away from her.

One moment, she had been alone, struggling to get Kerren out of the cocoon of fabric she had just ripped open, and next there was a searing shaft of light and a man who had dragged Kerren out from under the bed, expertly scooping her up and carrying her to relative safety before Sheryl could do much more than utter some feeble words of protest.

Sheryl glided along the hallway, allowing someone else to take care of things for the moment. She didn't even notice the uneasy inconsistency of the floor under her feet anymore; she must have been getting used to it. The blonde was talking to her, asking her questions, and Sheryl must have been answering with some kind of accuracy, but in actuality she was paying attention to Kerren's hair. With each step her rescuer took, a little wave of movement rolled down through the light strands as they hung halfway to the floor. That underwater-like little wave was the only thing that really drew her focus. When that motion reached the end of Kerren's hair, where did it go? And along the same lines, where was Kerren right now, exactly?

It was Kelly's voice that finally cut through this distracted reverie, when she spoke loud enough for the entire group to hear: "Should we be checking these other rooms, to see if anyone else is in them, maybe hurt too?"

Dale answered quickly, as if he had been thinking the same thing. "That's my next M.O., miss. But I'm going to get the four of you down to the lobby first. It's the only area that's been secured as of right now, and there's someone who also has some emergency training down there. Then I'm going to make a sweep of the rest of the rooms."

The celebrity, Sheryl noticed, was looking down at the woman cradled in his arms in a very peculiar way. "If you're taking volunteers," he said to Dale without looking away, "I'll come along with you. Provided this lady gets stabilized first."

The security guard seemed to think about this for a moment, then grudgingly admitted, "Sure. I could use the help. There are twenty-four suites in all, and the quicker we can check them, the better off everyone will be." Dale's flashlight briefly played on Bruce's slippered feet, shuffling carefully but quickly along the carpet. "We'll see if we can get you some safer clothing."

Bruce shook his head. "I can't get back to my room. It's behind that deadfall of beams and debris back there. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how I got out." He looked down at Kerren again, as if studying her. Did he recognize her or something? Sheryl wondered. She doubted he had been able to get a clear look at her wife's face since he had found them, but he seemed to keep trying. God damn it, was she going to feel jealous every time someone looked at Kerren for more than a moment? It was totally inappropriate at a time when they were being helped, but couldn't help it. It was kind of comforting, falling back on an old fear instead of focusing on the dozen new ones she had just been handed.

"See?" Kelly said to Sheryl. "The worst is over. We'll get you both someplace safe, and then figure out what to do." As the light around them grew, Sheryl was able to comprehend what was being said, at least enough to be comforted by it.

The beam of Dale's flashlight seemed to fade as it was added to by a growing paleness ahead. Sheryl was still in her head enough to know that they were getting close to the wide stairs that led down to the lobby. From what Dale had said about it, she had a picture in her head that it was going to be untouched, warm lighting and everything still where it should have been... She closed her eyes for a moment, in anticipation of walking back into the world as she had known it before...

Kelly had spoken over some raised voices that were coming from up ahead, and now there were thuds of people running. Coming up the stairs. Sheryl felt her hand being squeezed by the woman who had grabbed it, which sent a new shock through her own body as she sensed fear in the sensation. Her eyes flew back open.

"Manoj! There you are!" Kelly was crowing, and dropped Sheryl's hand as she ran forward. She met the young man -- dressed in a bathrobe identical to Kelly's -- at the top of the stairs, and they fell into a clutching embrace that made it clear they were a serious couple. Sheryl stood where she had been left, not having taken another step forward. She hadn't realized how much the grip of Kelly's hand had impelled her until it was removed.

There was a woman coming up the stairs, too, not too much older but definitely the maternal type, and Sheryl recognized her as the desk clerk. Much to the surprise of just about everyone there, she pushed right past the bathrobed couple, ran up to Dale and threw her arms around him. She had to literally jump up into the big guy's arms to plant a big kiss right on his lips, but that's exactly what she did. Dale stumbled backward, not just with the force the woman slammed into him with, but as if his immediate instinct was to push her away.

To Sheryl's eye, this was clearly an unexpected greeting for the security guard. It brought her closer to laughing than anything had in the last hour (or however long it had been since the world had collapsed on itself, she had no real idea). It was a fleeting joy, however, when she realized that the love of her life was still mangled and unconscious in the arms of the familiar stranger in front of her, with at least a whole stairway's descent between them and comparative safety.

This thought impelled her to look over the railing they had just reached, and her heart sank when she saw that apparently no part of the world she had known escaped this cataclysm unscathed. The lobby, which she had thought so inviting and homey when she and Kerren had first walked in and been greeted by the smiling woman who was amorously assaulting Dale, was now rendered in dim, bruisy blues and blacks. If there had been any other place for them to go, she wouldn't have even wanted Kerren to be taken down those steps.

But that was where they went. The security guard, once he had managed to pry the desk clerk off of him -- with a surprising sense of delicacy and politeness, Sheryl thought -- the group picked their way down to ground level and assessed the situation. First things being first, she stayed right by Bruce's side as he tenderly placed Kerren down on the couch. Other than the pillows being in a little disarray -- and she was quick to rearrange them so that Kerren could recline but not entirely lie down, as well as have one left over to support Kerren's limp, misaligned knees -- the couch looked like the most stable, comfortable place she could be put. She knelt down next to her wife's head, and stroked her hair while she finally started to tune back into the conversations that had been swirling around her since the top of the stairs.

The desk clerk -- was her name Glinda? Like the Good Witch of the North? -- was saying something about an intercom that wasn't working, which the security guard seemed supremely upset about. "Manoj and I were actually on our way up to the roof access," she finished by saying. She was staying right by Dale's side, who clearly wasn't as keen on her idea as she was.

"Hold on," he jumped in. "We don't know where Harmon actually is--"

"West of the service road," the man who Kelly called Manoj said, extending a walkie-talkie as proof. He seemed excited just to have anything to add. The device in his hand was making some odd clicks, then fell silent.

Dale, irritated, turned quickly to him. "That could mean almost anywhere, sir. The service road is seven miles long. And we still don't know if there are people like her--" he gestured to Kerren, unconscious on the sofa "-- right here in the Lodge with us. What we've got to do is secure this area, and then we can see about getting out of here."

"But he'll freeze out there!" Glenda -- that was it, Sheryl could finally make out her name tag on her chest-- was saying. "We're only at half occupancy tonight, and how many people are actually here?" She quickly began to count with her fingers, but it was clear that Dale was right. There must have been two or three times as many people as the present group in the Lodge when the avalanche hit.

"No, We're going to check for them first, Glenda. I'm sorry, but we've got to. I want to find Harmon just as badly as you--" a dissatisfied huff came from the woman who so recently had been leaping to kiss him, "-- but we've got to take first things first. Mr. Casey here has already volunteered to help."

"Bruce," the author said. "Just Bruce. No need for formalities at this point, I think." He was still looking down at Kerren in a way that Sheryl didn't like, mostly because she didn't understand it, like the sleeping woman were the celebrity instead of him.

Dale nodded, incorporating this information. "Right. Bruce. So we've got two hallways to cover... and what staff are still in the building?"

Kelly, who had selected a midpoint between Manoj and Sheryl around which to hover, gasped aloud. "The room service guy!"

Glenda couldn't help but roll her eyes in frustration. "Yes... Carlos and that other one..."

"Benny," Dale answered confidently. "They're usually here until two or so, prepping for tomorrow's breakfast. We'll have to check the kitchen too. So that's three areas." Without looking up from the spot on the floor that was taking his concentration, Dale threw his thumb in three different directions behind him: top of the stairs to the left, top of the stairs to the right, and back toward the first-floor dining room/bar. Everyone else was watching Glenda, who raised her own hand and pointed an accusing finger out the front windows, daring Dale to raise his gaze and meet hers. He didn't.

-5.2-

Bruce Casey was having a hard time paying attention to the admittedly crucial conversations going on around him. He found he couldn't pull his focus from the woman lying on the couch directly in front of him. He felt he knew her so intimately, and she him, but he had never touched her before. He had never even come close, because in his dreamworld she was always enshrouded in her swirling robes, and forever outside the circle of Sounding Stones that he didn't seem able to leave.

After all that time, all those waking mornings, full of energ, that he spent in wonder of the gift of inspiration that she gave him yet again, he had found her with broken legs, under a broken bed in a broken ski lodge that he had expressly come to in order to regain his thread of mental connection to her. He had ended up getting so much more than just dreams, and now he wasn't exactly sure what he was supposed to do.

He forced his gaze away from her, to where Dale the security guard and Glenda the desk clerk -- who clearly had some kind of quasi-romantic entanglement of their own going on -- were having a passive-aggressive war about whether to risk going outside to rescue someone they both clearly cared about. Bruce had already opened his mouth and said he would help with the search for others, but now he wished he hadn't volunteered so hastily.

He looked around the room, tallied the numbers, and then spoke up. As he had hoped, the other conversations going on about what should be done, and how, died off as he spoke. He had long since learned that celebrity had its small advantages, and default authority was one of them. "So I think we're agreeing that we need to split up." No objections to this came upimmediately, so he went on. "Well, take a look around. Even if we divide into pairs, we've only got enough people to check three places at once. And that's if we leave this young lady --" he gestured to Theda (who people were calling Kerren) lying sprawled across the couch, "-- all by herself, which I personally don't think is such a good idea."

Of course, this immediately got Sheryl on board with him. She crouched right down beside him, trying to show that she cared for Kerren's fate just as much as he did. "We can't do that," she said softly.

Meanwhile, the others were all looking among themselves, doing the same calculation. There were only six able-bodied people present. Either some of them would have to go off alone, or they would have to prioritize where they searched first.

Bruce reached out and put his hand on Sheryl's arm in solidarity, responding to her concern. "And that's why I think you should go back up to your room," he told her. The look she gave him was fearful and incredulous. Pretending to care about this, Bruce stood up, bracing his hands against the small of his back and grimacing. "Boy, I'm starting to wish I hadn't carried her all that way." He said to Dale, "I should have taken you up on your offer to help, but I thought it would just be easier..."

"Back's hurting?" Dale asked sympathetically, apparently eager to take Glenda's focus off of him.

"Yeah, a bit," Bruce said, grimacing again toward the security guard. "I don't actually have a room to go back to, anyway. I thought maybe you'd be willing to escort Miss Sheryl here back to her room, try to see if there's anything salvageable in there." He turned back to Sheryl. "Maybe see if you can't get your friend something warmer to wear."

"She's my wife," Sheryl said, standing back up, a reflexivedefensive bite in her voice. Bruce was a little surprised. To be honest, he hadn't entertained the idea of Theda having any kind of romantic notions at all. He had always pined for her, but he knew it was more for her creative powers, and anyway he had never seen any hint of reciprocation. He ended up figuring she was beyond such human aspects as love.

Dale jumped in, nodding to Sheryl. "I'll go with you. That area seems the most dangerous." He turned to Glenda, stammering a little. "We'll have to make sure that everyone's safe in here before we can go outside. We'll get everyone dressed warmly, and then -- I promise -- we'll find a way to get to Harmon."

Glenda looked at him incredulously. "It will be too late," she said, her voice flat, conviction gone.

Dale said, "He's tougher than he looks, Glenda. He can hang on a little while longer while we help the others. You know he'd say the same."

Silence fell then, and the walkie chose that moment to start clicking out its message again. Manoj, the young man holding it, didn't seem sure whether he should dampen the volume or let it ring out. Either way, he seemed to realize he would be choosing a side of the arguing couple. He ended up not moving, and the group listened to the flurry of clicks, pretending they knew what was being said.

The message stopped, and Kelly spoke up. "I'll stay here with Kerren," she said. She was looking around at their surroundings. "I think I can find something to splint her legs with, at least temporarily. We should do it before she wakes up."

Manoj looked at Glenda, who was returning his gaze incredulously. "Our room's not that bad, all things considered," he was telling her. "I'm sure we could find something up there that we can use. We could use some real clothes, too." He gestured to his and Kelly's bathrobes. No one had said anything about it, but everyone had come to their individual realizations that the pair were naked underneath.

Glenda gave out another huffing sound and whirled around, heading for the stairs. Once Manoj realized that she meant to lead him, he gave a quick look to Kelly, who nodded reassuringly, and rushed after the desk clerk. Dale watched them go, seemed like he was about to call something after them, then stopped himself. He extended his hand to Sheryl. "Ma'am? Can I escort you to your room?"

Sheryl, clearly reluctant to move, looked at each of the remaining occupants of the lobby, her eyes lingering on Kerren's closed eyelids last, before standing and moving toward Dale's towering form. His hand eclipsed hers, and he turned toward the stairs as if he were leading her to a formal dance.

Bruce watched them go, silently smiling to himself. Now he had Theda mostly to himself. He was still crouching, still trying to figure out what to do next. He wondered if this was the way she would find him when they met in his dreams, looking down at him and wondering when he would wake up.

-5.3-

Glenda wished she had brought some kind of light with her, but she wasn't about to turn around and go back down the stairs; that would require facing Dale again. It was noticeably warmer up on the second floor, but that wasn't why her cheeks were burning. She made it almost halfway down the hall before she remembered what she was supposed to be doing, and stopped. She stood still in the middle of the dark hall, clenching and unclenching her fists, trying to slow her breathing.

The most infuriating thing about the way Dale was acting was that it objectively made sense. Rationally, she knew that they should work outward from a secure central point, verifying the safety of everyone they could find in the most efficient way possible. She also knew that every time an area was cleared, and people gotten to safety -- like poor Kerren was, laid out on the couch -- he would be off on the next rescue mission. It wasn't just his job, it was the way his mind worked. It was why he was the person you most wanted in a crisis exactly like this one.

At the same time, things that he should be having emotional reactions to were just bouncing off him. Not only was Harmon -- who was closer to them than any other Lodge guest -- out there in the cold, freezing to death as they listened, but she had *kissed* him, for God's sake. They had never done that before... and they had certainly had previous opportunities. There had been a few times when they had just been talking, and all the while she had been thinking, If we both leaned forward right now, we'd be kissing, and why is he smiling at me that way? Is he thinking about it too? Is that what he wants to happen?

She took several long, deep breaths, trying to slow her mind and focus. She reminded herself that what most attracted her to Dale was his steadfastness. If he were to suddenly throw himself impulsively into doomed heroics, or if after the kiss he had forsaken everyone else and swept her off into a vacant room to succumb to their passion, he would also have ceased to be the person she thought he was. That idea seemed to be the only thing that made her heart stop pounding so hard and angry. She had made it known to him how she felt, and the only reason his refusal to respond immediately stung so much was that it had been such a long buildup to that sudden realization inside her own heart. There would be time later for him to tell her what he felt in return (if anything, a particularly cruel part of her mind added).

One thing she was sure about, though, was that she preferred not to be around him much until that time came. Fortunately, she had taken on another job, and now she had to pull herself together enough to--

Something tapped her lightly on the shoulder. She gasped and wheeled around, for the second time being startled by a white, headless apparition in the mostly-dark.

"Where do you want to start?" it was saying, and as it did quickly resolved back into human form. It was that Manoj guy, cinching his bathrobe as tightly around him as possible. She had almost immediately forgotten that they had been put on a search team together, and she hadn't heard him following her because his feet were still bare.

She shook her head, trying to bring herself back into the moment. "Right," she said. Her gaze went up and down the halls. "We should start knocking on doors, I guess." She was startled by how quickly her wildly varied thoughts about Dale dissipated as soon as she focused on how there might be other people in the Lodge, who might be hurt, or worse. She tried to call up in her mind the display she would have seen on her work computer, if she were standing in front of it -- and if it hadn't been smashed by the falling flatscreen. How many of the rooms were occupied tonight, and which ones were they? But too much had happened in the last few minutes. Her mind was drawing a blank. "I honestly don't know which rooms were occupied."

Manoj was picking his way back toward the main staircase, intending to start at the end of the hall and work his way down to her. He rapped on the door next to the landing. "Hello?" he called. He paused with his knuckles raised to rap again, listening. There seemed to be a faint sound from within, and Glenda's heart jumped at the sound... until she realized that it was Dale and Sheryl, coming up the stairs just beyond where Manoj was standing. She sighed as the pair reached the top and headed down the northern wing. She couldn't tell whether Dale looked her way as they turned toward the other side of the lodge, and then couldn't decide whether she really had wanted him to or not. Dale had his arm around Sheryl's shoulders in a consoling way, clearly a tactic to pry her away from her girlfriend's side. His show of consideration made Glenda feel a little silly for all the things she had been thinking. What was it about him that made her feel like she was back in high school again, obsessing over and picking apart what he might be thinking or feeling?

"I don't hear anything," Manoj said.

"We usually don't book that room anyway," Glenda said, some of her job sense coming back. "Most folks want to be far away from people tromping up and down the stairs all the time."

Manoj nodded, as if this made sense, and started sidling along the wall, heading for the next room along the hall. Glenda wanted to run immediately to the far end of the hall, to check the pull-down attic access door in the storage room, but realized that she had to at least try to be more like Dale. She shrugged to herself and moved toward the opposite wall, ready to knock on the first door there just as Manoj was hitting his second one.

Her rapping knuckles loosely rattled the door in its frame, and she could feel cold air flowing out from under it, onto her toes. She wished she had access to the locker room down on the first floor, where her sneakers were safely jammed into her tiny cubby. But Jimmy had very specific ideas about how the Deertail staff was supposed to dress and act, and they didn't include anything less than a one-inch heeled dress shoe... but come to think of it, they also didn't include passionate displays of affection between the married staff and the security team.

This thought made her chuckle a little to herself, and it was probably why she didn't think much about it when she tested the doorknob, and found it turning. There was a harsh grating somewhere deep in the lock, but it wasn't providing any resistance when she pushed the door open and looked out into what lay beyond.

The moonlight almost blinded her, and the cold wind blowing down off the mountain froze her lungs instantly. After spending so long inside the darkened halls of the lodge, it was like suddenly standing in a spotlight, a performer suddenly thrown onto the stage without knowing any of her choreography or lines. She must have made some kind of strangled sound.

The room beyond the door, which should have been identical to the others, and which she had walked into numerous times before, stopped existing after the first five feet of floor. Beyond it was a white monochrome wasteland, sloping steeply down from her right -- where the next rooms down the hall had been almost entirely covered by the standing wave of snow -- to her left, where debris of splintered and shattered wood, dotted here and there with the Native American motif that was repeated in the curtains and rugs throughout the Lodge, lay in heaps and piles below her, dusted and shot through with marbled veins of white.

Her mind could barely comprehend it. A swath of a half-dozen rooms had been swiped away, as if from a hastily wiped chalkboard. In their place was snow, a pile seemingly as tall and sturdy as the mountain itself, as if the lodge-building project had gone to a certain point and then simply been abandoned. Above it all, the moon hung like a rolling, crazy eye. She stared up at it, horrified, sure that at any moment it could swivel in the sky until she saw its burning iris, glaring down at her with stark malevolence.

A hand was on her shoulder, pulling her back again. "Glenda!" Manoj was calling. "Stop!"

Her mind returned to her, and she realized she had taken several steps into the room, toward that jagged end that hadn't been there before. The young man was leaning in through the doorway, his hand surprisingly strong and holding her back. She looked at him, saw the way the moonlight lit his skin, and backed up toward him. The walkie, still in the hand that hadn't stopped her from walking off the edge to her doom, was clicking again. It made sense that he should be the one to hang onto it tightly, since he was the one who would be quickest to tell if its message changed.

"Sorry," she breathed. "I just..."

He didn't seem interested in an explanation. "I can't believe it... This whole section of the wing is just... gone."

"Mm-hm," she said, suddenly realizing how miraculous the solidity of the floor beneath her feet was.

"What if..." Manoj said, and then swallowed hard. "What if Kelly and I had been in a room where that pile is now?"

Glenda didn't answer, even as she acknowledged -- if only to herself -- that she was the one who had chosen their room, and thus apparently saved them from certain death. But one thought chilled her more than the frigid air from that relocated mountain could... had she put anyone else in these ruined rooms? And where were they now, if she did?

-5.4-

The lobby was intensely quiet after everyone left, leaving Kelly with a famous author and an unconscious lady. She tried to recall how it had sounded when she and Manoj had been checked in earlier that day, by Glenda. It had been empty and hushed then, but there wasn't this current, pervasive sense of intrusive silence. What had changed, she wondered? Was there some kind of innate living vibration in the building that had been stilled by the shock of the avalanche? Maybe it was caused by the snow that had been piled on the windows, damping any outside sound or subtle wavering of the glass in the wind.

Or maybe her unease was being caused by something else entirely. The author, Bruce Casey, hadn't left Kerren's side since the group had dispersed. He was still crouched down beside her, adjusting little things. It wasn't anything overtly creepy: tucking a stray hair back behind her ear, adjsuting a pillow slightly under her head or along her arm. He had also pulled back the edge of a throw blanket that had been lying across the back of the couch and whose tassels were apparently hanging a little too close to her injured legs. But he kept stepping away and looking at her, as if he were a photographer manipulating a model to create a perfect pose. It was almost endearing, the care he was taking attending to her. Almost, but not quite.

Kelly kept an eye on him from over by the fractured front desk, where she was trying to determine if any of the boards could be pulled free and used to stabilize Kerren's clearly broken legs. She had taken care of teammates before, putting her limited sports medicine background to use. Ironically, the worst incident hadn't even been during a match; on the way back from an away game, the small car that had carried management, which had following the team bus, had gotten mildly t-boned at an intersection late at night. They had been close to the middle of nowhere, and while the rest of the team tried to summon the nearest ambulance with their phones, Kelly had set the assistant coach's leg with a lacrosse stick and several miles of gauze bandage.

Hopefully, she would be able to put that same knowledge to use now, although clearly Kerren's condition was several orders of magnitude worse that her previous patient's. Kelly carefully reached over and wobble-tested a few of the boards that had started to break away from the desktop after the huge TV screen lying on the floor beyond had smashed across it. Now there were huge chunks of wood that were visibly askew, and with luck a few not-too-splintery strips could be peeled away from it.

She realized this might give her an excuse to get the celebrity away from the unconscious woman, as well. "Mr. Casey?" Kelly called to him, then "Bruce?" when he didn't hear her.

His head snapped up abruptly, but his tone remianed placid. "Yes?"

Kelly tried not to think too much about to whom she was talking. "I think I can get some of these boards loose, but we need something to bind them to her legs. Is there anything over there we can use? It can be any long piece of cloth..."

She left Bruce to the task of hunting for items, breathing a little in relief when he finally got up from his perch next to Kerren and started moving about. He lifted the small blanket, tested it to see if it could be torn into strips, but it was woven too thick. Kelly turned her attention back to the counter. She carefully put her hands on the loose top, experimentally rocked the whole thing back and forth. It moved, but it was all of one piece, and she didn't see any evident way of breaking it down further.

She started skirting the huge chunk of wood, noting that the whole bottom part of it seemed to have been shaped from one titanic piece of tree trunk, which meant it wouldn't be of much help to her. But the lower section on what had been Glenda's side looked promising, especially the large gaps between boards that the flatscreen must have caused when it came down...

By the time she got around to the other side, making sure to step lightly because all she had to protect her feet from broken shards of plastic was her hotel slippers, it was clear that Bruce was frustrated by the task he had been given. He had given up on the blanket and moved onto the pillows, trying to tear them along their seams to make squares of fabric, but to no avail. Kelly guessed that most of the decor in the Lodge had been made locally, and wasn't cheap in cost or design. She took a moment to give the appearance of being totally focused on what she was doing, and then said, "Bruce, how about looking in some of these offices back here?" She threw a casual thumb back over her shoulder.

The author looked up from increasingly-desperate ransacking and saw the doorway she was pointing to. His brow furrowed at the prospect of moving away from the lady on the couch. "Dark back there, isn't it? How will I even see what I'm looking for?"

Kelly's hands scrambled around, looking for anything that might make some light. She eventually saw the row of walkie-talkies that still hung under the lip of the counter, and grabbed one, feeling and hearing the Velcro give as she pulled it free. She thumbed the power switch, and was delighted to see a single green LED come on over the main speaker, although nothing but low static came through the speaker. She turned the volume down fully and swung it around in Bruce's direction. "Here!" she chirped, and then tried to gauge how well he was hiding his disappointment.

After taking one more reluctant look down at Kerren's resting form, he crossed the lobby to Kelly and snatched the little piece of electronics out of her hand. He walked past without meeting her gaze, and turned the tiny light out in front of him as he stalked into the dark corridor behind the desk. Kelly made a face at his back, and then returned to her task.

There were several long, thin sections along the front of the counter that might work, if she could loosen them enough. The falling television had forced them a little outward and down, and she took hold of one, working it back and forth while it creaked in protest. She tried to ignore the muttered cursing from behind her.

Suddenly, one whole length sprang loose, a section about five feet long. She grinned in the dark; if she could break this in half, it would be usable for both legs. Not only that, but it had been held in place with glue and dowels; no nails that would have to be removed. She turned around to voice her excitement, but hesitated when she saw Bruce's silhouette, moving down the hallway surrounded by faint green light, which only barely illuminated a long column that had fallen across the hall and partially blocked it. He stood there for just a moment, seeming to study it. His hand came up, and he slowly reached out until he touched it. His intent didn't seem to be testing its stability, or trying to move it out of the way... he just seemed to want to find out if he could touch it. As if it might not be real or something.

Kelly's brow furrowed, but before she could say or do anything she realized that Bruce's sudden quiet allowed her to hear a different noise, this one coming from the couch on the other side of the lobby. It was low, just a vibration that was only a step above a whisper, so faint she was surprised it could carry all the way over to her. Taking the length of newly-liberated wood with her, she walked out from behind the counter and crossed the floor to the couch. She was glad the boards made no telltale sound under her slippered feet, because if Bruce heard anything he was bound to come right back.

Kelly knelt next to where Kerren lay on the couch, laying the long piece of wood on the floor in front of it. She lingered there, hoping to hear the sound again. And after a few seconds of silence, it came. It was clear, unambiguous, and Kerren's mouth barely moved, as if someone else were speaking through her.

"The stones," she said, as if turning a thought over, idly speaking to herself. "Protect them." And then less clearly, fading out on Kerren's breath, came something that sounded like "the horns."

Kelly waited to see if there was more, some kind of clarifying afterthought, but that was all. She looked back into the dark hallway, but the green light wasn't there anymore. She stood, and began looking for something to brace the wood against, so she could break it into something useful.

-5.5-

The feeling of rising was always the same, but this time the relief that came with it was much more pronounced. Harmon guessed it was because his body was in such pain, making the contrast of being suddenly feather-light and outside the cage of his body that much more exhilarating. He could feel the strange currents all around him, flowing like infinite, invisible rivers crisscrossing the world. He grabbed hold of one and was swept on.

His vision shifted, passed up through the needles of the tree that sheltered his battered body, and then he was encased by whiteness. He didn't feel the panic of being smothered, trapped by that crushing snow. Instead, he knew he would pass through it as easily as he could pass through air. Then his vantage point was above the ground, in a world that had all of its sharp edges rounded off by fallen flakes, every inch illuminated the same by cool, even moonlight.

Harmon's ability to sense what lay beyond the things around him had evolved in the past few years. At first, Harmon had thought it had been a series of dreams brought on by living at a markedly higher altitude. Then he thought it had been some kind of hallucination brought on by living under the stairs, natural gas or wood polish or something creeping into his brain. But after a while, he realized that the rising feeling was part of the talent that Jimmy Gough had officially hired him for; it might even be what really lay behind his ability to read people's intentions. The deeper he had pushed into it, the more he realized that this was his true power.

And so, by degrees, he had learned to use it. In the movies -- or in his vampire books -- there would always be some mentor, someone who laid out the nature of the powers for the hero, what they could and couldn't do, and the moral code that necessarily overlay them. Unfortunately, Harmon had never found one. There was no manual for handling his out-of-body travel. He had no other choice but to figure it all out on his own.

Now he was skimming across the surface of the snow, heading generally uphill, hoping the he was working his way back to the Lodge, the closest thing he had to a home. One of the drawbacks to this power was that, while he could seemingly go anywhere and access anything, his range of vision was shorter than if he had actually brought his eyeballs with him. The world kind of faded to vagueness a few yards around where he "was". As a result, his mind chose to interpret everything as huge and imposing, as if he were flying through an infinitely-enlarged copy of the real world. When he considered that he was doing all this with thought only, it did make him wonder how much of what we think of as visual "seeing" is a physical process.

He was sure that what he was moving through was the world as it existed in real time, though. He had done enough experiments with clocks to prove that. He could travel anywhere with astonishing speed, occupy any space no matter how small, pass through solid objects. But it was all still *him*, somehow. He had trained himself, after hours of lying on that subpar cot under the stairs, to push the boundaries of what was possible, to see just how much he could determine with this new sight. It got harder the farther afield and different from human vision as he got, but he was somehow sure that he would never come up against any hard borders.

Today, however, this power was required to save his own life, and he thought he might know how. He had felt something on his recent excursions, a way that he might not just observe, but influence the world outside himself. Right now, that hope was all he had. After perhaps thinking that the topography of the mountain had changed completely, he realized that the wide track in the snow next to him just might be the remnants of the submerged service road. He swung out and over it, trying to keep its twists and turns beneath him.

The slight depression in the snow, magnified by the low angle of the moon's light, snaked back and forth, and Harmon began to wonder what would happen if his body succumbed to the cold while he was away like this. Was he actually outside of his body now, or just projecting his vision? He couldn't help but think again of the vampires he read of incessantly... the way they could change shape and fly away when threatened. Maybe he wasn't flying anywhere at all.

The road swung up around a final curve, and then he was weaving among small hills that must have been what was left of the parking lot. He could tell from the shapes that whatever cars there were -- not many, since most people completed their Deertail isolation from the outside world by getting a taxi up to the Lodge -- had been tossed around and now lay on their sides and tops under their thick blankets of snow.

It took a bit of searching to find the Lodge after that. Aside from his sense of scale being entirely thrown off by his disembodied traveling, it was all but unrecognizable in its new, half-submerged configuration. The more he explored, the more surprised that it had structurally held up at all. Whole sections of the back half were gone; he was almost sure that the entire lower half of the side of the building facing the mountain had been punched in by the white onslaught, and it was the snow itself that was propping the rest of it up, giving nowhere to collapse to. Most of the crooked north wing was reduced to rubble and timbers, as well. Not only that, but the downrushing wave had crested over the lodge entirely in several places, flowing over it like a wave. The front windows of the lobby had only narrowly escaped being totally covered by the avalanche that had overspilled the roof and piled up in front. The offices looked all but blocked in.

The lobby, though! There was some kind heavenly radiance coming from it, one that for a moment tricked him into thinking that the power was still on, or that something had caught fire. As he moved from outside to in, from blinding moonlight to equally blinding dimness, a spot of wonderful warmth and radiance was revealed to him. This had been the warm, orange-yellow light he had seen from outside, and it was coming from the woman lying across the couch, her body laid as straight as it could be, the faintest of smiles on her lips.

By her light, he could see that there was another woman nearby, messing with what appeared to be a length of wood that had broken off of something, but Harmon couldn't spare attention for anything but the brilliant luminosity coming from the supine woman. Her hair was shining golden strands sweeping away from her across a terrain of pillows, and he was secretly thankful that he didn't have to be washed in the beautiful, terrible illumination that would have come forth if her eyes had been open.

It was the woman he had tried to talk to in the restaurant earlier that evening. It had been Sarah after all! It seemed impossible, but then again, he reminded himself that he was currently a disembodied presence seeing these things and thinking these thoughts. At the moment, he was hardly qualified to say what was possible and what wasn't.

So assuming this wasn't all a hallucination he was having as the last of his body heat bled away into the snow far behind him... what was Sarah doing here, after all these years? She hadn't aged, hadn't changed in any way he could see (and he was fully aware that he could duck under her clothes and check for certain birthmarks, but there was that ill-defined moral code to think of. He was pretty sure that would violate it). It was like she had been dropped back into his life after forty years of suspended animation, and now he was just waiting for her to wake up.

Harmon waited for a few moments, hovering, deciding what to do. He had originally come here looking for ways to direct his rescue party to his body's location, but he was now as distracted as he could be. There was one barrier he hadn't crossed yet in his exploration of his new powers, and now seemed to be the perfect time to do it. But should he? This woman -- Sarah! -- had apparently not come through the cataclysm unscathed. If he were to do what he was considering, he didn't know what he would find. Was she as damaged inside as she was out?

The woman working next to the couch was what clinched it for him. She was still twisting and turning that length of wood, trying to find a way to break it in half. But she kept stopping, kept looking down at Sarah, as if she were checking to see if the unconscious woman was moving, or making some kind of sound. Or maybe there was something in that face that she couldn't keep looking at for long. He doubted that, in the corporeal world, Sarah was glowing the way Harmon was seeing her, but there was something about her that was subtly drawing attention anyway.

He couldn't pass by and not try. He couldn't picture anything else happening after this moment. So he tried it. He closed his eyes and held his breath -- knowing full well that he needed to do neither of these things -- and slipped into the sleeping woman's mind, as easily as sliding under the placid surface of a still pond.

-5.6-

After the fire touched Benny's head, Carlos suddenly found himself suddenly trying to wrangle a raw pile of nerves and muscles. It had taken several minutes of Benny thrashing around in the snow, aware that he had been hurt, but unable to figure out how or why, until Carlos could get him to calm down. He eventually managed to get his co-worker settled on the damp floor, pulling him over to sit up against some of the cabinets that had been left intact, his arms trying to keep Benny's arms from continuing to pinwheel, although the motions were losing intensity with every second. After Benny had relaxed somewhat -- his breath heavy and petulant, his head hung forward in exhaustion -- Carlos had the time to inspect exactly what the flame had done. As he did, Benny didn't seem to be entirely awake, or entirely asleep either.

He checked the wound on his friend's scalp. The flames had mostly done what he had hoped; the edges of the gash had blackened, shrunk, and curled back a little, stopping the worst of the bleeding. He wanted to go get more clean towels and finish the job, but first he had to make sure Benny wasn't going to get up and run away once he let go. So they sat side by side against the cabinet, the cold brass drawer knobs digging into their backs, and took a moment to relax.

Despite all Carlos had accomplished, he was now more nervous than he had been before. He had checked off just about every item on his mental list, and the road forward was less clear than it had been since the kitchen had imploded with that horrific whiteness. He had time now to think about things other than what was right in front of him, and in doing that felt the world unfolding like an origami model, the angles that used to underpin its sane structure now expanding into a blank, featureless open plain. He had too many choices now, too many possible courses of action.

At least he could pretend, until he caught his breath, that he and Benny were just taking a break, hunkering down on the kitchen floor. At times like this, they often would step out the back door to sit on the bench there, feeling the cool breeze contrasting the sweaty confines of the kitchen, but now he doubted if that bench even existed anymore.

"Carlos?" Benny said suddenly, his voice incredibly loud against the distant hush of the hissing gas from the stove, which had only recently stopped sputtering, indignant about what purpose it had recently been put to.

For a moment, Carlos wasn't sure whether he should answer, but he eventually responded, "Yeah, Benny?"

"Don't... don't burn me again," he said. Benny's head was slumped forward, his slurred voice sounding annoyed, as if Carlos had used such drastic measures merely to wake him up from a particularly satisfying sleep.

"Well, stop bleeding so much then," Carlos answered.

Benny's right hand rose between them, and the fingers touched his own forehead -- just a little below where the gruesome slash began -- before swinging out in a limp salute. "You got it, cap'n."

Carlos actually laughed aloud at that, surprising himself. He placed his own hand on his friend's shoulder, this time in empathy instead of restraint. For a moment, the illusion that they were just sitting together was complete. But they couldn't linger, had to get moving.

Carlos looked toward the hallway that ended in the swinging doors that led into the restaurant/bar. No one had come through them since the avalanche. They hadn't even heard any voices, so that wasn't a good sign. If there was no one out there to come help them, that meant they were going to have to marshall their forces and go out there under their combined power.

"Think you can get up, buddy?" Carlos said, nudging his friend.

Benny's head, followed belatedly by his eyes, rotated up until he was looking at Carlos, then past him to look up toward the refrigerator lights. The way his gaze slid right over Carlos made the cook shiver, harder than he had at any moment since the kitchen had been half-destroyed and brought down almost to freezing.

"Maybe," Benny mused, his lower lip hanging slack off his teeth. It was like the cut on his scalp had loosened the skin over the rest of his skull. "Let's not go into the light, though."

Carlos couldn't even laugh at Benny's joke this time, if that's even what it was. Suddenly comparing the tiny bulb inside the fridge to a near-death experience was just too much, too cruel. "No, not just yet," Carlos answered.

He lifted his arm and put it around Benny's shoulders again, trying to duplicate the way he had pried them up off the floor earlier. This time, however, Benny was somewhat aware of what was going on, and he could assist more. In half the time, they were once again up and on their feet. As much as he tried to avoid it, Carlos couldn't avoid turning Benny toward the spot where he had been blindsided by the avalanche. If the injured man had any reaction to the heap of bloody slush and towels there, next to a steaming pot of soup sitting nearby, he kept it internal.

"Down the hall, Benny," Carlos said, nodding past the refrigerators and into the dark area beyond. "We've got to head out through the restaurant."

"Is that where the rest of them are?" Benny asked, making a supreme effort to keep his body weight positioned over his feet and his head atop his neck.

"I don't know," Carlos answered, "but we've got to find out. Ready?"

The creature with two of everything began to stumble forward. It took every ounce of their combined strength to leave the somewhat stable safety of the half-demolished kitchen and stagger down the service hallway toward the dining room. Carlos tried to make sure that if they were going to bump into the wall, it would be on his side, so his shoulder would take the brunt of the hit. Even before they reached the door's dark smoothness, Carlos could tell he wasn't going to like what was beyond it. On every other time he had approached it, back when the world was whole, he could always make out the flickering light from the wide fireplace beyond, accompanied by the light sounds of china and crystal and conversation that was the sound that all chefs secretly live for. Now, there was nothing. He could see the door's faint outline, but it was limned only in cool, steady moonlight.

This time, it was Benny that drew Carlos along, seemingly oblivious to (or perhaps just more accepting of) the unending strangeness they had been thrown into. Even though his head still hung down loosely, Benny's hand raised out of habit and pressed flat against the semicircle on the right door. A changed world revealed itself as Benny's hand swung the door open easily on its long hinge.

The restaurant/bar stuck out from the side of the two-story design of the rest of the lodge, providing its diners a full panoramic view of the mountain as it sloped downhill on two sides. Now that perspective was augmented by a total view upwards as well; the peaked roof, formerly full of sturdy wooden rafters, had been completely torn away, leaving the dining floor fully open to the night sky.

The walls, strangely enough, were still standing for the most part. The restaurant now appeared as if it were a notch carved in the side of the mountain, because the icy torrent that had slid down and blown in the kitchen window had found its match in the restaurant's uphill wall, which was fortified by the huge stones of the oversized fireplace that blazed warmly through every dining service the Deertail had ever seen. Towering above them, the new face of the mountain hovered just over the upper edge of that wall. The thickness of the chimney still stood defiantly, its full height totally exposed now that the roof no longer existed. It looked like the prow beam of a ship breaking through a frozen wave. Below, tables, chairs and stools were mostly arranged around the elliptical bar as they had been before, which made Carlos imagine the roof had been removed as cleanly as a magician yanking a tablecloth out from under the place settings of a banquet table.

"Do you see this, Benny?" Carlos asked under his breath, not really expecting an answer.

His companion began to make a coughing sound. Carlos didn't realize for several seconds that Benny was actually laughing. "The stones... they still stand!" the injured man exhorted, as if he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. Carlos was surprised he could see the chimney at all, the way he could hardly hold his head up.

"Yep, they sure are, buddy," Carlos said. "But that's about all." He looked deep into the mouth of the fireplace, and realized that, even though minor falls of snow were still coming down on either side of the stonework, a few embers continued to smolder in its interior. The fact that some bit of warmth still existed in this blasted, frigid world gave him more hope than anything he had experienced yet.

"Not to worry," Benny said. "She's being tested, but she's going to make everything all right."

Carlos had no idea what he was talking about. Much later, he would wonder what part of Benny's brain had been jostled, and in just what way, to make him aware of something he -- none of them, actually -- could possibly have known at that point.

-6.1-

Sheryl didn't want to go back up the stairs. While it might appear that Dale's arm around her shoulders was for physical support, in truth he was pushing her along. She didn't like it, but silently thanked him for not making her fear obvious to the others in the lobby. It wasn't that she was afraid of returning to the place of Kerren's injury and all that followed; she just didn't want to leave her wife alone with strangers. If Kelly hadn't been so comforting to her on their trip down to the lobby, she might not have been convinced to leave Kerren's side at all.

The hall was decidedly less menacing, now that she knew what to expect. She knew that the irregularities in the floor weren't dangerous, and similiarly she knew what she was going to see when she turned the corner; nothing more than the jumbled pile of hotel pieces that comprised the hallway a little past their room.

All along the way, Dale was murmuring encouraging things to her, "We'll just take it slow, check to see if we can get you and your wife some warmer clothes, okay? Then we'll find a way to get word out to the town that we're up here. In fact, it's probably likely that lots of people know about this already, and are working to get up here to make sure we're okay..."

She resisted telling him to shut up, but only because the silence that would then fall was too overwhelming to think about. The more she considered it, the more she realized that without Dale's formidable, calm presence, she would never have been physically able to retrace any of the steps she had taken this night, no matter how important they were. And right now, trying to find something better for her and Kerren to wear really was the most important thing. This made her try to picture the state their room had been in when Bruce had made his dramatic entrance... had the closet door even been accessible, with all the piled snow? It might be possible that all their clothes were still there, undisturbed by the disaster that had occurred around them. Sheryl thought that, if she could just get to those relics of the time before the avalanche, maybe some of the strength she used to have would be imparted to her when she put them on again.

Even though she was prepared, she was shocked when they turned the hallway's corner and saw the utter devastation that had happened so close to the place where she and Kerren had been lying. Then, quickly on the heels of that was the fact that Bruce said his room had been on the far side of it. But how was that even possible?

Dale seemed interested in that question as well, swinging his flashlight over the torn timbers, fractured beams, bits of light fixtures and other recognizable things from the lodge, all jumbled and distorted into an impenetrable wall. It took her several moments to realize that she was already standing outside the broken door to her room, the one that Bruce had carried Kerren out through. The darkness on the other side of the portal seemed to be reaching for her, but she was strangely unaffected by it.

While Dale continued to study the curious debris, she walked through the door into sheer darkness. It had only been a few minutes, but she felt as if she were walking back through time, into some important, traumatically defining moment of a former life. Even the smell of the room -- the heavy scent of snow and wet, broken wood -- which was pretty much the only thing she could sense without light, had already been imprinted on her brain.

She stood there a full ten seconds before the flashlight found her, throwing her jagged shadow forward and across the bed Kerren had been pinned under. She could see the large lamp shard where she had left it, tossing it onto the bed after her wife had been set free and Bruce had pulled her out from underneath it. Sheryl had followed the pair, leaving the implement behind, and it was still there, as if waiting for her.

"Sheryl?" Dale called, coming up beside her, swinging his illumination from side to side. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she said, surprising herself with how steady her voice sounded. "The closet's over here."

She stepped a few paces forward, coming to the sliding closet doors just on the near side of the corner where their bed had wedged itself. She could hear water from a broken pipe spraying somewhere behind the bathroom door. She hoped that the closet was free of water damage. She slid the doors apart and gave Dale a moment to swing the light inside.

As he did, she was glad to find that the contents were relatively unharmed. Having just arrived that afternoon, the women had taken the time to hang up the clothes they had intended to use most during their weekend stay -- their thick coats, ski suits, and a range of semi-formal evening wear for when they would dine in the restaurant -- so the central half of it was filled. There seemed to be some tangles of extra hangers above the rod, but Sheryl thought little of it until she pushed the clothes apart.

The face was directly behind the coats as she pushed them aside. It was vertically lined and striated, as if the dark wood at the back of the closet had spontaneously decided to take on vague human form. It had no eyes but there were hollows for them, as if the wall were pliable and soft, and someone behind it was leaning forward, trying to push through it. After the initial shock, Sheryl might have convinced herself that it was a sculpture, or some kind of happenstance formation of the closet's back wall being bowed out by the collision of mountain and building... but then it moved.

Without a change of expression, it tilted its head to the side, and the clacking sounds revealed what she had assumed to be tangled collections of hangers on either side of it to really be points sticking from the wall, also trying to poke through the wood of the closet's rear wall, ones that were traceable back to branchlike protuberances from what would be the face's forehead

Like a stag's horns, but more numerous.

The vaguely-shaped face tipped one way, then the other, as if to disentangle the points from the wire clothing supports they had become tangled in, and that was when Sheryl screamed.

She threw the coats back together, as if hurriedly shutting a curtain, and jumped back from the closet. "What?!" Dale interjected, and swung the light away from the closet and onto Sheryl. She looked at him, eyes wide, and realized that while he had kept the light focused on what she was doing, he had been looking elsewhere.

"You didn't see that?" she asked, not liking the amount of panic that was suddenly leaking into her voice.

"No, what was it?" Dale asked again, and when she pointed into the closet, he shifted the light back into its depths. The clothes were back in place, swaying lightly on the crossbar, but the sound that might have been that of antlers freeing themselves had already changed to that of hangers clacking together from the force of Sheryl's throwing them back into place.

She just stood there staring at the perfectly normal space where the apparition had been for a moment. She blinked several times, but the flashlight's white LEDs left none of the closet's contents to the imagination, and there was nothing there that shouldn't have been.

"Could you...?" she asked, and pointed. She knew that nothing would be there when Dale moved the clothes around, and she was right. Why should there be? She suddenly felt very tired, all the adrenaline she had accumulated in the last few minutes draining away. Had there really been anything in there?

Dale held the flashlight in his mouth as he began rummaging around in the closet. Sheryl flinched as he separated the clothes at almost the same point she had. There was nothing beyond them now; in fact, she could see the back wall of the closet very clearly. It was the same flat, dark-stained planking of the rest of the walls.

She'd just have to assume that the weird, animated sculpture she had seen -- she couldn't even cross the mental line that allowed her to believe it was any kind of living thing -- had been the result of fear and mental exhaustion.

Dale held up a pair of fluffy coats, designed more for looking chic than for their insulating properties. "How about these?"

She nodded numbly and took them. He dove back in, looking for other items that would help their small group stay warm. She kept her eyes on the back wall of the closet, completely unsure of what was going to happen next.

-6.2-

Bruce had once written a scene in a book where the protagonist had been forced to explore a dangerous abandoned factory using only night vision goggles. This had been in his pre-Theda days, when his ideas hadn't been nearly as good, but at least he could be fairly sure that they were truly his own. Back then, he felt that he had really earned them, especially when they turned out half-decently. Now, moving down a completely dark hallway with only one tiny green LED light to guide him, he realized that he had written that distant night-blind scene incorrectly.

What he hadn't conveyed -- and it had been because at the time he had been merely guessing what such a suspenseful situation would feel like -- was the way darkness could push in on a person, especially when the light source was just a little weaker than needed. He was experiencing that sensation firsthand now. Out of even the feeble range of the moonlight drifting in through the frozen lobby windows, he began to fully comprehend how darkness was really the universal state of things, the primal baseline that privileged humans had forgotten. He and everyone he knew had lived in light almost their entire lives, but now he was returning to the way things had been in the beginning, darkness within darkness. He filed these thoughts away, in case he ever wrote another scene like that again (and providing he ever wrote *any* scenes again, part of his mind told him, a thought which was then itself put away.)

He didn't see the large pilaster that had partially fallen across the hallway until he almost walked into it. It cut the hallway in half at a diagonal, and he paused a moment, studying it. He was suddenly reminded of the heap of debris he had crawled through on his way down the hallway outside his room. At the time, he had seemed to be crwaling down a narrow, barely-navigable path, and he hadn't noticed or heard any cave-ins behind him as he progressed, but once he was out in the open, he had been completely able to find the way he had come through. As he passed through, the passage had seemed stable and impenetrable. It was ridiculous, but he couldn't shake the idea that maybe he had passed *through* several layers of wreckage to make it out. This slanted pilaster, though, pushed back against his fingers when he put his hand against it. He ducked underneath and continued on his way.

There wasn't much hallway past the obstacle. Bruce held the light out as far away from him as he could get it, the feeble illumination doing little more than giving a general impression of space, only revealing solid objects when it came less than an inch from a surface. He passed the light over the wall at the end of the hall, and found one side to contain a door that was ajar. There was a glass pane in the upper half of this door, and after a few passes he could make out what stenciled the block letters there spelled out:

James Gough, Lodge Director

He pushed through the door into the room beyond. Here, past the door's watery glass, there was a little more light. The windows, which he was sure afforded a wonderful view when unobstructed, were all but entirely covered; what remained was a thin stripe of diffuse light coming in along where the windows' upper edges met the ceiling. Bruce swung the light quickly as he moved into the room, trying to patch together a sense of the space out of the tiny radii of light the walkie afforded. From what he could discern, it was an old-fashioned office space, rather small. A desk with shelves on the wall behind it, all of them covered with bric-a-brac, awards, shellacked cross-sections of tree used as bookends. A long bank of cupboards ran under the windows, and it was these that Bruce deemed worth investigating, because they were the only things that looked out of place.

The doors had been recently forcibly opened, and hung askew like broken teeth. He assumed that their state was the result of Glenda's story about trying to hail the outside world from a run-down comm unit. He bent, shone the light inside the cupboards. The antiquated radio box looked like it might have come out of an old war movie, all tarnished steel and yellowed plastic needle displays. He would have been more surprised if it did work. The shelves on either side of it were bare.

Bruce drew back and moved over, so he could try one of the other cupboards. As much as he wanted them to open easily, and contain some kind of first aid kit that could help Theda (or, more prescisely, the woman who wasn't Theda), he equally wanted to have to break into them as well. It would have helped his sense of frustration, which he noticed had increased since he gained physical proximity to his muse without any ability to communicate.

As he swung his attention to the next cupboard over, his foot hit something, sent it skittering across the floor. It was a small box, surprisingly light. He turned the walkie's LED toward it, and cracked a smile when he saw the traditional red cross on its white surface (although thanks to the green light, the cross shone black). He scooped it up and pried it open, the plastic clasp popping open incredibly loudly in the small, silent office. It seemed to be fully stocked with lots of coiled bandages, strips of adhesive, everything he needed.

He clicked the kit shut and turned to head back into the dark-beyond-dark hallway, but stopped short. As his arm came around, he was shocked to see a second light swing along the wall along with it. He hesitated, raised the light again, and watched its twin slide along the wall next to him. He had found a mirror of some sort. He was about to ignore the effect and leave the room, but then his curiosity got the better of him. He wondered why a lodge director would outfit his office with a large mirror directly across from his desk. He lifted the light again to investigate.

It wasn't a mirror, it was a painting, one that Mr. Gough had cared enough for to put it under glass. Bruce moved his light around and across its surface, trying to get a sense of what lay on the canvas beyond. His hand moved faster and faster, unable to get enough of the image together in his head to fully comprehend it, but knowing that he needed to. After a few moments, he stepped back and took a deep, shuddering breath.

It was Theda. And not only was the painting also an uncanny likeness of the woman lying on the couch fifty feet away, it was as Bruce had always seen his dream-woman up until tonight: her bare feet stepping through soft grass, robes billowing as if underwater, hair wreathed in flowers. He even thought that the dark shapes along the vertical edges of the work could be the shadowed sides of his own Sounding Stones.

What *was* this? His mind turned the idea that this artifact existed over and over in his mind and couldn't make sense of it... Was it just dumb luck that, save for minor stylistic differences, and the fact that the artist was clearly an amateur, Bruce was looking at an image plucked out of his own dreams? Not only that, but one that appeared to have taken corporeal form this very night?

He thought about this as he picked his way back up the dark hallway, wanting more than ever to look down at that angelic face again, to be sure that all three versions of her -- his dream-memory, the painting, and the actual woman -- were truly one and the same.

-6.3-

The idea that she might have condemned guests to death by putting them in one room over another clawed at Glenda's mind, searching for weak spots to clamber through and take her over completely. "I... I just can't remember..." she was sputtering, unable to recall even what the second half of her sentence was going to be.

Manoj placed a warm hand on her shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "We'll keep looking. I'm sure there wasn't anyone in these rooms. I only remember a handful of other people were in the restaurant, and the odds that they were..." Even he seemed to realize how unconvincing his argument was, and he turned and pointed down the hall. "Look!" he uttered, changing gears. "Kelly and I are in room 220, and we're still standing." They were standing in front of 214. Doing the math, he quickly said, "There are only two more rooms between this one and ours." His hand went from reassuring weight to tugging her shoulder. "Come and look!"

He pulled her, stumbling, down the hall. Glenda's eyes turned with dread toward 216 and 218 as they passed. What would be behind them, she wondered, if she were to use her manager's skeleton key to open? Would she even be able to, or would the snow and broken furniture and bodies behind them would be piled too thickly for her even to open them?

Manoj gestured through the still-open door of his and Kelly's room, as if the half-snow-filled devastation inside was supposed to make Glenda feel better. "See?" he asked. He pointed to the only source of light in the room, the small ventilation window that was in the corner past the patio doors, farthest away from the massive pile-up of snow that had plowed into the lodge. "It doesn't go all that far." He was acting slightly manic, clearly afraid that Glenda was about to totally lose it and he wouldn't know what to do.

She had gathered herself somewhat, but it wasn't because of him. In fact, she had been thinking of Dale, and how he would react if he were with her. Take it easy, he would say, there are only three rooms here that were destroyed. The odds that you put people in there and don't remember doing it is small. You wouldn't have put someone right at the top of the stairs, right? And you wouldn't put people right next door to Manoj and Kelly either, not if you didn't have to, to give everyone some extra privacy. So you're already down to one room that you have to worry about. She imagined she could feel the warmth of his voice reassuring her, and it did more than anything the young man beside her could possibly say or do.

"I see," Glenda said, her voice steadier than she had expected it to be. Now that her head was clearing, she was beginning to think that she knew where she had placed some of the other lodgers. Without saying anything to Manoj, she turned away from his extended arm and his half-ruined room, and looked along the other side of the hallway, at the doors of rooms whose views looked down the mountain toward the town below. This was often where she put the customers who didn't arrive loaded down with ski gear; clearly, they had come for relaxation, and probably didn't care to look up the hill at the peak. The die-hard athletes, though, Glenda could spot coming a mile away and put on the uphill-facing side of the lodge. It was why she had positioned Manoj and Kelly the way she had.

She headed for room 215, directly across the hall. Now she could remember the couple that she had placed there... the woman had been dark-haired, with straight-cut bangs across her forehead; the man had been tall, with the little round sunglasses that reminded Glenda of John Lennon's style. They hadn't seemed as ready to go skiing as much as attend an art gallery opening. Glenda remembered being surprised at how warmly they had greeted her while checking in. And she had definitely put them in 215...

She was moving to the door and digging in her pocket for the master key before Manoj could follow. With practiced ease, she slid the key into the old-fashioned keyhole and twisted it, hearing the tumblers turn inside the antique lockplate. She swung the door open.

Glenda was ready with questions to go along with her apologies for the intrusion: were they hurt, and had they realized what had happened? But she needed no falsely-cheery words. Inside, the room was unoccupied. She moved into the space with increasing puzzlement. Being on the second floor, the balcony doors were virtually unobstructed, and clear moonlight bathed everything in its cold glow. The room had been used, she could tell that much; the sheets were slightly rumpled, there was an open suitcase lying across the plush reclining chair in the corner.

Manoj had taken a few moments to overcome his resistance to following her into someone else's room. "Was there someone in this room?" he asked.

Glenda nodded, her head swiveling around, trying to take in the room in its totality. "They were a couple. Their stuff is here, but they aren't." She was staring at the bed again, as Manoj moved past her. He was looking out the balcony doors, which gave the first post-avalanche view of the town below.

Glenda didn't say anything, but the arrangement of the sheets seemed strange to her. They didn't look particularly disturbed, but they were lumpy in a strange way. It took a few moments before she realized what was strange about them. The lumps still bore the vague shapes of people, as if they had both been asleep side by side, then lithely slipped out from under the covers, up over their pillows, and just walked away.

Manoj seemed to be entranced by something outside the windows, but she didn't notice until he spoke. "Look at the hillside," he breathed. He was standing close enough to the balcony doors for his breath to cause a bloom of fog to spread out there. Forgetting about the oddly-placed bedcovers, Glenda moved over to him. His exhalation was just starting to fade from the glass, and as it did, the altered world before her was revealed.

She had never known how much more of the valley could be seen without standing trees. They could still be seen here and there, dark slashes lying almost flat along the ground, more or less covered up by the thick blanket of new snow, but they no longer obstructed the view. For the first time, she could take in the whole vista of the town below at once, its grid of lights in the center spreading out to become sinuous radiating lines as the terrain at its outskirts rose into rolling foothills. It was beautifully outlined with streetlights and warm radiance from homes. Hers was down there, too, but she wasn't immediately sure where.

"Why are all the lights still on?" Manoj wondered aloud. "And why can't we see anything going on down at the foot of the service drive?"

Glenda followed his gaze and saw that, not only was the service road itself totally covered with whiteness, but there was no sign of activity down at the base. There were no gathered emergency vehicles, and in fact there didn't seem to be any traffic at all. The town should have been a lightly shifting maze of headlights, even at this late hour, but there was no discernable motion. Only the faint wavering of heat haze seemed to hang over the town.

Glenda's brow furrowed, and when she added the mystery of the jumbled sheets behind her, she found herself asking, "Where did everybody else go?"

-6.4-

Kelly was having a hard time breaking the wooden slat in half. She had finally decided to lay one end of it against one of the lobby's upholstered chairs, and set the other end on the floor. She then tried stomping on it, as close to its center as she could, hoping that it would snap the piece near the middle. But she must not have been bringing enough of her weight down on it, possibly because she was wary of how flimsy the hotel slippers protecting her feet were, but she wasn't getting anywhere with it. She hoped Bruce would have more luck with it when he came back from searching the offices, because even though he had the same slippers on, he had more bulk to put behind his stomp.

She tried not to think too much about what Kerren had been whispering. It was probably just the kind of nonsense a woman starting to come back from pain-induced unconsciousness was likely to say. Kelly hoped she had enough time to strap the wooden pieces on the injured woman's legs before she totally came around. It was going to hurt.

She took a look up the stairs, wondering how Manoj was doing up there. She hadn't minded his going off with Glenda; in fact, she felt better knowing that the desk clerk and the security guard were on separated agendas right now. There was clearly some romantic drama going on there that didn't need to be played out right now, or in front of everyone. Her boyfriend would keep Glenda on track, focused on what they were trying to do. They had agreed on a clear plan, and they all needed to stick to it.

"Success!" Bruce suddenly called as he emerged from the dark doorway, startling her. He held up a shoebox-sized object in his hand, white with a red cross on it.

"Great!" Kelly called back. "I've just got to break this wood, and we can get her set up. Let's act quickly, though; she's starting to come around and it'll be easier if she's still out when we do it."

Bruce didn't stop looking down at Kerren as he came around the end of the desk and walked over. "She's coming out of it?" he asked, urgency evident in his voice. When Kelly didn't respond right away, his attitude changed. He turned and looked directly at her. "I felt so badly that my moving her hurt so much. Has she said anything?"

"She was just muttering. I was over there by the desk, so I didn't hear what." She was going to have to find out why he was so incredibly interested before she told him what was said. Something in his manner didn't quite have her convinced that his concern was entirely about the blonde woman's well-being.

He nodded, disappointed. "Well, let's get her set up before she does." His gaze flicked to the unbroken plank. "Sturdy little bastard, is it?"

Kelly laughed a little at this, and lifted a foot to show off her slipper. "Yeah. If I had my boots on, I could break right through it. Maybe Manoj will bring them down for me."

Bruce quickly stepped up, and without a word of explanation, did exactly what Kelly had done, stamping his foot down hard on the middle of the angled wood. And, just as it had for Kelly, it refused to break. Bruce hopped back, wincing. "Ah, Christ!" he hissed through his teeth, and it was hard for Kelly not to smile. He clearly thought he was going to walk right up and do what the young woman couldn't. He was quick to explain it away, though: "Must have really bruised my foot trying to kick down Sheryl's door."

Kelly nodded to placate him, but was already thinking on how to escalate the war of woman against wood. While Bruce leaned against Kerren's couch, nursing his foot, she walked over behind the other overstuffed chair and pushed it across the floor so that it faced the one she had braced the wood against. Stepping between the two chairs, she managed to slide the front of the relocated one partway up the angled piece of wood, so that the chair was tipped backward a little, its front edge resting on the wood. Then she climbed up into the angled chair, hopped up and down a little on its cushion, and heard the muffled but satisfying snap of the wood breaking in half under the combined weight. The chair she stood on suddenly dropped back into its regular upright position, and she managed not to be thrown off.

"And it's just as easy as that," she said.

"Well, that was impressive," Bruce said, amused.

"Can you pass me the gauze now?" she asked, climbing down and pushing the chair back enough that she could extraxt the two roughly equal-length pieces of wood she had created. By the time she was done, Bruce had opened up the first aid kit and was handing her a large roll of self-adhesive bandage. She took it and moved toward Kerren's legs.

"Now," she said as she knelt by the couch and laid everything out, "I'm going to need to remove this pillow propping up her knees, so her legs can straighten out while I splint them. I don't know if she's going to wake up, but can you... soothe her if she does?"

Bruce was already kneeling next to her, with a genuine look of concern on his face. "I'll do whatever I can."

"Good," Kelly said. "Here we go..." She gingerly slid the pillow out from underneath the crooked legs, sliding her hand in to replace it so the tortured knee joints settled slowly into their new position. Kerren didn't exactly wake up, but her brow furrowed and she made a barely audible moaning sound. Kelly obliquely noted that her voice didn't sound anything like she thought it would, based on the few phrases she had heard it utter a few minutes ago. It was lighter now, slightly higher pitched.

"It's okay," Bruce was already cooing, pressing his hand to Kerren's forehead. "She's helping you."

Kelly brought the pieces of wood up and laid them along the outsides of Kerren's legs, after a moment's consideration placing the more jagged ends down by her ankles. Then she began to loop the long roll of bandage around the woman's legs. Each time around, she had to lift Kerren's leg a little bit to pass the roll underneath, and both she and Bruce flinched a little every time they did, afraid that the movement would cause enough pain to wake Kerren up. It didn't, but she still knitted her eyebrows and released another thin, whispery groan each time.

By the time Kelly was starting to work on the leg closest to the back of the couch, Bruce seemed quietly flustered by Kerren's increasingly apparent discomfort. He seemed not quite to know what to do for the patient, or whether he should stop the proceedings altogether. To distract him, Kelly tried to engage him in conversation. "So, I hear you're an author, is that right?"

A moment of stunned silence passed, and then they both laughed. It was a sound she hadn't heard him make yet.

"I've been called that," he responded. "It's the term I most prefer."

"I think I've read one of your books," she said as she worked. "Was it the one about the aging rock star and the young producer?"

He chuckled. "Yep, that was me. That one's an oldie but goodie. Came out fifteen years ago. You couldn't have even been in middle school then, could you?"

She shrugged, paused to lift one of Kerren's legs to pass the bandage roll underneath once again. "Just barely. Some of the kids in my class were passing around a paperback copy with the edges of the dirty pages marked. We thought we were being really clever about it."

"Oh," he said. "Did you read anything other than the dirty pages? Although I seem to recall there were more than usual in that one."

"I did," she said. "I tried to game it so I was the last one of us to have it Friday afternoon. So I could take it home over the weekend and read the whole thing."

He seemed to be totally distracted from the current operation by this ego stroking. "And here I was, not knowing I was a YA writer."

The second leg was finished. Kelly sat back on her heels, exhaled, and looked directly at him. "What I actually liked was the non-YA-ness of it."

He nodded. "Well, thank you. That means a lot, that there was something in it for you. Other than the dirty pages, although writers secretly want their audience to like those parts too."

She was about to turn back to Kerren, ready to take a look at her completed handiwork, when Bruce's hand suddenly clutched her shoulder. She stopped, and realized why. Kerren had opened her eyes.

-6.5-

Harmon had never tried slipping into someone's consciousness before. He talked himself into it by rationalizing that for all he knew this was Sarah, not just anyone. She would understand.

He almost jumped right back out of her when he realized that, despite all outward appearances, this was *not* Sarah. And once the shock of this wore off, he wondered why he would ever have thought she was in the first place. Yes, physically she was a dead ringer for his former flame, but her sudden presence at his Lodge, unchanged after all this time, hadn't made any sense. From inside, however, some new things became clear to him.

This was a woman named Kerren. And he wasn't sure if it was because she was the first consciousness he had ever experienced in this way, but he found her to be an unbelievably intricate web of instincts, experiences, learned behaviors, attractions and repulsions, delusions and convictions. If he had been able to bring his eyes with him, he would have wept at the gorgeous complexity of her mind. Was everyone like this on the inside, he wondered? Was everyone -- even him, a broken relic of a man -- carrying around this vast, messy, wondrous tangle of life between their ears everywhere they went? And how could any of them for one second ever forget about the miracle of it?

But for all the marvels Kerren's mind held, it still wasn't the mind he had hoped to find. A part of him that had known it all along became acutely aware that Sarah did not exist anymore, at least not in this way, this literally incredible webwork of sparking filaments, each one a crossroad, a distinction between one thing and another, the sum total of which were thoughts that the body turned into action. With this realization, his virtual tears changed character, from awe to grieving.

For a long time -- and within Kerren's mind, it seemed like days that Harmon somehow knew in the real world were merely seconds -- he explored the fringes of her being, swooping through the vast, still unused places out on the edges of her thoughts, where they was still so much room to grow in the coming years. He sometimes felt as if his own mind were temporally stuffed to the gills, and wished he could conduct these experiments inside his own head. Maybe he could; he'd have time later to find out.

Or would he? He suddenly recalled that at this moment his body was lying under a layer of snow beneath a fallen tree in a vast forest of fallen, covered trees. If he didn't find a way to tell someone where he was soon, that body would die, and he wasn't at all sure what was going to happen to what he was experiencing if it did.

Before he turned to this problem, however, there was one more thing he had to check out. Namely, this feeling he had since he had arrived, a feeling of not being alone in this space. He was almost tempted to say the presence he felt was Kerren herself, but she didn't seem to be fully present at the moment. Perhaps she was injured in the avalanche, but Harmon had the unexplainable sense that she wasn't home. She'd be back, eventually; there had been no real damage to her brain, and everything was clearly still intact. No, there was something else going on, some subroutine somewhere that was foreign to the overall design. He turned around, trying to determine exactly what it was.

Far back in Kerren's mind, past layers and layers of neurons and bridging axons, there was a door. It wasn't shaped like a door -- in fact, it wasn't shaped like much of anything -- but Harmon could tell that's what it was. And that door was... the only applicable word was ajar. A slow, tiny trickle of perceptions and ideas were emanating from it, as if someone had lit a fire on the other side and was fanning vaporous thoughts through the slim opening. Of course, none of these visual metaphors were really playing out in front of Harmon's spectral eyes; they were just his mind's way of literalizing something that couldn't be comprehended in any other context.

The only thing Harmon knew for sure was that what was coming through wasn't him. His own presence seemed entirely different than this slow, quiet encroachment from the other side of the door. The strongest sense he received from this gap in Kerren's mind took the form of a word -- *other*. There was something that was leaking into Kerren's mind from *somewhere else*. He had no idea what it was, or where it was coming from, or what that meant for the woman whose mind he was occupying, but it was inescapably alien.

He moved toward the gap cautiously, as if it were inherently important for him not to draw attention to himself. As he drew closer to it, and passed through the dark filaments of thought that were beginning to waft in, he began to receive pictures. They were vague, fuzzy like a bad TV broadcast from his youth, but there were a few flashes that were unmistakable: a tall stone with a glowing rune carved in the side, its color a lovely, pale orange... a tall, black leafless tree that rotated its trunk, turning as if to say hello to him... a woman's bare feet hovering inches above lush green grass.

Taken by themselves, these images might have entranced him, because on the surface they were all suffused with a sense of serenity, like disconnected glimpses of someone else's vacation photos. In themselves, they were completely benign and quite lovely. But there was an intent behind them, and it didn't seem entirely... wholesome. He got the feeling that these images were something that shouldn't be in Kerren's mind.

Without realizing he was doing it, or even *how* he was doing it, Harmon's presence reached toward the door. Even though he was repulsed at the idea of touching it, even in this bodiless way, he somehow did anyway, detected its weird smooth coolness, and he pushed it shut. There was a sense at the last moment that whatever was starting to ease its way through realized that it was being cut off, and began to react, but it was too late. Harmon shut the door and -- again, he didn't know how -- fixed it so that it couldn't be reopened. At least, not without a mighty effort, one that he hoped the force on the other side didn't have.

As soon as the door-that-was-not-a-door was firmly shut and sealed, Kerren's mind sprang to blazing life, as if he had broken a spell. And even though Harmon had been stupefied by the beauty of his surroundings before, that feeling erupted exponentially. As the woman regained consciousness, her brain sprang to burning blazing life, like a city as big as a world having all its power switches thrown at once. Harmon's identity was almost washed away with the sheer voltage of it. He couldn't stay in this blast of power, he knew, but there was a message he had come to deliver, and he had to pass it along before he retreated from the engulfing enormity that was a single human brain.

He latched onto one neuron during his retreat back out of Kerren's head, one that seemed to be particularly active, and imparted one of his own thoughts to it. Again, he had no idea how he was doing it. It might have been something primordial, instinctual. He didn't care how it was being done, only that it was.

He was forcibly thrown from Kerren's mind by her consciousness, as casually and thoughtlessly as a waking dog shaking off a flea. As was he pulled back into the macroscopic world, feeling his strength ebbing from him and pulling him back toward his body, he tried to keep a tiny part of himself, a long thin thread of his consciousness, with her.

He flew back across snow and debris, watching all his laborious uphill progress unwinding in moments. He wasn't at all sure he had succeeded in keeping his strange connection with the woman until he heard Kerren uttering a few raspy words, her voice barely able to register surprise at the sudden knowledge she was imparting to the man and woman looming over her.

"Harmon. I know where he is."

-6.6-

The combined forms of Benny and Carlos staggered across the wooden boards of the former restaurant/bar, past the stairway that intruded partway into the area as it descended from the upper floor. The whole thing had been slewed to the side from the force of the avalanche, which was just barely being held back by the sturdy stonework that formed the back wall of the large room. The bottom half of the stairs had been almost folded up in the deluge; they reminded Carlos of when he had been a kid and peeked between the pages of pop-up books, seeing how the various elements flattened in an orderly, predetermined fashion.

It wasn't until they had staggered out to the middle of the floor, acutely feeling the freezing sky above them, that Carlos began to get nervous. With the roof torn off the room like this, he was all too aware that if there were a second donwrushing of snow, there would be nothing keeping it from finally overflowing the back wall and filling the spot where they stood. At best, it would slam them up against the downhill wall, and at worst drown them in whiteness.

"Come on," he said to Benny, nodding in the direction of the main door. They had to go around the collapsing stairway, and then hope that the double doors on the far side weren't blocked by debris. If they weren't, it would only be a straight shot down the hall to the lobby. Carlos wasn't sure why, but that seemed to be their natural choice of destination. If he had to say why, he would have said it was because it was the largest part of the lodge that faced away from the avalanche, so therefore it should be less damaged.

Carlos began pulling his friend that direction, but he felt some resistance. When he turned to Benny, the man was looking the other direction, a dazed, dreamy expression on his face. "What?" Carlos asked him. "What is it?"

Benny had already taken special notice of the fireplace, murmuring something about how its stones were still standing. Apparently, it continued to command his attention. Not only that, but a smile was struggling to make itself evident on the injured man's face. It was a totally incongruous sight, such a joyful expression on the face of a man so bloodied and scorched.

"We need it," he said.

"What, buddy?" Carlos repeated. "What do you see?"

Benny was already pulling from him, turning away from their intended exit and toward the dark bulk of the fireplace. Carlos wasn't exactly surprised; in this formerly familiar world where everything had now been either broken or ripped away entirely, that stony tower was the only thing that looked like it still had any real substance. He decided that he would at least find out what Benny was entranced by. There didn't seem to be any immediate danger, but then again he could have said the same thing up until two seconds before the kitchen window exploded in Benny's face.

His injured friend steered Carlos across the warped/cracked/loose floorboards of the restaurant, toward the seemingly immovable fireplace. Every now and then, little rivulets of snow from the stopped wave on the other side would shower down around the sides of it, spilling over the length of wall that the fireplace hadn't allowed to be knocked down. That hearth had always reminded Carlos of the one in his grandparents' house, with its rounded river stones stacked and mortared together with little technical know-how but lots of emotional investment.

Lines of light gleamed there now, above the fireplace's mouth, and Carlos realized what had captivated Benny. It was as if the moon itself were shining down on the stones and forming lines of light there, inscribing a message for them alone to see. They both knew exactly what it was, but at the very same time, Carlos could see how its appearance felt fantastical.

The logo of the Deertail was a stoic, serifed depiction of the letters "DL" underneath a stylized swoop that could either be a flame, the peak of the mountain that had towered solidly above the lodge until extremely recently, or possibly a diagram of the literal tail of a deer as it bounded away into the woods. This swoop connected the "D" to the "L", and gave the logo a triangular, traditional-vs.-modern feel to it. This fixture had been cast in silver, nearly two feet to a side, and then screwed into the stones above the fireplace's mantel. Its polished surface was now catching bits of moonlight, and the pair of exhausted men felt their faces begin to glow as they drew up to it, unable to look away.

The metal logo had come loose during all the vibrations, and hung a little askew. It would have annoyed Jimmy Gough to no end to see it that way, the bottoms of the letters pointing upward at an angle, instead of mirroring the level of the floor. He would have ordered a handyman to fix it immediately, but now Carlos couldn't say for sure if there would ever be anyone coming to correct it.

Benny's free hand -- the one that wasn't wrapped more tightly than ever around Carlos's shoulders -- was reaching for the logo. The metalwork wasn't too high off the ground for him to reach, and the fact that he had a difficult time reaching it said more about how much he was leaning on Carlos. But still the bloodied, trembling hand rose up through the freezing air and traced the lines of the cold metal, as if it were finally touching some ancient treasure that it hadn't been sure really existed until now.

Carlos intended to let Benny do as he liked for a moment, and then urge him through the door that led to the (hopefully intact) lobby. Just as he was about to enact this plan, Benny's hand grasped the inner curve of the metal D with sudden ferocity and yanked on it. With a surprisingly weak grinding sound, the logo came away from of the wall, leaving only little downspills of powdered mortar behind. Carlos could see how the metal had been anchored to the places between the stones, the holes that the bolts left behind positioned just so. Now Benny was cradling the thing against his chest. It seemed larger than ever with its new proximity.

"We need this," Benny said, as if stating a known fact.

"Sure, Benny," Carlos said. "But now let's get somewhere safe."

As they turned away from the fireplace, Carlos was secretly glad that Benny had taken down the piece of metal. After this horrific experience was all over, it might end up being the only memento of the Deertail Lodge to survive.

-7.1-

By the time Dale had pulled all the insulated clothing from the closet, and verifying with Sheryl a half-dozen times that it was okay for him to take most of her and Kerren's clothes with the intent of giving them to others -- she no longer believed he was going to be attacked by some horrific kind of horned, wooden wall-monster. She had, however, reached a state of alertness unlike any she had ever experienced. Even when she had been in utter darkness, trying to find Kerren, her nerve endings hadn't tingled like this. That had been in this very room maybe half an hour earlier, but time had seemed to stretch out indeterminably between now and then.

Every rattle of the closet hangers, every scrape and squeak of Dale's work boots against the planks of the damaged floor, was excruciatingly loud to her. Someone had cranked up the color and brightness of everything in her surroundings, regardless of how tightly focused Dale's flashlight beam was, or how its shining white LEDs tried to bleach everything. She stood there as he finished passing clothing to her, until her arms were full of fluffiness, waiting for the next moment to dawn with utter clarity, and then the next, and then the next...

Dale swung his light out of the closet, illuminating the short hallway where the women's bed had been jammed up against the corner that led into the suite's main room. "Probably no point in looking for anything in there, right?" he asked.

"Nope," Sheryl answered. It was strange how she could look at the scene of such personal trauma, and only see an arrangement of objects. She had already decided not to say anything to anyone about what she had seen in the closet. It was probably her mind's reaction to such an experience of blind force such as she had been through. Unable to comprehend such a thing as an avalanche happening for no reason, her brain was looking for malevolent forces everywhere, to the point where it could make up a very vivid one out of nothing.

"Ready to head back?" Dale asked, holding out his arms to her. Sheryl momentarily thought he was moving in for a hug, but instead he relieved her of about two-thirds of the fabric burden he had laid across her arms. She didn't respond, just followed him back out into the hall, trying hard to shake the feeling of something watching her as she hurriedly strode out of the re-darkened room.

On the walk back to the stairs, Dale seemed uncomfortable, and before they had even turned the corner back into the main corridor, he asked too-pointedly, "So what brought you two up here this weekend?"

Sheryl almost didn't speak, but then decided to answer, and was surprised to find it made her feel a little better. "It's our anniversary," she said. "Two years."

"Oh!" Dale replied, clearly pleased for the normalcy her answer provided. "Congratulations."

"Thanks," Sheryl said. "And how long have you been working here?"

"This is my fifth season," he said. "And probably last."

"Aren't you going to rebuild?" Sheryl asked, realizing too late that it probably wasn't up to the security detail to make such a decision.

Dale shrugged under his burden of clothes. "If you knew Jimmy, the owner, you'd be tempted to say yes. His heart and soul has always been in this, which makes it all the harder that all this has happened while he's on vacation. The only one that I've ever known him to take. Even in the summers, he's usually here planning the coming season."

"How strange," Sheryl muttered.

"And you know what's even weirder?" Dale asked, as if he were just remembering it as he spoke. "He asked me, about three weeks ago, if I was going to be around on this specific weekend. At the time, I thought it was just because--"

The silence that passed was the most tangibly awkward between them yet. "Why?" Sheryl asked, wondering if it were only the pin of that word would puncture whatever was keeping Dale's words from continuing.

The big man shrugged, as if realizing that the secret was out. "At the time, I thought he wanted to keep me and Glenda separate, while he wasn't around."

Now Sheryl understood. She nodded. "So he knows about you two?"

Dale chuckled a little. "Hell," he admitted, "even I wasn't all that sure at the time. But clearly, he did."

A smile spread slowly across Sheryl's face. "You know, it usually doesn't take a woman literally throwing herself into a guy's arms to let him know what's going on."

"I know," Dale said, a sheepish tone creeping into his voice. "But it's complicated with Glenda and me. She's married, has kids... I can't say I'm not attracted to her, but I also don't want to be *that* guy, you know? I mean, I was never really sure how much of her side of it was the uniform, or the fact that I'm technically responsible for everyone's safety." He took on a sullen look as the light from the lobby was growing, bringing the hallway around them into focus. "Not that I'm doing such a great job of that lately."

Sheryl moved close enough to nudge his elbow with hers. "Hey," she said, "I think you're doing the best you can. You're just one guy, and this whole place has been half-knocked down. I think you're going about it right."

He nodded thankfully. "That means a lot." His eyes were searching the hall ahead of them, past the point where the stairs to the lobby intersected it. Sheryl assumed that Glenda had headed that direction when she stormed up the main stairs, or else they would have come across her by this point.

Dale gave the dark hallways one more sweep of his flashlight, and then clicked it off. He hesitated before he stepped into the lobby's gray light. His eyes were still searching for her, but Sheryl couldn't quite tell by his expression whether he really wanted to see her right now or not. Anyway, there wasn't a sign of the desk clerk, not even a sound to be heard in the quiet hall. She might have gone into one of the rooms.

Sheryl nudged Dale again. "Come on," she said. "Let's get these down to my wife and our friends." She put a playful up-spin on the word "friends" to make it sound like she wasn't saying it seriously, but she really was.

"I just can't believe she still cares about me," Dale muttered, still looking down the hall. "Even though she knows..." He trailed off, then realized where he was and stopped himself from finishing his sentence. He looked back at Sheryl, as if surprised that he had been speaking aloud, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

"I just can't believe it, that's all," he said.

Sheryl nodded. "She seems great. Good in a crisis, stands her ground. My kind of woman."

This made Dale chuckle, and Sheryl found the sound, originating from even deeper in his throat than his speaking voice, pleasing to her ear. Hell, if she swung that way, she'd probably find him attractive too. "We've got people to warm," she said finally. She started forward, heading for the top of the stairs, but was halted by a horrified, desperate sound.

"Dale!" a female voice called from far down the opposing hall. Without waiting for a response, it came again quickly. "DALE!!!", this time with a panicked edge to it.

Dale had dropped his share of the coats and was tearing down the hall, fumbling with his flashlight to get it re-lit even as he was plunging into the darkness, before the second call had died away. Sheryl stood frozen at the top of the stairs, unsure if she should continue and get back to Kerren or to help Dale assist Glenda, who was clearly the source of the distress call.

She watched Dale run, boots clomping down the hall, unwilling to stop for anything in order to get to her. It told Sheryl all she needed to know about how he truly felt about her. Despite the danger, it made her smile a little.

-7.2-

For a long moment, Bruce just stared at Kerren's opened eyes, desperately trying to recall if Theda's had been that color. He couldn't remember, and didn't know if it was because he hadn't seen her in so long, or whether he had just never paid attention. His dreamscape had so much other sensory input to provide, after all.

Neither Kelly nor he moved for a long moment, wondering what was going to happen next. The voice Kerren had spoken with had come breathily, and if her slightly-parted lips had moved to form the words, it had been so subtle as to not be noticed alongside the sudden opening of her eyes. Those orbs were motionless, which was unsettling because it almost never happened in the living. Still, she was breathing, as slow and steady as she had been since he pulled her out from under her bed. So they sat and waited.

"Dale!"

They heard someone -- Glenda, presumably, calling from the upper hallway. The sound passed through the space cleanly, affecting nothing in the lobby. Another call, this one more frantic, came quickly on the heels of the first...

"DALE!!!"

Thundering steps came after this, sturdy work boots clomping on broken, thinly-carpeted flooring. None of the three people in the lobby turned their heads toward the sound, but they knew if they did, they would see the deep-blue bulk of the security guard rushing past the top of the stairs, on his way from one wing of the lodge to the other. That one action seemed to render the problem handled, and Bruce thought nothing else of it.

Shortly after came another form, one that none of them saw, this one considerably shorter and lumbering under a pile of clothes draped inexpertly across both arms. The figure began to descend the stairs, swaying a bit under the added weight. "Little help," it tentatively asked after a few wobbly steps.

Kelly and Bruce looked at each other at the same time. Bruce waited for her to get up to assist; after all, he had been the one who had helped Kerren before, so it was only fiar for her to be the one to step up. But there was something about the way the blonde was looking at him: did he imagine it, or was she sizing him up in some way?

"Do we tell her she woke up?" Kelly whispered to him. As she said this, she nodded to Kerren, who was still looking up at the faraway ceiling rafters with vacant eyes. "Before she gets down here and sees for herself, I mean."

Bruce, cursing himself for his paranoia, nodded. "I'll tell her," he said. Before Kelly could voice an opinion one way or the other, Bruce straightened and strode toward the bottom of the stairs, then hopping up them two at a time to get to Sheryl before she either slipped or dropped her load. "Let me assist," he said.

"Thanks," Sheryl said as she felt the clothing being taken from her. Bruce ended up taking more than half, and they started descending again, side by side.

"Now, Sheryl," Bruce said, trying hard not to allow a condescending tone to creep into his voice, "we've tried to stabilize your wife's legs. Kelly down there has proven herself quite able in these matters... see how she's splinted her legs? But the side effect has been that she's... well, she's started to come around a little bit."

Without any other kind of outward reaction, Sheryl was off down the stairs, tossing her burden of clothing over the bannister to keep it out from underneath her feet. It pattered down across the carpet, zippers and buttons clacking. One piece became snagged on the oranmental top of the grandfather clock, and hung crooked like a bulky cape around its tall form. Sheryl forgot to hold onto anything and mostly slid down the last few staps. Then she was running over to Kerren's side, barely missing Kelly as she dropped into Bruce's former spot.

Sheryl grabbed her wife's hand, lifted it and held it vertically. "Kerren? Honey?" she spoke down into those empty eyes, the fear rising in her voice as her wife's unresponsiveness continued. "Why isn't she moving? Is she awake?"

Kelly's hand moved comfortingly up and down Sheryl's back. "We don't know. She just opened her eyes." Unsure of whether to tell her the rest, she looked up at Bruce, who was taking his time getting his share of the clothes down the stairs. He paused in his journey long enough to give her a go-ahead nod.

Kelly took a breath, braced her palm against Sheryl's back, and then said, "She said something a minute ago."

Sheryl's head whipped away from the surveyance of her wife's features, and she locked eyes with Kelly. "She did? What did she say?"

Kelly didn't answer right away, even though she could tell that the suspense was excruciating for the dark-haired woman. "She said that she knew where Harmon was."

Sheryl's face fell. She had most likely been hoping for a valiant declaration of love, some eloquent defiance against the darkness that had barely failed to claim them. Bruce dropped his pile of clothes heavily onto the chair against which Kelly had broken the wood for the splints. "Can you talk to her, Sheryl?" he asked. "Maybe get her to say something else?"

Bruce had to admit that hearing unfamiliar words coming from the body of the woman he still half-thought of as Theda -- even if it really had been her true voice -- had him on edge, too. He doubted it was a coincidence that a woman who shouldn't be in this world, and had a portrait that shouldn't exist hanging nearby, would claim to have information she shouldn't logically have. If Theda really was in there somewhere, he wanted her drawn out. Maybe Sheryl was the key to that. If so, he was willing to let her speak to Kerren for the time being.

Sheryl bent down over her wife, clasping the barely-conscious woman's hand in both of her own. "Can you hear me, Kerren?" She spoke as calmly as she could, trying to coax out more reaction, as if luring a scared animal from a cave. The results were scattershot, no matter how well intentioned, Sheryl only pushing out fragments of sentences: "It's me, honey... I'm so glad you're not... that you're, well, not okay, but... Can you look at me? Or blink if you can't quite move yet... How about squeezing my hand? Are you there?" Bruce was momentarily confused when he saw a dark spot appear on Kerren's sleeve, and only then realized that a tear had dropped from the point of Sheryl's chin.

Kelly was still bracing Sheryl's back with her hand, but Bruce thought she might need more support than that. He moved over to the couch, hoping to come around and set down on the other side of the kneeling women. As the vague outline of his shadow passed over Kerren's face, however, she moved. It wasn't much, just the flicking of her eyes in his direction, but it was the biggest reaction they had gotten from her since her awakening.

Sheryl reacted quickly, not quite making the connection between her wife's movement and that of the author. "Kerren?" she said, her voice suddenly hopeful. "Are you with me?"

Kerren's eyes stopped trying to track Bruce, and shifted to Sheryl. "My legs hurt," she whispered.

Sheryl let out a relieved bark of a laugh, and clasped the bundle of upraised hands to her chest. "I know, baby. I know," she breathed. "We've been working on that. Just keep as still as you can, okay?"

"Okay," Kerren answered. The fear and confusion wasn't quite gone from her eyes yet. "Are we in the lobby?"

"That's right," Sheryl replied, intensely happy that someone was finally asking her questions she had the answers to.

Bruce was just about to jump in and ask a few questions himself, when Kelly did it for him. Her hand, which was already flat against Sheryl's back, slid up to the base of her neck. "Sheryl..." she began, her voice tentative but determined, "... can I ask her about Harmon?"

Before Sheryl could answer, Kerren spoke without looking away from her wife. "I know that name," she said. "I think he's the one who let me come back. He somehow... feels like a Harmon."

Kelly took this as permission to speak to the injured woman directly. "Kerren, you said you knew where he was."

Kerren's eyebrows furrowed. She thought for a second, and then answered slowly, "I think I do. He's here, and not here. Still in my head a little, but also out there." She lifted her free hand and pointed it back over her head, clearly gesturing toward the front windows of the lobby.

"Could you find him?" Kelly asked. "If we went out there?"

"I... think so," Kerren answered. "As long as he stays with me. There's still a connection... but it's so thin..."

Bruce had been standing there, mesmerized, all through this exchange. She didn't sound much like Theda, not like she had when she had first spoken. It could have been his desire to find her being projected onto that fragment of speech, but now that she was really talking, the difference was evident. Still, it was so clearly *her* face...

There would be time, he realized. It hadn't quite worked out before, but now that Kerren was conscious again, it was more important than ever. Just as she claimed to know where Harmon was without logically being able to, she knew something about Theda. He just knew it. He just had to get her alone, then he'd extract the information he needed out of her. And he was prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to do so.

-7.3-

Glenda and Manoj stood at the window for a long time, just looking down toward the village in the foothills of the mountain, waiting for movement. They would have accepted anything: a flicker of light as a pair of car headlights swept around a corner, the blinking of a storefront sign, the pinwheels of emergency spinners as rescue crews flocked to where the snow-covered service road usually emptied out onto the town's easternmost street. Anything. But all was paralyzed, stilled. Only the slowly wavering mirage effect, caused by errant drafts of temperature changes between there and here, convinced them that they weren't looking at a world-spanning snapshot.

"I live down there," Glenda said, whispering as if she didn't want to run the risk of her breath fogging the glass and obscuring the town's lights. "My family is down there."

Manoj turned around and took another look at the bed. At first, Glenda had stared at the strange hollow lumpiness of the sheets with almost the same intensity as she now stared out the window. Card-carrying nerd that he was, he couldn't stop thinking of a particular scene from a Star Wars movie, which happened to him even more often than he admitted even to his co-workers. In particular, the scene where Yoda dies and passes into the Force.

Like so many other characters in that saga failed to do, the green alien dies in his bed, a heavy blanket pulled up over his tiny 800-year old frame. As the light goes out in his eyes -- a moviemaking feat that Manoj could appreciate even as child, because puppets have no light in their eyes in the first place -- he fades out of existence, and the blanket hangs dome-like in the air for a fraction of a second before settling into the empty space where the Jedi master's body used to be.

The sheets in this room looked almost exactly like that. Once filled, now empty. As if the people under them had simply evaporated.

He looked back at Glenda, saw her eyes searching the panorama before them even more desperately. He could almost see the fear as it ratcheted up in her mind. She was putting the pieces together just as he was: the disappearance of guests she was sure were had been assigned to this room, the oddly frozen quality of the town, and the implications for what that would mean for the people living in that town, perhaps even those in the world beyond...

Manoj lifted his hand, went to place it on her shoulder and speak some soothing yet-to-be-determined words that would put her mind at ease...

"Dale!" Glenda called, loudly enough to make his hand recoil in mid-air. He hadn't yet recovered when the second yell came, even more panic-stricken than the first. "DALE!!!"

Manoj actually took a step back, fearing a third sonic volley. But Glenda didn't feel the need, or maybe was no longer thinking of what was happening around her. Her gaze remained fixed on the lights spread out in a loose grid before them. He imagined that on any other night, it would have a been a beautiful sight, a small town alive with light and life on a cozy weekend night. But the stillness they were witnessing was just... unearthly.

Heavy footsteps came thumping down the hall, growing closer. Apparently the message had been received. Dale's form came bursting into the room, a term that was almost literally appropriate because of the way his shoulder slammed hard against the doorjamb as he entered.

"What is it?" Dale asked, skidding to a stop. Glenda turned and walked toward him, her arms rising in need of an embrace, which the security guard provided without hesitation. As her head rested against his collarbone, Dale looked over her and to Manoj for answers. "What happened?"

Manoj shook his head, unsure of where to start. He wondered how long it had been since the walkie in his hand had made any noise. "We don't know where anyone else is," he said after several false starts.

"What are you talking about?" Dale asked, his frustration already visibly starting to build. Manoj already knew his explanation wasn't going to sit well with the guard; he suspected they were two men with similarly rational minds, and Manoj wasn't processing it well himself. It didn't help that the desk clerk Dale cared about most was visibly upset.

"There are no other guests," Manoj said. They had only checked one room, but somehow it seemed a strong assumption to make a right assumption. "And there's nothing moving down in the town."

"Nothing moving," Dale repeated, clearly disbelieving.

"We've been watching for a while," Glenda spoke up, her voice partly muffled because it was pressing against Dale's uniformed shoulder. "There's *no* *one* *down* *there*."

"That can't be," Dale uttered, his arms moving to pull Glenda even more tightly to him. "A whole town full of people can't just--"

"Then where are the cars?" Manoj asked. "Where are the rescue teams? And where are *they*?" He pointed to the empty heaps of sheets behind them.

Dale turned to look, having to swing Glenda along with him a little. He stared at the rumples for a long time. "There are lots of other explanations," he said flatly.

"Such as?" Manoj replied. He waited, honestly wishing that some plausible alternatives would come forth.

Dale just stood there, unable to provide any answers. Before he had to sputter something out, Glenda spoke, her voice rendered acoustically flat by Dale's fabric-covered chest. "I was okay with taking this job because I could see the whole town from the front door," she said. "If I was worried about my kids, I could just take a look and at least tell myself that things looked okay down there. But I never, *ever* thought..." Suddenly, she looked up into Dale's face. Manoj thought she might be moving to kiss him again, but instead she whispered, "I've got to get down there! I need to see them, to hug them--"

"Okay," Dale said. All trace of uncertainty about leaving the lodge was suddenly gone. "We'll get you home. Right now."

Glenda rested her forehead against his shoulder again, and a look passed between Dale and Manoj, one that conveyed twin feelings of utter bewilderment, about the Lodge, the world beyond, and the promise that Dale had just made.

Manoj turned around and looked down the slope again, toward the town. It was hard to do with Glenda standing beside him, but he tried to clear his mind and look at the situation analytically. He did this all the time at his job, and when he took a moment to consider it, this wasn't all that different. He had been uniquely trained to look at a simulation, then determine what was wrong with it, and how to fix it... so what was the issue here?

He took a long look at the scene while Dale and Glenda continued their embrace behind him, then closed his eyes. He redrew the town in his mind's eye, trying to add in all the details he would expect to see from this vantage point. What would a living town contain that this one did not? He mentally conjured what he should be seeing... the flow of cars, the faint waves of traffic-light red and green that would sweep across the orangey arc-sodium background light permeating the streets, the on-off wink of cell towers, the rotating wedges of light that spun as they led to the runway at the tiny airport on the fringe of town.

Once he had visualized this ideal, he opened his eyes and looked for the changes. He found them very quickly. He had been thinking in terms of artificial illumination, because at that moment so soon after midnight, there was nothing else of the town that could be seen. Everything was outlines. Aside from the temperature shimmering between here and there, those lights did not shift or move. It was as if...

"You can't go down to the town," he said without turning.

Dale's rational voice answered from behind him, perhaps after a long enough pause that he might have been removing his lips from Glenda's. "Of course we can. There are snowmobiles in the shed--"

"No," Manoj said. "I mean you will be physically unable to get down there."

A longer pause. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"The town's not really there," Manoj said. "Come on." He turned and left the room without looking at them. There were others who would be easier to convince than Dale and Glenda, and he would need them on his side first.

-7.4-

"Can you see where Harmon is?" Kelly was asking Kerren, who still lay across the sofa, her legs necessarily bound and looking around with less confusion every passing second.

"Not exactly," she was saying in a breathy voice, as if afraid she would injure herself further by speaking at full volume. Even though she was talking to Kelly, she seemed not to want to look away from Sheryl, who was still clutching her hand. She seemed to not want to look at the author crouching closest to her head. Her eyes pointedly never turned anywhere in that general direction.

For some reason, Kelly didn't want Bruce to be that close to Kerren either. She couldn't exactly put her finger on why -- was it the way his ears seemed to perk up every time something about the injured woman's condition changed? He just seemed too eager to be near her, to touch her, or look at her. It had been endearing at the beginning, when Kelly had thought that he was just a man caring for a stranger, but the longer she was around him, she suspected that there was something else going on. It was still just a hunch, but since she was the only one who had spent enough time with him to know him at all, she felt she should be the one to keep tabs, and run interference if necessary.

Kerren seemed to be searching for words to say. "He was here... well, not exactly here, but in my mind. I think he did... something... that let me wake up, and it's like... he left a part of himself behind. I think can follow back to where he really is."

"It's okay," Sheryl said, smoothing her wife's hair back from her forehead. She seemed not to be listening to Kerren's words carefully. "Just rest. We'll have time to find him later." She kept smoothing Kerren's hair, even after it appeared to be as smoothed as it was going to get.

After a few silent moments had passed, Bruce leaned in close, his voice low and measured. "What else did you see, Kerren?"

Alarm bells were going off in Kelly's head. She had to get this guy away from the injured woman, regardless of how much she admired his work. She was about to say something, anything to stop him from trying to probe any further into Kerren's unconscious visions. Fortunately, she didn't have to speak up, because at that moment they heard Manoj coming down the stairs, followed closely by Dale and Glenda, who were following in step, their hands entwined.

"Did you find anyone?" Kelly asked, loudly enough to drown out any answer that Kerren might be starting to reply with. Everyone's attention refocused, and Kelly breathed an inward sigh.

Manoj didn't speak right away, giving Sheryl enough time to interject, almost panicked with joy, "Kerren's awake! She's okay!"

In the relieved reactions that followed, Manoj managed to get close enough to the couch so that he could only be heard by Kelly. "I need to talk to you and Mr. Chase for a moment. Can we speak over by the desk?"

Kelly's eyes furrowed, not because of her boyfriend's strange request, but because it included the author whose conduct she was finding more and more suspicious. "What is it?" she asked.

His brow furrowed, Manoj just nodded toward the wooden counter on the other side of the room. "Over there. Could we?"

He was overtaken by Dale and Glenda, the couple rushing forward to greet Kerren, now that she had mentally returned to their little group. In contrast, Manoj didn't seem the least bit interested. His eyes were fixed solely on Kelly's, and his intensity unnerved her.

"Sure," she found herself saying, and without thinking about it she reached around Sheryl and touched Bruce's arm. The older man's skin was cool, more so than she expected, even though he had no sleeves and the large room had grown chilly. When he looked at her, she got up. "Manoj wants to talk to us." She turned and walked away with no further explanation.

As she followed Manoj's white bathrobe across the lobby to the broken lobby desk, she considered his expression as he had spoken to her. She had seen it once before, when they were discussing a particularly knotty problem in the sports videogame they had been collaborating on when they met. It had been one of those moments where real-world physics and enjoyable gameplay butted heads, and she had watched, fascinated, as he had combined her thoughts on the problem and his, turning them into a series of hand-drawn flowcharts and diagrams that spread out farther and farther across the conference room table they had been working at. By the time they had worked it all through, she was wishing that he would sweep them off with one decisive motion and lay her across the table in their place.

A similar look of concentration was on his face now, but it evoked an entirely different emotion in her. Clearly, there were things that weren't adding up for him, and he needed to talk them through. That explained why he was asking for help, but what did they need Bruce Casey for?

She placed a hand on Manoj's shoulder after he had reached the front desk and stood, facing away from her, for several seconds. His head lifted and he turned, his puzzled look easing a little once he knew she was there.

"What's the situation?" Bruce asked, coming up to them. It was clear that he wanted to get back to the small group of people standing in wonderment around the resurrected Kerren, listening to her once again state that she might be able to find Harmon, and the subsequent start of another argument between Dale and Glenda, albeit one less passionate than before.

Manoj looked at both Kelly and Bruce gravely before saying, "We found a few things upstairs, Glenda and me. First of all, there are no other people in the Lodge. The shapes they left in their bedclothes are still there, but their bodies are gone. Disappeared." When that was met with two pairs of silent, uncomprehending eyes, he blundered ahead. "It led me to my second conclusion, which is this..." He was steeling himself, and finally it came out. "I don't think the town at the base of the mountain is really there anymore. I could see it from the second floor, but it's totally still. Empty. Like the beds. I think what we're seeing when we look out the windows is mostly a simulation."

A silent moment passed, and then Bruce asked calmly, as if testing how the word felt in his mouth. "A simulation?"

Manoj spoke evenly, methodically. It kind of made Kelly want to tear her hair out as he went on. "I wondered if maybe I was seeing things. But it's clear that there's no motion going on down there. It looks normal, until you watch it for a little while. You realize that there are no moving lights. No cars going up and down the streets, no changing traffic signals, nothing. Once I saw this, I realized there were two possibilities: that what I was looking at wasn't the real town, or that it was, and it had just been ... taken outside of time."

"Outside?" Bruce asked. "You mean, stopped time? Is that what you're talking about?" He had the casual sound of a man who experienced this sort regularly, or at least thought about it a lot, and Kelly realized it was his world-famous imagination that had made Manoj pull him aside as well as her.

"Right," Manoj said. "That's what I thought it was at first, but the lights do waver, because of the atmospheric disturbances between here and there. Like the motion of mirages in the distances. The cool air down at the snow level makes the warmer air higher up bend the light in strange ways."

"So that wavering is still there," Bruce said, now speaking as if he were trying to expand on Manoj's logic. Kelly understood, but just barely.

Manoj nodded. "Exactly."

"Are those really the only two options here? A fake town or frozen time?" she asked.

"I've tried to find another," Manoj said, "but it's the best I could do. Mr. Casey, I was hoping that I could have you think about this one, too. Is it possible that we -- us, the lodge, and some of the surrounding terrain, considering we can still communicate with Harmon, who got some distance away down the slope before he was stopped -- that we all could have been *transplanted* somehow?"

God help them, Bruce seemed to be seriously mulling this over. His eyes roamed over his immediate surroundings as if the answers to all their questions were written there, scattered across the floors and furniture, and his job was only to piece them together. "It would explain certain things..." he murmured, almost to himself. "Almost as if the force of the avalanche... moved us in some new direction..."

Kelly couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Come on, guys," she said. "Are we seriously considering this?"

Bruce looked as if she had just slapped him. "Of course. Even beyond the disappearance of the other guests, and what Manoj has said about the town at the base of the mountain, there are other things going on here that can't be easily accounted for."

"Such as?" Kelly asked, crossing her arms.

Bruce looked between the two of them, as if he had just been caught stealing something. She waited patiently, eyebrow arched, for his answer.

-7.5-

Harmon's presence slammed back into his body, and he felt as if the avalanche was plowing him under all over again. He hadn't truly been aware of how light and ethereal he had felt, until he was confronted with the pain of the flesh again. The creeping coldness, the grinding sharpness in his broken ankle, all conspired to knock his breath out before he could properly draw it.

He gasped, turning his head back and forth to see if anything about his situation had changed while he had been gone. Unfortunately, nothing had. He thought for a moment about what an observer might have seen while he was -- well, he guessed "away" was the most benign way to describe the state he had just been in. Had he continued to breathe, and had his eyes been closed or open?

Instinctively, he wanted to push those thoughts away, to take his mind off his body. He feared he would start to become afraid if he didn't. He had been in situations similar to (though not nearly as bad as) this before, had nursed enough friends through injuries to understand the way the mind reacted to massive pain. It begins to fear that even if the body doesn't die outright, it will never quite the same again, forever scarred, one step closer to the dark descent that ultimately waits for us all. The brain begins to turn against the body, to separate itself. I'm not this base matter, it testifies, I'm so much more! It is the mind's way of not losing its sense of control over the world, to not go stark raving mad when faced with a prison of wood, pain and snow.

But Harmon had seen friends slip away while steadfastly denying that there was anything wrong with them that a stiff drink and some weed wouldn't fix. It turned out to be crucial to stay aware of that mind/body connection, and to embrace it. The most important thing to understand that the mind and body are inextricable, that they need each other in equal amounts. Harmon knew he must suppress this desperate, clawing attempt by the brain to retreat.

After all, hadn't the importance of this just been proven to him? He had wandered through Kerren's mind and actually done something -- blocked what felt like a foreign, invading force -- that brought her body and mind back together. He now had to maintain himself the same way. Perhaps the reason he had been afraid to use his powers in this way until now was an intuitive understanding of this. The relationship between brain and body wasn't a one-way street, with the body being only the vessel for the brain's wants and needs.

So he clung to his consciousness, resisted the urge to leave again. He had done all he could, more than he thought was possible, actually. Now it was time for him to wait until the trail he had left with Kerren to be followed, and he could be rescued. To that end, he picked up the walkie from underneath his hand (he apparently had let go in his own absence and dropped it the few inches to the surface of the snow) and began clicking the Send button again, hoping that someone was still listening on the other end.

They had agreed that he was going to check in every five minutes, but he couldn't say with any certainty how long it had been since his last transmission. In any event, he had a different message to send this time. He thought for a moment, and then selected his Morse letters: "D-i-d K t-e-l-l y-o-u w-h-e-r-e I a-m?"

He repeated the message three times, to ensure that someone picking it up even halfway through would get the full text string, and then waited. In the interest of not letting his mind drift away again, and not wanting to turn full attention to the pain he was in, he tried to focus on external sensory input. He thought he could start by checking the level of moonlight he had available. The little green power light on the walkie, weak as it was, provided most of his illumination, so he covered it to see if he were any closer to daylight than before.

There wasn't much external illumination. The moonlight coming through the vertical branches over him was still feeble and filtered through several inches of white powder, but he took a moment to notice that its source hadn't seemed to shift at all. Given the number of times he had communicated with the outside world, there should have been some change in the light quality, even if his mental voyage to Kerren had been instantaneous. That was strange.

There was some other bit of sensory info coming in, and at first he couldn't pin it down. All he knew was that something was making him uneasy, through his effort of remaining calm. Something wasn't right, and by the time he realized what it was, there was no time for him to stay still and experience it.

Rhythmic vibrations far off in the snow were coalescing into something he recognized: footsteps. Up until that moment, Harmon had been thinking that he would welcome nothing more than the feel of feet plodding along somewhere nearby. He had already planned to call out and direct whoever it was to his hiding place, but now he felt differently. There was something diabolical in them, the way they moved. He couldn't even tell how many legs were involved, or how they would have to be constructed to fall into that particular pattern.

The bottom line was there was something walking around nearby, and it seemed to be on the hunt. There would be a short flurry of motion, then silence as it stopped and listened. If it were an animal, Harmon would guess that it was taking the time to smell the wind, hoping for a scent of something edible. But this thing, whatever it was, didn't give him the impression that it was merely sniffing around. It was looking and listening with a more singular purpose. Harmon was determined not to give it anything to react to. He let his breath slide in and out of his lungs as slowly as he could, not even trying to let it hitch when pain randomly flared in his ankle.

More than he ever had before, Harmon wanted to become part of the background, unnoticeable to whatever was out there and looking for him (while he had not consciously admitted it to himself, he knew that was exactly what it was doing). Moments before, he had been struggling to stay mentally present, and now every instinct was telling him to fade away. Perhaps leaving his body again would prove to be the best way to hide. It was a tempting experiment, but he resisted it as much as he had the strength to. He had to be able to put up a fight, if it did find him.

The footsteps were drawing closer, and increasing clarity did no good in figuring out exactly what was causing them. Harmon knew the footfalls of just about every creature one could encounter out in the forest, but this matched his idea of none of them. His mind conjured impossibilities as he tried to interpret the sounds: a giant crab scuttling along on hoofed feet, a bear running at full gallop but only covering a few inches with each step, maybe even something even bigger leaping from tree to tree, taking the time to tap out misleading rhythms on each trunk before jumping to the next.

He was suddenly very glad that he had covered up the walkie's power light to check the moon's position. He suspected that whatever it was out there would have been able to notice the difference between a fallen snow-covered tree with a tiny light under it from a fallen snow-covered tree without one. He kept his thumb in place, and with his other hand slipped a gloved hand underneath and dialed down the volume until the power switched off with the slightest muffled click. He couldn't see the LED light wink out, but he knew it had, and hoped now he couldn't be detected by illumination or noise.

This was how Harmon, his body heat bleeding away into the surrounding snow faster than he realized, and being actively searched for by something he would not have asked for as a search party, missed the important message that was being sent to him from the Deertail Lodge.

-7.6-

Benny's strength was starting to fade. Carlos had let himself believe that the ease with which he had gotten his co-worker across the restaurant floor would continue, but now it seemed that the adrenaline that had fueled their crossing was running out. He felt pulled down on that side, and it was more than just the weight of the metal logo that Benny had yanked free from above the fireplace mantel. But their destination wasn't far now, and Carlos dug deep to get them there.

Only one of the double doors that led from the lobby into the restaurant could open, and it was clear why; the frame of the doorway had been skewed a little by the same force that had sheared off the large room's roof, wedging the leftmost door up against the jamb. Surprisingly, the heavy stained-glass panels that decorated both doors were intact, without a single piece broken or knocked out. Carlos continued to propel Benny and himself forward, longing to feel the familiar smoothness of those panels under his palm.

He hoped that the hallway beyond would be similarly unharmed. It would make his heart soar to walk back into a place that was as he remembered it, after struggling through such an altered landscape. The hallway, designed to ferry paying customers from the hominess of the lobby into the rustic stone-and-wood elegance of the bar/restaurant, had always struck him as a fine balance of the two styles. Paneled in dark wood, the walls alternated between framed oil paintings of Deertail Mountain and the surrounding forests, and ornate wall sconces holding flame-shaped incandescent bulbs. Its relatively low ceiling made it feel like a hidden passage, connecting the two largest rooms in the Lodge. Either way you went down it, you always got a sense of space opening up once you reached the other end, of expansiveness. Carlos didn't realize how much he missed that feeling until the possibility that the hall might have been damaged.

Carlos shifted, taking as much of Benny's weight as he could afford onto his supporting arm so that his free one could reach out and push open the least-askew door. It gave under his hand, swinging easily just as it always had. The darkness beyond took a few seconds to resolve, and when it did he realized that he had been holding his breath. He let it flow out in relief.

"Looks like our luck is holding out," he murmured to his friend, who was slowly becoming more like the rag-doll he had pulled out of a pile of pink slush with every passing second.

"Smurr," Benny said, his head slumping forward. Carlos realized he had maybe fifteen seconds before Benny would fully return to his unconscious state, and although he hadn't had to lug his friend too far without any help, his own strength was on the ebb, too. The last half hour had taken so much out of him, he feared that if he stopped to think about it, he would just fall down on the spot too.

He slowly guided Benny through the canted doorway -- there was no reason to risk bumping into either side and causing the pair of them any more pain than they had already endured -- and into the dark hall beyond. It was a surprising relief to leave the open air behind; Carlos had been starting to get the feeling that they had been being watched. None of the hallway's lighting sconces were lit, but he hadn't been expecting any of the building's power to be on anyway.

As the pair shuffled further into the gloom, he realized there was a vague glow from the far end of the hall, dim light from the lobby filtering around the corner to them, thanks more to the nature of the polished wood along the walls than anything else. The strangest thing was the cold air that seem to be infiltrating the hallway. It was almost as chilled as the opened restaurant had been.

Carlos' feet began to speed up, eager to get the both of them into the familiar comfort of the lobby before either of them collapsed from sheer exhaustion, a moment which clearly was going to be within the next ten seconds. Benny exhaled another unintelligible "Murnn," and fell silent, unable to hold his head up any longer. They were so close, just two steps away from turning the corner and stumbling into the building's main room, victorious...

The silence when they turned the corner hit Carlos almost as hard as the cold wind that was coming in through the place where one of the huge plate glass windows used to be. He stopped in his tracks. A few flakes of snow blew far enough into the dark lobby to graze his cheeks as they sailed by.

As feeble as the moon's illumination was, it took a few moments for his eyes to adjust from the lightless tunnel they had just emerged from. Secretly, Carlos had harbored the idea that there would be someone there to greet them, but he was wrong. There was no one. This was not to say that there wasn't evidence of people having been there recently, however.

The first sign that something was amiss was the clothes. There was a substantial scattering of them across the floor next to the main staircase. The hallway from the restaurant came out near its base, so Carlos and Benny (if he were still able to see anything, that was) were looking right at the door that led to the area under the stairs where that skier guy basically lived. Carlos often wondered how many people were freaked out by the grizzled old man coming out from what looked like a glorified janitor's closet as they strolled out of the restaurant after breakfast, but he supposed that was why he wasn't Lodge Director.

The unceremoniously-dumped clothes looked similar, as if the contents of some woman's closet had been thrown from the landing directly above them. There was more disarray here, too. Aside from the commanding vision of the shattered window, which stretched all the way from the far corner of the lobby to the double set of doors that led in from the parking lot, most of the furniture had been moved from its usual places. The chairs had been shuffled, one of them had been knocked over completely, and the long couch had been pushed farther down along the wall. Carlos, diverting necessary energy from keeping Benny upright, tried to imagine what sequence of events could have occurred to lead to this new arrangement.

It was while he was trying to decipher the drag-tracks of the chair legs in the rug that he saw the blood. There was a large pool of it near the foot of the stairs, and he suspected that in a few seconds his eyes would adjust enough to see a wide splash of it on the polished wood of the wall. Leading away from the large, slowly coagulating pool that must have been where its former owner fell, the blood formed a trail that led across the rug -- passing underneath one of the repositioned chairs and wove in a drunken line to the huge, broken window, where it passed out into the night. The small pool where the bleeding person must have paused before vaulting over the window's low sill reminded him of the pink pile of snow he had pulled Benny out from under.

Something terrible had happened here, but now the room's only occupant was the cold mountain wind.

-8.1-

Kerren continued to lie still. Her eyes moved incessantly, but she was careful not to move her head. Once in her teenage years, she had awoken in the middle of the night and been inexplicably, stupefyingly dizzy. She could still remember the feeling of that traumatic, dark stumble down a hall that suddenly seemed to be alive and trying to thwart her attempts to get to her parents' room to plead for help. Now, lying on the couch in the lobby of the Deertail, she worried that the same thing might happen if she were to move too quickly. The way Sheryl's hand gripped hers helped, but she still was afraid to move.

Her mind felt like a large open space, a deserted battlefield, as if there had been feet tramping across it, ground fought for, gained and lost. She wasn't thinking any less clearly than since she had fallen -- and it might be the continuing pain shooting through both her legs that was keeping her awareness sharp -- but something had gone on while she wasn't quite present, and she was still trying to figure out what it was.

Meanwhile, there was a lot going on around her. Manoj, Kelly, and Bruce the author (who seemed to have some kind of strange sense of ownership about her) were huddled together on the far side of the lobby, having some kind of intense, half-whispered conversation. Nearer to her, Dale and Glenda had managed to agree on leaving the Lodge, but for different reasons: the security guard seemed intent on getting Glenda home to her family; she still wanted to find Harmon, who had crashed somewhere out in the snow.

Kerren looked back into Sheryl's eyes, a calm place in the chaos that swirled around them all. How? she wondered. How had she ever thought that leaving this safe harbor, this woman who loved her so deeply, could have brought anything other than ruin? She couldn't recall the reasons now. She had cheated, been caught, and had fought her way partly back into her wife's grace. There was still tension there, of course, and Kerren understood it was going to take a while to earn back all that trust she had cashed in for one foolhardy spin of the wheel, but as of this trip, she could say that she was more than willing to put in the effort.

Being trapped in that choking cocoon under their hotel bed had proved it to her. Even as she had been slipping in and out of unconsciousness, Kerren had never been more sure of where her true passions lay, and they were with the woman who now knelt next to her, and would have knelt there for as long as she needed to, until Kerren came back from her inner journey.

But where had that been? Kerren had told the truth to those who were present when she awoke... that she had felt Harmon's presence, and it had called her in a particular direction, outside and down the side of the mountain. It was like he had left a trail of mental breadcrumbs, and if she were to concentrate and pick up the signals, she would be able to lead them right to him. If Dale and Glenda were seriously thinking about leaving, she could help them.

That presented a problem, however. Not only was she afraid to move for fear of severe vertigo, but she felt that if she were to try, she might not be able to move at all. That would be worse than just being dizzy. Not only that, but something was telling her -- as clearly as receiving a broadcast from somewhere else (Harmon again?) -- that it would be best for her to remain still where she was a little longer. As much as she knew Sheryl wanted her to sit up, and as much as she was longing to put her arms around her wife, Kerren heeded that voice.

Bruce, Kelly, and Manoj were rejoining the group now. "Everyone," Kelly was saying, "Bruce just told me and Manoj something that we think is important." She turned to the writer. "Can you say it again, Bruce, so that we all can know what we're dealing with here?"

Bruce looked like a whipped dog as he stepped forward and drew focus, albeit a dog that still might bite if pressed too hard. "I don't want to assume, but I think you've all realized by now that I'm somewhat known as a writer."

The group nodded its agreement with this fact, and a few smiles were suppressed. Of course they all knew who he was.

"I... I was telling Kelly and Manoj about my writing process, more specifically the dreams I have when I'm deciding what to write next. There's a particular recurring dream I have -- and when I say dream, I'm almost inclined to point out that it's a particularly vivid dream, a vision, one might say... It's of a woman. She meets me in a sylvan glade and gives me ideas, plotlines, sometimes pointing my attention in directions I never would have consciously thought myself. I liken her to one of the fabled Greek muses. For a long time I've taken her assistance for granted. Maybe it's because she never asked for anything in return, and perhaps it's that I could never shake the idea that she was really just a part of my own mind. In any event, she's been gone for a while now, and I actually came to the Deertail hoping that what I needed to get her back was a little isolation and relaxation. And in a way, I was right.

"However, it hasn't happened in the way I thought it would. I have seen her, yes, but this time it wasn't in my dreams." As Bruce continued his speech, he slowly started walking in the direction of the couch where Kerren lay. She didn't like that; she felt her body tensing as he came closer. She could tell that Sheryl was feeling it through their clasped hands.

Bruce stopped as he stood beside where Kerren lay. "I'd know that face anywhere. You look just like her, my dear Kerren." Then he just stood there for several seconds, silently regarding her. Was it for dramatic effect, or was he expecting some kind of response from her? If he was, she was unwilling to give him any. She was still afraid to move.

Finally, he broke from her gaze. He spoke to the rest of the group again. "If it were just that one coincidence, I'd have written it off, either as a trick of my own imagination, or some kind of traumatic mental stress after everything that we've been through tonight. But..." Here, he started walking toward the reception desk again, his hand slowly rising from his side, "... I went looking for a first aid kit in Mr. Gough's office, and found that there's a painting on his wall that contains her image as well. Not just her face -- which also happens to be Kerren's face -- but her surroundings too, the way I always saw them, her robes, her garden, even the ring of stones that I was always standing in when I saw her in... my dreams."

A ring of tall stones, each with faintly glowing runes... the idea sparked something in Kerren's mind, a dim recollection that a memory had once existed. The strange thing was that it didn't feel like one of hers.

Glenda spoke in the pause that Bruce gave to his audience. "I've seen it. On his office wall. And now that I think about it, it does look a lot like you, Kerren."

"More than just a lot, to my mind," Bruce said.

"I never really noticed it until I was in there a little while ago, but I think he painted it himself."

A smile spread across Bruce's face. "Yes! This confirms my theory even more, coupled with what my friend Manoj has already guessed at." He nodded toward the computer programmer. Manoj took a half step back, unconsciously refusing to be drawn into these ramblings. "He believes that the avalanche we've experienced tonight somehow took us out of the world we know, that we're now in some kind of bubble that exists outside it. And if my vision, Jimmy's painting, and Kerren's corporeal appearance all seem to coincide, doesn't it seem like that should mean something?"

There was less sound in the lobby than there had been at any time since the mountain's rumbling had subsided. Cold, insistent wind could be heard pressing against the outsides of the windows.

"Now I'm thinking that all of us are involved in this, in some way," Bruce said quietly. "If the other guests are gone, and we're all that's left, then it must be for a reason. There's some kind of purpose we're all intended to fulfill. We already know what that is for some of us. Others, I'm not yet sure about." He looked around at each of the lobby's inhabitants in turn, and no one seemed to know which group they belonged to.

Kerren was starting to panic. It had been bad enough when the author had claimed that she was some kind of real-world representation of a woman he had repeatedly met in his dreams, but Glenda's corroboration of his ravings was almost too much. Her head was swimming, this time not with vertigo, but with too much conflicting information. She was definitely not anyone's muse... this was just a case of mistaken identity...

But didn't she now feel that there was space in her mind for other memories? It had something to do with Harmon. He had somehow entered her mind... but why her? The more she tried to grasp hold of the impression he had left in her brain, the more she realized that she had felt somehow familiar to him, at least at first. There had been a level of recognition as he was slipping between her synapses, but it hadn't lasted. She didn't know what to make of this, or what to make of any of it. Still, it felt truer than she wanted it to. It was like the scattered pieces of a puzzle; she had a sense that they fit together, but she was inexplicably afraid of the completed image they would disclose.

Glenda was the one to ask what they were all thinking. "So what does this mean? Are you saying the rest of us are here to fulfill some kind of purpose that only benefits you?" Her jaw was set tightly as she spoke. Dale's arm held her securely to his side.

"I don't know," Bruce answered, shrugging innocently. "But there is one detail I've left out... The last night I saw my muse, there was a terrible storm in my dreams." His eyes drifted into the distance as he spoke of it. "It was terrible... such wind and thunder. It felt like the whole dreamworld was being torn apart, like the end of all things. I tried to reach out for my muse, either to pull her into the ring of Sounding Stones, or to pull myself out of it, I couldn't tell and didn't care. But as always, she was too far away for me to reach. Forever just beyond my fingertips... And then the storm grew stronger..." Kerren had known he would say this, and she found she knew what was coming next. Then I felt a presence behind me...

"Then I felt a presence behind me... Something that had invaded our secret place, something that did not belong in this or any sane world. I don't know what had summoned it, or how I could get rid of it. I only knew that it had been on its way for a long time, and that its arrival would signal an enormous change for both of us. Then I saw the shadow of its antlers falling across her face, as it emerged from the storm that was its shroud, lightning flashing like explosions..."

Kerren could feel Sheryl's hands starting to shake around her own. She looked into her wife's eyes, and had never seen such abject terror in them before. Her head turned toward Bruce, still lost in his verbal reverie, but she did it slowly, as if afraid of what she would see when she faced him. She made to open her mouth, and now Kerren was the one who was afraid.

-8.2-

Sheryl had only been half-listening to Bruce's rambling, overwrought tale about his dreams, until he openly recognized her wife as the recurring star of them. She tried not to show her shock, both then and when Glenda seemed to corroborate the evidence of the painting in the director's office. The idea of it was all too abstract, too hard to accept.

Kerren, in stark contrast, was solid reality. Among all the mentally and physically numbing things that had happened in the last few hours (had it only been that long?), Kerren had been taken away from her twice, once physically and once mentally. The fact that she had returned both times gave Sheryl the only tangible hope she was managing to hold onto, the one thing she could truly feel. The sensation of her and Kerren's hands clasped together -- and she felt that neither one of them was holding on more tightly than the other -- acted as a grounding tether. This unity was what she had yearned to feel with Kerren all these past, tenuous months, and its sudden return threw into relief how badly she had been suffering without it. It was exactly what she had been searching for through all the uncomfortable, silent evenings, the nights of restless sleep and vaguely paranoid dreams.

They were together now, in every sense that mattered, but Bruce's monologue impinged on that, made jealous hackles rise on Sheryl's skin... that was, until he mentioned the antlers. She knew immediately what he was talking about, and was powerless but to say what she knew.

"I saw it!" she blurted, interrupting Bruce's continuing florid description of his dreamstorm. "Upstairs! While Dale and I were getting clothes out of the closet!" If her hands hadn't been held so tightly by Kerren, she would have slapped them over her mouth in an attempt to call her words back. No, her mind was telling her even as she spoke; no, you didn't see that at all, it was just the way the flashlight was swinging around...

"You... saw it?" Bruce had frozen in mid-gesture, halfway lifting his splayed hands to his forehead to exactly portray the creature he was describing. "Actually saw it?"

Sheryl's brow furrowed. "I don't... know." She shook her head a little, acknowledging that now she had started, the best thing to do was neither to embellish or downplay, but to describe exactly what she had seen. "It was pushing against the back of the closet, like it was trying to break through. It couldn't, but I could see how it bent the wood forward."

Bruce's voice was distant, flat. "Did you see its face?"

"No," Sheryl said. "Just its shape. Its antlers were so close to breaking through they were actually catching on the hangers..."

Dale spoke up. "I was right there with you, ma'am, and didn't see anything like that." His tone was as professional as always.

Bruce turned to the security guard. "I realize I was in that room before, but please refresh my memory. I was focusing on other things." He gestured again to Kerren, reminding everyone that he had been the one to pull her out from under the bed. "That closet is on your left as you enter the room, correct?"

Dale nodded. "That's right. We pulled out as many clothes as we could carry." He gestured to the pile spread out next to the main stairs, where Sheryl had unceremoniously tossed them over the railing when she had been informed that Kerren was awake.

Bruce's hand slid across his scraggly chin as he thought this over. "That's on the same side as the hallway that leads to my room. Or led, I should say, since it has collapsed. Right next to it, in fact."

Dale furrowed his brow a little as he said, "That's the hall you said you came down, though I honestly don't see how you made it through. I checked it. The passage is entirely blocked."

Bruce nodded and wagged a professorial finger at him. "Yes, but you see, I did come through it. And that... thing... almost did as well. We came from the same direction. It's as if it is trying to follow me. I ended up emerging into an open passage, but it ran into the back of a closet, a mere twenty feet away from where I came through. It was stopped... perhaps only for the time being, until it finds a way around."

Sheryl couldn't take it anymore. "None of this makes any sense! You think that horned thing is trying to get you?"

Bruce shrugged. "I do not know its motive. I only know that it first arrived with my dream-storm, and that it was trying to follow the same path into this world that I did. Fortunately, it seems to have missed." He added, "Barely," with canned gravity.

Glenda spoke softly from next to Dale. "The suite Mr. Casey was in really is down at the far end of that hall. The one that collapsed."

A long silence followed. For some it was a silence of disbelief, for others the beginning of wonder how so many coincidental things could be added together, no matter how ludicrous the sum.

Kelly was the next to speak. Her words came slowly, tentatively, like a skater taking her first steps out onto an icy pond that she hopes is solid enough to hold her. "This storm in your dreams... did you wake up from it before or after the avalanche?"

Bruce smiled at her, cocking an eyebrow in a roguish way that Sheryl immediately recognized as a go-to move he often employed in his dust jacket photos. "Ah. Here's the crux of matter, Miss Kelly. The last experience I had in my dreamworld was four months ago, the night of that storm. And my writing dried up immediately." He snapped his fingers for dramatic effect. "I suppose I didn't realize how reliant I was on... " he caught himself, as if he were about to say a familiar name, "... on my muse until I had to go without her, cold turkey. I've been trying to find my way back into that garden ever since. Not all of my attempts have been actions I've been proud of. I actually came here this weekend in the hope that unplugging from the sordid world and all its distractions would be the thing to finally rekindle that old connection." His gaze drifted up the stairs, toward the blocked hallway he claimed to have come down. "And perhaps it was."

Manoj said, almost to himself but heard by everyone, "Or perhaps the something that broke your dreamworld in the first place has come here looking for you."

Bruce nodded, looking out the half-covered front windows of the lobby, out into the blowing snow, and repeated, "Perhaps."

Sheryl shivered, vividly recalling the way she had experienced her own small, terrifying part of the writer's vision, which was quickly proving not to be a vision at all. How did Kerren fit into this? Her wife -- or someone looking much like her -- had appeared in at least two other people's minds, Bruce and Mr. Gough, the lodge director. Sheryl's lips pressed into a thin line. She had already experienced what it was like sharing Kerren with others, and she wasn't about to let it start happening again. That it was against both her and her wife's wills this time didn't make the jealousy any less cutting.

"Kerren isn't the muse you've been looking for, though," Sheryl said, looking Bruce directly in the eye. "You know that, don't you?"

Bruce took a long look at the woman lying on the couch before answering. "Yes. At least, not directly. But the resemblance is so uncanny that I think there's got to be some sort of connection. My guess is that there's a similar meaning for each of us, a common reason why we've been detained here."

More uncomfortable silence followed, and Bruce seemed fine with letting it unspool in the cold dimness of the lobby. Sheryl had to ask herself if she really believed that she and Kerren -- and Glenda and Harmon and all the rest -- were really being put through this just so that an already world-famous writer could crank out yet another bestseller.

Bruce lifted a finger in Manoj's direction. "Our friend here has a theory. Maybe he'd like to fill us all in on it, as he just told it to myself and Kelly." Manoj almost sneered at Bruce. He had clearly called the two of them away from the rest of the group for a reason. But Bruce seemed to think that laying out all the cards was the best way to go about this, and he might have been right. That was a writer's job, wasn't it? To take all the scattered nonsense of life and shape it into the something meaningful?

Bruce began urging Manoj. "Come on, then. We're in this together, you all but said it yourself. As a group, we should be privy to your thoughts, just as you are now privy to mine. After all, Sheryl might not have admitted experiencing her vision of the horned menace if I hadn't told you about my inner life."

Sheryl winced, wishing she hadn't done that. Then they all might have been able to retreat back into the safety of self-delusion, that blissful state of not-knowing. But there was no going back; the worm can had been opened. Manoj stepped forward.

-8.3-

He didn't quite know where to begin. This had happened to him many times before; his mind had made all sorts of leaps to get to the conclusion he had drawn, but he had no idea how to articulate them to someone who couldn't see inside his head. As had happened to him many times before, language had not been a part of the thinking process, instead a series of images and connections that made sense to him, but he couldn't hope to explain. Still, everyone was staring at him, so he had to say something.

Without looking, he reached for Kelly's hand, and was surprised at how quickly it presented itself for him. It gave his a reassuring squeeze, and he felt a little stronger.

"Bruce is right," he said. "I believe that where we are... is somehow outside of the world we are usually in. I don't know if the avalanche caused the displacement, or if the displacement caused the avalanche, but I don't believe that anything we can see outside this lodge is actually there. Beyond, there seems to be a shadow of reality, some sort of visual remnant..." His voice was steady, confident, but he was quickly losing the thread, and he could feel it.

"The town's still there," Dale said, gesturing toward the front windows and down the mountain. "We saw it. The lights and the far side of the valley..."

"But there's no motion," Manoj said. "Think about it. If the town were still there--"

Glenda jumped in, a tinge of panic edging her voice. "What do you mean, if it were still there?"

Manoj put his palms toward her in a placating gesture. "I'm not saying it's not. I think the town is fine. It just us who aren't. Like I was saying, if this had been a normal avalanche, how long would it take before we would start to see rescue vehicles at the bottom of the mountain slope?"

Dale shrugged with the arm he didn't have around Glenda's shoulder. "Half hour, maybe, this late at night. Volunteers and reserves are pretty quick."

Manoj spread his hands. "Exactly. But there aren't any. Even though we haven't been able to communicate with anyone -- save for Harmon, that is. But I couldn't see any moving lights in the town at all. Traffic lights aren't changing, no cars are moving. Even the cell tower lights aren't blinking."

They seemed to be seriously considering this, and he thought he was making progress, until he heard from behind him, "What about Harmon, Manoj?" It was Kelly. "He's not in the lodge with us, but you can still communicate with him. And he somehow communicated with Kerren, too. How can he do that?"

Manoj winced inwardly. He could always count on Kelly to poke holes in whatever logical argument he was trying to build. He bore no malice toward her, though. In his philosophy, it was more important for the right answer to be reached than for him to be the one to provide it. "Perhaps," he thought aloud, "there's some kind of radius that's being affected. After all, he didn't make it all the way down the hill. And up here, Mr. Casey seems to think there's a barrier of some sort within the lodge, the one that he came through but his pursuer didn't. Maybe Harmon just didn't get beyond the downhill end of the zone."

As he spoke, Manoj was dimly aware of the walkie clicking in the pocket of his bathrobe; he had placed it there when he was preparing to lead Bruce and Kelly away from the rest of the group. He ignored it now because he assumed it was just a check-in message from Harmon, but it was still going after he stopped talking. Something about the end of the message caught his ear, but all he could register was the fact that it was different from the ones he had received before. Until now, they had all been identical by design, but this seemed to be new information. He thought he should probably step away, click Harmon back and ask him to repeat the new message--

"I'm going to put this forward again," Glenda said suddenly. "If Harmon is out there and we can reach him, then we should." She stepped forward, out from under Dale's arm, and walked toward the front windows, now piled higher than ever with dark gray snow. She stopped as she drew up next to the couch, and spoke down to Kerren. "You said that you can show us the way to him?"

Kerren didn't give a response other than with her eyes, but Sheryl was quick to jump in from her spot crouched next to her wife. "She can't go anywhere right now, of course."

Bruce jumped in quickly, holding out a turned-down palm as if the desk clerk were going to immediately attempt to pull Kerren to her feet. "Sheryl's right. Moving her would be dangerous at this point, I think."

Glenda apparently hadn't considered this wrinkle before. Her face showed acute disappointment. "Isn't there some way? Once we find Harmon, we can try to get everyone who's injured down to the town. If there's some reason people haven't started trying to get up here and help us, we can find out why." She hesitated, as if the next part was going to be hard to say: "And of course, I want to..." Her voice unexpectedly choked itself off, and although she shook her head to clear the emotional thoughts that stopped her voice, she couldn't and fell silent.

Dale stepped forward, reaching forward to put a hand of reassurance on her back. Before it even touched her, however, she seemed to sense its approach and twisted away, raising her hands in a please-don't gesture. Dale's hand stopped in mid-air, but he did finish her sentence for her: "She wants to try to get back to her kids."

Glenda nodded with her face turned away from the group, crossing her arms and pressing the index finger and thumb of one hand against her eyes. Dale spoke again, and while he didn't move toward her, this time it was her he spoke to directly, softly enough that he clearly didn't care if the rest of the group heard or not: "I'll get you there, Glenda. No matter what. We're going down this mountain. I'll take you to your family." She must have heard him, but didn't react.

Bruce stepped into the silence that had descended on the room. "Now, I understand your eagerness to get away from here," he said, loud enough to show he was speaking to everyone but looking at Glenda's back, "but we can't forget the wild card in this hand. This horned... *thing* that Sheryl and I have seen -- and you've seen the painting too, Glenda, don't forget -- is as far as we know still here with us, still looking for ways to get in --"

Manoj spoke up, presenting something he had been thinking about ever since Sheryl told of her vision. "And what will it do when it gets in, Mr. Casey? If it means us harm, then isn't the best course of action to get as far away from it as possible?"

Bruce turned in Manoj's direction, and for just a second an expression of raw fury passed across the author's face. It was replaced almost immediately by his previous look of impassioned concern, so quickly that Manoj wasn't entirely sure he had been tricked by the diffused light and odd shadows of the lobby. In his usual calm, mannered voice, Bruce responded, "Perhaps... but I would remind you of your own argument, my friend. If we are in some sort of bubble and cut off from the rest of the world -- and I think we can all agree that we are cut off, regardless of whether the rest of the world is frozen, or an illusion, or whatever -- then being inside, behind walls that thing clearly does not have the power to break through, is preferable to being out there, in the open, in the dangerous cold. Don't you think?"

The walkie was going off in Manoj's pocket again, reminding him that there was something else going on, something vital to their current situation, that he was missing. Harmon, like it or not, had been proven as a part of their group, if for no other reason than that he hadn't disappeared like the rest of the lodge's guests. Manoj was distracted by it, didn't want to let go of the little control of the conversation, but couldn't deny its siren call of more information. Maybe Harmon was telling them some vital new piece that would unlock everything...

-8.4-

Bruce filled the silence with "This goes back to what I was saying. The more we talk about this, the more convinced I am that we -- all of us -- are here for a reason. There's something greater at work here, and running away isn't what's going to help us figure out what those things are."

Dale didn't like the way Bruce was steering this discussion. The author seemed bent on getting everyone to stay where they were, and in his experience, people who did that often had their own interests in mind more than anyone else's, regardless of what they said.

Dale hadn't seen the thing that Sheryl claimed was in the upstairs closet, but when she spoke of it, there was nothing but the ring of truth to it. He had heard of people in traumatic situations -- the kind of situations he had been trained to handle -- seeing or hearing things that weren't there, but this felt different. He had examined the wall of debris that Bruce had apparently come through, and it had been totally impassable. He had also seen the painting in Jerry's office more times than Glenda had. Jerry sometimes liked to have Dale hang around the office and shoot the shit a while during the course of a day. He tried to recall if, in their rambling conversations, the lodge director had ever said anything about it. It seemed to him that he had, but exactly what was out of his reach at the moment.

Now people were throwing all sorts of new information at him, and his brain was in danger of burning out trying to process it all. Bruce clearly thought they should stay put, and Manoj hadn't quite put forth his full theory yet, but... He kept looking at Glenda's turned back. She wasn't crying; he knew her well enough that he would be able to see the slight change in her shoulders if she was. She clearly wanted to go, and if that's what she wanted, then it was hard for him to justify staying, regardless of how logical Bruce was making the option out to be.

He had been thinking a lot ever since she had planted a kiss on him at the top of the stairs they now stood at the foot of. Not enough, because of the more pressing matters they had to deal with, but by the time she had turned her face against his chest in the guest room, it was clear. He was in love with her. There was no disputing it, and the fact that she had a husband and children down at the bottom of the hill couldn't make it change.

It had snuck up on him gradually, reaching its stealthy weight at some point during the last eight months they had shared custody of the Deertail. And custody was the way he thought of it; she was the public face, and while Jimmy was the official mind behind the operation, Dale was the one who kept things together practically. That shared responsibility was how it had started. Now his mind was a churning mass of memories and instances of casual intimacy, unearthing itself. Every time their fingers had grazed when he passed her the lunch he brought from the kitchen, each time she had shyly asked him in that soft yet authoritative voice to help her with some task, the heartbreaking smiles she sometimes gave him across the lobby from behind that now-shattered front desk. It was all clear now.

This came in spite of what she knew about him, the thing that no one else did. He hadn't meant to tell her; when he thought about it, it had all been Jimmy's fault. He was the one who had the brilliant to uncork some of the older wines during their annual fall re-opening party. He and Glenda had found themselves away from the crowds, out on the sun-warmed slope overlooking the parking lot (where Jimmy had rented a small tent to house the food and dining tables). Dale didn't even remember how the tipsy conversation had veered from stereotypical co-worker talk to that of life histories, triumphs and regrets, and he had sudenly found himself telling her. There had been no preamble, no testing of the waters before jumping into such a subject, it came out as easily as tipping over his half-full chardonnay glass onto the grassy hill. Even after hearing him speak his piece, for her to still feel the way she did about him, seemed just short of miraculous.

He spoke aloud in the here and now, cutting off Bruce's ongoing monologue about the merits of standing their ground. "Glenda and I are going to get Harmon. We'll take Kerren if she's able to move, load her onto one of the snowmobiles, and go find him." It didn't even matter that getting Glenda to her family would carry her further away from his arms. And as much as he longed to feel her weight there, to again feel the curls of hair on top of her head grazing his chin, what she needed now took precedence over anything he might want.

He held up his hand in the direction of both Bruce and Manoj. "I know, you both think that there's no point to it, but if we're here for a reason, then Harmon is too, and leaving him out there shouldn't be an option. Maybe when we get to where he is, we'll have a better idea of what's going on in the town."

Manoj spoke up first. "You may be right. We certainly won't learn anything new by staying here."

Bruce's head whipped around toward the programmer, although his tone remained even. "Go out into the elements? With this horned thing on the loose? I don't know if I can get behind that course of action."

Dale's brow furrowed, and he moved toward Glenda where she stood facing the wall. "You don't have to. You're welcome to stay up here as long as you want. But we're going, with as many others would like to come." Glenda started turning back toward him, removing her hand from her eyes, and he hadn't known until that moment how badly he wanted her to do just that. He felt new strength in his body, new surety in his heart.

"Now, let's think this through," Bruce said, stepping toward the center of the group. He looked to Manoj, who had produced the walkie-talkie from the pocket of his bathrobe and was punching the Send button in a seemingly random manner. "Clearly --" here, he almost spoke a different name aloud again, but stopped himself, "-- Kerren is in no condition to be moved. Whatever this thing wants, it's obvious that she and I are the ones it's trying to reach."

Still crouching, Sheryl instinctively moved forward to block Kerren from as much of the rest of the room as she could. Bruce continued, undeterred: "I think we should stay here, and do what we can to fortify our position. Who knows whether it could bring down another storm on us? Maybe it's the force behind everything that's happened so far!" There was a wildness beginning to creep into his eyes, and the anxiety level in the room was clearly being ratcheted up by it.

"It's something to think about, no?" he was continuing. "It couldn't destroy me with a storm in my dreams, so it tries an avalanche out here? In the real world? But what is this thing? And what does it want with me? I'm not going to sit here and wait for it to come! No, that's exactly what it expects me to do!" He was rocking back and forth now, manically passing his body weight from foot to foot, as if he were about to dash off but hadn't decided which direction yet.

Dale's sense of danger was now burning in his chest, something like heartburn. It was an internal signal he had learned to accept without question over the course of his career. He stood next to Glenda, but underneath his uniform his muscles were tensing, ready to react if the author's body started to get as out of control as his mind was. Despite the evidence that had been presented so far, he had to admit that he didn't believe the confusing explanation about dreamscapes, ESP connections, and otherworldly creatures that was being laid out. He needed concrete threats, tangible problems; without these, there was no hope for rational solutions.

Dale knew the only thing to do with an irrational person like this. He took a confident step forward, forcing Glenda to come with him only because he still had his arm around her shoulders, and Bruce took a reflexive half-step back. The writer's hand ducked briefly behind him, and Dale paused, but then he merely scratched his hip where his pajama pants had slipped down a little, exposing a short slice of middle-aged love handle. "Look," Dale said flatly, firmly. "Staying here isn't going to improve our situation. Until I see this *thing* with my own eyes, I'm going to work toward getting us out of here. If you have a problem with that, then you're welcome to stay!"

He took another step, hoping to get Bruce to mentally back down by making him do it physically. That wildness didn't leave Bruce's eyes, but he did back up, and his hand went to his hip again... and then it reached beyond. Maybe it was the dim light, maybe it was his imagination, but it almost looked like Bruce was reaching--

Kelly, who had been silent for the last part of the conversation, was rushing forward. Bruce was turned mostly toward Dale, so he was mostly turned away from Kelly. She dashed forward with her hands raised, looking like she was prepared to tackle the man from behind.

A screech rose from her throat, so panicked that Dale wasn't sure he had heard it correctly. All that his brain had time to register was "He's got a--!" before his instincts fully took over and everything started happening automatically.

-8.5-

"There's a meaning for each of us," Bruce had said, "a reason why we've been detained here." That phrase had stuck in Kelly's head since it had been spoken. Her mind had immediately begun roiling with the implications of it. A reason? Determined by whom? And to what end? As much as she tried to find logical explanations for what was going on here, she seemed confounded every way. She couldn't accept as Manoj had -- too easily, she thought -- that the laws of time and space had suddenly decided to take exception to themselves, nor could she come up with a way that all these strange occurrences could take place in a universe she still understood.

It was the ambiguity that she hated most of all. In athletics, it was easy; it was pure physics. Action A becomes Result B, and the only thing of importance was executing Action A as perfectly as possible. In this lodge tonight, nothing was making sense or adding up correctly. It was hard to deal with, when she had never seen a moment in her life where it hadn't. She was totally out of her depth. At least, she decided by looking around the room, she wasn't the only one.

Even though he was speaking the most and seeming to steer the conversation, Bruce was the one she was most concerned about. Granted, she had spent the most time with him since this whole experience started, even more than she had with Manoj, so that made her more fluent in the quickness with which the author could transition from one emotional state to another. That was what bothered her the most, and also caused her to spend a lot of time rationalizing that this was just the way his writer's personality worked: a focused laser-beam attention to detail that could swing wildly between subjects without taking any break in between. She certainly could identify with that, but there was something acutely unsettling about the way he was doing it...

She wished Manoj would pay more attention to what was going on, but he seemed distracted by the walkie's clicking. It was a sharp reminder that one of their group was in real danger somewhere else, but then again it was starting to seem like they all were. This was something her boyfriend did sometimes, focusing on the thing that wasn't really relevant or even important -- hadn't their argument at dinner been another example? -- but over the time they had been together she had learned how to grab his ears and get his mind to come back from whatever corner it had run to. He even had started to do this himself, which she appreciated.

Kelly looked down at the woman lying on the couch. No one else seemed to be doing this; if they did, they would see what she was seeing, a look of dawning horror in her fellow blonde's eyes. And those eyes -- an intriguing hazel -- were focused squarely on Bruce Casey. Kelly kept hoping that Kerren's eyes would swing her way, so she could connect with her in some wordless way and they could share their growing anxiety.

Dale and Bruce were currently having an escalating conflict of words about whether the group should stay, leave, or split up. She had to admit, right now she wanted to be any place other than where the author was. She doubted the security guard could see it, but there was a patch of skin on the back of the writer's neck that was ripening to deep scarlet. She noticed he also reached back from time to time, absently scratching just above and behind his right hip. He tugged his t-shirt down after he was done, even though it wasn't riding up.

Kelly noticed that Kerren's hands were still entwined with those of her wife, suspended in a knot between their bodies. There was some vibration there, which at first she couldn't explain. Sheryl seemed not to notice because she was looking up at the progressing argument -- Bruce was getting louder, Dale more reserved -- but Kerren's gaze remained focused on the author.

All of a sudden, Kelly got it; Kerren was pointing. Her entire body remained motionless, but one of the index fingers in that ball of knuckles was straightening, almost imperceptibly and twitching, in the direction of the ranting author. It all came together in Kelly's mind at once: the pointing, the fear in Kerren's eyes, the hesitant scratch Bruce had made above his hip.

When she looked back at the author, he was taking his second step toward Dale, and his hand was sliding around his back again, but this time it wasn't to scratch. As he turned further away from her, the barely visible lump just above the waistband of his pajama pants solidified under the stretching fabric, transformed into an unmistakable handle.

No. A hilt.

Kelly lunged forward without any kind of forethought. All she could manage was "He's got a--!" before she slammed into him. Her hands reflexively came down on the pajama fabric bunched just over his tailbone. Bruce's hand had come down on the tall, rounded shape, his fingers had closed around it, and he was just starting to draw it when she struck. Kelly's hands pressed hard against him, but his hand was unable to stop the upward motion it had begun.

Kelly had meant to grab his wrist, to restrain him from fully pulling the blade out, but as she leapt forward her hands became too low to do this; she ended up pressing her hands against the back of his pants, with the blade underneath. Bruce didn't cry out as he raised his hand, and Kelly didn't know how badly either had been cut until the blood almost immediately started to soak through the thin fabric of his pajama pants, staining her hands. Bruce was still moving forward, and her recoil from the blossoming red spot on his lower back sent her sprawling to the floor. As she fell, she managed to get a look at the blade he was drawing as he brought it around to threaten Dale, and the long gash along the side of his spine that her pressure had forced it to create.

It was a hunting knife, at least five inches long. It had been drawn up so quickly that Bruce's blood did not have time to touch it, and the metal caught the feeble moonlight in a way nothing else in the lobby did. Kelly kept looking at it as she fell, watching the way it swept cleanly through the air, unaffected by the long cut it had left behind. Then it was out of sight, eclipsed by Bruce as he brought it around to his front, toward where Dale and Glenda were advancing on him.

Kelly had meant to stop him, but her fall had only imparted more force into his forward motion. The author was stumbling forward, straight toward Dale and Glenda, the gleaming blade coming between them, it and their frail bodies lining up like planets moving toward an eclipse.

-8.6-

Bruce had felt his mind slipping. His first sign had been when the wind swishing along the outer edges of the lodge had started to sound like Theda's screams. It brought his dreamstorm from last night -- that was the appropriate term, because in a very real way he felt like he hadn't really slept in all the months since -- back to him, slipping under his skin, as real a presence as Theda herself still felt to him. It made him realize that he felt much like a parent whose child has wandered off in a vast department store, stricken with paralyzing fear but knowing that he had to move, had to search, and nothing could be right again until he regained what he had lost.

He tried to remain calm as he explained to everyone present what he knew, and what he thought they should do next, but they refused to behave like the characters in his fiction stories. They seemed intent on making their own decisions, based on their own outside allegiances and interior fears, none of which he had any power to make them ignore.

And then there was the horned thing. Waves of chill went through his blood every time his mind turned toward it, as if it were a dreaded invading force, his skin aware that it was sweeping its forces of detection across him, and soon it would find him. If it were just some physical presence that was coming after him, he thought he could stand a chance against its encroaching darkness; however, he knew it was much more than that.

He was aware of his own voice rising in pitch and volume, despite his best attempts to modulate it. The people around him just weren't *getting* it, this motley crew he had been thrown in with. They were unfathomable to him in their ordinariness. At the same time, he had no choice but to believe that they were there for a reason; some unifying theme existed that he couldn't get them to stand still long enough to understand. If only he could pin them in place somehow, so he could fully examine them and give his creative mind a chance to work, he was sure he could suss out the reason they all were still here.

He was the center of this drama, of that he was sure. Whatever cataclysm had been called down on them all, it was because of him. His current working theory was that the horned thing was coming to take back all the ideas he had received from Theda. It didn't seem to care that she had given them to him freely, nor was it particularly interested in bargaining with him. What would happen when it finally tracked him down, he didn't know, but he had never been more terrified of any oncoming event in his life.

Thus the increasingly frantic voice and the wilder gesticulations, as he tried to rally these random troops to stand along with him; thus his motivation for tucking the hunting knife into the back of his pajama bottoms. It had been in the first aid kit, ironically Velcroed into the lid above the gauze and bandages that its usage might necessitate. He had taken the healing equipment for use on Kerren, and kept the defensive piece for himself. He had originally meant it only to do whatever damage he could to the horned thing, but he felt the chill of its metal it scraping against his back whenever he turned, as he began to lose control of those around him. They were starting to physically move away from him now, saying they were going to go down the hill to get Harmon, and then on to the town.

The knife felt like it were gaining mass and gravity, until he imagined he could feel the vast lobby commencing to rotate around it. He could bring it out, take control back with it, present everyone with concrete evidence that *he* was the center of all this, and if they didn't understand that, then he was perfectly willing to use threat of force to set each of them back into their proper orbits.

He had put off drawing it out as long as he could, until Dale started moving toward him. He was being tested; he had been in enough physical altercations to know that. Dale's half-steps forward were prelude to attack, and Bruce would have no chance if the larger man really decided to put him down. He waited for his moment, making a prior feint out of scratching his hip so that no one would think twice when he finally reached to pull the weapon out...

But as fate would have it, someone did. He had made the mistake of turning too much of his back toward Manoj and Kelly. The Indian fellow was messing with that infernal walkie-talkie, but the woman must have been watching more closely. Bruce didn't even see her coming, only heard her blurting out the front end of a warning, and then the pressure on his lower back as he lost the race to pull the knife free before she could reach him. He had pulled it anyway, as he did feeling a stinging sensation that spread like ignited primer cord up his tailbone. It didn't immediately dawn on him that what he was sensing was his own skin splitting open as Kelly pressed the sharp side of the blade against him, but soon the blade was out in the open, undeniable and known to all.

Everything in his mind was telling him to stop, to take a moment to assess the damage that the blonde had done to him, but there was no time. A show of force had to be just that, and called for brandishing of the weapon between himself and his biggest threat as soon as possible. His teeth gritted as the severed nerve endings began to cry out and he felt an odd warmth begin to spread across his lower back, but his hand still obeyed its original instructions and came up front and center. The satisfaction he felt as he saw Dale's eyes widen in fear and surprise was almost worth the tear-inducing pain.

Bruce pushed the weapon a little closer to Dale, not really intending to harm him, just to give him a better look at this little shiny piece of reality as it shifted the room's balance of power. He thrust it forward, tipping the blade away from vertical, and for just an instant it caught the faint moonlight sifting through the front windows. His eyes flicked just for an instant, in appreciation of this moment of beauty, and when they came back up, Dale's body had completely changed position.

The security guard's arm, which before had been protectively draped across Glenda's shoulders, in the interim had dropped behind her and come up again between the couple's bodies, so quickly that Bruce couldn't quite understand how it had been done. That darting hand clapped around his wrist, as tight and as strong as a bullwhip. Dale's other hand was close behind it, slamming into Bruce's elbow, forcing his arm straight and locking it in place.

Bruce's pain was suddenly doubled, a hot circuit running between his brain, arm, and lower back, skewing his vision out of focus. If Kelly hadn't just pushed and hurt him, his balance would have been better, but as it was, the force of the heel of Dale's palm hitting his elbow caused him to stumble. The two men begin to rotate as if dancing, Dale twisting Bruce's arm upward and at the same time starting to pivot the rest of him on an trajectory that would bring the author down to the floor. But the severed muscle in Bruce's back caused miscalculation in both men's movements, and Bruce stumbled closer to Dale. The blade swung up... and Bruce felt it sink home.

The skin of his palm had already felt the unique vibration that resulted when blade met flesh -- his own, when he lacerated his back. This feeling, however, even though he was half-bent over and couldn't see it, was different. It was completely obvious that this wasn't a slice, but instead a stab. The blade sank into something fully, and blood that wasn't Bruce's own immediately flowed hot down over his hand.

For the first time in many minutes, the lobby was totally silent.

-8.7-

Glenda hadn't seen any of skirmish between Dale and Bruce. As soon as Dale brought the writer's arm down and back up, his broad back was eclipsing what was going on. She heard flesh slapping against flesh, saw Dale's shoulders tense underneath his uniform, and then the pair of men swung around like partners doing some kind of drunken dance.

Dale staggered, which was something she had never seen him do. His feet so far had seemed always sure, always steady. This idea made her hesitate with its novelty, or else she would have been out of the way when Bruce came out from behind the security guard, extended arm first. Her mind registered something thin and glimmering coming toward her.

The way Dale held Bruce's arm made the shiny thing in his hand surprisingly steady. It came right at her, and she had only started to think she should probably move out of its path when it reached her. Strangely enough, she only felt a whisper, like a bit of wind blowing through her, as the shine passed just under her left collarbone and disappeared. Bruce's fist came to rest right up against her shirt there, and for a second after he had fallen to the ground, she just looked at the chunk of sculpted wood -- contoured with depressions for a person to tuck their fingers into -- sticking to her.

The firey feeling came all at once, spreading out as if she had been ignited at the spot where the handle touched her. It drew her breath out of her lungs, erasing her sense of time and space. Dale, once he had finished pushing Bruce to the floor, turned to her, and for what felt like the longest time just stood there, looking at her. She looked back at him, incredulous. She simultaneously had no idea what had just happened, and could see every possible consequence of the coming seconds spreading out into the future like the fine fibers of a net.

Then her knees were not doing what they were designed to, failing to hold her up. She tipped backward, but Dale managed to grab her and half-lower her down on the floor. She landed hard, but not as hard as if he had not been there. He was speaking to her, but the pain was making it hard to hear -- or think -- clearly. There was a lot of yelling around her, and more people were piling on top of the author nearby. She abstractly thought that maybe they were trying to cover him up entirely, in the hope that he might disappear. She hoped he would, although she couldn't exactly articulate why.

He was struggling underneath the people trying to hold him. Dale was with her, but he was distracted; he kept looking over at the colapsing group, and doing his best not to detain her attacker. She stared p at him, because at that moment seeing his eyes looking at her was the best of the awful things happening to her, the only thing that even slightly diverted her attention from the burning metal that seemed to be in her blood now, pumping through her body and down the front of her shirt in equal amounts. She could feel the blouse fabric sticking to her. She hated the feel of it, wanted to pull it away from her skin, but her arms seemed to be suddenly asleep.

Dale kept looking back and forth between her and the man pinned under the people in pajamas and bathrobes. He was calling to them. He eventually shifted her around in his arms, cradling her, leeping her upper half from sprawling out across the floor. When she looked at him this closely, she found she couldn't quite focus on him. He looked down and began speaking to her, his voice sounding all watery, asking her questions she couldn't answer about someone called Glenda. She felt that she knew who he was talking about, but couldn't quite place a face to the name. She opened her mouth to tell him this, but didn't think anything was coming out.

Dale looked up from her, and with more urgency than before, spoke to everyone else in the room. Kelly and Manoj struggled to keep Bruce down on the floor, but all of a sudden lost the battle. The author was scrabbling along the floor like he was doing a child's imitation of a horse, hands and feet slapping the floor, heading straight for her. She had learned enough to feel dear this time, convinced he was going to reveal another shiny thing that he would then try to slip through her, but he jumped over her instead. The vibrations of the floorboards hurt as they passed through her, but they eased as he got farther away. He had leapt over her to get to the stairs, and was now rising away from her, following their shape up and away. Good. She didn't like him anymore.

Dale was leaning over her, which she liked much better. He was paying a lot of attention to the wooden handle stuck to her chest. She would have tried to just brush it off her, if her arms had been working properly, but she somehow knew it wasn't going to make the thumping fire go away even if she did. It was okay, though. Dale was here. He would know what to do...

Why, then, was he sliding out from under her? She wanted to call him back, to make sure he wouldn't leave her side. She didn't want him to go away from her, ever. She had known that for a long time. But now he was receding, picking up something... one of the large upholstered chairs that this room had several of. He was moving toward the still walls of snow at the far end, his muscles tensing...

And then the chair was leaving his hands, flying through the air, tumbling a little through space before a web of white lines spread away from it in a brittle webwork. The lines all fell away, and a cold wind struck her, as if they alone had been holding back the chill. It should have helped quell the fires inside her, but it didn't. She began to shiver while still burning.

By this time, Dale was coming back to her, and she tried to smile for him. She managed to gather enough strength to lift her hands a little and reach for him, like a child silently asking to be picked up. He gently tucked a tentative arm behind her shoulders, and another under her legs, and lifted her up off the floor. She felt his muscles trembling as he did this slowly, and it matched the way she was shivering in a way that almost felt comforting.

Lying across his arms, her head was a little higher than when she was standing up. He floated her toward where the white web had appeared (and just as quickly disappeared), toward the source of that cold wind. Maybe going out into it would cool her, and her body wouldn't burn so much. If Dale was the one taking her there, she knew it would be a better place.

She looked up into Dale's face. The pale moonlight hit his cheeks as they moved out into the blowing snow, but her vision was starting to darken around the edges, like the closing iris at the end of a silent-era movie scene. There were tears sliding down both his cheeks, brilliantly lit with whiteness. She wanted to lift her hand to them, to swipe them away and ask what they were for, but her hands wouldn't do even that.

-8.8-

Manoj would have told Harmon what was stalking him, if the older man's walkie had been on. But since the veteran skier had switched his off, Manoj's clicks radiated out into the surrounding atmosphere unheard, and were lost forever. Harmon, for his part, was trying to hold his breath so the thing out there in the woods nearby wouldn't find him.

Harmon had spent enough time in the woods, thanks to his hobby, that he had witnessed all sorts of creatures. This one, however, was confounding him with its sound. The way it seemed to move, the irregular path it was treading... but most of all, what frightened him -- and gave him extra incentive to stay absolutely still -- was the sense of intelligent intent behind what he was hearing. The longer he listened, the more he realized that he was hearing something moving through the world in hunt mode. And that he was its prey. Was this how rabbits felt, he wondered, cowering down in their burrows while foxes roamed the world inches above them, all razor-sharp teeth and sniffing, searching noses held close to the ground?

Whatever it was stopped moving. For a long, dark moment, Harmon was sure that it had located him, and was only relishing the moment before pouncing. But then something happened. It was far away, and so close to the edge of hearing that he would not be surprised to learn it was only his imagination, there was a brittle, splintery sound. The hunter, in whatever odd form it might be taking on, immediately pivoted and sped off in another direction. Harmon could only guess that it was toward that distant noise, whatever it was.

He was alone again. He let out his breath, gulped down more air as deeply as he dared, so much that his leg ended up moving and flaring in pain again. His lungs hitched, he coughed, and then held his breath once again, unsure that the thing's acute ears wouldn't direct it right back to him. Moments passed, and it didn't return.

Harmon was aware that he couldn't stay where he was. Waiting for people from the Lodge to come find him had been folly from the beginning. And now they apparently had something else to contend with. Maybe whatever they had done to make that noise would end up buying him enough time to get out of here, and find a new hiding place. But how would he do this? Skis could be used as a decent shovel to dig himself out, but they happened to be at the far end of his snapped legs -- if they hadn't flown off his feet during the snownami he had been plowed under in its flight down the mountain. With his luck, both of his skis would both be lodged like anchors in the snow, making it impossible for him to remove them.

There was a particularly thick branch ahead of him, just a few inches beyond comfortable reach. He had been eyeing it ever since awakening under the tipped-over tree, and might have even wondered if he would be able to pull himself forward by grabbing onto it. No doubt, it was the parent of the fine network of twigs above him, which was holding back the rest of the snow directly above his head. No matter. The time for waiting had passed. He had to get out.

Steeling his nerves, Harmon reached his gloved hand forward and gripped the branch. Its woody solidity was actually nice to feel in the midst of all this smothering softness. He felt sap locking the glove's fabric into place, and pulled. Fire immediately shot down his leg as it stretched, and Harmon ground his teeth together to keep from crying out. To his surprise, the snow let go of his legs and he slid forward a few inches. He stopped pulling, and took as many deep lungfuls of breath as he could to calm the burning in his chest.

So he could move, a little. Good to know. The only obstacles left to him, then, were the broken ankle itself, the climb to the surface (he still wasn't sure of how far that was), and then the trip to the Lodge itself. All while under the eye of something that most likely wanted to tear him apart. Easy as pie.

When the pain had started to recede, Harmon realized that not all that much snow had fallen on him when he pulled on the branch, which was right next to his cheek now. Feeling bold, he made one more experiment. He shook the branch hard, and ducked his head. As he expected, whooshing waves of snow fell on his head, but not as much as he had feared. When it seemed to be done, he shook off the weight of what must have been a smallish pile on top of his hat, and looked up.

The branch he had shaken spread overhead to a wide swatch of compressed needles and twigs, and even with the weight of snow pressing down on it, only a little had sifted through to land on him. But the light above the area he had disturbed was definitely lighter. Quite a bit so, actually. If he had to guess, he thought he might just be another inch or two from the surface.

He braced himself, shook the branch again, making sure to alter the direction of his tugs; instead of side to side, this time he went back and forth. This new motion caused more falling snow than before, and he closed his eyes against the stinging onslaught. By the time he stopped, he had dislodged enough snow that he could feel the weight of it starting to press down on his body.

Slowly, Harmon opened his eyes. The change was immediate and visually brutal; he had opened up the sky. Not only that, but now that the weight of the avalanche had been removed from the branch he had shaken, its smaller ends had been able to spread out for the first time since the tree had fallen. Harmon grinned to himself as he imagined what that must have looked like from the outside: a needly arm unfurling out of the ground, like a zombie starting to emerge from its grave in one of those novels he obsessively read.

He loved the thrill of coming across visceral moments like that in his books, and they never failed to make goosebumps break out on his skin. He had thought it was because the image was so terrible -- the moment when the sane, real world was breached by the unreal -- but now he was on the other side of the equation, and realized what all those zombies must have felt in that moment of breaking through... ultimate triumph, in rebellion over the death that tried to keep them underground.

He had barely moved, and had such a long way still to go, but now he could see the night sky punched through with cold stars overhead, and it was amazing how much difference that made.

-8.9-

For a long moment, Benny and Carlos stood there, surveying the lobby, so familiar, but with its parts rearranged, clothes strewn across the floor, and an unsettling volume of spattered blood. They had not quite come out from underneath the overhanging second floor yet -- and it was only going to be a matter of moments before Benny's strength would totally fail and he would go sprawling across the floor, causing even more damage to himself -- but the violence of whatever had occurred couldn't be missed, even at this distance.

Carlos's mind instinctively tried to piece it all together... someone had been traumatically injured near the foot of the stairs and fallen, and then either gotten up or had been picked up and had been carried -- still trailing blood, but otherwise in a situation very similar to his and his co-worker's -- through the huge broken window at the front of the lobby. The rearranged furniture must have come from some kind of scuffle. Between the injurer and the rest of those present, maybe?

If he had been by himself, Carlos would have moved slowly out into the room, and assimilated all the evidence more closely. But as it was, he was carrying almost two hundred extra pounds of semi-sentient weight, and couldn't move smoothly or without specific purpose. For now, he had to be content with whatever he could glean while on the way to getting Benny to a soft place to lie down.

"Come on," he said to Benny, unaware if the man was fully conscious or not. "Let's get you to that couch. Then we can relax." Of course, he knew they couldn't stay there, but he had no intention of Benny getting back up without the help of medical professionals. Assuming that Benny was silently agreeing with his plan, the two men resumed their two-and-a-half legged stumble forward. Carlos was just starting to evaluate the easiest path through the random piles of fallen clothes, when he sensed a shadow passing in front of the broken-open window at the lobby's far end.

He looked directly at it, then turned his attention back to analyzing the floor, and paused. What he had observed outside finally sank in, and he turned his head back up fully expecting for the shape to be gone... or to have it resolve itself into what it actually was, rather than what he had thought he had seen.

It was still there, just as he had seen it the first time: the silhouette of a spindly human form, so sleekly shaped that it might not have been wearing any clothing, with a wide array spiky antlers protruding from either side of its head. It stood just beyond the broken window, its lower legs and feet lost from sight.

"What...?" Carlos asked incredulously, and the thing tilted its head slightly. If the antlers hadn't magnified the movement, Carlos wouldn't have thought it heard him. But it did. It crouched the tiniest bit, preparing to step or jump over the low sill and come into the room with them.

It would be in the room with them. Carlos's mind revolted against this thought, instinctively understanding that was the worst possible thing that could happen at that moment. He immediately halted his and Benny's forward progress, threw his mental and physical gears into reverse. He had no idea what he was thinking, that one man carrying another man could outrun this lithe being, who was already nimbly stepping over the threshold and striding across the floor toward them. All he knew was the encompassing sense of revulsion he had at being in its presence, and that he wanted to be out of its sight immediately.

He half-turned, trying to swing Benny around to give them some extra momentum. He could already hear the shadow-man's feet clacking (clacking?) on the floor behind them, gaining. Carlos turned them back the way they came, down the hallway toward the roofless restaurant. He already knew it was too far, there was no way they could make it to the broken double doors by the time whatever this was could reach them -- and at the same time found it mortally important that this not happen.

Benny was so heavy, it felt as if he were being pulled in an entirely other direction -- and then Carlos realized that he actually was. His injured friend had swiveled his head away from Carlos, and toward the unornamented door under the main stairway. It led to the tiny triangular room where Harmon lived, which they'd noticed when they first entered the lobby. Carlos took about a tenth of a second to wonder whether Benny was acting consciously, another tenth to consider this new option, and then pivoted that way as well. Whoever it was behind them was going to catch up -- this was an indisputable fact -- and when that happened, Carlos thought he'd rather have a thin door between them than to be caught in the open, in the middle of a dark hallway.

The odd clacking sounds didn't increase in speed, although they did ramp up in volume... if Carlos had to guess, he would think that the man behind them was starting to *bound* after them, unhurried, like that cartoon skunk who always ended up catching whatever scrambling prey he was after, despite his unhurried gait.

Benny was reaching for the doorknob to Harmon's quarters, but there just wasn't time. Carlos swung around and grabbed it himself, twisting it before Benny's weight slammed him into the door itself, pushing an exasperated "Unngh!" from Carlos, his shoulder taking the brunt of their combined force. The side-by-side pair of men bounced erratically off the door, and it was only Carlos's iron grip on the knob that kept them from tumbling right into the leaping thing's path.

The door popped open, stopping when it rammed against two of Carlos's toes. He cried out again, and used his pained frustration to basically throw Benny into the gap that had appeared. He dove in after, making a grab for the inner knob at the same time. His fingers somehow found purchase, and he yanked the door closed behind them. Against every estimation he could have made up until that point, the lock clicked.

In the instant Carlos had to swing his head around to watch as the person pursuing them (although he doubted that was really what it was) opened the door and finished whatever job it had come to do, he noticed that the small under-stairs room wasn't as cramped or dirty as he had assumed it would be. Harmon's quarters were fully ten feet square, although the downward slope of the stairs cut a sizeable diagonal chunk out of the ceiling. Still, there were amenities he would expect to see in anyone's room -- a simple cot against the wall where the ceiling was lowest, a pair of dressers and haphazardly filled bookshelves lining the others. A shaded lamp atop one of them threw warm light across the wood of the walls and floor, which were polished and lacquered, the exact same shade as the lobby itself.

Carlos's attention was drawn to the doorknob he had just let go of, most notably the way it was now extending out into the room. It wasn't just the metal that was stretching, but the surrounding wood as well, melting toward him like a burning photograph. The knob itself didn't turn, although he could hear something vaguely animal scrabbling against it on the other side. Other bits of the door and adjoining wall did the same thing, pressing inward and receding, in two or three places at a time.

Then, almost hesitantly, one single place started to flow outward from the wall. This time, it was clear what Carlos was looking at...

The shape of a hand impossibly stretching the wood, five fingers splayed, trying to push its way through from the other side.

-8.10-

Benny was trying so hard. Trying to stay awake, to stay conscious, to stay living. But he was so, so tired. He was aware enough to appreciate everything Carlos was doing for him (even the improvised stovetop cauterization of his head; he had no idea how bad the wound had been, but it must have been quite bad, for his friend to take such drastic measures), and was still trying to help their escape in any way they could.

At least he had something now to help him focus. It had called to him from its spot over the fireplace in the restaurant, and was now clutched protectively in his hand. The Deertail logo was solid, cold metal, exactly what he needed to keep himself -- a concept that, after his accident, had never felt more insubstantial -- stuck together. The hard triangle shape was almost literally an anchor. If he hadn't heard it thrumming like a tuning fork there on the wall, or if Carlos hadn't indulged him and made a detour from their tortured path to the lobby, he was sure his soul would have floated away by now.

Not only that, but they would have had time to move a lot farther out into the lobby when the figure with the antlers appeared at the broken window. It would have been much closer, and they wouldn't have made it back into this little room before the Qoloni caught them. And yes, he knew exactly what the thing was, knew its name, and even thought he knew where it came from. He had seen it before. Ironically, right in this very room. Except that now it was alive, and real, and trying to get in. It couldn't, though. It was trying, but it seemed like even the thinnest physical barrier in this world was too much for its extra-natural body to overcome. Benny thought he might know why that was, too.

He had fallen on his side on the floor, knocking his already violated skull against the wooden boards, and was untold minutes away from being able to gather the strength to get up, or even roll over. If the Qoloni found a way in, then he would just have to accept that he might not get the chance to, ever. If it did get through, he would hold up the Deertail logo, to see if it might act as a talisman; it might turn out to be the cross to this thing's vampire. He doubted it, but it was the only hope he had.

Carlos was watching the bulging door and wall with fascination, his eyes wild and uncomprehending. Benny half-wondered if he himself might be reacting that way too, if he hadn't been knocked so hard into this semi-conscious state. He certainly wouldn't have made the connection that made the thing's name plain to him; he would have been too overridden by fear. That had been, what? Over a year and a half ago since he had first seen it? He wondered if that picture was still in here. If they had any time left at all, he could at least use it to warn Carlos, show him what it was they were running from.

He managed to raise his aching head and turn it toward the bookshelves. He tried to focus on the volumes there, but he hadn't really been able to do that ever since the massive white fist of snow had punched through the kitchen window and shattered him. All he could make out were crazily tilted stacks of paperback spines. The letters refused to behave, all their different colors and fonts and sizes swimming around, none of them readable.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, Carlos had seemed to accept what he was looking at. The Qoloni had been pushing at various places along the door and wall, trying new methods of entry but always coming to the same deadlock. Once Carlos had sat with his back against one of the walls, elbows resting on his knees, watching it work, his eyes became less and less wide with fear each passing minute, transforming into the focus of a war commander studying the battlefield. The only time he jumped a little was when the Qoloni pressed its horned head directly against the wood of the doorjamb, and that was only because its antlers stuck almost halfway across the length of the little room. Maybe it had been hoping to tear through the impossibly warped wood, but it hadn't worked. Whatever power this thing had to bend reality, it couldn't entirely break it.

Even as they were being threatened by this otherworldly force, Benny was glad for the break in the action; he ached all over, and the large piece of glass that at the time felt like it had split his skull in two was hardly the only source. He guessed that he had been battered about as much as a human being could be without actually being broken, although he wondered how he would know if he had been, through this haze of pervasive hurt that covered him, draining away his mental and physical strength.

He had to show Carlos what he was thinking about. But the words on the book spines wouldn't stop swimming around, and Benny couldn't move much, or speak. He wondered what kind of nerves had been severed by that flying spear of glass that made it so hard to do things that had once been so simple. He couldn't even shake his head to clear it.

Carlos kept studying the Qoloni as it tried various methods to break through the wall. First, it swung its antlers from side to side, as if trying to slash through the abnormally stretched wood of the wall, then pressed its entire body against it, clearly straining with the effort. None of these tactics made any progress, but it didn't seem likely to give up either. Benny noted that the creature didn't seem to focus on either of them as it made these attempts. This made him believe that it couldn't see through the barrier. It only knew that this was where its prey had gone.

Benny didn't need to turn his head around to realize that he had fallen not far from the simple military-style cot that Harmon spent his nights in. The old man lived in a cramped apartment, but he made an effort to keep the place nice. Benny had originally noticed this when he had been in here before, invited back for a late-night story trade between two no-longer-young bachelors, after the younger folks had all gone to bed, in their pairs and singletons.

The room was the same then as now, clearly because it was the way Harmon liked it. The bedclothes were still neatly tucked in, meaning that he had not yet gone to bed before the avalanche. Even from down on the floor, Benny could detect the smell of hair tonic on the perfectly-aligned pillow. He thought of his own messy apartment down in the town, and felt envy. Harmon was a part of the Lodge, he was needed here, and lived simply. Benny thought that if they made it through whatever this was that was happening, he would try to live out his remaining time little more like this.

Another stack of paperbacks stood next to the cot, almost rising to the level of it, clearly situated to be in easy reaching distance of a person lying in it. Benny remembered, during that late-night confessional that had not been repeated since, when he had asked about the sheer volume of books in the room, Harmon answered:

"If you see something you like, go ahead and take it. I ain't too precious about the books themselves; I throw them out if they don't leave a mark on me somehow. As I see it, if an idea is strong enough for me to remember, I can do it without having the book itself around. I can always find another copy. These here are all ones that have spoken to me in some way."

Benny's eyes became focused on the base of that singular stack of books next to the cot. He was willing his arm to move. The large metal weight at the end of it twitched.

Right next to Benny but still on the other side of the tiny room, Carlos continued to watch the shape bending and twisting the room's door far out of true, and then backing off, letting reality snap back into place. The Qoloni's attacks were getting less and less insistent; maybe the thing would eventually give up and search for easier prey.

Benny struggled to move across the floor, the metal Deertail logo in his hand slowly making its way across the polished boards toward the precarious stack. He hoped that he wasn't wrong, and that the books near the bottom were still basically the same as they had been before, effectively being changed from entertainment into furniture, serving to prop up newer acquisitions.

He was disgusted by the way his hand looked, still stained with streaks of his own blood, the strain of moving the weight it carried making the tendons stand out. Mostly, he had never before now realized how old it looked. Using this frustration as fuel for his rebel muscles, Benny thrust his arm forward, just managing to hook one tine of the logo around the closest corner of the bottommost book. Using every last bit of his strength, he jerked his arm to the side along the floor, rotating the whole stack no more than an inch.

For a long moment, Benny thought he had failed. But then, several of the topmost books on the wavering stack began to tip over, and their slide began to drag others along with them. The top portion of the tower tilted past the point of no return, and fell. As they did, they pushed against the bottom half of the stack, forcing it in the opposite direction. The result was better than Benny could have hoped for. One half of the books fanned out like dominoes in his direction, most of them revealing their covers.

Carlos's head whipped around at the sound, a rapid-fire staccato of paperbound corners hitting the wood floor. In reflex, he rhetorically asked, "Benny, what the *fuck*, man?" Then he looked just as quickly back up at the door, to see if the horned thing would come back again. It had been several seconds since its last attempted intrusion, and a few more silent moments would prove that it had moved off. Or at least, that it wanted them to think it had.

With the immediate threat gone, Carlos looked with more concern toward Benny. "You all right?" His eyes followed Benny's extended arm and metal logo, the tip of which rested on a book that would have been located only two or three up from the bottom, if the stack had still been intact.

Benny tapped it, patiently, as if he had known it would be there all along. It was one of the books he had almost taken with him after he had spent that late evening shooting the shit with Harmon. At this moment, he was glad he hadn't, because then it wouldn't have been here.

Carlos looked down and picked it up slowly, marveling at it. The same kind of horror that had recently left his eyes returned, mixing now with confusion. "What the...?" he breathed, scanning the cover for an explanation. Benny didn't have one, only knew that what was happening, this strange confluence of reality and fantasy, was important.

The book's cover art featured a dark-haired woman in flowing Renaissance clothing turning in panic away from an ornate, full-length mirror. Its surface, reflecting a twisted version of the woman's fleeing back, was bending as if it were semi-liquid and being pushed forward from behind, like quicksilver... into the form of a horned human being.

The name of the book was The Qoloni, by Bruce Casey.

-9.1-

Sheryl had no idea what had happened. Dale and Bruce had been arguing, and she had looked down momentarily at Kerren because their hands, clasped together almost since the moment her wife had regained consciousness, were trembling. By the time Sheryl looked up again, everyone had changed places and Glenda had been stabbed, Dale slowly lowering her to the floor. No one had even thought to scream.

Despite everyone's best efforts, Bruce had run up the stairs, trailing blood of his own. Dale had then thrown a chair through the front window and carried Glenda out into the white/dark night. That left the remaining four of them, herself, Kerren, Manoj and Kelly, standing there, wondering what to do next. For a long moment, they just listened to the sound of Bruce stumbling around somewhere in the upper corridor. It wasn't until later that they realized that none of them had noticed which way he had run: back down the half-ruined wing where his room used to be -- and the last place the horned thing had been seen -- or the opposite way. It would have been a valuable piece of information to have, to know whether the author was running toward their nemesis, or away from it.

At that moment, however, the group's own well-being was the most important thing. Kelly broke the silence, by saying, "Do you guys think we can use this couch to get Kerren out of here?" She spoke insistently but quietly, but who or what she was afraid of being overheard by, she had no idea.

"I think so," Manoj said, visually appraising it. "But where would we take it to?"

Sheryl spoke, nodding to the broken window. "After them. Wasn't Dale talking about snowmobiles in a shed or something?"

"Right... but how will we get Kerren on one?" Kelly asked.

Kerren, in a voice whispery and barely audible above the new volume of the blowing wind, "I... can..."

Kelly smiled at her, wistful. "Oh honey, I don't think you can. You've got multiple fractures in both legs. You're going to have to let us carry you for a while."

"But we can't stay in here, not with *him* running around!" Sheryl let go of Kerren's hands long enough to thrust an accusing finger up the blood-spattered stairway.

Manoj was over by the side of the couch, looking behind it and pressing his hands against it, trying to gauge its weight without actually jostling it. "That's true, but once we're outside, we're committed to leaving the mountain. And we don't even know if that's possible yet."

Sheryl's rational mind rebelled against this thought. She had seen the horned thing, of course, but accepting that she couldn't physically get away from this place was a step too far for her. "If it's a choice between staying in here with that thing or going with Dale and Glenda, then we're going!"

Manoj continued to check the couch, nodding at Sheryl's shout of protest, as if it were just more information to add to everything else that was going on. "I'm not sure if we can move this. It's old and pretty solid. Can we give it a try?" He looked to them expectantly. Sheryl's heart melted a little when she saw how quickly Kelly leaped to help. She also noticed that there was a smear of blood down the front of Kelly's bathrobe, but it couldn't have been hers.

Sheryl got to her feet, shaking the minor pins and needles from her legs, which she had gotten from kneeling for so long in the cold. She moved to the end closest to Kerren's feet, mostly because she wanted to be able to watch Kerren's face as they attempted the move, so that any discomfort would be immediately apparent. Kelly stood right next to her, with Manoj taking the end closer to Kerren's head. He would also have the disadvantage of walking backward.

"Ready, baby?" Sheryl asked Kerren, and was answered by a terse nod. Her wife's hands clutched the back of the sofa and the edge of the cushion she lay on for purchase.

"On three," Manoj said, and Kelly's feet spread apart in a professional stance. "One, two, three."

They all lifted at once, and the sofa began to rise. It rocked a little, stabilized. "Now, let's take a few steps toward the window," Manoj said. "Slowly."

The couch, bobbing as if it were floating on a pond, began to move toward the window. Manoj craned his head back over of his shoulder, then turned back to the women at the other end of the sofa. "Wait, wait," he said, and moved to set his end down. Kelly and Sheryl followed suit. They had only traveled three or four feet farther along the wall. Kerren looked from one of them to the other, bewildered.

"It's not going to work," Manoj said, surveying the entire scene and not speaking to anyone in particular. "I can't back up over that windowsill. Even if we were able to clear the broken glass from it, it's still too high and too wide for us to lift the couch. Plus, Kelly and I still don't have proper shoes."

Sheryl had totally forgotten about that. Manoj was still wearing his flimsy hotel slippers; Kelly had left hers behind entirely. Kelly spoke up quickly. "I don't care about that, Noj. It can't be that far to the shed Dale's heading for."

"And after that?" Manoj asked. "How long do you think we're going to have to be out there?"

Kelly thought for a moment, then growled in frustration. "Well, we can't stay here, so how are we going to get Kerren out?"

Sheryl looked down at her wife lying there, injured, nearly mute, and immobile. She thought back over the events of the night, and was surprised to find that she had hardly done anything to help Kerren. Ever since Sheryl had slit open the sheets that she had been trapped in -- and she hadn't even been the one that finally set her free from that situation -- she had only followed along, as Bruce carried Kerren down the stairs, then Dale as he escorted her back to look for clothes, and everyone else as they discussed what to do next...

Kerren was lying across the couch, looking to her for help, and Sheryl realized that their places had somehow reversed. She had always been the one chasing Kerren, trying to keep her near. Now, she could see in Kerren's eyes the same please don't leave me here that Sheryl must have gone around with the whole time she knew Kerren was seeing someone else.

Until now, Sheryl had always thought that if she ever saw that expression on Kerren's face, she would enjoy it. Of course, she didn't wish for it, but if Kerren could just know a little bit of that helplessness that Sheryl had felt for so long, at least then they might have some kind of mutual understanding. But now that she was really seeing it, Sheryl found she didn't like it at all. Kerren needed a hero, and all Sheryl felt was guilt that she wasn't rising to the occasion.

So she would do it. No more following behind the bolder ones, wringing her hands and looking for a "right time" to step in. This was her chance to prove herself. "Hold on," she said, and then ran to the piles of clothes she had tossed over the banister. She thought about bending over to sort through them, but then decided instead to 0ick them about, spreading out the various piles until she found the things she was looking for.

Manoj and Kelly could have been standing behind her, watching her leap around like a kid playing in a pile of raked leaves, for all she cared. Seconds were important. They had no idea what Bruce was doing upstairs, and he could decide to come back down at any time. The only plus was that he was now unarmed. This made her think again of Glenda, and made her work even faster.

She found the boots first. They were ones she had purposely bought for the trip, overlarge to make sure she had room for multiple layers of socks inside. She grabbed them and threw them back in Manoj's direction. She went back for more, grabbing articles as she came across them, for the first time seeing them as purely functional items, instead of wondering how she would look inside them, or whether they lived up to her current sense of fashion.

Every time she found something useful, she tossed it back toward the small group. She didn't stop until she figured she was done, thinking she should have enough accumulated fabric to cover everyone adequately. It was strangely thrilling, taking such strong action to get her wife to a safer, warmer place, even if it was only the first of what would be many steps.

When she turned back, her blood pounding in her ears and an inexplicable smile on her face, she found herself looking at three immobile pairs of eyes. She waved her hands at the debris field of clothing she had just hurled at them. "Get dressed!" she said. "We're running out of time!" She didn't know exactly what aspect of their situation she was referring to, but it felt good to say.

After trading a glance with each other, Kelly and Manoj moved forward, scooping up pieces of clothing and trying to figure out how they were going to wear them. It was easy for Kelly, but for a man to try to put on women's ski clothing was going to be tricky. Also, there was the fact -- and Sheryl had noticed this long before now -- that the couple were naked under their robes. In order to get dressed, they had to take those robes off entirely. Kelly didn't seem embarrassed at all, fully exposing herself before stepping into a pair of the ski pants. Sheryl made a pointed effort to avert her eyes.

Manoj, ironically, took his selections and moved behind the broken front desk before disrobing to put anything on. It made Sheryl smirk, noting that he was doing this in a room that contained no one but his current girlfriend and pair of married lesbians. When he stepped back out again, looking uncomfortably wedged into clothes that Sheryl had chosen in hopeful preparation for this weekend -- another world (perhaps literally) ago and away -- she couldn't help but snicker.

He had put on purple snow pants, a thermal undershirt that was being stretched within an inch of its life, and a diamond-pattern jacket that could only be pulled tightly enough to cover just past his elbows and wouldn't entirely close over his chest. Manoj, aware of his ridiculous look and turning into the skid, pivoted and shot out his hip like a model. "What do you think?" he asked.

All three women, despite everything else that had happened to them that night, began to laugh. They didn't stop until Sheryl and Karen were clutching their sides, and Kerren had put her hands over her face in an effort to hold her aching body still.

-9.2-

It was up here, somewhere. Bruce hadn't hesitated as he hit the top of the main staircase, and turned left, heading back toward the ruined hallway where his room had once stood. It was a long, dark expanse between him and the end of the hall, but he didn't care. If he kept moving, he thought, he could outrun it. For the moment, the only thing that was following him was the excruciating, fiery pain in his lower back. He didn't think any nerves or important muscles had been severed, but the cut felt so deep that he imagined some more intangible part of himself had been severed, perhaps a phantom tail he'd never known he had.

As he took time to think about it, hurtling over familiarly uneven parts of the hallway, he considered that maybe he should be heading the other way, if he really were trying to avoid the thing that had followed him into this world (or, perhaps, they had chased each into a world completely alien to them both). So was he the pursuer, or the pursued? He didn't know, but he was incapable of just staying still and waiting for it. He had to *move*.

On a deep level, he knew what the thing was. He had created it, after all. Or, to be more specific, Theda had. It had been she who had given him the idea, wasn't it? That had been back in the heady days of productivity, when he would wake from every night's slumber with a head so full of ideas that it sometimes took until lunch just to outline them on paper. He had felt invincible back then, and why not? He was a writer, with enough stories to chase down until the end of time. He would live forever, he thought in those near-druglike fugue states, simply because he had too many things to write.

But it had all dried up, eventually. Not enough of the ideas Theda gave him during the nights survived the light of day. It was discouraging, yes, but after a while he began to see the results of the diminishing payoffs he saw. There was a power lurking within the stories sh would bestow on him, and even as her presence began to withdraw, it continued. The strongest example had been the night after the movie premiere...

It was the first time one of his books had been translated into film, and perhaps if it hadn't been such a success he might not have realized how a story can take on -- it was such a cliché to say -- a life of its own. But somehow, that first foray into the visual medium clicked. It was a feeling he had noticed in the theater, sitting in the back and watching the audience become rapt with the experience.

He couldn't say whether what resonated so deeply was the story itself, the way it had been directed, or the way the screenwriter had intuitively understood Bruce's source material, quoting lengthy dialogue from the book with a skillful sense of when it would best suit the cinematic vision. It could have been all these things combined that wove such a potent spell. Regardless of the reason, when the lights came up, and the standing ovation was over, there was an energy in the room that Bruce had never felt before. As much as he wanted to write it off as typical communal experience, it seemed to extend farther than that.

The feeling continued at the afterparty. Just as Bruce had convinced himself that what he was experiencing was the heady mix of pride and ego that any author would feel after seeing his ideas so richly and faithfully imagined, the film's editor pulled him aside. "This *never* happens!" she said excitedly.

"What doesn't?" Bruce asked, back in those days entirely innocent of the bizarre machinations of Hollywood.

"Listen to them!" she said, throwing her hand -- which held her martini, spilling half of it over onto the floor -- in an expansive gesture that encompassed the entire room.

Bruce tried to parse out what was special about all the conversation swirling around them. "I don't know," he finally said, shrugging. "They're just talking about the movie, aren't they?"

The editor beamed at him. "That's the thing!" she gushed. "They're talking about the movie!" She moved in closer to him, so much so that he could smell all of the drinks she'd already imbibed that evening. She was an industry veteran, nearly twenty years his senior, but she was now so close that Bruce tangentially wondered how hard it would be to finish this evening in her bed. "This never happens!"

Bruce mentally shook his head, trying to understand. "What doesn't happen?"

"Listen," she said, leaning even closer and speaking so loudly that there was no way should could have meant to be conspiratorial, "I've come to dozens of these things before. And it took me about three of them to realize that they're never actually about the movie everyone's just seen. It's all about the schmoozing and the boozing and everyone playing the angles to get their next job. It's the one thing that theyr all actually have in common... now that This Thing is done, everyone already has to be thinking about the Next Thing. Usually the last thing on their minds is the movie they just walked out of. But listen!"

She fell quiet again, and this time Bruce could pick up bits of the conversation around them. Here, someone was extolling the film's performances; there, he fell into a diatribe on the director's exquisite use of angles; wasn't the dialogue just so snappy; no, not just snappy but *whip-smart*; the onscreen world just felt so inhabitable; was it too out of line to talk Oscars so early in the year?

She was right. They were both right, he would come to find out; such after-party topics of conversation were totally outside the norm, and he did go home with her that night. He actually lay awake a long time in her middle-aged insomniac's apartment after she had fallen asleep, thinking about it all. He should have been able to sleep peacefully, content with all his jobs well done, if it hadn't been for one incident, which came while they were outside the afterparty's restaurant, caught together on a silent street between pockets of debauchery.

She had downed three more drinks by this point, but was holding her own and not taking "maybe I should go" for an answer. They had been standing at the curb, waiting for the valet. She had been sloppily flipping through a dozen manners of social media, trying to glean what the buzz from the screening was. Bruce, who never thought of the phone in his pocket although he was never without one, had stepped a little away from her because she was also puffing on a cigarette. The prospect of tasting that smoke for the remainder of the evening didn't particularly enthrall him, and so he had moved aside to prepare himself.

Away from the sonic rumble of the party, he could appreciate the Californian night. It must have rained at some point while they had been inside; the asphalt of the road had that just-wetted gleam that it only has in the movies, reflecting the street lights as colored bars extending away into the starless night in both directions. A sound slightly behind him caught his attention, and when he turned to find its source, was pleasantly surprised.

Victor Richardson, one of the movie's stars, was standing a little ways down a side alley, turned his way. The strangest part was that Victor was dressed as his character from the movie, down to the futuristically-piped trenchcoat and trilby. Bruce was a little shocked; had the stars from the film made an in-costume appearance during the party, and he had missed it?

Victor looked out of the alley, right at Bruce. The actor had apparently taken the time to grow the three days of perpetual beard stubble that his character maintained in the film, too. Bruce was about to say something to him, when Victor gave his character's traditional gesture of running three fingers along the brim of his hat and turned, his trenchcoat flying out in a convenient gust of wind as he disappeared down the alley, which looked like one of the dressed sets from the movie too, right down to the sprays of steam that hissed out of random places along its length.

Bruce stood there, puzzled. He turned to look back at the film editor, saw she was still hunching over her phone, her face bottom-lit by its cadaverous glow. He turned back for one more glimpse of Victor's disappearing back, but the alley was empty. Now that he thought about it, it didn't look much like an alley set anymore, either. And the pavement had dried.

"I didn't know the actors were going to be here," he said to her.

Without looking up, she laughed a little. "What's that? The actors aren't here tonight."

"I just saw--" Bruce started, but she interrupted him by holding up her phone.

"See?" she said, using her thumb to scroll along a long list of congratulatory posts from various members of the cast (including Victor), all hashtagged to denote the con they were all currently attending, over six hundred miles away.

Bruce frowned. Taking a moment to tally up how many drinks he had downed that evening, he decided that it was just the right amount to allow him to both hallucinate a little, and to not question his judgment about spending the impending night with the editor.

Now, running down a lodge hallway that reminded him a little of that momentarily transmogrified alley, he remembered that was the first time he had gotten a glimpse of what combined human consciousness could do, and wondered if this night was more of the same.

But it if was, why had it happened here, at the Deertail Lodge, with these particular people?

-9.3-

It took about thirty seconds before the women could collectively regain their composure. Manoj knew that he looked absolutely ridiculous in Sheryl's ski wardrobe, but he had long learned that turning into emotional skids, rather than trying to protect his ego, was often the best way to go. It was certainly proving the case tonight. It didn't even seem incongruous for them all to enjoy a brief laugh when one of their group had been injured so severely; the tension had to be broken somehow, as sure as they had to find a way to get them all out into the elements and ferry Kerren to safety, as quickly as possible. If had to make a fool of himself in order to get that to happen, then so be it. It was what they needed to refocus on their situation.

It seemed to work; once they had finished laughing at his ill-proportioned women's clothes and faux-model posing, they got back to the business at hand. The women hurriedly gathered up the rest of the clothes and put them on. Fortunately, his body type was the most dissimilar of the group, and the process went smoothly. For his part, Manoj started to pick out an assortment of jackets and coats that could be laid across Kerren, since it would be not only painful but nearly impossible to slide any kind of leg coverings on her.

Sheryl seemed to notice what he was doing, and came over to him. "You don't need to find much for her; I've got an idea. Would you come over here with me?"

Manoj followed her, and she headed directly for the front desk he had recently hidden behind to change. She seemed to have a clarity of purpose now, one that had been entirely absent before. It was nice to see. He had been worried that he and Kelly were going to have to bear the full responsibility of figuring out how to get Kerren anywhere other than where she was.

Sheryl stood before the desk, appraising its jagged edges, especially the place where Kelly had pulled off the long piece that had been converted to splints for Kerren's legs. "What we need..." she said, almost to herself, "... is a piece long enough for her to lie on..."

Manoj had no problem in suggesting possible issues with proposed solutions. "Even if we find one, it's not going to be wide enough for her to lie across."

Sheryl nodded, taking the criticism in stride. "That's what the rug is going to be for." He didn't know what she was thinking of, but she seemed to be working it out as she spoke, and so he let her. He stood still, giving her space to circle around the front desk in silence. When she had made a full circuit, she gestured to the topmost part of the desk, where most travelers would rest their elbows while speaking to Glenda during check-in.

"That's what we need," she said, and Manoj nodded in approval.

Once the decision had been made, Sheryl's plan came together quickly. She, Manoj, and Kelly managed to work together to rock a long, thick plank off the top of the desk, which they then laid across the seats of a pair of the lobby chairs. Then came the hard part; transferring Kerren so she lay across the board as it was suspended two feet off the floor. Kelly had the idea to ease her over while atop the sofa cushions she was already lying on; Kerren gritted her teeth and cried out just once, when they had to slide the cushions out from under her legs so she was lying directly on the board. Other than that, she complied totally. She was just as aware as anyone how pressing the idea of leaving the Deertail lobby was.

The second part of Sheryl's plan took care of both stabilizing Kerren and covering her from the elements; one of the smaller lobby rugs could be wrapped around Kerren multiple times, cocooning her and her supporting board together, while leaving the plank sticking out, both above Kerren's head and below her feet, so she could be carried as if she were on a stretcher.

The wrapping process was, at least, less painful for Kerren. She closed her eyes, furrowed her brow, and remained all but silent through the process. By the time she was fully secured, the other three were all starting to sweat under their ski clothes, and actually kind of looking forward to moving out into the cooler air.

"Ready?" Sheryl asked her wife, leaning down to kiss her forehead, and Kerren nodded in return. "Don't worry," Sheryl said. "We'll be so careful. Right?" she asked Kelly and Manoj, who nodded affirmatively. They didn't seem to need to speak, in that strange connectivity that groups intensely focused on a shared activity tend to have -- Manoj had been a part of it many times, when programmers put their heads together to tackle a thorny bit of coding. He imagined that Kelly saw it in group sports as well; the physically strongest of the group, she instinctively moved up to Kerren's head and prepared to take the lead.

It was going to take two people to get each end of Kerren's board up and into carrying position, so Sheryl helped Kelly get Kerren's head lifted off the chair, and saw the athlete positioned so that she would be facing forward as they proceeded. Manoj had already established that it wouldn't work for the lead person to walk backward over the window threshold, certainly not the entire way to the equipment shed that Dale had taken Glenda toward. Sheryl made sure Kelly's grip was secure before running around to help Manoj gently hoist Kerren's legs up as well.

For a moment, they just stood there, unsure that this was going to work. If any one of them stumbled, the whole contraption was going to fall disastrously, but at least the board didn't seem like it was going to break under the combined weight of Kerren and her rug/shroud, nor was she going to roll off without some kind of major disturbance.

They continued their silence as they steadied themselves, ready to venture out over the jagged bottom edge of the broken lobby window. Kelly took the first step, and the others moved in tandem, ferrying Kerren toward the edge of their shelter. Manoj watched the way Kelly's hands tightened around the end of the board as she stepped up and over the windowsill, causing hardly a bump in Kerren's makeshift pallet.

Manoj's ill-fitting women's boots did a good job of keeping out the chill, at least while he was stepping through the randomly piled slush that had flowed in since the window had been broken. Enough had fallen into the lobby to create a slope up to the level of the snow outside, and the incoming fan of snow across the floor had been slowly melting this whole time.

The four of them started heading on an upward angle that increased to just a little past comfortable as soon as they got outside. They slowed a little, partly because they were still testing their footing on the slope, and because they didn't want to get out of sync, because that would be the easiest way to spill Kerren's makeshift travois face-down onto the snow.

Sheryl had the foresight of pulling one of her wooly hats down over Kerren's head before they walked out, and it proved a good idea; powdery snow was swirling around them as they rose up to a height of about twelve feet above the floor of the lobby they had just left. Manoj felt Kelly's feet falter only once, when her head finally crested the top of the surrounding snow bank, and when he did the same, he understood why.

The slope of the mountain spread down and away from them in an immediate panorama that was expansive enough to startle. The view was very similar to that he had seen from the second-floor guest room -- he was very close to that same elevation now -- but it was so much sharper and clearer when not seen through glass. The snow stopped blowing across them, as well. There was a slight wind, but there was nothing to keep it from just flowing like water around all obstacles, imparting to the air a clarity that made even the town far below seem close and toy-like, though still unmoving.

The moon, from behind the bulk of the Lodge, cast a constant flash-bulb shadow of whatever shapes managed to stick up from the frozen onslaught that lay across everything. They all kept their feet moving, and he heard Sheryl's delayed gasp as she looked up from her wife and beheld the vista that had unfolded before them. There was absolute silence here, away from the sharp angles of the building they had come from, which might have been the sole cause of the strange sounds they had heard while still inside. Out here, there was no such unnatural resistance to the flow of air down the altered sides of the mountain, the result being visual and aural serenity.

If only they had a chance to enjoy it. After being in the unheated lobby, the group had no residual body warmth to protect them for even a minute of exposure of the chill, even though the wind was nowhere near as strong as they anticipated. They had to get around the side of the Lodge, hopefully before Dale and Glenda got any of the snowmobiles up and running. It would certainly be easier to pool their rescue efforts and get both injured parties down the mountain together.

Even while thinking this, Manoj held no ill will against Dale for leaving without them. Glenda's situation was certainly more perilous, and he had seen the look in the security guard's eyes as he walked out of the lobby, Glenda draped across his strong arms. The big man had clearly been in his version of panic mode, his mind ceasing to function except for the imperative of getting the woman he loved to a safe place. Manoj didn't know if he'd ever felt such a powerful version of that emotion, but he certainly could understand it.

Kelly wasn't turning her head back to look at him as they carried Kerren's stretcher, and this made him strangely proud. She wasn't checking on him, or gave any sign that she seemed unsure that he couldn't keep up. This had been a persistent, underlying fear all through their relationship, that he wouldn't be able to keep up with her. But now that circumstances made it necessary, he was holding his own. She had even looked for a little reassurance from him. Maybe he was deserving of a woman such as her, after all.

The trio trudged along, following Dale's heavy footprints in the snow, surprised at how their group confidence was growing with each step farther out into the elements. Things were strangely tranquil here, as if the world had been put on pause in the aftermath of the avalanche. And, if Manoj's theory proved to be correct, perhaps it literally had. Thinking this, he looked down toward the frozen town, wondering if it really were just a mirage, a visual echo of some sort.

But then he spotted one thing that was moving. It was small, still far off along the devastated tree line, but once or twice every second it would eclipse the whiteness that lay partially over everything. All he could determine was that it was dark, a stark contrast to the the rest of the snow-covered, moonlit scene, and that it was bounding quickly through the snow, heading in their direction.

It had two legs, and moved upright, like a person, but Manoj's dawning realization was that it wasn't one.

-9.4-

Dale's arms were warm, the perfect balance between the air (too cold) and her body (too hot). They buoyed her up like tropical ocean waves, or at least what Glenda imagined tropical ocean waves must feel like. She'd never been south of northern Texas, and some part of her distant mind felt like she should be regretting that.

They moved along the thin border between the white below them and the black above. There was a bright -- too bright -- spot of white in the black, just like there were black things in the whiteness underneath. What was that Eastern symbol that did that? Black with a spot of white, white with a spot of black? It was supposed to symbolized how everything came in pairs, and in every single thing there was a bit of its opposite.

That made her think of Dale again. He was strong, his skin dark, carrying the weak one with pale skin, across the divided/united landscape. Duality within duality. Wow. Where did that thought came from? Glenda had never thought she would start thinking so philosophically with five inches of steel painfully embedded in her upper chest.

That was where the heat seemed to be coming from. It was spreading through her body, radiating from that spot in movements that sometimes felt like waves of rich syrup, and sometimes like pointed, probing fingers. The feeling wasn't supposed to be there, and her body knew this. It was rebelling, waging a little war against the metallic invader, and she thought this internal battle was causing the worst of the heat.

Dale was talking to her as he brought his feet down over and over again into the snow, moving them a little forward each time. Everyone should have a Dale, a warm protector to carry her wherever they needed to go. Even Dale himself should have one. She wished that one day she would get the chance to be that for him.

Glenda was only slightly aware that she was dying. This partial blindness to the fact was part of the rebellion of her body (a unit in which her mind was definitely included), shielding itself from the truth. Sometimes lies were just as important. She was thinking about philosophy and half-drunk musings on how the world should be, instead of how it actually was. But she had lost a lot of blood, and some nearly-vacant corner of her wished she knew more about how much a person could afford to lose.

Dale kept moving his feet around the side of the building, first one then the other. He was almost lulling her to sleep with the side-to-side rocking and his voice; he was speaking to her almost subconsciously, his voice as methodical as his steps, first one word then the other...

"Gonna get you to the shed with the snowmobiles, honey, hopefully you can sit upright enough that I can steer us down the hill, that's what we're going to do... Those things are so noisy but that would sound so good right now, can't hear anything out here except for that ringing your ears get in them when there's nothing else to listen to, I heard once that's the actual sound of the electric circuits in your brain running, they're there all the time but you can't hear them until it gets so so quiet like this... Glenda, I wish I would have kissed you back, I was just so surprised, I mean I knew there was something between us but I didn't know you'd pick that moment to jump me, and don't get me wrong, I'm all about you jumping me, but I was thinking about something else... any other night you'd be pretty much all I was thinking about... Honestly, I thought maybe you never would want me, not after... that night I told you about. I was just a kid, you know? And my dad... he was so drunk. He shouldn't have gotten either of us into the car. That's something else I wish I had done differently. After the crash, I should've... I should've helped him. Instead of just sitting there after I was thrown clear. That's the greatest gift he ever gave me, not making sure I was belted in right. How crazy is that? He hits a tree, trapped in the wreck, can't open the doors, burns up right there, and I'm thrown clear with hardly a scratch. I should have helped, I know. But I was so scared and angry at him... an attitude I supposed I inherited from him. So ironic that I just stood there, and I know he saw me there, watching me watching him die. God..."

Dale fell silent for a long time after that. Of course, this was a story that Glenda had heard once before. He had confessed it to her at that opening-day party. He was right in his suspicions that it had changed the way she felt about him, but wrong about the way in which it had. It had shown a side of him she had never seen or even suspected before then, forming into a whole man where before he had been mostly the function he stoof for at the Lodge. But suddenly here was a man who had pain in his past, who carried it with him wherever he went. It had made hiim real to her.

On any night before this one, if Glenda had been asked where those feelings had come from, she would have answered incorrectly. She would have said that seeing this large, powerful man choose to be vulnerable in front her (even if it had taken several glasses of wine to get there) threw her natural, nurturing instincts into overdrive. She was a mother to young boys, so of course the story of something Dale went through when he was young would resonate with her mothering instincts. However, this heat under her skin, spreading out from the knife in her chest until it felt like it was going to make her brain burn up, was making her see things more clearly, seeing reasons not only deeper than the surface, but even deeper than the ones she thought were the deepest. Just as she could now observe the individual beams of moonlight as they streamed across the two of them as they trudged through the snow, even more complexity was being revealed.

She loved Dale not just for the pain he had been through and her own most basic tendencies, but for what he had done since then. She had never made the connections before, but it was plain as day in what were turning out to be her last few moments of consciousness. Ever since that terrible night his father had died, Dale had never once turned away from helping people. Even when the noise and horror of the world became too much and he ran away to work in a high, mostly quiet place where the number of life's variables had been whittled down as much as they could be, he was still helping people. He was unable to do otherwise.

If she had the strength, she would have started crying with the painful gorgeousness of that realization. Instead, she just struggled to keep her eyes open so she could continue to look up at him, witnessing every moment of his life etched in his face, limned in moonlight. Even when she felt their forward momentum toward salvation stop, and that steadfast expression change into one of horror, he was still beautiful.

He uttered one more thing, little more than a breath exhaled, that fell across Glenda's face with a puff of warmth that defied the despair in it: "It's gone... smashed." She didn't know what he was referring to, and found she didn't care. She just wanted to stay there, warm in Dale's arms, forever.

-9.5-

For a long time, Harmon just lay there, drinking in the moonlight that now fell across his upper body, soaking it in as if it were nourishment. The sense of euphoria he felt inhaling the fresh air made him wonder just how close to suffocation he had been under all that snow. And, on the heels of this thought... would he have stayed under there too long and slipped away if that thing -- whatever it was -- hadn't passed by so closely and goosed him into action?

All these thoughts were nicely distracting him from the corporeal concern of his broken leg, a subject he knew that he had to address soon. Although being packed in snow for an hour or so had reduced the sharpness of the pain, there was still no way for him to move in any meaningful way without rousing its wrath. He'd had plenty of broken bones before, and could tell that this one was shaping up to be in his top three, both in terms of pain and inconvenience.

His first goal should be to get his head up above the snow and take a look around, but since he had been thrown under this sheltering tree and half-buried while face down, this was going to require his turning over first. To be honest, at his age there were mornings when this exact maneuver seemed like a tall order even when he was in his own warm bed, all his body parts in working order, and an urgent need to piss jumpstarting his motivation.

He grabbed on to the branch that he had shaken to clear his way to the open air, and pulled forward. He didn't think about it, didn't prepare for it, because no amount of either of those things was going to make it easier. This was one of those times when he just had to do the thing that was hard to do. Do it, and have it done. He pulled again. By increments, at first large and then smaller, he drew himself forward until his shoulder was up against the branch, his legs had almost fully emerged from the leg-shaped tunnels they left in the snow, and tears were coursing down the veteran skier's cheeks.

Then he rolled over onto his back, wincing for the fiftieth time as his legs crossed. He had done it with the intact leg going over the top, however, so he could reach down and pull it the rest of the way without too much extra pain. Then he braced himself against the branch, and sat up. The old pain hit him in all-new places as he changed position, but he had expected that. He tried an old yoga method, imagining himself as a rock in a stream, letting the water/pain pass over and around him without resisting against it. It had been a exercise that had sounded like bullshit when he first learned it, and only slightly less so now. But it was working (or at least he thought it might be, and what was the difference between those two things really), so he kept at it.

His head rose above the level of the snow, and he sucked in his breath in shock. It wasn't that the view of the mountainside wasn't familiar, it was that after an hour or two of being trapped in such a small space, the sight of such a huge, open area was hard to process. He found himself looking across a field of tiny hills, and immediately assumed these were other trees that had been knocked over and covered the way his had. The constant rising and falling of the land added up to an upward slope, revealing that he was looking back the way he had come.

He was too low to the ground, or perhaps merely looking in the wrong direction, to see the Lodge, but he wondered how quickly the thing that had been stalking him got to it. After the distant sound of shattering glass, it had seemed to take off at a considerable speed, but he also knew that he got well away before the snow-wave had overtaken him. Whatever the reason, he hoped that the residents still in the Lodge had figured out a way to evade it, or scare it off. He knew that he could attempt to slip back into Kerren's mind to check, but was reluctant to. It took so much of his energy, and he would need every ounce if he were going to get out of this situation on his own. Not only that, but it had felt like an invasion of the woman's privacy, and then she had only been partially conscious. Now it would be too weird. He chuckled at himself for thinking in such terms at a time like this, as if social mores really applied here and now, whatever that term even meant anymore.

There was something he was starting to notice, especially now that he was above the surface again. He had spent over half his life on mountains, and knew the feel of them, their breath and temperament. There were even times -- usually when he was high -- that he felt he was tapping into a sense of its movement, those impossibly vast, geologic time scales by which mountains roam the world, feeling those atomic increments of change under his feet.

But now, he could sense none of those things. This mountain was dead. Or possibly not even a mountain at all anymore.

As he turned his head from side to side, a thin, flat gleaming line leapt into his vision. He turned his head toward it, but it disappeared. He bobbed his head around, ducking and weaving it, trying to regain sight of that light, and eventually found it. To his surprise, it was moonlight bouncing off the grip end of one of his ski poles. He had assumed they had both been thrown even farther than he had when the wave hit, but he must have held on to this one long enough to get it tangled in the same tree's outer branches.

He smiled at his good luck, and then realized that he now had very little excuse not to tuck it under his arm like a crutch and try to hoof it the rest of the way down the mountain. Well, then that was how it was going to have to be.

He was surprised to find that he had enough strength in his hand to wrench the ski pole free from the tree's formidable grip. Doing so only caused mild discomfort in the parts of him still under the snow, all of them. But this was the unspoken pact of the athlete; there are times when you will be hurt, and when this happens, you will have to take care of it yourself, to one extent or another. You do it without complaint, knowing that everyone else falling down the hill/plunging through the air/slamming into other people are running the same risk. The hard part comes, and then you deal with it.

Like a chick emerging from the whiteness of its egg, Harmon began to squirm his way up and out of the imprisoning snow. He grimaced constantly, and progressed slowly, but progressed nonetheless.

-9.6-

Carlos didn't ask any questions until after he was reasonably sure that the thing outside wasn't going to try to push itself into the room again. He made sure the door and wall on that side of the little room had been stable and solid for a good two minutes before he scooted over to the fallen stack of books. He scooped up the old paperback copy of The Qoloni and looked closely at the cover art, scrutinizing it.

"What are you saying, Benny?" he said, waving the book in his injured friend's direction. "That the thing out there, is like this?" He pointed to the figure pressing against the bent mirror on the front cover.

Benny, still lying on the floor next to the fallen stack of books, clutching the iron Deertail logo, expelled a great amount effort, and took a deep breath, before belching forth the words, "Not like... Is."

This just confused Carlos even more. He looked at the artwork, then at the door again. It couldn't be... He tapped the author's name on the cover. "Bruce Casey. Hey, he's actually here this weekend." His brow furrowed, struggling to put the pieces together. He said his next sentence as matter-of-factly as he could, trying it out, seeing if he could do it while remaining sane. "So this book is based on real life... He somehow brought this creature with him, and now it's terrorizing us after a terrible avalanche." He considered this last part, then amended, "Or it actually caused the avalanche."

Benny made as much an approximation of a shrug as he could, lying on the floor on his side.

Carlos blinked his eyes, widened them in the dim light of the lamp, as if trying to fully rouse himself from sleep. "Well, I'll tell ya, old buddy, if I hadn't just spent the last five minutes watching that thing--" he pointed at the door, trying not to let his finger tremble as he mentioned the monster outside, "-- doing its fancy trick, I would say that you were crazy. Or maybe we were both hurt in the avalanche, and we're hallucinating the same thing." Even as he said this, he knew it wasn't true. He hadn't seen the book until now, so why would he have already imagined it? Down that road lay the possibility that the book wasn't real either, and once you got to that point everything was up for debate. Better to assume that at least some of what was going on around him was real.

He looked at the title again. "The... Koh-lon-ni," he sounded it. "Like 'colony', sort of. Is that the thing's name, or what?" He flipped the book over, and read the synopsis on the back aloud.

"'Princess-to-be Ynarra Mednik arrives in the Kingdom of Cheval believing she knows everything about her prospective husband. He will one day soon be King, and the girl who can win his heart will find herself in a world of riches and luxury beyond measure. However, not only does Ynarra have to compete against the Prince's other suitors, but Cheval Castle holds many secrets, inaccessible tower rooms, levels below the dungeons, hidden passages behind walls, hallways that lead nowhere. Too late, Ynarra will learn that this architecture is designed to confound and trap the one inhabitant of the castle that no one speaks of, yet all fear. And with good reason, for she is about to unwittingly unlock the biggest secret of all. The secret of... The Qoloni.'"

He sat there for a minute, trying to work out what new light this threw on what he and Benny had just experienced. He looked across the tiny room at his injured friend. "You've read this?"

Benny closed his eyes, nodded.

Carlos riffled through the pages quickly as he continued his musing aloud. "And if what we're hiding from really is the thing in this book, then how are we figuring that's possible? Did Mr. Casey write about something real, something that has been following him around?"

Benny had enough strength enough to make a fist, extend his thumb, and point it toward the ground.

"Don't think so, huh?" Carlos thought a little longer, wishing that Benny was able to articulate himself better. "Okay, how about this? That this is an idea that Bruce had, and then he somehow made it real?"

Again, Benny turned his thumb downward. Carlos furrowed his brow.

"Not that either? Well, how do you know?"

Benny made no response other than lifting his other hand, which still held the metal Deertail logo in a white-knuckled grip.

"What is that?" Carlos asked, puzzled. "What does that mean?"

Benny didn't answer right away, but deliberately lifted the metal to his forehead and gently tapped his temple with it. Finally, he said, "Just know... We... *made* it."

Carlos stared at him silently for a long time, trying to comprehend what his friend was saying. He couldn't quite piece it together, and after a minute or so of silence, he became aware that he could tell something was going on elsewhere in the Lodge.

At first, he thought it was a distant sound... footsteps, or maybe someone moving furniture around. But the longer he listened, he realized that it wasn't sound traveling through the air; it was the slight vibration of the wall he leaned back against. The thought should have made him realize how vulnerable he currently was to a creature who could bend and twist the fabric of reality, but instead he found he was only curious.

He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to divine what the Lodge was telling him. He could hear/feel distant thumping, but it fell into no regular pattern. Now that he was paying close attention, he found he was getting two sets of thumps, varying in distance and intensity. One seemed random, farther away, and was occasionally punctuated by "louder" thumps; the other was slower, stealthier. Strangely, he thought he understood what the wood was telling him... There was someone upstairs moving things around, and the thing -- the Qoloni, if what Benny was telling him was right -- was approaching that someone.

His eyes snapped open. "Benny," he said, "we've got to warn whoever that is!" He struggled to his feet. Benny looked like he was less on the verge of dying than he had been since Carlos had pulled him from the avalanche, but he would still be incredibly hard to move at this point. Thinking as quickly as he could, Carlos reached for the lamp that had been steadily glowing on the bookshelf closest to the bed. For what he had in mind, he had to give it to Benny. Unfortunately, the cord was short, and didn't reach anywhere close to where his friend was lying.

Carlos turned it over, trying to figure out if there was any more cord he could play out, but instead found himself looking at a screwed-down battery compartment cover. Of course. The power in the Lodge had gone out long ago; the only reason they hadn't been sitting here in the dark all along was because it had backup. He yanked the cord from the wall and set the still-glowing lamp down next to Benny.

"I'm going to go out there..." Benny started to rouse himself, clutching the metal Deertail logo even closer to himself if that were possible. "Just for a second!" Carlos reassured him. "Someone's out there with that thing, and I can't just sit here while it catches them. Now, we know the thing's weakness; it can't pass through wood... or metal... maybe it can't pass through any physical material at all. It sounds like the book synopsis is telling us that it can be confused, or get lost easily. Maybe it can't really see the way we can. I think I can get around it, or at least hide from it when I need to."

Benny struggled to speak, and Carlos gave him a few moments to get it out. "Can't... fight. Run. *Run*."

Carlos knew what Benny was saying, that his friend was telling him to forget his foolish errand and get away, but he chose to act like he misunderstood. "Yes, I'll run. I'll go as fast as I can. And I'll bring whoever it is back here, if possible. Just hang tight, okay? You can turn this back on when I close the door." He tapped the lamp and then, without giving Benny time to react, Carlos switched it off. He set it on the floor next to Benny's free hand, then turned to the door. He worried that the knob might feel different, or maybe that the door would stick a little in its frame, but the thing's distortion of it apparently hadn't caused any lasting effect.

He turned the knob, knowing that no extra light was going to spill out into the lobby, and slipped out. He heard only one final, whispered "Run!" from behind him as he closed the door silently behind him and stepped back into the silent lobby.

-10.1-

No words needed to be passed between Manoj and Sheryl. Because all their hands were occupied with holding their shared end of Kerren's stretcher, he resorted to elbowing her in the ribs. She looked at him, saw the trepidation in his eyes, and followed his gaze.

There it was, skimming along the edge of a field of fallen, snow-covered trees. It swept along with a weird kind of grace, not disturbing any terrain it covered as it swept up the mountain, almost directly toward where they were standing. Sheryl didn't need to see it fully revealed to recognize what it was. She had seen that grace of movement before, when it had been protruding from the back of her closet upstairs.

The breath in her lungs, already composed of well-chilled cold mountain air, seemed to solidify in her chest. She could tell from its speed that it would be much closer to them very soon. Her legs hesitated momentarily, and when the snag in their progress was felt at the other end of the stretcher, Kelly turned to look back from where Kerren's head was. She and Manoj shared a look, and through whatever telepathic link the couple had -- and Sheryl was definitely considering becoming a believer in that sort of thing now -- he got her looking in the right direction. When she did, her steps faltered as well.

As a unit, the entire group started to skirt a little closer to the exterior wall of Deertail Lodge. It was kind of impressive; it reminded Sheryl of the way the pointer of a Ouija board will move as if of its own volition, with none of the participants aware that they're all moving in tandem toward a common result. They instinctively moved to where a darker background might shield them from standing out against the moonlight.

The snow was less deep along the wall. The overhanging eaves had diverted most of the snow that had come smashing over the top of the Lodge. The churning of their feet was mostly concealed from view, but the group would be passing in front of a few intact patio windows that normally belonged to second-floor rooms. Still, their silent consensus was to keep moving. Every step took them out of line of the direction the thing was heading; more and more, it seemed to remain aimed at the lobby they had just left. Any step they could take farther from there seemed like a a step out of danger's path.

They trudged, each of them keeping one eye on the thing's progress, watching as it became less and less distant. After a certain point, as the lobby fell farther and farther behind them, Sheryl stopped glancing toward it every few steps. It was taking ever sharper turnings of Sheryl's head to keep track of its progress, until she wasn't sure she could keep her hands level as she did it, and that might mean dumping Kerren onto the snow. In the necessarily immobile state she was in, her wife wouldn't even be able to protect herself from being smothered in the snow if she landed face-down. So Sheryl forced to keep her eyes forward again, biting her lip, expecting at any moment to see the tips of the thing's antlers invading her peripheral vision, the instant before it was upon them.

That moment never happened, though. With each increasingly heavy step, that outcome felt less and less likely, until her heartbeat's speed was due only to the physical effort she was putting out. She found herself watching Kerren's face instead. Despite having closed her eyes in the effort of tolerating the pain she must be feeling, her wife seemed to be the least troubled off all of them. The need to get her to safety swelled again in Sheryl's chest, and she tightened her grip on the makeshift stretcher, trying to keep the journey as smooth as possible.

They came to the corner of the Lodge after what seemed like hours. They passed it with little change to their manner of travel, but a whole new, brilliantly-lit side of the mountain silently opened up before them. Sheryl couldn't remember a time when she had ever seen such a gigantic, featureless expanse. It almost felt like she was standing on the edge of another dimension, a never-ending plain of pure, flat white. Even though her mind knew it must be an illusion, and what seemed like the infinitely distant horizon was just the farthest she could see before the curve of the mountain blocked out the world beyond, it was still frightening to witness.

Then the group's collective will was turning them again, and they were heading away from the new wall that had been exposed, until they were no longer following the shape of the building. It took Sheryl a while to realize that their destination was now a very complicated shadow upslope from them, something massive with lots of random angles and curves, thin black arcs rising out of the snow and bending back again, and behind all that a long, large canted shape, sticking out of the frozen tumult of snow.

"Is that the ski lift?" she heard Manoj utter from next to her, and then she could see it. The last few hundred yards of thick cable, and at least one of the towers, had been pushed down here, piled up against the chairlift boarding platform, which was mostly demolished under the cascading debris. Before the avalanche, the ski-lift portion of the building had been little more than tall walls and a roof, a slight shelter from the wind housing the massive flywheel. There, skiers would wait for a tethered bench to swing around, sweep them off their feet, and whisk them up and away, cruising thirty feet above the ground toward the summit of the mountain. Riding a ski lift had seemed like a crazy proposition to Sheryl in the first place, and now that she was seeing many of its components jumbled in one place, she swore that she'd never in her life travel that way.

The group was still moving toward the smashed structure. The lift platform was really just a glorified deck off the side of a slightly more substantial outbuilding, part of which was still standing. As their angle changed, Sheryl became sure that was where they were headed. Was that slightly-less collapsed part the equipment shed that Dale had been talking about? If it were, the chances of there still being even one working snowmobile inside seemed slim. Her skin felt suddenly colder, even under the layers of warm clothes she had put on.

When the tall, dark shape emerged from around from the side of the building, she almost stopped working altogether, brain and body. We've been tricked, she thought to herself. That thing that came racing up the mountain made us think that it hadn't seen us, but it really went the other way around the building and beat us here, and now it's finally come out to--

But this figure had no antlers. And it was definitely bulkier than the horned thing was. It was Dale. He was staggering around the corner of the building, his arms empty. The stretcher's speed increased, and Sheryl struggled to keep up. The security guard wasn't urging them onward, was only facing them, as if waiting for them to catch up. But where was Glenda?

As if understanding the need for as much silence as possible, it wasn't until they were a few feet from Dale before he spoke. "This isn't going to be easy," he said.

"What isn't?" Kelly asked him. "Are the snowmobiles still working?"

He held up one thick finger. "Just one. And it's the spare. I'm surprised anything's still intact. I just gassed it up, and was about to give it a try, when I saw you coming." He pointed to a small pair of windows in the barely-standing front wall of the shed.

Sheryl spoke up, "Let's get inside and see. Is there room for us all?" She suddenly felt very vulnerable standing out in the open, so close to a massive pile of wrecked machinery, which could conceivably decide to shift again at any moment.

Dale's response was a puzzled shrug, delivered as he turned and went back around the side of the shed, not seeming to care if they followed or not. Sheryl took another cautionary look back over her shoulder, hoping that her scan of the Deertail Lodge was the last she'd ever take; she certainly didn't plan to look again once they were on their way downhill. Then, as one, the quartet followed Dale around the side of the building.

-10.2-

The answer had to be in there somewhere, some magical solution that Bruce wasn't finding. He was just going to have to dig his way toward it. He had made his way back to the massive deadfall that marked where the hallway that led to his room had collapsed, and was trying to see if he could pry away some of the debris. He had no illusions about digging his way back to his things and finding them undamaged; he was pretty sure that everything past this barricade was just as demolished as the wall he was facing.

He also tried to ignore the flaring pain in his lower back, and the way the backs of his slippers would squelch and let out trickles of his blood every time he put his weight down on them. He felt strong and adrenalized; he imagined that he would know if blood loss was starting to be a problem, and ignored the thought that the increased energy might be a symptom of that very thing. He had tucked his t-shirt into the back of his pajama pants and tried to hoist the elastic so that the wadded fabric would be held tightly against the wound, but he had no way of checking on how effective this technique was.

He focused on trying to remove as much of the barrier before him as possible. He could wrench free a torn, splintered board, or unwind a length of insulation that until recently had been shut up inside the walls, never expecting to see light again, but the more he pulled stuff free and tossed it haphazardly behind him, he began to realize that even if he pulled all the loose stuff free, he would be confronted with the underlying chaos of thick, immovable logs, sections of tree trunks that had been the original supports when the structure was first built.

As his body worked, his mind raced, trying to put together mental puzzle pieces. Ever since he had seen Victor in that alleyway after the movie premiere, he had tried to understand how that particular hallucination had happened. And the deeper he got, the more insane the machinations of the AllStory became. But here, tonight, was something he hadn't known how to interpret, even after his years of theorizing and investigating. He was still trying to sort through the tangential relationships the various people here had to his dreamworld. Jimmy Gough clearly knew of Theda, or was at least aware enough of her to paint an accurate picture to hang in his office, and that Kerren looked exactly like both his own muse and Jimmy's painting. That was all he knew so far, and was not sure if it were enough to manifest the Qoloni right here.

Did the avalanche have anything to do with it? Was its sheer elemental force somehow responsible for bringing something from his dreams (or from the book they had subsequently inspired) into this world? Perhaps it had somehow amplified the connection to Theda they all potentially shared... He had definitely made a mistake when he told the whole group about Theda, but he had needed to know if any of them understood what was going on here. If he had to guess, he would say that Jimmy knew the most, but he wasn't even here, and anyway he must have thought that Theda was a manifestation of his own personal creativity, just as Bruce himself had thought at the beginning. He knew better now.

This brought on a horrible thought: what if his growing understanding of the AllStory in the past months, and its various implications, was what had summoned the dreamstorm that had driven Theda away? Or was it this knowledge that had been keeping her away since then?

All of a sudden, he knew it was behind him. It wasn't akin to other form of terror he had ever felt before; there was no creeping-skin feeling, no chilling of the blood. He merely became aware of it, almost as if he were seeing himself from behind, through its eyes. He had scattered broken objects pulled from the crumbled wall around him, but none that were sufficiently weapon-shaped were within easy reach. He pivoted to face it, saw it standing right at the corner where the Lodge's main corridor turned in the direction of his former room.

They regarded each other silently for a moment, the creator and the created. Bruce realized that, even though their paths had crossed several times, he had never really taken a good look at it before. Even when he had written about it, he had always taken the Hitchcockian route, merely implying its characteristics rather than shining a clear literary light on it. This might have been why its form, while uniformly matte black, like a shadow come to life, was a little undefined around the edges. This didn't seem to diminish its power, however. Its antlers stood out straight from either side of its head, arcing upward and catching what little light there was to be gathered from the distant lobby at the far end of the perpendicular hall, revealing contrasting sharpness on its myriad points.

"You've finally come," he said to it. "So what is it you want? Is it me you're coming after? And why did you feel you had to tear down a whole hotel to do it?"

The Qoloni did not answer. It only stood and watched. Bruce supposed he only had himself to blame... In his book, he had left its motivations intentionally vague. He had originally conceived the creature to be a metaphor for Ynarra's fears about her burgeoning sexuality, the possibility of marriage that could easily turn into enslavement, and the horror of impending pregnancy. It was supposed to be the ultimate Other, an embodiment of the internal body horror that all young people face in isolating silence. He had written the book in a flurry of activity twenty years ago, and honestly, he had flown through its transcription so quickly on its way to publication that he hadn't thought about it much since. He barely remembered those days, other than that those were the times cocaine kept him focused, moving his fingers during the day, causing a crash that made him sleep heavily -- if not soundly -- at night.

And here that very thing was, staring him down. It had finally broken free of that cursed Chevalian castle to... what? "Come on!" he called to it, exhausted from fright and cold. He was as close as he had ever come to no longer caring, to just throwing himself at it and discovering the end of this story, one way or another.

It still did not answer or move, save for the slight, pendulous tilting of its head back and forth, which would not be noticeable except for the magnifying movement of the antlers. They came close to scraping the wall on first one side of the hall, then the other. No, that wasn't right. They *were* touching the walls, but he could just make out that the tips were pushing the walls a little where they touched. The antlers pressed into them, denting them like a pin slowly being pressed to the surface of a balloon that refused to pop. As the tilt reversed itself, the wall immediately snapped back into shape, unaware of the way it had just been violated.

The thing seemed to be studying him, and maybe it was just the way it was cocking its head, but it seemed curious. It had, after all, traveled a long way to find him, if that really was its intent. Now here they were, facing each other across an expanse of empty corridor. Bruce had just started to relax when the thing suddenly bent its knees, preparing to launch itself at him. Standing defenseless before it, Bruce opened his hands, turning his palms to it, and raised his chin slightly. After all the time he had spent running from it, he was ready to accept whatever punishment it had to give him. Maybe this was his road back to Theda, who knew?

The instant before the thing lurched forward, a blur of dark motion came in from the side, around the corner the Qoloni still stood near. It came in low, legs pumping to keep away from the horns and hurtling forward. It hit the Qoloni across its midsection -- much like a linebacker slamming against a defensive line -- diverting the thing's spring-like momentum to the side. The pair crashed against the far wall of the hallway, and Bruce watched, fascinated, as the thing's weight distorted the wall far out of true.

True to the design of his creation, the thing met resistance at the physical barrier, which increased the harder it was pushed, until it could go no further. Now, with what was clearly a human form pressing it against/into the wall, the combatants scrambled against each other, the Qoloni was trying to twist away and be free, as Bruce's savior tryied to keep it embedded in the softened reality of the wall.

Bruce suddenly realized that he didn't want to find out what the thing intended to do to him after all. He wanted to be away from it. The only ones who would call it cowardly were ones who weren't standing in his place. He had been temporarily blinded to the concept, but now he realized how incredibly wrong it was for a creative mind to be destroyed by something it had created. Such blasphemy violated every rule of creativity.

Now someone had temporarily saved him from it, and while he wanted to stay and thank whoever it was, he knew that what had been intended was to buy him time. It was his imperative to use these precious seconds to figure a way out. He thought to just run past them as the thing was pinned to the twisting wall, to run down the corridor and back to the lobby, but just as he thought this, the tide of battle turned a bit. The Qoloni used a little of the tension it inspired in the wall to push back, rebounding the pair out into the center of the hall again. Bruce's rescuer stayed low, keeping its head down and its arm wrapped around the thing's middle. For the time being, it was managing to keep the dark thing's arms pinned to its sides, but it was unclear how long this advantage was going to hold.

There was nowhere for Bruce to go, but he still scanned his surroundings. Off to his left was the doorway that led to the room where he found the woman he mistook for Theda, and behind him... Strangely, it seemed that all the pulling of random loose pieces from the wreckage behind him had revealed a passage after all. He wasn't surprised he had missed it; it was right at ground level, no more than a little triangular space between two of the larger fallen timbers. It would be tight, but he was sure he could fit.

Keeping an eye on the combatants, he dropped to his knees in front of the gap, and slipped his feet backward into it. He wasn't plunging into that darkness head-first, absolutely not. He wasn't about to turn his back on his enemy either, his body blocking out the remaining light as soon as he was fully inside. And if there turned out to be anything dangerous in there, he would much rather his feet find it before his head did.

He pulled himself back into the tiny space, feeling his shoulders painfully compressing as he strove to pull them in close to his body, scraping against the rough edges of the thick wooden trunks. He wondered if the dark creature would be able to bend reality enought to follow him into this vast debris pile. He didn't know, but wouldn't risk pulling anything down in front of him for fear of becoming trapped himself, or causing a deadly collapse.

He kept his eyes on the struggling Qoloni and human in front of him, until all he could see was their shuffling feet, the tide of advantage being traded back and forth. Then they disappeared fully from view and utter blackness descended.

-10.3-

Manoj didn't fully appreciate how bright the dramatically-slanting moonlight had been until he stepped into the shed. It was like following Dale down into a pool of ink. He would have hesitated, but Kelly stepped over threshold with supreme confidence, and if he wanted to keep his end of Kerren's stretcher from dropping into the snow, he had no choice but to follow.

He felt better when he heard Sheryl gasp next to him, suffering from the same momentary blindness he was. Fortunately, Kelly stopped shortly after they had all gotten into the shelter and stood still, giving them all time to adjust. In a surprisingly short amount of time, Manoj's eyes found the bright areas of the windows, huddled close around them. As his eyes continued to open themselves to the reduced stimuli, he saw why there were so few of them; they were standing in only a small portion of the building that was still habitable.

Where the damage in the hotel had been clearly caused by the falling of large timbers, the near-complete destruction of the small shed appeared to have a different origin. It looked as if when the ski lift wreckage had come sliding down the mountain, it had plowed into the end of the structure holding the embarkation station. The mechanism that the cables wound around had fallen here, and the giant flywheel had come down like a buzzsaw twelve feet in diameter, tilting vertical as it sliced into the building, and ironically sparing most of the snowmobile shed from being further damaged. That wheel now formed an uncomfortably close steel wall, a giant plate separating them from the rest of the devastation. Manoj thought he could see broken timbers and possibly a hint of the outdoors through its myriad machine-tooled holes, some as big as a foot across, but his eyes were suddenly more concerned with the contents of the half-room itself.

The falling of the huge steel wheel left only a small corner of what must have been a garage. It now was barely large enough to hold a single, oversized snowmobile, its shiny corners catcing the meager light being the only revelation of its presence. It looked formidable, but at the same time Manoj's stomach dropped in disappointment. He didn't see how five people were going to get on it and ride down the mountain, never mind the fact that two of them were incapacitated.

Considering the second injured person, he suddenly perceived a pale leaf tumbling in the darkness that turned out to be Glenda's raised hand. She was feebly waving at them from the far side of the snowmobile. He heard Kelly give out a short, sharp sound that was halfway between a bark and a laugh, both relieved and horrified by the gesture.

"We're not ready to go yet," Dale was saying to them. "I've got to make sure this is secure..." He was moving around to the rear of the contraption, revealing the way Glenda had been laid down on a sled hastily hitched to the back of the snowmobile. What appeared to be cloth storage bags had been piled on its back, so Glenda could recline against them. She looked groggy and pallid in the dim light, the handle of the knife still obscenely sticking out from below her left collarbone, as if it had always been a part of her, but still had no right being there.

Dale was continuing to explain what he had done, attaching one of the low, flat equipment sledges to the back of the snowmobile, which hadn't been easy in the cramped space. "The only thing I could find was some of this heavy-duty line, so it's looped around about twenty or thirty times." He was pacing around the vehicle now, grimly studying it like someone who had customized their car might. He went on, talking about weight distribution and using the word "torque" in a context that Manoj had never heard before, when Kelly interrupted him:

"Dale, is there a way we can get Kerren and the rest of us on it?"

He stopped talking, as if she had asked the very question he was afraid she would. Manoj could see Glenda's eyes sluggishly flicker toward the security guard, as if wondering what his answer was going to be, too.

Dale swallowed hard, then said, "We can figure out a way."

Manoj suddenly felt the weight on his arms increase. He hadn't noticed how tired they were until he was forced to adjust them, picking up the slack as Sheryl let go and walked toward Dale. Manoj had just enough time to stabilize Kerren before Sheryl reached Dale. She put her hand on his arm, and spoke to him directly, softly.

"I'm sorry, Dale. You're trying to get Glenda to safety, and we're making it that much harder. But we appreciate it. I want to make sure you know how much." She went up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. A great sigh rose up through his chest, held, and released.

"Come on," he said finally. "Let's find a way to set them together on the sledge."

A few moments later, the four of them worked together in the minimized garage to lay Kerren's stretcher down next to Glenda, who had slid over enough to allow some space next to her on the storage bags. Dale went to get some elastic bungee cords from where they hung on the wall, which Manoj realized he never would have noticed, even though his eyes were now fully adapted to the darkness. He shivered for the first time since they had left the Lodge, and the only thing he could think of to explain it was the bitter coldness of the immense steel disc standing on its edge a few feet away from him.

Dale used the cords to strap the women down, hooking both edges to the sides of the sledge and laying them snugly across the women. He moved carefully, not wanting to touch Kerren's legs any more than he wanted to touch Glenda's knife. Eventually he stepped back to survey the arrangement, trying not to look into the eyes of the two women he had lashed to the sledge. Their eyes were calm, resigned in their own individual way. Manoj thought that Glenda appeared like she was trying to stay awake, and feared what would happen if those eyes closed and stayed that way. He figured they had all managed to ignore the wet darkness that was still spreading across the extra storage bags that Dale had laid across her body.

"Now how do we sit?" Kelly asked, surveying the snowmobile-and-sledge hybrid he had constructed.

Dale looked up and down the length of the vehicle. "Kelly," he asked finally, "can you sit on the sledge? Every time I have to slow down, it's going to want to keep going and bump into the snowmobile. Maybe--"

"Brace my legs against it. I got it," she said, comprehending immediately, and gracefully slid into position, gingerly sitting between the supine women's feet. Raising her own, she propped them up against the back panel of the snowmobile. Manoj couldn't help but recall times when she was in a similar position with him, and the coiled strength he could feel hidden inside those calf muscles. He swallowed hard.

"I think the three of us--" Dale was speaking about himself, Manoj and Sheryl, "--can fit on the seat. It's only supposed to be for two people, but we can make it work. I'm not going to go any faster than I have to, so it's okay if I'm right up on the handlebars. Twisting them too far in either direction wouldn't be a good idea, anyway, because of the added weight. First, though..." He motioned to Manoj, and then swept his hand toward the side of the mini-garage, which the snowmobile's nose was almost grazing. Now Manoj could see it; next to the door they had come through, a set of shutter-like garage doors were securely fastened closed.

Manoj stepped forward to help Dale open them. It didn't look like the structural damage had warped them at all, and that made him recall what they had seen on the way here. As Dale messed with the lock mechanism, Manoj said, "Dale, we saw the horned thing again." The tall man's hands faltered against the knobs and hooks, then continued. Manoj pressed on: "It went into the Lodge. I think it might have been attracted to the sound of the window breaking."

"Yeah?" Dale asked, hands contiing to move, clearly more interested than the tone in his voice was letting on."

"Um... how loud is the snowmobile going to be?"

Dale shrugged as his hands worked. "Pretty loud. It's not really built for subtlety. But it's the only way down the mountain, so what choice do we have?"

"None," Manoj agreed. "I just wanted to be sure you knew."

The lock finally popped open. "Thanks," Dale said. "I can't go any faster than it's safe to, though. If we lose traction or the sledge jackknifes, it's all for nothing anyway."

Manoj nodded, grasped the righthand door as a moonlit crack appeared between them. Dale took the lefthand one and started accordioning it back, creating a wide opening that looked down the mountain's slope, as starkly white and forbidding as always.

Manoj mimicked the guard's movements, pulling back his own side of the doors. The gap was more than wide enough for the snowmobile to pass through, and probably would have been able to accommodate two of them side by side, which it mostly likely had been designed for.

Dale, then Sheryl, then Manoj, climbed onto the long, padded seat, which was refreshingly soft but ice-cold. Manoj turned his head back far enough to look down at Kelly, still lying back with her feet braced against the back of the snowmobile. Her lips tightened in a concerned approximation of a smile. He reached down behind himself and briefly clasped her ankle with his near-numb hand, trying to convey more reassurance than he really felt.

Dale turned the snowmobile's key, and the sound of the engine revving was deafening, even with nearly a whole wall of the garage open to the air. Manoj felt his entire body wince. As the engine cycled up, he was sure he heard a moment where the steel disc behind them picked the sympathetic throb of the engine out of the air, and began to ring like an immense gong.

Praying that they wouldn't attract the attention of the horned thing for a second time, they pulled out of the garage and back into view of the moon, which shone down on them like a cold spotlight, exposing their escape attempt.

-10.4-

The cool air felt good sliding across her face, so much that she wished Dale hadn't laid the other covers across her. It would help to cool the burning heat, which had dissipated somewhat but still hurt her, making her itch on the inside. She hadn't been able to pull together the strength to tell him; it had taken everything she had, fueled by the adrenaline of joy, to wave at the others as they came through the garage door.

She was so glad they were together again, and for the first time she felt sure she was going to be away from this horrible place soon. It was strange how something that seemed a home away from her home like the Deertail Lodge, a place of sanctuary and comfort, could change character so quickly. It really wasn't the fault of the Lodge itself, she supposed. It had taken something with the force of an avalanche to turn it into a place of cold, dark, and fear. But now she was leaving it. Dale was shepherding her to safety, and soon they would find someone who knew how to take the metal and its heat away from her, find her a clean place to lie down until she felt better.

This was the feeling she clung to as the snowmobile and its passengers began the long downhill slide. More than anything else, these thoughts kept away the strange sensation Glenda had of being pulled backward, away from the light of world. The feeling was always there now, waxing and waning in intensity. Kind of like she suspected the moon would, if she could lie still and watch it long enough. Or the tides the moon brought. That didn't sound so bad, did it? To just let it all go and look forever up at the sky...

No. She was going home, Dale was making sure of that, and she wanted to get there, to her children, to her... husband. Would he like Dale? She didn't see any reason why he shouldn't. One thing she had learned through all this was that there was enough love in the world for everyone. There was no reason to be jealous, or envious, or anything like that. Just love... that would be a world worth going back to. That possibility was another handhold that she could cling to when the backward pull into the dark became gradually stronger and stronger.

She turned her head back and forth, savoring the way it made her hair ripple in the wind as the snowmobile made its way downhill. She silently thanked Dale, for letting her feel this. Trees moved by incredibly slowly, far off at the edge of her vision. She looked over to where Kerren lay beside her, noticed that the woman's hair -- blonde, longish, curled -- was moving the same way she imagined hers was. Glenda didn't care for the look in her eyes, though.

Kerren's lips parted and she silently mouthed two words. "I'm scared."

Glenda was charmed, much in the same way she always was when her children woke from bad dreams in the middle of the night. Not that she doubted Kerren's fear... With her kids, she it could be cured with fifteen minutes of snuggling under warm covers before being carried back to bed with a drink of water and a few extra clicks on the nightlight timer. She wished she could help Kerren in a similar way. Maybe if Glenda could similarly find the right combination of comforts, she also would come to understand that all the fear and doubt and pain was temporary, ephemeral. It would pass, and all there was to do was hold on as best you could until you reached the bottom of the hill.

"We will be okay," she spoke back to Kerren, sure that no one else could hear it above the wind and engine noise. She had no idea how strong her voice was, so she hoped her cold lips weren't slurring so much that they couldn't be read. She could feel that backward pull growing ever stronger... "Dale will take us home," she said.

And with those words, Glenda died.

-10.5-

Harmon was mentally ready to pass out from pain long before he had lifted himself out of the snow and back into the world. The fact that he didn't, and that he even managed to use the ski pole to bring himself to a standing position, was a testament to every injury he had up until this day. They now appeared to have been mere prep work for this one. Even so, he could feel bones grating against each other down there, sending out little glass lightning bolts when they touched. He closed his eyes, ground his teeth a little tighter together, and attempted a step.

The snow, he found, was packed a little looser around his fallen, imprisoning tree than it was a little farther out. This was a good sign; maybe if he could stay in the little valleys between the long hillocks of other buried trees, he could make decent progress. These were thickly scattered, but there were thin, shallow paths between many of them. The landscape looked like a white cemetery where every grave has been freshly dug, but it could be managed.

Now came the big question... to continue downhill, the direction he was headed when the avalanche knocked him down, or turn around and head back up toward the Lodge? Returning certainly had a few marks against it. Whatever the thing was he had heard/felt prowling around, he was convinced it had gone that way, toward the distant sound of breaking glass. Definitely not a place he wanted to be. But it also was much closer than the town, which was something to consider when you were working with a broken vessel.

And speaking of that town, Harmon was getting a better look at it as he turned his head first one way, then the other, gauging his options. When he looked down at the town, he found himself a little puzzled. It was there, pretty much exactly as he expected to view it from this distance, but also... not quite. There seemed to be a lot of wavering air between here and there, as if an unseasonably warm wind were blowing up out of the valley, colliding with the cool drifting down the mountain and making the town seem more like a wavering mirage than usual. He couldn't quite put his finger on why, but that unsettled him.

Another thing to consider was that there were people back at the Lodge he cared about. Dale and Glenda, of course, but there was also that woman named Kerren whose mind he had stolen into, and altered somehow. There was a tiny, insistent drive in him to find out more about her, and exactly what he had accomplished while exploring her mental interior. It felt like he had done something significant, but he wouldn't know if he descended and left them all behind. If anything, he would like to have the chance to apologize to her. He, more than most people, understood what it was like to have your mind invaded, and thought he owed her at least that much.

He looked back toward the town (but it's *not* the town, something in the back of his head corrected him) and sighed. Like nearly all of the most important decisions in his life, he found that his course of action was really just a foregone conclusion. He pivoted on his good leg and looked upslope, back in the opposite direction that he had so cowardly fled from. He planted the ski pole as far in front of him as he dared, braced it under his armpit, and hopped forward on his good leg. The pain in his raised ankle flared even though it didn't touch down, sending hot sparks up the length of his leg. He grimaced, but in all it wasn't as bad as he had feared. He found he could even bring himiself to do it again, and so he did.

The snow did prove to be nearly solid in between the piles that marked every fallen tree, and Harmon was able to scan far enough ahead to keep from being caught in a blind alley, forced to backtrack. It was a slow, arduous process, but with each step he felt he was getting closer to the Lodge, even though he couldn't quite see it yet.

After many minutes of this, he was starting to get into the meditative groove of repeated motion, which made even the pain seem manageable. There was virtually no wind, easing the journey further. Plant ski pole, transfer weight, hop, breathe. Plant ski pole, transfer weight, hop, breathe. All other things fell away. It wasn't until he had been in this modified meditation for several minutes that he realized the presence of some kind of motorized sound. It was far off, almost as far away as the breaking glass had been, but more constant and insistent. It was an engine running, somewhere out of sight. A generator, maybe... Sound traveled funny around the mountain, which was true at any time, but especially on this strange, suspended-time midnight; Harmon couldn't discern exactly where it was coming from. That was too bad, because when he thought about it more, it sounded like one of the snowmobiles in the emergency shed. He would have liked to hitch a ride.

Someone was heading off, and he wished them the best. But it wasn't until he had covered several hundred more feet that he started to ask himself what his endgame was, exactly. To confront whatever it was that had been stalking him? To crawl back into his bed and wait for this bizarre dream to be over? He didn't know, and for the time being didn't allow himself to try to figure it out. He had made his decision, and he was sticking to it.

It was strange... he had always thought of life in terms of the many varied hills he had skied down, those pumped-full-of-adrenaline moments when he had felt most alive. But now that he was clawing his way back up one of them, he was becoming aware of how little of his life had actually been spent in that downhill rush. Far more time had been spent climbing, and he had paid so little attention to it. Now, he was forced to confront those long moments between the things he actually noticed. He began to wonder if this was how he had lived the other non-skiing parts of his life too.

What felt like hours had passed, but he noted that the moon was in the exact same place it had been when he had climbed out of the snow, perching slightly above the top of the Deertail Peak, far above him. He noted its immobility as plain fact; by now, there was nothing that would have seemed impossible, even the idea that the planet might have stopped turning. He would just keep moving forward, avoiding the obvious pitfalls, and he'd eventually the journey would reach some sort of conclusion. He already felt as if he had gotten away with something by surviving the avalanche, so he had no right to demand anything of the world anymore.

He became aware of the Lodge, ahead of him and a little to the left. It was close enough that he must have been moving toward it for many minutes without seeing it. His eyes scanned the upper part of its facade -- all that was visible from here -- for signs of danger or comfort, but found neither. The Lodge had always been a welcome sight to him, a view that meant he was home. Now, coverd by snow except for the wall of its downhill side, Harmon couldn't help but see it as a blank slate, one that gave him no impressions at all, positive or negative. The points of the eaves were familiar, but lacked a sense of presence. This sudden disappearance of architectural personality disturbed him even more than if he had tuned into a vibe of pure evil radiating from it.

And yet, his feet kept moving. There was a notch in the evenly-distributed snow blanket that rose halfway up the front of the facade, and Harmon felt his legs hobbling toward that point. It was just to the side of where the lobby doors should be, and the closer he got, the more he could tell that there had been activity there. Multiple foot tracks came up through the notch, which he found out was a slope, formed when a mini-avalanche occurred with the breaking of the front window (that crashing sound both he and the invading force had heard?). The only time he stopped walking in his entire uphill journey came when he realized the darkness laid across the snow wasn't a shadow.

Blood. A faint, dripping trail that led from the window along the front of the building, disappearing around the side. It had happened a while ago, and the snow had melted against its warmth, turning patches of the path dotted pink. His first instinct, as someone who had routinely needed to help people who had been injured in the great outdoors, was to follow it to the end, but he really had no idea which direction led the way to the person who was hurt. His original intent had been to get back into the Lodge, if for no other reason than to maybe find heat or food, so he took a chance and topped the slope that led to the shattered window.

It was as bad as he feared. As he descended the slope to the window -- extra slowly even though he had almost mastered traveling without putting any weight on his broken ankle -- more and more of the darkened lobby came into view. The blood continued across the floor, along and under overturned and broken furniture, staining the familiar patterns of the large rug into strangeness. Then the trail seemed to change consistency and continued up the main stairs. He didn't have time to figure out what it all meant, he just wanted to get to his room. There, he knew, was at least a battery-powered light, aspirin, and some canned food he kept for emergencies. Maybe he could lie in his cot for a little while, prop up his ankle (which felt like it was bearing hundreds of pounds and meters of circumference in accumulated pain), maybe even sleep a little of this interminable night away...

Dragging his leg and thumping his ski pole on the floor in the sound-deadened lobby, he wondered what kind of creature he sounded like to a listener, possibly someone hiding somewhere else in the Lodge.

-10.6-

Carlos saw the horned thing standing in the near-utter darkness ahead of him, and the sight froze him where he stood. It wasn't because it was looking in his direction; in fact, it was turned to the side, standing at the L-junction of the Lodge's two main halls, staring stoically down the other length.

Now that he had the time to take in its unobscured form without immediately fearing for his own safety, Carlos felt his feet inching forward, eager to learn more. The thing was uniformly dark, so dark that it was hard to tell whether that was its skin tone, or if it had been assembled from pure, distilled shadow. Its form was human, and male as far as he could tell, but rail-thin, so thin that he thought he should be able to see a trace of its skeleton outline unerneath its outer edges. He couldn't, however. The more he tried to discern its true form, the less distinct it seemed to become. It was like he was looking at a hasty living charcoal sketch of a human being, one that was in the process of being left out in the rain.

The horns/antlers, though, were something entirely different. They were clear as cut ebony, in hi-res focus while the rest of the thing was fuzzy around the edges. They tipped slowly from one side to the other like scales, as if the thing were considering a particularly difficult problem. He couldn't really see the tips of the antlers, because they extended far enough ahead of the creature that most of them were hidden by the hall's change in direction. Carlos wondered how a creature so slight could support such a ponderous array of stony appendages.

He didn't like the way it was making that motion. He had once seen a cat watching an oblivious mouse, waiting for the moment to pounce, and the thing's attitude reminded him more of this than anything else. There was something at the other end of its eyeless gaze, and Carlos feared for it. His feet stepped lightly, his body hugging the wall, getting as far out of the thing's peripheral vision as he could while still drawing closer. He surprised himself about how quiet he could be. Soon he was within ten feet of it, and it had seemed not to notice his presence at all.

His intent really had just been to see what had so fascinated the beast. He felt that if he could get close enough behind it, he would be able to see down the other hallway to figure it out. His noble thoughts about warning the other inhabitants of the Lodge had long since fled his mind. Now he was serving only his own curiosity. He could almost see the other, darker section of hallway beyond the creature. Just a few more steps...

The thing tensed. It was just a slight movement, a bowing in the area of what should have been the thing's knees and a spreading of what should have been its elbows, but it telegraphed to Carlos exactly what it was about to do. The time had come for the cat to pounce. And Carlos, much to his own surprise, found himself flooded with an overwhelming feeling that he should not allow it to do this. Whatever its intention, this dark, abominable thing should not carry it out.

Carlos was rushing forward before he had fully conceived of what he was going to do. He came in low, for no other reason than an instinct to stay away from the fearsome antlers. He drove his shoulder into the thing's side, simultaneously throwing his arms out to pin its elbows close to it. He found it lighter than he had expected because it was already lunging, having partly lifted its weight off the ground. He was able to take that momentum and divert it, swinging the thing to match his own trajectory, which took them both barreling right into the wall at the far side of the hallway.

Even before it was fully held in his grasp, Carlos was utterly repulsed by the feel of the thing's body. It was horribly dense, but felt as ill-defined as it looked; the unbidden image that immediately flashed through Carlos' mind was one of tackling a side of beef, one that was carpeted with buzzing flies. Then there was nothing else to think of but keeping his arms locked around the thing, to not let it slip away from him. It wasn't going to be easy.

He braced himself to hit the end of the hallway while locked together with the thing, but when the moment came the impact was surprisingly soft. In fact, his forearms -- the first part of his body to hit -- touched the wall, and then felt as if they pushed it away as he continued to stumble forward. Coupled with this was the sensation that his shoulder, forced up hard against where the thing's ribs should have been, was turning into rubber, bending in an unholy way that should have been breaking bones and rupturing muscle, but wasn't. Then Carlos remembered the way the thing interacted with the physical world, everything giving way to its space-warping presence. Was what was happening to him, the same as he had seen happening to the door to Harmon's room?

He tried not to think about it, focused instead on keeping the thing from retaliating. Once he realized that the pair of them were creating a form-fitting dent in the wall of the hallway, Carlos hoped that maybe it would be easy enough to keep the thing pinned in it. The feel of the thing against his body, though... it felt absolutely horrible, like he was being painlessly twisted out of shape, and at the same time his skin trying to grip a non-solid surface, one that stung and flowed over him in a grotesquely molten way. Carlos hadn't given another thought about what the horned thing's intended target was since he had locked his arms around it, but now his head ended up facing down the broken end of the hallway.

The only thing that surprised Carlos when he saw the author Bruce Casey standing there, pressed back against the wall of debris with no place to go, was his own utter lack of surprise. After all, he had just figured out with Benny that this creature he was grappling with was remarkably similar to something in one of Casey's books, and he knew that the author had checked in this weekend.

Then his focus was back on keeping that very thing pinned to the wall, a maneuver that was quickly proving impossible. It seemed that the thing's inability to pass through material objects gave it an advantage; it was actually leaning into the wall, and too late Carlos realized that it was preparing to use its springiness to launch itself back against him, like a boxer pushing himself back against the ropes in anticipation of a renewed attack. It worked, and Carlos was forced to stumble backward, just trying to stay on his feet. If he fell back and still managed to hang onto the thing, it would fall on top of him, pinning him to the floor, and Carlos didn't want to think about what state his body would find itself in if that happened (for that matter, why wasn't the thing sinking into the floor with every step it took?)

Instead, Carlos found himself forced to let go of the horned thing, which was starting to twist its torso in Carlos's grip. Its surface was so ill-defined, so hard to keep hold of, feeling simultaneously viscous and ephemeral against his skin. He really had no choice but to let go. He spun away, staying low because of the swinging horns, the terrible vibration of its body continuing to resonate in his bones.

He glanced one more time toward the author, hoping he would get some kind of help from that quarter, but instead found it hard to make out exactly what was happening at the end of the hall. Bruce Casey was getting down on the floor, looking as if he were about try to crawl past the combatants on his hands and knees. But instead, he started backing up against the wreckage of the former hallway. There was clearly no way for him to get through it, beams and broken pieces of wall everywhere... But then the retreating author just kept going.

If Carlos hadn't been facing off against this weird manifestation of that man's imagination, he would have been able to pay more attention to what was happening. But the author, still keeping one eye on the confrontation playing out in front of his, just kept moving back, and back, until the shadows that filled the miniscule gaps between the debris engulfed him entirely. It must have been a trick of the light, some gap that Carlos was too disoriented to see...

Carlos gathered his balance and prepared to flee, but realized that the horned figure didn't seem to be interested in him anymore. It swung its head so quickly that Carlos had to duck to keep from getting his head impaled on one of the viciously pointed tips of its myriad antlers. It was turning its attention to the end of the shattered corridor, where the author had vanished to... somewhere. Anyway, it didn't look like the thing could follow with all the stuff in the way. It was only going to take a second or two before it realized this, and re-focused its rage on the only other person still around.

Carlos had done what he came to, warning and protecting the person who had been making all that noise. Job done, he spun on his heel and tore off down the corridor, his feet pounding on the cracked boards and his labored breathing filling his ears, waiting to hear the bounding thuds as the creature began its loping strides after him.

-11.1-

The sound was horrific. Even sandwiched as Sheryl was in between Dale, who was hunched tightly over the snowmobile's handlebars, and Manoj, his hands delicately placed on her shoulders as he tried to keep his balance on the very back of the seat, the roar of the engine was the sensory input that overrode everything else. She kept her eyes shut most of the time, trying not to think about all the ways they could crash, or skid, or the sledge could suddenly slew out sideways and then flip, crushing Karen and Glenda face-down in the snow under its weight...

Even though she knew Dale was taking it slow, travelling no faster than he deemed absolutely safe, she couldn't keep the fear from her mind. It still seemed like they were travelling unusually fast. It must have been her anticipation, knowing that they were leaving the broken mountain behind, and heading for something better. She had a very limited view of where they were going (Dale was a big, sturdy guy, after all, one of the few facts that helped to ease Sheryl's mind as she kept tight hold of both sides of his wide security belt, per his instructions), but she tried to piece together a mental picture of the terrain from what she could glean by glancing off to either side, and what it had looked like as she and Kerren had driven up the service road. It felt like that had been ages ago.

From what she could tell, Dale was following a downhill track that ran between that service road and the open range of large bumps that she never would have imagined a forest looks like after an avalanche. It was the most gradual and smooth way to go, and she was thankful for that. She had already been worried about what Kerren's injuries would mean in terms of her long-range recovery; she didn't need to add fear of further damage from a jarring journey on top of that.

All in all, it should have been a tranquil journey... but there was something off about it. It might have been the high whine of the engine, but it sounded wrong. She never ridden on one of these things, and didn't know why she was thinking that, but there it was. The thought wouldn't leave her head. There seemed to be some component of it that seemed oddly familiar, a high-pitched sound that arose, held, and fell off again in a repetitive way that raised the hair on the back of her neck.

What *was* that? Now that she was focusing on it, she had the disorienting sense that it was coming from behind her, instead of from the engine up front. Could it be some trick of sound, bouncing off of something and coming back from a different direction? But there was nothing out here for it to bounce back from; they were traveling through a virtual wasteland, with nothing over a few feet still standing save for the Lodge itself, far behind them now.

Her face suddenly felt as cold as the wind hitting it. What if it was the horned thing, following them down the mountain, roaring as it leapt, the fury of an entire pack of wolves bearing down on them as they fled? She felt a stripe of electricity shoot up her spine, and felt her head start to turn of its own volition. Her body clearly didn't care if death itself was bearing down to eviscerate them all... she had to see, had to know.

But what she could see of the mountain behind them was clear. Everything was as it had been the last time she had seen it. Manoj was behind her, Kelly sitting on the sledge with her strong legs propped up against it, behind them the reclined forms of Kerren and Glenda...

When she saw Kerren's mouth, and the way it was stretched wide, it came together in her mind. Kerren was *screaming*. That was the high sound, and why it had seemed familiar! Suddenly her hands, which had been holding so tightly onto Dale's wide leather belt, were yanking at them, pulling at both sides with equal panicked insistency.

"Stop!" she was screaming into the wind, into the security guard's ear. It didn't matter whether stopping would expose them to the horned thing; something horrible was happening, and she had to know what it was.

Dale swiveled his head from one side to the other frantically, trying to determine what was going on, whether the problem was with Sheryl, or from something nearby. He couldn't see anything, Sheryl knew, but he was slowing anyway, trying to keep their vehicle from skidding as they came to a stop. Even though Kelly was using her legs to keep the sledge from bumping into the back of the snowmobile, Sheryl felt the jolt when the two impacted.

"Cut the engine!" Sheryl was now yelling into Dale's ear, afraid that if he stopped but kept idling, they would miss the horrific sound of Kerren's screams. He did, and the air was filled with... silence.

Then a deep intake of breath came from behind them, and Kerren screamed again.

Sheryl threw herself sideways off the snowmobile, falling into the snow. There was no other way to dismount, being stuck between Manoj and Dale. Snow got into her eyes and mouth, she stumbled to her feet, and she staggered back to where Kerren was. Her wife's scream died out as she approached, but her eyes will still wide open. She looked over at Glenda, whose eyes were still open as well. But Sheryl could immediately tell the difference.

"Oh no..." Sheryl breathed. Glenda's sightless eyes were looking right at Kerren, who had no way of moving away from their glassy stare. That must have been why she started screaming, Sheryl thought, because she couldn't avoid that final, blank look.

Sheryl knelt down next to Kerren, rested her hand on the top of her wife's head, mostly because there was no other exposed place for her to put it. "It's all right," she said, her throat already starting to become scratchy with impending tears. "She's okay now." Sheryl didn't even know what she was saying, or what kind of consolation she was trying to give. A clearly sweet, conflicted woman had just been accidentally killed by a famous author. What meaningful words were there for her to say?

Those eyes... they were deep blue, Sheryl noticed now that they had been stilled. Unsure of whether it would work the way it did in the movies, she carefully reached out with one hand and tried to lower Glenda's eyelids. She succeeded, sort of. There was still a rim of white at the bottom where the lids didn't quite meet the bottom row of lashes. The effect was debatably creepier than having her staring at them.

Now Dale was there, falling to his knees in the snow just as Sheryl had done on Kerren's side. His hands reached for the deceased woman reflexively but stopped themselves, unsure of what to do. "No... no..." he murmured, his deep voice clear as tolling bells in the snow-blanketed silence surrounding them. "We just needed a little longer, just a little longer..." One of his hesitant hands found a place for its fingers on Glenda's temple, as if he were feeling for a pulse, and remained there even when they found nothing.

Kerren and Glenda were both crying now, as silently as they could. Sheryl wanted to move away -- Glenda and Dale's final tender moment was less than two feet away from her face -- but stayed because Kerren couldn't go with her. Deep rivers of guilt flowed through her stomach like cold lava, this death made even more awful by the fact that her own love was still here, still alive in this most precarious of situations.

Dale's fingers drifted back through Glenda's hair, stroking her head softly, and Sheryl realized that he probably never had the chance to touch her that way before. His fingers disappeared into the soft waves, and his head bent down to hers. He rested his forehead just above her ear, and paused.

"I'm so sorry, Dale," Sheryl whispered. She was aware that Kelly had gotten up off the sledge when she realized what was going on, and she and Manoj were now half-seated on the snowmobile, arms wrapped protectively around each other.

Even though he was whispering, his voice hoarse with regret, Dale spoke almost directly into Glenda's unhearing ear. "There just wasn't enough time," he said, his face scrunching into a horrific mask before springing back into some woeful resemblance of his warm, kindly face. "It all happened so *fast*... and I didn't think I deserved any of it... but *you* did. You always did."

Sheryl laid one arm lightly across Kerren. Watching the sorrow of Dale saying his final goodbye to Glenda, she realized how much she needed Kerren, loved her even through all the trouble and uncertainty they'd had. It had been too late to get Glenda to help, but there was still time for the rest of them. She and Kerren could still return to the way they had been.

None of them made any indication that they needed to hurry to continue their journey. They gave Dale the time he needed, to kneel there in the snow and make the first step of what would be many, into deep grief. Until he was ready, they all patiently waited and said their own private prayers, both for the dead and those still in need of saving.

-11.2-

The passage was longer than he had expected. He tried comparing its length to when he had crawled down it just after the avalanche had collapsed the hallway. Then, as now, he had been traversing a narrow, low passage that may or may not actually have existed; this time, however, he had the experience of his previous trip to keep claustrophobic panic from his mind.

Devoid of other options, he kept retreating, sliding backwards into the tiny crevice on his stomach, his feet ceaselessly flailing around, trying to determine the point when the passage would either open up or close down entirely. Neither happened. The pressing weight of debris around him was always just big enough for him to slip through, just clear enough for him to not spear himself on a jagged edge or lacerating point. He knew he didn't have to go all that far for the Qoloni to be unable to follow, but kept moving anyway. Perhaps he was hoping to rewind time, maybe it was merely the act of backing away from his nemesis that kept him from pondering the more insane questions that were pressing in on him as closely as physical space was.

So he kept moving, waiting for a change, any kind of change. The dim point of light ahead of him had dwindled until he could not tell where it was anymore, or whether some subtle curve in the crawlspace had turned it out of his view. In any event, the sounds of struggle had long since ceased from that direction. Now there was only his breathing, the rasp of his elbows on the jumbled carpet, the scrape of his toenails against dirt...

Dirt? The terrain he was advancing into was definitely changing, from the uneven floor of the hallway to soft, slightly damp dirt. He stopped, unsure of whether he should continue. What was his other option, however? He couldn't retreat (in this case, that meant move forward) to the place where his dark creation might still be waiting. Also, he was a perpetual victim of the writerly curse of needing to find out What Happens Next. So he pressed on, the ache in his spine beginning to lift as he passed completely over to grassy ground. He felt that strange, lifting sensation that he remembered from his dreams, as if he had entered a place where gravity had less of a persistent grip on him.

He knew this place. It was his. And Theda's. He sped up his efforts. He could not pinpoint when it happened, but he became aware that he was no longer crawling on his belly in a low, tight tunnel of debris. He was on a patch of ground in a moonlit grove, the air lying refreshingly warm over him like a soothing blanket, limitless space above him.

He stopped, rolled over onto his back (not even thinking about the knife wound there, although it didn't seem to hurt anymore), and sat up. His breath caught. He was once again in his dream place. He was within the ring of Sounding Stones, their carven runes still absent their inner, pulsing light. But they were still there. This place still existed. He didn't truly know how afraid he had been until this moment how afraid he had been that the storm (and don't forget the horned thing, he had first seen its shadow here!) had blasted it away.

It was much as he remembered it, although he had never been here during whatever passed for night in this realm. He looked out beyond the ring into the forest beyond, trying to see how far the familiarity of the place stretched. The trees still seemed as thick and lush as before, the farthest depths lit with their usual flickering will-o'-the-wisps that seemed to promise even more wondrous lands beyond.

There was no moon in the sky, and Bruce noted that he was unaware if one even existed in this world. Or, if there were one, what it would look like. He had to investigate only by the light of the stars, which knitted themselves into unknown constellations overhead, and a thin, pale curtain of aurora that hovered high, high above him, barely moving as it cast a faint, evenly green caste over everything.

No wind stirred the dream world, and similarly Bruce was holding his breath. He moved to the edge of the ring, moving as closely as he dared to the gap between the two Sounding Stones where Theda invariably made her appearances. Would she come now? Or had the storm and Qoloni permanently chased her away?

"You've come," she said, from behind him. Bruce whirled around, and there she was, not inside the ring with him but at the gap on the opposite side, although the source of her voice, as always, seemed to be coming from inside his own head.

"Yes," he said, turning and walking toward her. "And so have you. I'm so glad to see you."

Her robes, myriad veils that slowly swirled around her as if she were underwater, hid most of her form from his view. Only her face, with those crystal-vivid eyes, did he see with absolute clarity.

"The Qoloni," she stated, and he was surprised to hear her pronounce it with a slightly different inflection than he had always imagined it. "It went over with you."

Bruce nodded, hoping that now, finally, he would get some answers. "That's right," he said. "I don't know if it was the storm you had here, or the avalanche I had there, but it did. It took a while, but it found me. And now you must tell me how to get rid of it, or defeat it!"

Theda considered him closely, even as he came to stand at the gap between the two stones, the limit of how far he could venture into this strange world. She didn't seem in any particular hurry to clear things up for him. "You are in great danger," she said. "The others, as well. The Qoloni does not discriminate. It knows only its own rage."

"I know I am!" he agreed. He spun around, lifting his shirt in the back to show her the knife wound. "I've already been attacked! And by one of the others!"

He craned his neck to see her reaction, but there was none. He got that feeling he often felt when he was talking to her; that this idealized image of a woman was but one facet of a vast intelligence that often acted as if it were speaking with a belligerent child. "There is no wound. It does not translate here." Bruce probed with the fingers of his other hand, realizing how ridiculous he must look, and found his skin at the small of his back smooth and unbroken.

Theda went on. "I had feared this. The convergence of your mind with several others has caused an anomaly in the Allstory."

"Others?" Bruce asked, tugging his shirt back down and facing her again. "What others? You mean the woman who looks like you?"

"Not just her," Theda said calmly. "The woman who resembles me. The man who painted me. The men who have read your story. These are just a few of those who have caused a rift. I had feared this... the gift I gave you, the story that yearned to be told, was a powerful one."

"The story of the Qoloni?" Bruce asked. "Are you saying that I wrote it so powerfully that it stuck in their minds? And combined, they've managed to harness that part of the Allstory?"

"In part," Theda said, her voice edging toward impatience. "The woman who resembles me is more that she seems. As is one of the readers. A strong combination, and your physical presence has caused a sort of bubble to split off your particular reality. That disruption caused the avalanche."

Bruce thought this over. Hadn't the Indian fellow said something about an alternate reality? Did he have some inkling of what was going on too? Is that why he remained behind as well? "But it can be restored, can't it?" Bruce asked. "We can sort of... reattach ourselves back to our own reality?"

For the first time, Theda's face registered a clear expression, and it was concern. The hair on the back of Bruce's neck rose as if he were about to be struck by lightning. "Perhaps," she said. "But to do so they would need to be made truly aware of the power of the Allstory."

"I can tell them!" Bruce blurted. "I know that I don't understand it much, but I can explain what I can! I already told them some of--"

"You have already told them too much!" Theda said, so loudly that it made Bruce feel like the insides of his skull were being pushed outward because of its force. He recoiled, and when she spoke again she had reined in her volume. "There is danger in letting others in on the secret. The result could be more damaging than what the Qoloni could do."

"But I can't just give up, sacrifice myself as a necessary loss! And what about the others? I've already... hurt one person. How can I accept letting them all go down with me, as part of some trans-dimensional accident that they don't even know they helped cause?"

Theda stared at him for a long moment, and where he had once read affection in her goring stare, he now read blankness. "The Allstory preserves itself in any way it needs to. Its near-infinite blind alleys and ruined worlds are inevitable. You may have just ended up in one. It's no one's fault." The words did nothing to soothe him.

Bruce was growing angry again. If he had only known, on that long-ago night when Theda first came to him and gave him his first story, that there would be such a price paid for her generosity, with such astronomical dividends...

"Why?" he asked her suddenly. "Why did you even come to me in the first place?"

"Because you asked for me," she said. "All those nights that you lay awake, begging the Universe for inspiration. That was what drew me."

Bruce couldn't take responsibility for this catastrophe. He had never signed a contract in blood, never made a deal with this devil, which was what he was quickly determining Theda to be. "I'm going to find them," he said through his clamped jaw. "I'm going to tell them, and we're going to beat this. The Qoloni, the Allstory itself, can just go to hell!" But his words sounded flat and toothless.

"I cannot stop you," she said. "But what I can tell you is this... You cannot win."

"We'll just see about that," Bruce said. "If I called up the damn thing--" he ignored the arched eyebrow he received from his muse, "-- then I can put it down." With this, he turned to storm away. He got to the midway point in the circle of Sounding Stones before he stopped, realizing that he did not know how to leave this place. He had never consciously left it before, had done so only by waking up.

He turned back to Theda, about to sheepishly ask her for a manner of exit, but she had disappeared. The wind picked up, flowing through the giant stones like hissing breath through teeth.

-11.3-

For a long time, none of them moved. Watching Dale bent down, his massive shoulders heaving as he silently sobbed over Glenda's cooling body, was nearly impossible to stand. But they all sat quietly, patiently waiting, unwillingly sharing in this tragic moment together. Kelly had stood up from her position seated on the front edge of the sled and Manoj, turning to sit on the back part of the seat, had scooted around to accommodate her. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, her gloved hands tenderly coming to rest on his mittened ones. Even in this comforting pose, Manoj felt stunned more than anything else. He had never seen death up this close, and frankly was having more trouble processing it than he could have guessed.

This was the result of his relatively protected life, he knew. Both his parents and all four grandparents were far away, but still alive. And since he was a child, he had been steeped in gaming culture, where death and injury were regarded as inconveniences, where the discovery of a health pack or a flick of the Restart button could put everything right. Vanquished enemies usually took only occupied a few seconds of existence, before disappearing from sight.

But this was entirely outside his realm of experience. The specter of death, thrust upon him like this, after they had all survived so much already, threatened to force his mind into retreat. He felt the impulse to detach from it all, to hold onto the warm, living force that was Kelly and draw from her strength, to experience nothing else until he was ready to return. He might have done just that, if he hadn't suddenly felt Kelly's lips pressing against him. She had surreptitiously turned toward him within his enclosing arms, and brought the soft heat of her mouth up against his. The urge to mentally check out completely flipped over, and her presence was suddenly all he needed. When she pulled back after a long moment, they looked into each other's eyes.

"Thank you," he mouthed. She nodded, the corners of her mouth turning up just a little bit, as if she was aware of what she had just done for him. He marveled at her; she was so intuitive, so often seeming to know exactly what he was thinking. He couldn't help but wonder if Dale and Glenda had that kind of bond, if they had ever had the chance to find out.

Dale was standing up. The four surviving members of his team watched him, wondering what he was going to do next. He stood over Glenda's body for a while, looking down at the blood-soaked coverings, the protruding handle of the knife. He just took in the sorry tableau for a moment, as if to make sure it was permanently anchored in his mind. Then he spun, and headed back to the head of the snowmobile/sledge rig.

Kelly spoke to him as he passed. "Dale...?" Couched in that one word was a world of empathy, reassurance, and uncertainty.

He didn't respond at first, instead threw a leg over the seat just in front of Manoj, who was still facing backward. Dale said something under his breath, and it took several seconds for the sounds to register in Manoj's brain as: "I'm still getting her home."

When it became clear that Dale's intention was to press on, the remaining passengers scrambled to find a place to sit. Sheryl quickly stepped to where Kelly had been sitting, just as the athlete was preparing to get back down onto the sledge. Stopping her, Sheryl put a hand on her arm and said, "You stay with your love. I want to stay with mine." Saying this, she looked back at Kerren, who had seemed to have calmed down somewhat, but was still clearly wishing she was able to get up and run away. Unsure of quite how to sit, Sheryl tried to position herself the way Kelly had been, feet planted against the back of the snowmobile to help keep the sledge from bumping into it.

While Kelly tried to help Sheryl get set, Manoj dismounted so that he could turn back around to the front. Dale had already gotten himself positioned, once again hunched over over the handlebars, but not yet restarting the engine. Manoj placed a hand on the big man's shoulder, but couldn't think of a meaningful thing to say. After a few moments when Manoj wasn't sure that Dale knew he was making this gesture, the security guard half-turned his head and gave a long, slow nod. Manoj took this as acknowledgement, and removed his hand.

Sheryl and Kelly had finished their exchange of information, and before Kelly spun around and took her place as the rearmost occupant of the snowmobile, Manoj gestured to the spot he had previously occupied. "Scoot up," he told her.

"Yeah?" she said.

He nodded. "You'll be warmer, and... I want to hold you as tightly as I can."

Kelly seemed to understand that this was more than just a matter of temperature and proximity. She nodded back, and scooted up against Dale's back. She slipped her fingers through the sidemost loops of the driver's belt, clearly having noted how Sheryl had been riding earlier. Manoj slid up close against her, wrapping his arms tightly around her middle. He felt her rest her head back against his shoulder for a moment, before Dale started the snowmobile's engine and they resumed their downward trek.

Manoj tried not to think about Glenda too much. He acknowledged the loss, and knew there would be time for true grieving later, but there were other pressing matters that were coming to the surface, now that taking care of her severe injury wasn't top priority. Part of him realized how callous this was to think, and he would never say it out loud to anyone (maybe not even to Kelly, which was something he would never have considered before this), but he at least could comfort himself by calling it self-preservation. And maybe that's all it was. He forced himself to focus on his view of the town below, because there was something strange about it.

The image hadn't changed much, even though they had drawn much closer to it; it clearly filled more of his vision than it had before. What was bothering him, though, was that it wasn't any more distinct than it had been up at the Lodge. The effect gave his mind a slight queasiness, as if aware that it was being shown an illusion, but unsure of its origin. It actually reminded him of when he had looked at the orange full moon on the horizon as a child, and noted how it seemed much larger, much closer than when it was high in the sky. He had already heard that this was a trick of the mind, that the moon was actually only a few thousand miles closer to the Earth when high overhead as opposed to when it first rose, and understood the geometry of this, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that there was magnification going on. So what was it, then? Some kind of refractory property of the Earth's atmosphere, maybe the same kind that gave the moon that mildly unnerving sunset color? It seemed so clearly that it was, so why were his eyes deceiving him?

He finally convinced himself that it really was an illusion with an argument he came up with all on his own. If the moon really was larger when on the horizon, then at that time its features should be clearer. But as long as he looked at the orb low on the horizon and high, with binoculars and without, night after night, he realized that nothing was more distinct, no lava plain or mountain that looked any closer or clearer just after moonrise. He was forced to accept that the giant harvest moon was a myth, playing against the mind's understanding that, in every earthly case, an object on the horizon has to be much bigger than an overhead object with the same apparent size.

He was experiencing that same disorientation now. The town was there, definitively closer, but also remote somehow. Looking at it, he didn't like the way it made his brain feel. It gave him the sense that they were going to be going down this hill forever, perhaps losing more of their band one by one, never really reaching the base of the mountain.

His hands instinctively tightened around Kelly's middle, and she removed one hand from Dale's belt long enough to grasp his fingers in hers for a brief, reassuring moment. This put Manoj's mind as much at ease as it could, which was why he missed the change in their surroundings. By the time he realized it, it was too late to warn Kelly, so that she could warn Dale, or to change anything about the speed they were traveling.

The air around them had started to lighten. It wasn't an intensification of the moonlight, or the warm light of dawn (which he already doubted they were ever going to see again). It wasn't even because of snow being kicked up around them, or falling from the sky. This lightness was the same as if someone were slowly de-saturating all colors, like a fade-out but to bright white. And being a programmer, he instinctively sensed what this kind of transition meant. He saw it all the time, when game designers needed to mask an abrupt transition.

They were being taken from where they were, and brought to some other place. By the time this thought had fully formed in his mind, the world around them had gone to an impenetrable no-color, and the wind shifted direction.

-11.4-

Dale welcomed the white. It gave him the only sense of relief he had felt since he had seen the blade disappear into Glenda's chest. Take it all away, he thought. Let it be wiped clean. Take away every bit of all he was feeling. He would never have to reach the bottom of the hill, never need to give up responsibility for the people he hadn't failed yet. He wouldn't have to deliver Glenda to anyone else; she would be with him forever and he wouldn't have to give her up. He'd be perfectly fine with that. Let the white come. Let this be the end.

This was the second time he had seen someone he loved die. Yes, he had loved his father, in that strange, distant way that many fathers and sons loved each other. Back then, he hadn't tried to save the person in peril. This time, he had done everything he could, and the result had come out the same. Did any of it matter, then? He had spent the larger part of his life trying to protect those around him, in any way he could, and this was the final result of it, hauling a bunch of people he barely knew and the body of the woman he loved to... where?

Whatever the white finally proved to be, it wasn't the end. After too short a time, the world slowly returned, like a fader knob being turned back down from overload. He didn't know what he had been expecting, but it certainly wasn't more of the same. But here they were, heading down the side of the same mountain, with the only difference that the terrain was somewhat flatter, not as many trees to look out for. There was only one major deviation from the flat paleness, which was some sort of outcropping far ahead, where something dark was pushing up through the thick, pervasive covering of snow...

Dale was not a man who swore easily. He'd never thought about it much, but Glenda had pointed it out to him on more than one occasion, so it must have been true. He didn't know why this was, he just never felt the need to express himself that way. There always seemed to be other words, better words, when the time came to say them. But when the outcropping grew closer, however, and he began to suspect what it was, only to see that thought realized, crystallizing before his eyes, he muttered a phrase under his breath that he knew would have delighted Glenda for its rarity, and its understated tone.

"Oh, God damn it."

The outcropping was really a large building, downslope from them, partially smashed where the leading edge of the avalanche must have punched it down. The junction of the L-shaped wings was the least covered part of it, sheltered for the most part, but the nearer side was piled high with snow, which spread out over the entire roof and had most likely spilled copiously over the front...

It was the Deertail Lodge. They had somehow circled around and were now approaching it again, this time from the back. He had no idea how it had happened, but that didn't change the fact that it had. He felt all the strength drain out of his arms; after all this, they had just come back around to where they started. They hadn't made any progress at all. Instead of delivering her into the arms of her family, Dale had brought Glenda back to the place where she had been fatally injured.

He braked them to a stop, and shut off the engine. There was a little bit of rustling behind him, but no words, as his passengers looked around him, individually recognizing the Lodge on the slope below them. They all knew what its existence in front of them implied. For a long time, they just sat there. The wind stirred a little, died before it really became anything.

"It looped us," Manoj finally said. "We hit the boundary, and it took us back to the far edge. Toroidal space." No one asked what that meant. All they needed to know was that there was no way out.

"We've got to get back inside," they heard Sheryl say from the back of the group. "We'll freeze out here." Meaning that Kerren, immobile and low to the ground, would freeze first. Dale nodded to himself, knowing that what she said was true. But he had half a mind just to get up off the snowmobile, lie down on the sledge next to Glenda, and wait for whatever new, pointless event was going to come next. Maybe he would just wait there until he froze, joining Glenda in a more intimate way than he had ever managed to in life. It was only force of habit, his ridiculous instinct to help others, that made him start the engine and let the vehicle start sliding downhill again.

He didn't quite know where to go. From this new, higher vantage point, he could assess more of the damage the avalanche had done. He could see how the crushing weight of the snow had almost entirely destroyed the side of the Lodge where Bruce had pulled Kerren out from under her bed. The author's own room, which he said he had been near when the deluge came, was nonexistent. Before he could stop to think about how Bruce could have possibly survived, he saw the restaurant, which stuck out from the first floor near where the crumbled wing spilled its guts down the slope. It was strange; although he could make out the bulk of the restaurant's lone chimney, he couldn't make out any of its roof.

So he couldn't circle around to the front of the Lodge that way. The area at the junction of the L-shaped wings looked out of the running, too. The snow hadn't piled up very high there, but the doors on the bottom floor (which were mostly staff access to the utility areas) were entirely covered, and getting any of this group up to the level of the second-floor rooms would be both dangerous and difficult.

Then there was the closest side, near where the wreckage of the ski lift was piled up against the very shed they had departed from. That wreckage, all the thick, tangled cable, and towers bent like toothpicks, was only partly covered by the snow. He couldn't go that way, either... he had no way of knowing how much twisted metal was lurking just under the snow to snatch their wheels out from under them, or how far the debris field extended up the slope.

He felt the futility of all this pressing in on him again. He imagined himself pulling the snowmobile back into that tiny garage, returning to where Glenda had last been alive, and there had been hope of getting away from this place. Now he had nothing, and all the support of the other people in his group wasn't going to get him to pretend that he did.

Which brought him to the closest wing of the Lodge. It was still intact as far as he could tell, and the way the snow had spread broadside across its roof, making it all but perfectly flush with the new slope of the mountain, it was starting to take on a familiar form, one that the Deertail had never had before, but that nature had fashioned, seemingly just for him.

That was when an exhilarating horror rose in him, breaking like the dawn that he was increasingly more sure would never come. That near wing, from the point where the snow stopped at new ground level, to the front, fifty feet up, looked an awful lot like a ski jump. Even the thin lines of chimneys protruding from the shallowest parts of the snow looked like guide lines, leading right up to the roof's front edge.

He swiveled the handlebars in that direction. He wondered how long it would take before his passengers realized, once the snowmobile started skating across the roof shingles, that Dale had no intention of stopping until they were plunging, snowmobile and sledge and all, off the far end of the roof. To fly, to see the whiteness rising to meet him, and then to hurt no more. To go with Glenda on their first and last journey together. It made perfect sense.

He pressed his foot harder on the accelerator.

-11.5-

Harmon proceeded into the lobby cautiously, even though he had no idea what he was on the lookout for. He knew there was something in the Lodge, something that did not belong there -- or in the same universe as he, for that matter. The large room, which had once been so familiar to him, had utterly changed in his absence. Now it held the unnatural hush that a haunted cathedral might. All the life had been removed from it, as if a museum replica of the every object had replaced what used to stand on this spot. He could only hope that his little sanctum under the stairs was still as he had left it.

He moved as quickly as he dared, still leaning heavily against his makeshift crutch as he crossed the floor. By now he was used to the particular brand of pain that erupted from his broken ankle every time he moved it. Still, he went out of his way not to make any extraneous noise, skirting the bloodstains on the floor by a wide margin, still puzzling over what kind of recent tragedy they could be spelling out. The closer he got to them, he became sure that they didn't quite connect among the confusion of tracks, pools, and smears at the base of the stairway. Whatever had happened, the multiple injured parties weren't there now, and thus Harmon was able to absolve himself from concern without much guilt.

After the blood, he had to weave through a scattering of women's clothing on the floor. He assumed this was the result of someone trying to outfit themselves (and maybe a few others) before going outside. He finally approached the door to his apartment -- although it was little more than a well-equipped closet, he thought of it in more elegant terms -- and adjusted his balance before reaching for the doorknob.

He opened the door, and paused. The little light he had on the dresser was on, and had been moved. There was a staggered line of his paperbacks fanned across the floor. And most notably, there was someone lying on his cot. Harmon waited until he saw that the figure's chest was moving up and down in shallow, sleeping breaths. He stepped into the room, and closed the door.

Once his eyes adjusted to the yellowish, battery-powered LED light, Harmon was quite shocked at his new roommate's appearance. The man had clearly been through a lot, his face bloodied and burned until he was almost unrecognizable. Despite this, Harmon did recognize him; there wasn't anyone working in the hotel that he didn't know, even if their name didn't immediately come to mind. This was one of them, a familiar face from the kitchen that he had never been officially introduced to.

Harmon would have squatted down next to the man on the cot if he had been able, but at the moment all he could manage was to stand over him and look down, studying the man's battered face as he slept. Some kind of metal piece was held close to his chest, and it took Harmon a moment to figure out that it was the metal logo of the Deertail that used to hang over the fireplace in the restaurant. Whatever the reason, the man was holding onto it like a security blanket.

"Hey," Harmon said, intending to make a more assertive sound than the tired croak that came from his throat. The man on the cot didn't move. Harmon tried nudging his leg with the shaft of the ski pole. "Hey," he repeated.

The man on the cot stirred, and just as Harmon thought he had fallen back asleep, his eyes flew wide, surprised to find someone in the tiny room with him.

"Don't worry," Harmon said, raising his hands. "It's just me. I know you from the kitchen, don't I?"

The man on the cot twitched a little, eventually making a motion that Harmon recognized as a nod. He wondered if the man was leaving dried blood and bits of charred skin on his pillow.

"You look like you've been through hell, buddy," Harmon said. "So I'm glad you found my room. Comfy, isn't it?"

No response this time, just a continued wide-eyed stare.

"I've had a pretty rough time myself," Harmon said, looking around for a place to sit although he knew there wasn't one. Honestly, there'd never been need for one before. "Don't suppose you could make some room?"

The burned man, an apologetic look clear on his face, immediately started trying to sit up, then realized he couldn't and rolled on his side, lowering his feet limply to the floor.

"No, no," Harmon said when he saw the man's difficulty. "Don't worry about it. I think you probably need the rest more than I do." This didn't deter the man's efforts, however. He kept trying to sit up, and Harmon was unable to bend down and physically stop him, so he gave up and let room be made for him. Through the maneuver, he kept a close eye on the metal emblem, trying to decide if it was being clutched so tightly because the man didn't want to let go of it, or if he physically couldn't. By the time there was space for Harmon to sit, he still hadn't decided.

"Well, thank you," he said, making sincere eye contact with the wounded man before he turned around and tried to lower himself down. Grimacing, he propped himself against the wobbling ski pole and tried to seat himself on the cot as tenderly as he could. By the time he had to give his trajectory over to gravity, he had realized that there was no way to do it without more pain than he'd experienced so far on his entire trip. He gritted his teeth and let the pain have its way with him until he was sitting next to the man on the cot.

"Whew," Harmon said finally. He turned to the man, tried not to be shocked by how much more horrifying his injuries looked close up. "I apologize," he said, "but I'm having a devil of a time trying to recall your name." The disappointment in the man's inability to communicate was obvious and painful to see.

The man, intense sadness in his eyes, seemed to be trying to form words with his lips, but they quivered and couldn't quite coordinate themselves to do it. After a few moments Harmon shushed him gently and said, "That's all right. It will come to me."

For a while, the two elderly men sat side by side in the quiet room, sharing a moment with their individual injuries and common predicament. In that short interval, Harmon made a decision. It was one that never would have crossed his mind before this night, or even before he went out into the snow, trying to outrun an avalanche like a damned noob.

This time, he didn't ask for permission. Harmon closed his eyes and reached out in that way he had with Kerren, but this time into the mind of the man sitting next to him. As he had wandered through the filigreed light of that woman's mind, he had been moved to tears by its beauty. It was like a nearly endless labyrinth made of soaring, living crystal cathedrals. But this time, he was entering a place that was horribly corrupted. The inside of this man's mind was similar to Kerren's, but its lofty architecture had suffered a horrible attack, some awful cerebral approximation of the London Blitz.

Many parts of his mind had gone dark. Whole planet-sized areas of it had been cracked apart and stained pitch black. Elsewhere, jagged cracks were the origin of bleeding areas that coated other vast sections in crimson viscosity. But Harmon kept looking for intimations of life somewhere else; he could sense its direction by the way the dark parts were lit from behind, or from the side. It was like trying to divine the sun's position using only stray beams that punched through the cloud cover. He kept moving, and eventually found his way to the core.

The man's name was Benny -- as soon as Harmon heard the name, he realized that he had once known it, but had forgotten. There was a little startled mental activity as Benny realized that Harmon was present, but calmed down quickly as the two realized how kindred their spirits were. They were two men, old enough to feel themselves past usefulness to the world in general, who had found a new place to belong, high up in the rarified air of Deertail Mountain. This was what Harmon could glean from the glittering, sputtering part of Benny's mind that was still functioning like it always had.

After this era of mutual understanding, Harmon began to ingest all the information that Benny had of what was currently happening, and in turn he shared with Benny his own experience. They found even deeper kinship there; both had sustained horrible injuries, and had fought hard to persevere despite them. It was when Benny started to unweave his thoughts about the Qoloni that true horror began to dawn on Harmon. Of course he remembered the creature, although it had been several years since he had read the book, which took its place on the deceptively long list of things he had apparently forgotten about. With Benny's sensory impressions of it, though, Harmon recalled the visceral thrill he had experienced from his first literary encounter with it.

Reading about something terrifying and actually coming face-to-face with it were two entirely different things, however. As he thumbed through Benny's catalog of mental images from when he had been attacked by the thing, seeing how Harmon's own little sanctuary had almost been invaded by the thing, he felt despair beginning to creep in around the edges of his own disembodied mind.

Together, they began to attempt piecing together how something from a book could possibly find its way into their real world. It must have had something to do with the author's presence. If Bruce Casey were here, was it possible that he had brought the thing with it? Was it some kind of real, haunting presence that had dogged him for years -- since the book had been published back in the heady year of 1991 -- and followed him here?

They worked together, their intellects cranking in a sort of tandem that would have been impossible in the outer world, even if they had been fully able to articulate their thoughts to each other. Inside, thoughts took on almost physical forms, intricate forms of light and chemicals that could be understood more intuitively than the most perfectly chosen string of words. They tried to recreate the plot of the novel together from their aged recollections; it was harder for Harmon, because he had read it much longer ago than Benny, but found that different parts of it had made impressions on each of them.

For example, Benny seemed to recall Princess Ynarra's initial exploration of Cheval Castle's dungeons more clearly, due to his childhood fear of his grandparents' basement. He brought that memory forward for Harmon, who could viscerally taste the terror in the child's throat. For his part, Harmon had formed such a clear picture of the initial ceremony where the Prince of Cheval greets his suitors at a grand ceremonial dinner. Harmon had read that part right after he had recovered from a bad stomach flu, when there had still been a good two hours before the Lodge's restaurant opened for the day. He was ravenous, and Bruce's purple prose as he outlined the menu of the banquet had set Harmon's stomach growling in the most enjoyable way.

Eventually, they had painted a mutual picture of the story, the way the initial beauty of Ynarra's experiences at Cheval were eventually stripped away, revealing the frightening skeleton of intrigue and dark magic underneath it. They had sculpted the shape of the tale inside Benny's mind, and could turn it this way and that, examining it from all sides. It was a strange way to look at a tale, but it made sense in the way that a vision of beauty in a dream does. And when they turned it just the right way, they saw what they were looking for, the reason they had been collaborating to reconstruct it in the first place, although neither had known it.

The answer was there, inevitably woven into the very fabric of the tale itself. It was plain, obvious to them in this quasi-physical form. The novel's ending was menacingly unresolved, even though Ynnara escaped. But now they were able to unlock the secret behind the author's words. They both knew how to stop the Qoloni.

-11.6-

Carlos didn't look back. He just ran. He had no idea how long his feet would keep him ahead of the grasping hands (or, even worse, the razor-like swinging antlers) of the dark, buzzy thing pursuing him. He just kept moving as fast as the uneven floor of the hallway would allow. He could only hope that it was slowing his pursuer down as much as it was him.

He was almost past the stairway down to the lobby. He thought briefly about bounding down them out into the snow, just to get the thing out of the building and away from Benny's hiding place, but it didn't work out that way. His foot caught on an unfortunate fold of carpet just as he was about to swerve, causing him to stumble and take a lateral step away from the stairs to retain his balance. He realized that he wasn't going to be able to correct his trajectory without stopping to turn, and then the footsteps chasing him would undoubtedly catch him. So he kept running straight, down the opposite wing of the Lodge, his heart threatening to throb itself out through his ears.

He had never run in such a blind panic before. Not even the time when he was small, and they had visited a horse farm. It had belonged to one of his dad's cousins, some small ranch far off in another mountain's foothills. Little Carlos had somehow wandered out into the pasture, and suddenly an eight-foot-tall horse was coming over to investigate. To his child's eyes, the thing had been the size of a freight train, and closing in on him much faster than he could run away. He felt that same panic now, barreling down the Lodge's upper hallway, so fast that he felt like his legs might detach from his body. Only now, the thing behind him really meant him harm, to catch him, throw him down and impale him...

Just beyond the stairs, one of the guest room doors stood open, and it wasn't until it was too late for him to aim his stumbling body toward it that he realized it would have been an ideal place to hide. He could have just thrown the door closed behind himself and been safe. He was sure the thing couldn't have followed; it would be blocked by the physical solidity of the door just as it had before. But as quickly as this thought came, the hope was dashed and the door passed behind him.

Carlos still hadn't managed to fully correct himself, and his pounding feet skirted the left side of the corridor. He could hear some distorted grating sound behind him, which he assumed were the tips of his pursuer's antlers scraping the wall above and behind him. The sound was like nails on a chalkboard fed through a broken amplifier, and sent jagged bolts of discord up his spine. He wondered if that resistance was buying him time. His breath wheezed in and out between his gritted teeth, and he was acutely aware of how his life was quickly boiling down to a scattering of infinitely small moments and incidents, ground gained and lost in millimeters of distance between the clutching hands of the thing behind him and his fleeing heels.

There was something in the hall ahead, propped against the wall, giving him a reason to keep trying to steer his never-fast-enough body toward the middle of the hall. The shape drew closer, and he realized what it was; a decorative table, narrow enough to be of no practical purpose other than to carry two small but elegant vases, which were perpetually filled with dried but lovely flowers. A table runner ran the length of it, pinned down by the crystalline weights at the ends, and a large, sunburst-shaped mirror hung on the wall above it, long waving threads of steel flaring out from the circular frame. Carlos was surprised to see that, despite the universal disruption of the avalanche, this arrangement was still mostly intact. The mirror was still hanging straight on the wall, and only one of the vases had been knocked over, tipping out its freight of pussy willows across the table and onto the floor. Barely thinking about it, he grabbed the fallen vase, then passed it to his other hand and grabbed the second as he ran by as well. The sunburst mirror wobbled back and forth on the wall, barely hanging on after being dislodged by the avalanche's rattlings.

He flipped the upright vase over in his hand, dumping out its freight of dried sticks, and secured his grip around its neck. He took a quick look back over his shoulder, and found that the shape -- so vague against the pervasive darkness of the hall -- was closer than he thought from just listening to its approach. *Much* closer, in fact. Now in a near panic, he flipped his left hand over his right shoulder, releasing the vase at what he hoped was the right instant. He couldn't help but continue to watch as it flipped end over end, reflecting what dim light it could gather from the surroundings, until it impacted the horned thing squarely in its chest, right where its heart might possibly be.

He should have seen the reaction coming, although in the moment he couldn't guess what was going to happen. Basically, the pursuing thing stayed true to its physical nature. It couldn't affect the vase's presence in the world, so in the collision of kinetic energies moving both forward and backward, it inevitably lost. Carlos had a fleeting glimpse of the vase being bent out of its true shape, wrapping around the creature's shoulder like a wet towel being slapped across its skin, and then the thing was twisting in mid-stride, one side of it being almost entirely stopped in its tracks. Its antlers swung mere inches above Carlos's head as it pivoted.

He ducked instinctively while turning forward, realizing that he had just bought himself a few more tenths of a second of life. He knew he had to take advantage of it, and try to get his legs to pump just a little faster. He heard the vase, having presumably slipped around the dark figure's space-warping edge and coming out unscathed and unaffected on the other side, make its final skittering crash on the floor far behind them both.

At the moment, however, Carlos was trying to figure out what the end of the chase was going to entail. He was rapidly approaching the turn at the end of the hallway, and depsite the even dimmer light there, he knew that there was a door in the crook of the L. It didn't lead to any room, but contained a service area where the majority of the housekeeping supplies were stored. He was heading straight for that door, and if he could buy himself enough time to get it open, dash through and shut it, he might make it out of this encounter alive.

That was a big if, though. He could already hear the horned thing's footfalls regaining their rhythm, not as far away as he would have liked. Maybe he had just prolonged the chase, instead of winning it. His legs were getting weaker, his breath rasping in his throat. Before he knew it, he was just a few steps from the door, and couldn't remember... did it swing into the storage room, or out into the hallway? His shoulder impacted with the force of his entire body behind it, and he immediately knew it was the latter.

He bounced off and spun to the side, which brought him around to see the horned thing. It was bearing down on him with frightening speed, and for a moment Carlos thought they were going to replay the tackle that had happened at what was now the far end of the hall, this time with Carlos pinned between the thing and the wall, instead of the other way around. He obliquely wondered how his body would react when compacted between the thing and an immovable object, and braced himself...

But it turned out that he had been thrown too much off course for the thing to collide with him. Instead, it ran full speed into the maintenance door; clearly, Carlos's prior knowledge of the Lodge's layout was an unexpected advantage in this near-total darkness. He threw his hands protectively over his hand and ducked away, aware of the way those fearsome antlers were spearing their way into the wall above his head. Even so, he could figure out what had happened. Similar to what had happened at the far end of the hall, the horned thing bent the door inward almost three full feet. Then, after a moment of suspension, it was flung back out. Carlos marveled again at how the immovable material that he had smacked his shoulder into could become so pliant. The horned attacker stumbled backward, its arms pinwheeling in a decidedly human fashion, trying to keep its balance under the weight of its enormous antlers, tipping backward from the impact.

Carlos saw his opportunity, and grabbed for the door handle. At the exact moment he felt the cool solidity of the knob, he also felt a debilitating pain shoot up his arm, collecting at his left shoulder and turning into a bright flare. He still held the second vase in his right hand, so opening the door with it wasn't an option. He pushed through the feeling that his arm was on fire, grabbed the knob, and yanked the door toward him. It swung open easily, but he overestimated how hard he had to pull so much that the knob flew out of his hand, and the door swung wide open.

If there had not been a small window high up in the wall of the storage closet, the blackness inside would have been impenetrable, but after the prolonged dimness, the small gateway to the moonlit mountainside turned into a virtual spotlight, illuminating the horned thing as it strove to regain its footing. Carlos realized he had maybe a second to make it inside. At this point, he didn't even care about getting the door to close behind him. Maybe the thing's wide antler-span wouldn't allow it to enter anyway. That was all he had to hope for as he dove into the gap. Two steps in, he wheeled around.

The horned thing was so close it was almost filling the doorway. At the same time, he was aware of his peripheral vision revealing the way the antlers were pressing into the walls above both sides of the doorway as well, like splayed fingers trying to push through a membrane. It lunged forward, trying to force its way across the threshold, in the process stretching the doorframe farther than Carlos had thought it could. Its outlines, while still far from distinct, were limned by the light from behind Carlos, making his heart threaten to stop out of terror. Because of the stark lighting, he could truly see the contours of its face for the first time... and he felt that sudden sense of dislocation that only comes with profound shock. Fortunately, the one instinct he did have was to raise his hand and throw the other vase.

It was little more than a lob at such close range, but it hit the thing in what would have been its throat, had it truly been human, or even animal (Carlos had long since begun to suspect that it was neither). Instead, Carlos witnessed the way the shape of the glittering crystal distorted, wrapping around the thing's neck like a melting choker necklace, and how the creature was swept backwards by its light but undeniable kinetic force. It wasn't until it had backed away that Carlos realized he now had an opportunity to close the storage room door.

He jumped forward, every impulse in his body screaming at him that it was the wrong direction to travel in. He threw his right arm -- now blissfully available to do work his left couldn't -- around the jamb and fumbled for the knob while trying to keep an eye on the horned thing. He couldn't keep his eyes off it, trying to tell if what he had seen in its face a moment before had really been there, or was just a trick of his eyes.

His hand found the knob, slipped once across its slick surface, then tightened around it and pulled. At the same time, his nemesis started recovering from the attack, and Carlos watched in simultaneous fascination as the door swung closed and the thing lunged. He had no idea which was going to win the race.

-12.1-

Now that Sheryl had switched places with Kelly, she could appreciate how hard it was to be the buffer between the snowmobile and the sledge. She had to recline between Kerren and Glenda's legs (trying hard to drive from her mind the thought that one of the women was deceased), and brace her feet against the back of the snowmobile, right below where Manoj was sitting.

When she had been up on that seat herself, there hadn't felt like there was much change in the hybrid vehicle's downward velocity. Now, with nothing but her body making sure that the two pieces didn't collide with the slightest fluctuation in speed, it was getting more obvious that they were speeding up. It was taking most of her strength and concentration to keep everything steady.

She decided to take a chance and throw a look back over her shoulder toward Kerren. The sight of her wife's face was pretty much the only thing that was keeping Sheryl going; it was the reason she had asked Kelly to trade places with her, so the two of them could be closer. When she looked back (which was as much a matter of tipping her head back as turning it to the side), the expression of incredulity on that lovely face was enough to direct her to look down the mountain.

It was surprising how quickly she determined what she was looking at, what they were heading for. She had experienced that strange period of whiteness just as everyone else had, and it had so disoriented her that she wasn't particularly surprised to see the Deertail Lodge reappar on the slope below them. It felt natural to her somehow, although she wasn't even close to being clear whether it had been relocated, or they had.

Regardless, it was there, and growing larger in their collective view. It was kind of hard to see, because she was almost lying down on the sledge, and so close to the rear of the snowmobile that the vehicle obscured most of her field of vision. Before this catastrophe had occurred, she he had to admit that she had been nervous enough about hitting the ski slope the next morning that she had already imagined/dreaded seeing the building from the upslope side. It might be because of this that she recognized it so easily.

Sheryl braced her legs, sure that Dale was going to slow down so that they could at least reevaluate their journey. Were they going to go around its half-buried bulk and try again, or stop and go back inside? Was it just a fluke that they had looped back around above the Lodge, or would it happen every time they tried to get down to the town? She tried to shut her mind away from that thought; it brought up too many other questions, not the least of which was that it would mean that their imprisonment -- and maybe the avalanche itself -- had some kind of design to it. Once you opened that door, the question of a designer came up, and then things got *really* terrifying.

She realized that the change in pressure against her feet, which would happen every time the snowmobile slowed and the sledge started to catch up with it, wasn't happening yet. If anything, she felt as if the snowmobile was still being pulled away from her... which would mean that Dale was speeding up. Why would that be happening? She could chalk it up to his impatience, except for the fact that they were still heading toward the building. Not toward the center, between the two wings, but if they kept on this heading, they weren't going to be able to avoid it.

Panic started to creep in around the edges of Sheryl's mind. What was Dale doing? She started to tap the heel of her boot against the back panel of the snowmobile to get the attention of someone of the vehicle, but got no reaction. She kicked a little harder, and then even harder. Soon she was drumming both feet against the smooth surface with as much force as she could, the continuing acceleration of the snowmobile making it difficult to make a truly loud noise, as the sledge kept trying to pull back from it.

She even tried to lift her foot enough to nudge Manoj's butt with it, but couldn't get her leg up that far without first gaining solid purchase on the sledge, which she just didn't have. There was nowhere to sit but the edges of the storage bags that had been laid over Glenda to keep the blowing snow away from her, and they slid around dangerously every time Sheryl tried to move her legs too much.

The building continued to draw closer, and their vantage point became higher as they rode the gradual rise of the snow that piled behidn it during the avalanche. Sheryl began to panic; she was becoming more and more convinced that Dale was not going to stop. They were going to ride up onto the roof and... then what?

From here, she couldn't see much of the roof, nor could she tell how flat it was. Could it be that he was waiting to slow to a stop until they were on some clear patch of roof? It would be easier than skidding to a stop on snow, but then shouldn't he at least not be accelerating?

Sheryl threw her head back to look at Kerren again, completely at a loss for what to do. She realized how much she was like Kerren at that moment, nearly immobile and unable to affect what was going on around her. Panic began to rise to the back of her throat when she saw the expression on her wife's face; clearly, she was thinking the same thing Sheryl was. This was all wrong.

Sheryl tried to call back to her "It's okay!" and then went back to kicking the back of the snowmobile, digging in with her boot heels. She watched the fibergalss panel buckle under the force, twisting the moonlight and shaping it into crazy arcs. She threw out her arms and tried to grab the edges of the sled, gaining herself as much purchase as she could. She could only reach one of them, on Kerren's side, although it might have been that she felt too weird about reaching across Glenda's body to grip the farther side.

She started yelling, trying to get someone's attention. As far as she could tell, no one on the snowmobile had changed position... did they know what was going on? Whatever Dale's plan could be, was it possible that they were going along with it? That was the only thing her mind had to cling to now; that there was something in front of them that she couldn't see, something that made sense for them to speed onto the Lodge's roof.

She kept kicking, kept yelling, although when she felt the transition of the snowmobile's skis and treads go from churning through snow to grinding across roof shingles, she closed her eyes.

-12.2-

Bruce looked at the spot Theda had disappeared from, acutely aware that this time he was not asleep. It wasn't all that different experience, he found; things that before had been kind of hazy and wavery were just in sharper focus. Colors were more vivid, and there was a vital sense of place to the stone ring that had been lacking before. Of course, when he had visited this place in dreams he had been waiting for her, eager to hear the ideas she would always impart to him. But now that she had left, he had nothing to do but analyze his surroundings more closely, and strive to figure out how to get back.

He found himself turning around and around inside the circle of Sounding Stones, trying to determine which direction was most likely to provide escape. The first gap he tried was the one Theda had been standing at, opposite her usual direction of approach from the nearby forest. But when he stepped into the space between the stone columns, he felt the same invisible backward pressure he always experienced, the one that kept him from moving between the stones.

He spun around one more time, facing back toward the forest. Was there some coded message in the fact that she had always come to him from the other direction? He walked across the circle, approaching her usual spot, and stopped. Yes, the world was different here somehow. He just had to figure out what that difference was. He stood there for a few moments, looking back and forth between the opposing directions, and literally felt the answer lock into place inside his head.

Before, on those nights he had come and there had been no Theda, he had noted that his dreamworld had been shrinking. And it still was; in the nights that had passed since he had last been here, the horizon had gotten appreciably closer... but only in the direction he had just seen her in. When he looked instead at the forest, he could see that it was just as it had always been. If anything, it had grown more lush with foliage. Perhaps that was why Theda had forced him to turn around the other way -- she had wanted him to notice this.

He drew close to the two Sounding Stones that he was accustomed to seeing Theda between. Before he got too close, he noticed the change. There was an openness that hadn't been there before, a lack of pressure that allowed him to feel, probably for the first time, what the air was like outside the deceptively open-appearing circle. He passed between the stones with no resistance.

He took a deep breath, only now realizing how rich and oxygenated the air was, compared to inside the circle. The change was so pronounced, it was like being relieved of an asthma attack he didn't even know he was having. The air outside was so deliciously dense, and he realized that if had been wearing flowing robes, they very well might be doing that underwater-floating thing that he always noticed Theda's doing. He turned his bare feet -- luxuriating in the feel of the velvety soil on his soles -- onto the path she had always come down by on those imaginatively fertile nights.

The forest ahead was singing. He could hear it calling to him, and as he drew closer he could see more of those faint, lazily whirling lights in its interior. They beckoned him forward, drifting along branches, jumping the span between closely-packed trunks, as if the tiny points were searching for something, or conveying important messages. Bruce couldn't deny that they moved as if seeming to have a sense of purpose. And through it all, a low hum permeated the thickened air, voices in thousands of languages that seemed to have no real source. The only thing they had in common was their shared sense of eagerness. They had something to say, these disembodied voices, and took great delight in speaking it, even if those voices were heard by no one but themselves.

He passed into the vague shadow of the trees, his feet crossing the boundary between the forest and the rest of the dreamworld. The air inside was cooler, but thrummed with energy. The voices grew in volume, replacing the sound of brushing leaves and creaking branches that he would have expected if he had been in an earthly place. His breath caught as he heard a fragment of phrase in English. At least he thought it was English; the accent was unlike any he'd ever heard, although at times it came close to complete recognition.

It was hard to parse out every word over the general low-level cacophony, but every now and then there were words he recognized, mostly because they were unique and linked by a common thread. He first heard "hurly-burly", then "Dunsinane" and "Birnam wood". Bruce stood, swiveling his head from one side to the other, trying to triangulate where these particular words were coming from. With each recognition, he took a few steps toward where they seemed to originate. Eventually, he could hear entire lines from the tale he was so familiar with: "Show his eyes, and grieve his heart; Come like shadows, so depart!"

Somewhere, Shakespeare's Macbeth was being recited, specifically the first scene, in which the future king encounters three witches that prophesy his future. The play had always been one of Bruce's favorites, in his mind the perfect literary encapsulation of man's unending drive for power, and how it inevitably causes his downfall. The words themselves seemed to be emanating from the yards-thick tree in front of him. How was this possible? And were all the other voices surrounding him also coming from the millions of trees? This particular one did seem to be sturdier that the others, its bark dark and thickly grooved. It had seen many years of healthy growth, and even its lower branches overhead were heartier than the trunks of many of those around it. As a living organism, it was unutterably beautiful.

For the briefest of instants, Bruce caught a flash of the memory he had experienced earlier, when he had seen one of his invented characters apparently conjured out of thin air near an unusually effective movie premiere. He recognized that same electric feeling now, telling him he was seeing a story spontaneously made into something alive. Then, it had been a person; now, it was a tree. But the similarity in emotional feel was undeniable...

A realization hit him with almost physical force. He was standing in a forest that was also what he had, for lack of a better name, been calling the AllStory. Since the night of that premiere, he had tried to find out more about this unusual concept. The awareness of it had been around long before Bruce came to learn of it, but had been hidden well, its secret details discussed and discreetly passed along only by a select few. Over the years he had found tangential bits of it, and felt he knew a little of its nature, if not its true name.

The secret, he learned, was this: stories, in their own way, are alive. And not in the sense that they live in our hearts and minds. No, that night in the alley had been his first glimpse into the possibility that when stories are loved, when they are felt in human hearts and turned around and around in human minds, as they are told and retold over years, that process of imagination weaves some kind of alchemy that begins to shape and bend reality.

At first, his mind rebelled against the concept. But the more he pulled at the thread, finding tiny mentions of it in secret literary circles by authors who had similar inklings of the nature of things, it began to make more sense. He began to think of all the fictional characters he had read about, and how the best ones had become ingrained in him, a part of his soul. These experiences formed some of the deepest human connections he had ever known. And now he was aware that there were many others who had read those same books and conjured those same people out of their own thoughts... the same words forming a common neural path in the vast network of human minds, ones that were continually reinforced, by the exact same words, the exact same conveyance of thought. Couldn't the argument be made that a character like Lady Macbeth, or Huckleberry Finn, or Gilgamesh, was more fully realized, more shared, more *real*, than just about anyone else in the history of the world?

The hardest part to accept in all this -- that the world of humanity was the jumping-off point for countless other worlds, ones that had started out imaginary but had evolved into their own little universes, where heroes and villains lived and breathed, where anything from fantastic epics to tiny scraps of fancy had a chance of being made flesh, tangentially weaving themselves into the tapestry of reality?

Bruce was now faced with the idea that what he had been chasing all these years was real. All of it. The author wondered what all these other trees clustered around Macbeth were. Where had they come from, what language emanated from their cores, how were they affected by the stories whose branches and roots entwined with theirs? And, his sharper-than-average ego spoke from the back of his head, where were *his* trees, the living incarnations of his stories? What worlds had he dreamed, that now grew in this impossibly fertile place?

He was starting to run through the forest, his bare feet pounding through the lush underbrush. His mind had suddenly become ravenous to see more of this forest, to try in some meager way to grasp its breadth and its inner connections. He sprinted through shaft-lit, green chapels formed by arching trunks, whispering voices urging him on, deeper into the heart of the story-forest, faster and faster, until it seemed to be rushing toward him more quickly than he was moving toward it, denser and darker and denser and darker...

-12.3-

Kelly knew what was happening. She had been watching for the warning signs for a while, ever since she had seen Dale not quite let his emotions flood through him when he realized that Glenda had died. It was his sense of duty that had gotten him back on the snowmobile after they had made that terrible discovery. She hadn't known the man long, but enough to know that it was his primary driving force. He had told everyone that he would get them down the mountain, and that was what he had focused on, not allowing his mind to fully accept what he had just lost.

Being around athletes as much as she had been in her life, she had seen the scenario played out many times, in many permutations. Everyone went through the traditional five stages of grieving -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- but she also knew that for each individual there were little epicycles of emotion contained within them. In the sports world it paid to know the various ways these could play out. Loss was utterly visceral out on the field, often accompanied by physical jolts of one kind or another, and there was often little time to react before you had to go back out and deliver a better performance. The paths through grief were varied and rapid. And right now, with her arms looped around Dale, she imagined she could feel everything he was going through. And the outlook wasn't good.

After the strange white-out and the realization that he might not be able to fulfill his primary directive of saving them all, she had felt the change in the muscles of his midriff. When he saw the Deertail Lodge come back into view after thinking they had finally left it behind, he had tensed in panic, but then relaxed. This humiliation, piled on top of loss -- and yes, she could tell that the security guard was processing his inability to deliver them all to safety as humiliation -- dealt him a second blow that closely matched the pain of the first. It was like a ball player who breaks their leg near the tail end of a clearly losing match... It seemed unnecessary and vindictive, even if there were no real source to point blame toward.

Kelly hadn't started to get scared until she felt resolve flooding back into Dale's muscles. This kind of tension felt distinct from effort, and she recognized it quickly. It was the kind of tension a batter gets when they've been brushed back too many times and is about to storm the pitcher's mound, or the footballer who is about to double down on the behavior that has gotten her a yellow card *because* she has gotten a yellow card. With a sudden pickup in the snowmobile's speed, and the failure to change direction, she still didn't know exactly what Dale was intending, but she knew that any decision he made at that point would likely be impulsive and self-destructive.

Pain of this sort, more specifically internalized pain, was the only thing that would make a man like Dale forget about who else his present decisions were going to affect. And so, with the treads of the snowmobile churning up the roof tiles, the whole vehicle feeling like it was going to shake itself to pieces, and the leading edge of the hotel roof approaching, she did the only thing she could. Kelly's arms, already wrapped around Dale a few inches above his utility belt, lifted. She turned her head, laying her ear and cheek flat against the broad expanse of his back.

Her left hand slid up his chest, to just over the place his heart must be, and lightly pressed there. Then she clenched her thighs around the seat of the snowmobile and forced herself to be conscious of Manoj's arms, which were in turn wrapped around her, savoring the warmth and reassurance of them. She hoped that Dale could feel that warmth as well, the warmth of all of them, passing through her and into his broken heart.

She waited. Seconds streamed past like the wind, and since she could no longer see how much runway they had before the roof ended in empty air, there was nothing else for her to do but wait, and hope that it was enough. Please, Dale, she thought, hoping that he could somehow feel her thoughts, think of us. We all have homes to return to, like Glenda. Would she have wanted her death to be the thing that doomed us all?

For a long moment, Dale's body did not change, as if he had turned into stone, bent on taking all six of them to oblivion. Then, beneath the palm of the hand she had placed on Dale's heart, Kelly felt him exhale, in one long, shuddering sigh of resignation, defeat and acceptance. Then she felt herself being pressed closer against his back, just as much because his muscles were loosening as that the snowmobile was beginning to slow.

Kelly heard a distant yelp from Sheryl, guessing that the sudden pressure she was feeling on her legs was unexpected. It didn't matter, because it wasn't until the combination vehicle had almost come to a stop that the sledge it was towing began to slew a little to the side. Then they were no longer moving.

The engine cut out, and a stunning silence descended. Kelly remained where she was, her hand over Dale's heart, her other arm still around his waist, feeling the coiled tension in his muscles. She waited patiently, and the ultimate release finally came. She felt the big man start to curl around her palm, closing in himself like a flower being crushed. He hunched down over the handlebars, and Kelly continued to cling to him. She knew the second part of what was coming. She had seen a smaller version of it so many times, in locker rooms and the quiet spaces of empty stadiums after everyone had left, the inevitable result that comes with the knowledge that a possible future, one that could have been so beautiful and triumphant, is now closed off forever.

She remained pressed close to Dale's back as his spine arched, his head tipped back, and he released a cry of anguish so visceral that tears squeezed out of the corners of Kelly's eyes. She could actually feel his release of energy, the way his very frame shook with his explosion of grief and regret. His voice tapered off into a long, pained whimper, and although she expected it to devolve into sobbing, it didn't. By the end, it seemed like he had nothing else to let loose. His body, deflated, lowered down over the handlebars again. She kept her hand pressed against his chest the whole time, wondering if maybe it was the pressure of her arms around him that had kept him from literally flying apart with sorrow.

Dale drew in a long, deep breath, replacing all that he had lost in his protracted cry. The rise-and-fall flow of it returned, and it wasn't until she felt it that Kelly was reassured that they were all not about to go over the edge. The man had given voice to his hurt, and now he could move forward. She opened her eyes, lifted her head, and took a look around.

They had come closer to the forward edge of the roof than she felt comfortable admitting; only about four feet of shingles remained in front of them before the drop-off. They were close to one of the front corners of the Lodge, marked by a small cupola, about the size of a large tool shed, a smaller version of the lobby facade that reared higher into the black sky a good two hundred feet away. They had come down the avalanche slope right onto the roof of the half-enveloped Lodge, which must have looked to the bereaved driver of the snowmobile like a custom-made ski jump to nowhere.

She still didn't move, because Dale didn't either. She would stay there as long as he wanted her to, but so far there was no resistance, no subtle shrug that told her he didn't need her anymore. For a long time they just sat there, waiting for the last of it to pass.

-12.4-

He really would have done it. The solution had been right in front of him, as clearly as if the avalanche had laid out a destined path, one that he only had to follow. And Dale had had every intention of doing just that, until he had been stopped by a hand.

On a very conscious level, he knew that the palm that had laid itself so gently across his aching heart was Kelly's. With that knowledge alone, it wouldn't have been enough to put the brakes on. With the wind increasing in his face, with the edge of the world coming on ever faster, his mind chose to conjure something decidedly unreal, but sharper and more real than anything else he had experienced that interminable, horrible night.

What if, his thoughts unspooled, that hand were Glenda's? He imagined that if she had ever placed her hand directly in the center of his chest, that's exactly what it would have felt like. He knew it wasn't hers, and understood that on every level, but his mind wouldn't quit imagining it. It was some extension of her, telling him not to give up, to keep fighting even though she was no longer there to help and inspire him. It was this thought -- which he heard clearly in her voice, even though he knew it was really his own mind -- that convinced him to bring the snowmobile under control, and to finally let it stop.

Even then, it wasn't over. He still felt the urge to punch the throttle, to finish the job. It seemed preferable to a life of years stretching out before him without Glenda in them. All that future time, every morning waking up and remembering what had happened. Could he really face that? This is what prompted his howl, all the rage of a beautiful life destroyed being thrown up into the indifferent sky.

And all the while, that pressure remained on his sternum, never changing. When he finally slumped forward, every last ounce of energy seemingly expended, it stayed, a gentle reminder of how he was not alone. Not on this snow-covered roof, or in this crazy looping nighttime world. There were still others.

For the moment, at least, that was enough.

He straightened, pulled back his shoulders to their natural position. He felt his chest expand, cool air flow back into his depleted lungs. And still the hand remained. He took his hand -- the one formerly poised over the throttle -- and covered the hand with his own. He knew it wasn't Glenda's, and he knew that it wasn't going to be there forever, as an eternal reminder of her, but for that moment, he allowed himself to believe that both those things were true. For the first time, he felt a twinge of relief that he had not sent them all plunging over the edge of the roof, to slam into the snow-covered garden that ran the length of the front of the lodge, far below.

He took another deep breath, patted Kelly's hand twice, and pulled it away from his chest. He focused on keeping the feeling of its pressure in place, though. He hoped it would last. "Thank you," he whispered, not knowing if Kelly heard him. She gave no overt sign that she had, but he did feel her arm on his waist squeezing him slightly before releasing its hold.

He heard Manoj's voice, unsteady. "How do we get down from here?"

Finally, a question Dale knew the answer to. Moving slowly enough to make sure that Kelly wasn't going to get kicked, Dale lifted himself up off the snowmobile and dismounted. "Over here," he said, and walked toward the cupola at the corner of the building. He stepped up the side of it that faced the rear of the building, and threw open a latch that was all but hidden in the multiple layers of woodwork that gave the structure an ornamental feel. The entire back wall of the cupola swung out, revealing it to be entirely hollow inside.

Kelly and Manoj followed, fascinated by the revelation. "What is this?" Manoj asked.

"Roof access. For repairs," Dale said, his throat scratched by the first words he had spoken since his desperate cry. "It was part of the original design, but it's been modified since then. We should be able to get everyone back down this way."

The young man continued, "And we... want to go back down?"

Dale paused from his survey of the cupola's interior. His back still turned to the couple, he muttered, "What other choice is there?"

He heard a sound that might have been Kelly swatting her boyfriend's sleeve, silently imploring him not to answer that question. It was okay; he knew enough about Manoj now to take his concern at face value. Of course he was going to look for alternatives; it was in his nature.

Dale continued to survey the inside of the small shed. It was still as he remembered from three years ago, when he had accompanied the maintenance crew in the pre-season inspection, just to see the mountain from a new vantage point. The long trapdoor in the floor seemed untwisted, just as the cupola's exterior was; the avalanche's damage didn't seem to have affected this forward corner of the building as much as elsewhere. He took just a moment to look out of the downslope window, silently cursing the devious mirage of the town that still hung there, glowing warmly far below. They had felt so close to escaping...

He turned, walked right past the young couple hovering at the doorway and headed for the sledge. He threw a "Would you mind opening the trap, please?" over his shoulder to them as he steeled his nerves for picking Glenda's body up off the spot where she still lay reclined against the storage bags. Four expectant eyes -- Kerren and Sheryl -- looked up at him from their places next to her.

"We can get back inside through the trapdoor in there," he said simply.

Sheryl had sat up, no longer bracing her feet against the back of the snowmobile. "A trapdoor?" she asked. "How are we going to--"

"You'll see. It won't be too hard." Dale said, his voice tired beyond measure. He was looking down at Glenda, who lay as if sleeping. The light from the blind moon overhead, shining on the bits of unmelted snow that had settled on her face, gave some semblance of life to her skin, but Dale knew it was an illusion, like so much else in this new world.

The two women watched as he bent down to the desk clerk and peeled away the bags he had laid across her, sticky and heavy with blood. Underneath, her clothes were in the same blackened condition. It physically hurt to look at her, the obscene knife handle sticking out of her chest. He wanted to wrench it out, throw it over the edge of the roof (just as he had almost thrown all these people off), but couldn't. He couldn't shake the feeling that to do so would hurt her, and he couldn't bear to take even that small of a part in the terrible act that had destroyed her.

He picked her up, supporting her shoulders and knees, never taking his eyes off her face as he hoisted her tenderly. Without watching his feet at all, he carried her steadily across the slightly-angled roof to the cupola. Kelly and Manoj were just finishing their struggle with the oversized trapdoor, swinging it up to release a draft of significantly-warmer air out of the five-by-ten gap they had just created in the cupola's floor.

Underneath, a shallow set of wooden stairs led down into darkness, and alongside it was an equally shallow-graded ramp, really just an extra-wide, flat rail, built of apparently the same wood as everything else. It had been designed for equipment to be slid or rolled alongside the maintenance workers as they went up and down the stairs. Dale walked around to the far side of the trapdoor, past Manoj and Kelly where they stood solemnly, and reached the top of the stairs. He only looked away from Glenda's cool, relaxed face long enough to watch his foot take the first step, and then he began to descend, carrying her as, in a different universe, he might have carried her over a threshold, making sure that her head and feet cleared the sides of the roof. They disappeared together down into the dark.

-12.5-

They were going to have to get out of the room, which at the moment seemed like a pretty tall order. They were two old men, broken in different ways, and it was unclear just how far from this rickety old cot they could manage to get. But they had the fire of knowledge, and they would just have to hope that was enough.

Harmon withdrew from Benny's fractured brain slowly, carefully, not wanting to cause any more damage than had already been done to it. He wasn't even sure if he had such power, but he didn't want to risk it. He opened his eyes and he was out, Benny sitting next to him slumped back against the wooden wall of Harmon's small understairs room. Looking at the broken man, he marveled at how incredibly complex and beautiful the human mind was, even in such a compromised state. It was a depressing shock, going from such a sense of limitless potential and space, to being trapped inside a tiny box of bone. It was no wonder that people expected so little of themselves, and each other.

As disappointing as the physical world was compared to that of the mental, he had to fully return. Things needed to be done. The look in Benny's eyes when Harmon spoke to him meant that the kitchen worker knew this grim fact too, but with nearly infinite regret he knew he wasn't going to be much help.

"No worries," Harmon said to him, cautiously patting him on the knee. "We'll figure this out. I guess I can walk a little more, since I've made it this far. Maybe I can lure the thing out from wherever it is, get it to come to us..." The fear in Benny's eyes was growing more intense, so Harmon stopped his vocal spitballing. It was belatedly starting to dawn on him that if the two of them were going to defeat the Qoloni, they'd need more than one working body between the two of them.

It was his longing for the sense of weightlessness that came from being inside another's mind that made him think of Kerren again. Even while he admitted that the feeling could possibly be addictive and he should be careful, he knew that it was their only means of getting additional help. Out on the snow, he thought he had heard the distant sound of one of the lodge's snowmobiles heading down toward the village, and if that were true, the blonde woman (who, he couldn't help thinking, looked *so* much like Sarah) was most likely one of the passengers. If they had made it all the way down, they might be able to send assistance. Of course, how he could possibly explain what the Qoloni was, and how it would have to be fought, was something he would have to work out later.

Turning to Benny again (and feeling a flare in the broken ankle he had almost forgotten about during his inner travels), Harmon said, "I'm going to try to reach Kerren. Maybe she can send help to us." He didn't feel like explaining that Kerren was dealing with some mental and physical trauma of her own, because Benny seemed to be in a particularly emotionally vulnerable state. "Hold on," he said, "I'm going to see where she is and get a message to her, if I can."

Surprisingly, as he closed his eyes and prepared to reach out -- a process that seemed to get a little easier each time he did it -- Harmon felt a shaky, hesitant hand slip into his own. It was Benny, trying to hold onto him, as he would a lifeline. "Don't worry," Harmon said without trying to shake off the hand, "I'll be right back. And right here." It was true; where he was going next, his body would necessarily stay behind.

He felt that unique sense of dislocation again as he expanded his thoughts to outside his own body, pushing into the feeling of anti-world that he now understood existed everywhere, between all spaces and times. Almost immediately, he was distracted by something else, something fascinating: the presence of Kerren, less than a hundred feet away. She was high above him, much higher than he thought she should be, and far enough away that he had to wonder whether she was still in the Lodge or not. So perhaps she hadn't been on the snowmobile after all...

Harmon drew his disembodied presence back, trying to get a better overall look at the surroundings. He backed through the lobby, pointedly not looking at the disturbing, fading traces of life in the blood stains across the floor and up the stairs. He tried to keep his attention high, but he kept having to raise it, up above the Deertail's second floor, up above the thin attic space that lay on top of it...

He actually heard himself say aloud, "The roof, goddamnit. She's on the roof," and dimly felt Benny's hand clench a little too hard against his, back in his tiny room under the stairs.

They were *all* up there, in fact. Well, five of them were... no, six, but one of them... dear God, one of them felt vacant, a complete shell, nothing left... what had happened? As if he had willed it -- and maybe he had -- Harmon felt his consciousness slip inside that silent, still mind, and then just as quickly retreat. One phrase was all he could sum up about that vast, unlit space -- *There was nothing left.* They were the only possible words to describe what he had seen and felt in that eons-long instant he had been inside Glenda's mind. Until that moment, he hadn't even realized it was her, the person he had interacted with more than anyone else at the Lodge, because she was so unrecognizable in that form. He didn't feel the tears that spontaneously ran down his corporeal cheeks.

The only thing that gave him solace was Kerren. She was right there, next to the darkened form, so luminous she almost blinded his vision, forming a perfect counterpoint. How could one person be so incredibly *alive* while another, less than two feet away, was utterly, irrevocably absent?

He forced himself to turn away from this unsolvable dilemma, to turn to more pressing matters. How had they gotten up on the roof? A quick survey of the area seemed to answer this: the avalanche had piled snow up to and over the roof line at the back of the Lodge, so they must have driven right up onto it. But why?

Now he became aware of movement elsewhere on the roof. Dale (he had come to recognize the man's particularly warm energy signature, but now it seemed strangely ragged and dimmed, and Harmon believed he knew why) came over and knelt down next to Glenda's former self. Harmon watched as the security guard gingerly picked her up and turned to walk away. Harmon followed, watching as he carried her into one of the little cupolas, which he always assumed were merely ornamental, at the front corners of the Lodge. Now, he could see that there was a hatch there that led back inside. A young couple had just finished prying it up, and now leaned it against the inner wall of the cupola, standing back as far as they could to make room when they finished.

Dale moved slowly, reverently, as if enacting a ritual, and the others patiently waited while he descended into the Lodge with infinite care. Once he was out of sight, Manoj and Kelly moved out of the cupola, coming over to help Sheryl and Kerren -- it surprised him only a little that he knew all their names, having learned them tangentially through his previous time in Kerren's mind. They seemed to know exactly what to do without speaking, and picked up the injured woman, who had been wrapped in a rug around a thick piece of board that acted as a sort of travois. They moved without outward or inward communication, following Dale's pilgrimage into the cupola.

Harmon prepared himself, whispered an apology for intruding again, and dipped into Kerren's blazing mind for a second time.

-12.6-

The door slammed shut, and immediately warped as the dark thing impacted it from the other side. Carlos watched, fascinated, as it twisted and struggled, bending the door, its jamb, and the surrounding walls in ways that shouldn't have been possible. Before, when he had been down in Benny's room, he had been too terrified that the thing was going to break through to appreciate the phenomenon, but now that he was reasonably sure it couldn't, his feet became rooted to the spot where he stood, and he just observed it happening.

The blank face of the creature, until now, had lent it a kind of detachment. At least, that's how Carlos had thought about it; when your pursuer didn't have an expression to be read, you could never be sure of its motives. Was it angry at Carlos? Was it hungry? Was it insane? He would have been able to tell if it had a mouth, or eyes to look at. But its mere approximation of a human face made it hard to read. Carlos guessed from the way it was contorting its body, its hands blindly grasping in his direction through the membrane that its strange physics made of the door, that at least two of his guesses were true.

Now that he was out of immediate danger, Carlos was able to inspect his shoulder, which had taken so much force when he slammed into the door that he feared it might be broken, or at least dislocated. He touched it gingerly with his free hand, then rubbed it. It would be quite bruised, but it seemed intact. He was able to rotate it most of the way around in its socket, with no sensation sharper than the expected ache. He had lucked out on that count.

He watched the ripples and thrashes from the other side of the door until they started to subside. There was one final flurry of slashing activity from the other side, and then the thing retreated slowly, stealthily. The tips of the antlers were the last thing to disappear, the hard points receding high up on the wall above the door. It wasn't until it had entirely withdrawn that a long, deep shiver passed up the full length of Carlos's spine. He tried not to think too hard about what he had just escaped from. The most unnerving thing, he realized, was that it was so silent. Not even the twisting of reality itself as the walls and vases and doors wrapped around the thing's lean, horrible shape had made any sound. The ambience it left in its absence was almost as frightening as when it was snapping at his heels, which just lent even more surreality to the experience.

It was in this silence, however, that Carlos was able to discern a totally new sound. It was nearby, but muffled, a kind of hollow stepping and scraping, as if several people were walking slowly, methodically, in another room, over resonant wooden boards. For some reason, he was almost as afraid of this sound as he had been of the silence of the dark thing that, for all he knew, could still be waiting just outside the door. There was something ominous in its order.

Carlos's eyes drifted to the back corner of the room, where he saw a door he hadn't noticed before. It was unusually wide. He'd never been in this part of the Lodge before, but he assumed what lay beyond was more storage. Maybe some of the larger maintenance equipment? He stepped lightly over to it, listened to the steps as they continued their heavy treads. Some of them seemed weirdly synchronized, as if there were some kind of marching maneuver taking place inside. He tested the doorknob, found that it turned silently. He returned the knob to its resting position and backed away, not knowing whether he should risk going back into the hall, or seeing if the procession would try to gain access to his new hiding place.

All of a sudden, Carlos found himself filled with anger, which he hadn't been able to bring himself to feel against the dark creature he had been grappling with. Maybe it was the residual adrenaline from that encounter, but he found that he didn't want to spend the rest of his time in the Lodge running and hiding. He reached for the knob again, decisively turned it and threw the door open.

On the other side was another, longer storage room, lined with plastic storage racks, all of which were filled with every manner of things needed for the upkeep of a large, wooden building: cans of paint, stains, and varnish; boxes of nails, assorted woodworking supplies and equipment. But in the center of it, a long, shallow-grade staircase with open slats descended from a large rectangular gap in the ceiling, which let the moonlight hinted at through the window in the outer room shine down directly.

Next to this stairway -- which started almost over Carlos's head and descended to the far side of the room -- stood Dale, the Lodge's head of security, with a limp female form draped across his arms. He turned to look at Carlos as the door opened, and the expression on his face was confusing. It took a little longer for Carlos to realize what was coming down the stairs: three people together, one in front and two in back of a long, cylindrical shape as they stepped down the stairs as a unit. Carlos could only see the backs of their legs through the thick slats of the stairs, so he couldn't determine any more facts than that.

"What... what's happening?" Carlos's excitement about finding other able-bodied people in the Lodge was tempered by his uncertainty about what they were doing. "Is she all right?" He was speaking to Dale now, nodding his head at the woman in his arms. As soon as he had said the words, he realized that it was Glenda, the desk clerk who always had a warm smile for him -- and, he assumed, for everybody -- whenever he would venture out from his work in the kitchen. Dale only shook his head gravely.

Now the group was hitting the bottom of the stairs, and turning in his direction. Once all three of the group carrying the long shape had pivoted around his way, everyone stopped and looked at each other. It became clear to Carlos that what they were holding between them was a woman, wrapped in a rug. She surprised him by tilting her head his way, her bright eyes regarding him coolly. This made him assume that Glenda, despite the knife stuck high in her chest, was merely injured as well.

He broke the silence by saying, "It's outside the door. It chased me in here. But it can't go through solid objects. So we're safe for now."

The best feeling Carlos had that night, aside from when he realized that Benny was still alive, was the collective shudder of relative relief that went through the group when he spoke those words.

-13.1-

Sheryl was perched between strong emotions, not knowing from one moment to the next which way she was going to tip. On one hand, she was back inside the Lodge, out of the elements and inside an environment that was bounded, and she at least could pretend she understood. Not only that, but she surrounded by people she trusted, and who she felt deeply bonded to, now that they had gone through Glenda's tragic end together. Laid across this layer of comfort, though, was the fact that Kerren was still hurt and needed more care than getting carried around wrapped in a rug, not to mention that they had just re-entered the lair of some bizarre creature whose abilities and intentions weren't even clear yet.

She decided to put off her decision on how to feel until later. For right now, there was someone new in their midst, a man wearing what looked like an apron that seemed to have an inordinate amount of blood on it. She and the others had finished carrying Kerren down the stairs from the roof, and she kept moving, forcing them to keep following her. She walked until she was standing next to Dale, who was just standing there in silence, with Glenda still draped across his arms.

"Who are you?" Sheryl said to the bloodied man. As soon as she had spoken, she knew the words sounded harsher than she intended.

The man's eyebrows raised, clearly assuming he'd be welcomed more readily. "I'm Carlos," he answered. "I was working in the kitchen with Benny when the avalanche hit. Does she need--"

Sheryl didn't let him get distracted with questions about Glenda, who the man had clearly been looking at. "No. We need to know what's going on out there. You've seen that thing with the horns?"

Carlos focused back on her, nodding. "Like I said, it chased me in here. Benny's hurt, though. I told him I'd try to find a way to lure it away, so maybe we could get him some help..."

"Well," Sheryl said, nodding in various directions, "we've got people hurt too." She glanced over his shoulder and into the room beyond. "What's in there?"

"Just more storage," Carlos said, but his eyes kept drifting over to Glenda. This time, he spoke to Dale. "Is she going to be--"

Dale shook his head ruefully, and looked down at the woman in his arms. The snow that had accumulated in her lashes and on her cheeks had melted in the Lodge's relative warmth, the sheen making her look decidedly more alive than she had been outside.

Carlos breathed out an "Oh," and then stood with the group as silence gathered around them. A moment passed, and then Sheryl spoke again, as matter-of-factly as she could. "My wife's legs are broken. Is there someplace we can take her?"

Carlos eventually turned his attention back to her. "Well, it looks like any closed room would okay. Whatever that thing is, it can't pass through anything solid. I hit it with a -- a vase, I think -- and that almost brought it to a total stop. Like it had some kind of force field around it. Or maybe it *is* the force field. I don't know. What were you doing on the roof?"

"Trying to leave," Sheryl said. "But we just ended up right back here, where we started. There's no way to get off the mountain. So it sounds like we're stuck in here with it."

"Well, I came out here to see if I could find anyone else," Carlos continued, "so now that I helped that author guy, and found you all, I want to get back--"

The tension in the room started to ratchet back up. Manoj spoke up from the back of the transom that carried the blonde woman. "You saw Bruce Casey? Where is he?" The edge of rage in his voice was unmistakable.

Sheryl saw the look in Carlos's eyes get suddenly cagey, as if he was aware that what he was about to say was the vocal equivalent of walking through a minefield. "That thing was going to get him... So I grabbed it, and he got away."

"Where?" Sheryl asked insistently. "Where did he go?"

Carlos chest puffed out a little. "Sorry, but I was wrestling with what might be a literal demon at the time, I didn't get a chance to see. He was down by the other end of the hallway, where the whole thing collapsed. It was almost right above the kitchen where I was. But I left Benny down in Harmon's room, so now I'm going to--" He was starting to turn and leave.

"Wait. Please," Dale's voice filled the room, his throat strained. He nodded to Glenda, where she lay across his arms. "Let me go with you. I want to get her somewhere... safe." The regret in his voice was painfully clear. "Harmon's room would be good. Quiet. Can we take her there?"

Carlos looked at the big man, as if surprised by his sudden vulnerability. "Sure, Dale. We can get her there. It'll be a little crowded; Benny's not doing so well himself."

Sheryl jumped back in. "But it's a safe place? Can we take Kerren there too?"

As if given a cue, Kerren began twisting her head from one side to the other, letting out little, troubled hisses. Sheryl, concerned that she would hurt herself, said "Down! Put her down," to the couple holding the far end of the rug, and together they lowered the troubled woman to the floor. Sheryl ran and knelt next to her head as soon as she could. "Honey?" she soothed against Kerren's continued twisting inside her confines. "What's wrong? It's okay, we're going to get you someplace--"

She paused, listening. It was strange, but she thought she had heard something articulate in Kerren's breaths. She bent close, and there it was again. She was hissing two tiny phrases: "In here" and "Again".

"What's happening to her?" Manoj asked in an anxious whisper. For some reason, it didn't sound like he was asking because he didn't know.

Kerren's aspirations started to sound a little more like "heart". Sheryl leaned closer, trying to soothe her. "It's okay, honey, you'll be comfortable soon..." Her voice drifted off as she drew more disturbed by what her wife was doing. The urgency was starting to drift out of Kerren's repeated utterings of "heart", and her eyes were starting to take on a faraway look, as if there were something high overhead that was distracting her from where she was and what she was doing. Sheryl started to feel her old panic settling in, almost convincing her that the shock of Kerren's injuries had finally kicked in and she was fading away like Glenda had... but she managed to keep it at bay, at least for a few moments.

"What's that, Kerren?" Sheryl asked her, leaning closer, trying to divine her fading words.

"Sarah," Kerren said clearly. "It's all about Sarah. They all know her."

"Sarah?" Sheryl asked, confused. "What about her?... Honey, What does this have to do with your mother?"

-13.2-

Bruce couldn't remember a time when he felt so alive. He was bounding –- literally *bounding* -- through the impossibly dense air of the story-forest, hearing the whispers all around him, deliberately spurning literally millions of opportunities to stop and listen to the trees. Part of him longed to stop forever, however, to spend the rest of his life hearing the tales they had to tell. As much as he wanted that, there was also something pulling him along, a force that came as much from him as his destination, inexorably drawing the two together.

He had learned at some point in the past that lightning doesn't originate in the clouds. It partly does, but it also reaches up from the ground -- or whatever it is that is going to be struck -- simultaneously, a pair of possibilities seeking each other. Only when the connection is made does the bolt flow, linking the energies of heaven and earth. Now, barreling among trunk after massive trunk, barely missing them with uncanny accuracy, Bruce similarly felt what he was searching for ahead of him, reaching for him.

His own stories were there, in the depths of the forest, beckoning him on.

Would they be strong, hardy growths? He knew of at least three that would be, if any of them were. These were the novels that had been made into films or television shows. They had been cemented in more people's minds (and experienced more uniformly, which was something he intuitively knew was important in this forest) than any of his unadapted works could ever be. He imagined that triad as a grove unto themselves, with his more minor works surrounding them. It was this urge he was following, a burning need to see how his thoughts and dreams represented themselves in this world.

There they were, just ahead. The little drifting lights that illuminated even the darkest part of the forest -- which Bruce still didn't understand the purpose of -- seemed to grow more numerous around them. When he reached his own particular piece of the imagination grove, he instinctively slowed. The soul has a way of recognizing its own creations, no matter what form they may take, and his breathing became easier as he was able to stop and see his life's work in physical form.

He sighed. As humbling as it was to see his entire career distilled into a sizeable grouping of trees, he couldn't deny the pride he felt in being able to encompass it all in one look. He was right; the three major works (Trench City; Eyes of Malevolence; and The Unpaved Road) formed the boundaries of his area, whispering their familiar tales to the heavy air. In between, ranging in size from small seedlings to close rivals to the mighty trunks of the main three, were his other works, from essays and think pieces all the way to novellas and short stories, every one of which must have sparked the interest of more than a few people, judging by how large they had grown.

He was surprised to see a few of them that he hadn't known had acquired such a following. Some of his stories seemed to have found quite an audience, but others that had done well for him financially looked particularly slim and even withered. He didn't know if this was because they had fallen out of favor, or maybe his creator's bias (not to mention all that money) had blinded him to the fact that they weren't that well regarded.

There was one in particular that was on the bigger side, and seemed to have more floating lights clustered around it than the others. As he grew closer to it, carefully stepping through the verdant grove without disturbing any of his other works, he suddenly realized which one it was, and his blood ran cold... He heard the name "Ynarra" coming from its gently whispering leaves. The Qoloni. Shit.

The book itself had been a quick cash grab, typed out in a three-week fever dream that may have been the result of particularly rancid batch of cocaine. The idea of the creature itself, that horrible dark thing with massive stag horns, had come to him so quickly and forcefully that he knew he wasn't going to be able to get rid of it until he purged it onto the page, and so he had. It wasn't his fault, entirely, that the result was a slim novel he had shipped off to his publisher and made a nice chunk of cash from without even remembering much about doing it.

The ever-present little lights were circling this particular story-tree in what, to them and their usually languid pace, looked like a kind of feeding frenzy. They circled and spun around the trunk in both upward and downward helices, as if hunting for a place to land. Watching their restless movement, Bruce dimly grasped that the lights were some kind of conveyance method for human thought. It might even be that the lights were what made the trees grow, their warming light and attention coaxing the creative works to rise even higher and stronger.

Bruce looked up the length of the trunk, watching as the story-tree strove upward, slowly striving toward the overarching canopy that his major works were creating. Was it possible, he wondered, that The Qoloni could rival them, given the proper time and care? And, quick on the heels of that thought... Did he want it to?

The work itself didn't seem to care what its creator thought. It was growing dangerously close to punching through the canopy despite its relative slimness, and now that he was really inspecting it, he began to see how it was unlike all his other works. Even though the thought-lights were abnormally present at the base, Bruce could see that they were even more concentrated higher up, where there seemed to see some kind of secondary growth, a large protuberance hanging from its upper reaches. He squinted up at it, trying to figure out what it was. There certainly was nothing else like it up at that level, a sort of offshoot that was attracting a lot of the drifting lights...

That thing up there, that not-quite-natural fruit high on the Qoloni-tree... what could cause such a thing? Did it have something to do with Theda -- or her conspicuous absence in his recent life? During the cataclysmic dream-storm so long ago, he was sure that she had been scared off by the Qoloni, as it somehow made its presence known here in this sacred grove-world. In one of those wordless transactions that the brain sometimes makes when it fully grasps a concept all at once, Bruce understood. There were so many things he didn't know, but at least now he thought he knew what was happening, despite its reason.

Somehow, his fictional work had manifested itself in and around the Deertail Lodge. The side of the mountain became an offshoot, a pocket Universe splitting off from the main, centered on Bruce's proximity (plus the Qoloni's own story elements) and dragging part of the core "real" world along with it. This dislocation had caused an avalanche, setting off the chain of events that led to his return to the dreamworld, and reaching this revelation.

But something extraordinary must have happened in the world that birthed it to create such weird fruit. Works of fiction didn't just spin off their own little mini-Universes all over the place... did they? He tried to marry this thought to what he had already learned about the AllStory. Given that concentrations of focused human imagination could combine to create a sort of reality out of fictional people and places, perhaps sometimes those things could infiltrate the commonly-experienced real world. It was like when Bruce had briefly seen one of his own characters outside the movie premiere party. It had been on all the revelers' minds, and they had all been similarly picturing the vision they had just shared in the theater. Could there have been a similarly high concentration of thought being enacted in the Deertail for some reason?

Bruce had an inkling of why. He had seen it in Jimmy Gough's office, and on the face of the injured woman he'd carried out of her hotel room. Both times, he was looking at a woman that looked like Theda... but then again, Theda in turn looked like someone else, didn't she? Was it possible that this woman, the original muse for the story of the Qoloni, was somehow involved in all this? If so, she could be the connecting point of what must have been a colossal intersection of imaginations.

He had to get back to that tiny Universe, the one he could see represented by the ponderous weight hanging high in the Qoloni-tree above him. He could see now that the fault was his, and the people who had been trapped along with him -- although they must have their own parts to play -- had done nothing wrong. He was the one who had attacked them, stabbed one of them. His mind, gradually clearing of fear and panic, began to see how badly he had handled all of this. He had to return to the growth he had created, and resolve it.

Bruce moved to the base of the tree, reached out a hand and pressed it against the thin trunk. The thought-lights parted for him like water, altering their courses to spiral up and down uninterrupted. The trunk felt sturdy, unyielding under his hand. Bruce stepped forward and ran his hands across the bark, looking for any little protuberances of subtext he could find. There were enough to give him confidence, and he closed the gap, putting both arms around this manifestation of his creation. The lights enveloped him, giving him space to touch the tree while continuing their eternal circling.

Bruce looked up the length of his story, judged what the best route was to reaching the bulbous fruit he had unwittingly created, and started climbing.

-13.3-

Manoj felt that he had been holding himself together admirably. He had accepted things that were so far beyond his normal worldview that mentally, he was almost unrecognizable to himself as the man who had arrived at the Deertail Lodge with his girlfriend the day before. So he fully accepted it when Sheryl bent down and began listening to the words that Kerren was whispering, something that seemed to be about the blonde woman's mother.

After a few exchanges, Kerren's voice began to fade out, and Manoj found that Sheryl was leaning so far forward to hear that she was obscuring her wife's face with her head. "What was that?" he couldn't help but ask. "What's that about her mother?"

Sheryl listened a little more, her ear all but pressed against Kerren's mouth, and then straightened up a little, looking at the group standing around her, bewildered. "I can't tell. It's something about her mom. Kerren called her last night, actually, right before dinner, just a few hours... before the avalanche. But I don't understand what she's trying to say about her."

Manoj moved forward instinctively, wanting to help. "May I give it a try?" He looked down at Kerren, who was still lightly mouthing words, her eyes closed, speaking from the edge of consciousness, as if dictating a message from some other place.

Kelly nudged his shoulder. "Try it, Noj," she said.

Sheryl instinctively put her hand out over Kerren, palm down, as if by doing so she were putting an impenetrable barrier between the couple and her wife lying on the floor. "No, it should be me." She seemed disheartened, however, her eyes turning toward Kerren with a dismayed look.

Manoj was just about to back off and respect her wishes, when Kelly spoke up. "Let him try, Sheryl. You might not be understanding her because you're expecting to hear *her*. And I don't think that's what's happening here."

Manoj managed to say, "I'm often on long-distance conference calls with horrible connections. Please, Sheryl. Let me try to interpret her." When Sheryl didn't move, he assumed that meant her acquiescence, and carefully knelt down next to Kerren. He adjusted his ill-fitting hat to keep his ear clear, cupped a hand to it, leaned in, and began to focus on nothing other than the sounds that were being whispered through her lips, making no assumptions about their content, only concentrating on faithfully conveying them.

He consciously forced himself to relax, recalling when a colleague would call from across the world, dictating code for a particularly tricky patch that Manoj had to manually type into whatever project he was working on. He opened his mouth and repeated the whispered sounds he heard, barely taking time to think about them as they lifted into the chill air:

"Her name was Sarah. She arrived at the Deertail Lodge for the first time twenty-five years ago. I don't need to describe her for you, because you're looking at her right now; apparently, it takes a mother and daughter to look find two people so much alike. But the one thing I can't describe to you is the energy she carried with her. It was like you could tell when she was about to enter the room. The air would turn electric, and you would start picking up a vibration that you couldn't quite pinpoint. And then you'd turn around, and she would be just walking in.

"I can't vouch for anyone but myself, but others must have been inspired by her too. They each tried to capture whatever kind of essence she brought, in their own ways, whether it was writing or painting. Jimmy Gough clearly never forgot the blonde woman, and apparently neither did Bruce Casey. Then there were others -- myself included -- that didn't have their kind of creativity. So I did what I could... I visualized her as the constant heroine of the books I read obsessively. I didn't even notice when I had stumbled across the very book that she had been the real inspiration for.

"But I'm starting to understand what kind of mental connection something like that can have, especially when there are others nearby that feel the same way. I know how I felt when I saw Kerren yesterday... like time had frozen, that somehow I had gotten old while she stayed exactly the same. Now I'm wondering if that sense of dislocation has anything to do with what has happened to us here tonight.

"I also can't help but wonder if this never would have happened, had Benny and I not both read Casey's book. This thing that's hunting us, this Qoloni, has come to life, right out of those pages, just as this woman who looks like Sarah has walked right back into our lives. I don't know, is it possible that when four people who have been so inspired by the same woman all read the same book...? I can't even begin to figure it out. And honestly, I'm too old and broken and tired right now to try to figure that part out.

"But that's the thing. Even if Benny and me don't know why, at least we know *how*. It's right there; the answer is in the book itself--"

Heads turned at the sound of the storage room's outer door behind hit by something, hard. They all immediately knew it wasn't the Qoloni; its interactions with the physical world had never been anything other than perfectly silent. Manoj's eyes widened, as if waking from a dream.

"Let me in!" a voice called three inches of metal and wood away. "It's coming!" Bruce's voice had lost none of the panicked edge from the last time they had seen him, when he stabbed Glenda and ran bleeding up the stairs. Manoj might have imagined hearing Dale's jaw clench audibly, in between the bangs.

Kerren's voice continued, but with such external noise there was no hope of Manoj relaying the information. There was suddenly movement around him; three people immediately headed for the source of the sound. Kelly was the first into the other room; Carlos was a close second, and Dale, of all people, was the last. He still held Glenda's body in that classic movie pose -- judging by the man's posture, it was clear that she was a burden that he was prepared to carry as long as necessary, and possibly beyond. He was last through the doorway, taking care not to bump Glenda into anything as he did, calm and self-assured.

The banging from the storage room door continued, a hammering of fists that was escalating into a continuous drumroll. Manoj was still bent over Kerren, trying in vain to decipher her continued monologue over the sound of shuffling feet and creaking floorboards, but it was a lost cause. Then came the sound of the door opening, followed by stumbling, then that of the door closing and a hysterical barrage of words from the author: "Thank you God thank you now please hear me out I think I understand what's--" There was a strange whacking sound, followed by a startled yelp, and the thud of a body on the floor.

Then, silence. Manoj could no longer see what was going on in the outer room, but the sudden absence of motion and noise was jarring, so much so that he almost missed the last few words Kerren was saying:

"--the mirror on the cover. Do you understand? It's the *mirror*!"

-13.4-

Dale didn't know he was going to hit Bruce. On the contrary, he had been fully prepared to restrain himself. After all, he still supported Glenda's body with both arms. Despite what Bruce had done, Dale had had time to assess that it had not been his intention to stab Glenda and subsequently cause her death. He had meant to stab Dale himself, a fact that, strangely, the security guard took that much less personally. The man had been raving, and had in fact just injured himself when Kelly prevented him from drawing his knife cleanly.

Despite all this, Dale had thought he was going to give the author a chance. But when Bruce burst through the door, spewing words, taking the state he had been in when he had turned violent before and intensifying it even further, Dale's instinct went into overdrive. Before the man could take more than a few steps into the room or finish his sentence, Dale struck him with the only thing he had available...

Dale had seen many movies where it looks like the hero is about to shoot the bad guy, rifle or shotgun pressed tightly against temple, and then in a fit of mercy swinging it around, knocking him unconscious with the stock instead. The sound was always a satisfying Foley-crack in those movies, but clocking Bruce in the head with both of Glenda's feet -- with the pivoting force of Dale's full body weight behind them -- was markedly less so.

The end result wasn't similar, either. The author took a half-step to the side, his voice erupting into a yelp that might have been his next ten seconds of babbled words compressed, and then toppled, slumping to the floor, his shoulder taking the brunt of the fall and just keeping him from breaking his head open on the boards.

Kelly's hands instinctively reached out to catch Bruce, but it all happened too fast. She was left with arms extended into empty air. She looked down, saw what a mess of blood Bruce's back was, and slowly lowered them again.

"Bastard," Dale hissed under his breath into the overwhelming silence that filled the room in the absence of the author's babbling. Carlos' eyes were fixed on the door, as if fearing it would spring open again. Dale couldn't help but notice that the cook was making no effort to keep it closed, however. There didn't seem to be a lock on their side of the door anyway.

Dale checked Glenda's feet. They seemed to be okay; if she had been alive, he would have guessed that she would be in for at least a painful ankle bruise. Even so, he couldn't help but think she would have approved of his rash act. Actually, he visualized her giving him a high-five for some reason.

On the floor, the author groaned. "Where the hell have you been?" Carlos asked him, bending angrily over the fallen man. "I tackled that... whatever it was... to keep it from killing you, and then you just disappeared."

Bruce shook his head in apparent denial as he rolled fully onto his side. He took several labored breaths, then feebly turned his palms toward them. "Give me a chance to explain, please," he uttered, and then took even more breaths. Dale didn't believe that he needed them, not for a second.

Dale didn't feel like waiting. "Get on your feet, Mr. Casey. You have some apologizing to do."

Bruce's sense of indignation flared surprisingly quickly. "Me?" He pointed a finger up at Kelly. "She's the one who slashed me in the back!"

"To prevent you from stabbing someone," she jumped in. "Which you did anyway."

The author didn't have an answer for that. His eyes fell across Glenda at that moment, realizing that she was the shape Dale was carrying, and also the one whose feet had had struck him. He fell silent. Dale felt a small portion of satisfaction, seeing the author visibly wither as the realization of her state began to dawn on him.

"That's right," the security guard said, affirming the suspicion. "Now, why should we listen to anything you have to say?"

The question seemed to galvanize Bruce, re-flooding him with energy, although he remained cowed on the ground. "But I've been there! I've seen the stories! You've got to listen to me!"

Carlos stepped in, clearly concerned that Bruce was about to get bludgeoned again. "Slow down, Mr. Casey. Was that thing really after you?" He cocked his thumb at the undistorted, closed door.

"Yes!" Bruce blurted. "Well, not *directly* after me, but it's out there! It's made its way inside the Lodge--" and here he cocked an eyebrow at Dale "--because you let it, and it has free reign of the halls. But it's okay, I know how to defeat it now. I know how to send it back!"

"Back to where?" Kelly asked, with genuine interest in her voice.

Her sincerity seemed to give the author pause. His head still cocked up off the floor at what must have been an uncomfortable angle, he mused for a second. "I'm... not entirely sure where. But I can at least say that it will be well away from us. Not only that, but I think that when we banish it, we'll snap ourselves out of this broken loop that we're in!"

Dale, Kelly, and Carlos all looked at each other, unsure of whether they were about to be presented with a bizarre solution to an even more bizarre situation, or if the man was just raving. Dale tended to think it was the latter, because of the cold weight lying across his arms. He could already tell that he was never going to be able to forgive the man lying before him, no matter how mad he was, or how mad this terrible night had driven him.

"Okay," Carlos said. "Assume that we believe you. How do we destroy the thing?"

"The Qoloni," Bruce corrected offhandedly, before launching into another near-hysterical monologue. "The trees, the ones I saw in my dreams, they're actually *stories*, from all over the world, well, at least a tree-shaped representation of the human perception of them. For whatever reason, we've become trapped in some kind of version of one of the stories I created, as if this part of our world has split off and become a place for the creature from my book to grow...

"I thought I could climb the tree, pull that odd fruit off the branch, and maybe that would force us back into our real, waking world, but the closer I climbed toward it, it just seemed to be getting bigger, until it no longer seemed that I was moving toward it, but that it was pulling me in, encompassing me, growing larger and larger until I was falling into it, and it was bringing me back here... Then I was in the hallway, just outside this door. As if I had never left." At this point, his eyes became unfocused. "But *did* I ever leave? No, I must have..."

Dale had had enough. "Shut up!" he said to the author. "If you know how to end this, then tell us! If not, then we have other things to take care of." Even Dale didn't know if he was talking about killing the author in revenge or not.

"I do! I do!" Bruce Casey put his hands up, trying to placate the towering guard. "Just let me..." He froze, then tentatively put his hands on the floor, clearly trying to brace himself so he could get to his feet. He halted as his palms touched down, keeping an eye on Dale. When the big man did not move, Bruce pushed himself up, wincing in pain, and managed to get onto his knees. Then he sideshuffled over to the nearest wall, braced himself against it and slowly stood, wincing even more. His hands reflexively went toward the small of his back, but stopped short of actually touching it.

Kelly didn't step forward, but motioned to him. "Turn around. Let me see how bad it is."

The author pivoted slowly, rotating the wound in his lower back into view. It looked worse than it was; the vertical slit just parallel to the base of his spine was shallow, but a large amount of blood had soaked into his sleep pants and t-shirt, giving a horrific impression.

"You'll live," Kelly said, after giving it only the most cursory of glances. "Now turn around, but stay against the wall."

The author did, an earnestly contrite look on his face.

Dale spoke up again. "You said you know how to destroy that thing out there. So tell us."

"The Qoloni, yes," Bruce said. He had nothing else to do with his hands, so he started wringing them, as if he were obsessively washing blood from them. "You've seen the way it reacts when it touches physical objects, yes?"

"Not only seen, felt," Carlos said, shuddering at the memory of its buzzing, chaotic surface against his body.

"Well, I created it for the book when I was in a particularly... agitated state. I made it feel like I felt at the time, which was... I was thinking about what it happens when you touch a surface, because you know you never really *touch* a surface, you just get so close that the atoms in your hand start being electrically repulsed by the atoms in the thing you're touching, billions of these infinitesimally small interactions that keep you from passing through it altogether..."

Carlos jumped in. "So is that why, when I threw stuff at it, it seemed like it made the objects warp around itself instead of actually touching it?"

"That's right!" Bruce took a tentative step away from the wall, and toward the group. "It's made a completely different kind of stuff altogether. It can't fuuly touch anything in this world, not really."

Kelly spoke up. "So why are we so afraid of it, if it can't touch us?"

Carlos added, "Those horns certainly don't look harmless."

Bruce's fevered gaze flew between them. "That's the one place where it can at least partly intersect this world, at least that's how it was in the book..." In reaction to the disturbed glares he was getting, he continued, "It's the monster of the story! I had to give it at least some teeth... so to speak."

Kelly sighed in frustration. "So how do we do whatever you said... banish it?"

Bruce's attitude went from cowering to enthusiastic inside of a second. "Yes! That's the ending. In my book, the Qoloni first appears to Princess Ynarra by attempting to push its way through from the *back* of a mirror." His eyes went far away, deep inside his own invention. "She's looking into it, and sees her face beginning to distort, only to find that the mirror is actually bulging toward her. Funny thing, that was something that happened to me during that time too--"

Dale spoke absently. "Like Sheryl claimed that it was trying to get through the back of her closet..."

Bruce continued as if he hadn't heard. "So the princess does just the reverse at the story's climax, luring it into the other side, the reflective surface of the mirror. It's fitting, don't you think?"

His look of creative glee was met with utterly blank stares. Finally, Carlos said to him. "Come into the other room with us. You need to help us make an attack plan."

-13.5-

Harmon didn't know if he was getting through at all. He had to devote so much energy to translating his message into coherent speech through Kerren's compromised system that he couldn't also try to look out to see if anyone was listening. The only indication he had that he was being heard was the way his host's brain lit up when he mentioned her mother's name.

All he could do was continue to speak through her, hoping beyond hope that there was someone on the outside to hear him trying to verbally piece together the various ways the long-ago Sarah had impacted people at the Deertail Lodge. The visual similarity between her and Kerren really was uncanny, so much so that when he had seen the daughter earlier that evening, he had almost been forced to rethink his views on immortality.

As he spoke what he had since come to know and believe, he was delighted as new sections of Kerren's young brain sparked to life. It took a little while for him to realize that he was actually watching her fitting the puzzle together, and he hoped that there was someone else doing the same on the other side of her lips. Even if there were, it would have given him no extra satisfaction; when he spoke ofwhat he and Benny had discovered about the role of mirrors in the story, being inside Kerren's head had been like flying around inside a firework show.

It began to occur to him that maybe all his invasive activity was doing Kerren some good. All his mucking about with her neurons might actually be helping them mend from the shock of her injuries, or at least he was going to allow himself to rationalize it that way. As he told her about her mother, and the positive role she had played in the lives of people at the Deertail, he had begun to feel a slowly increasing sense of welcome. Either Kerren was getting used to the idea of someone being inside her mind, or he was becoming inoculated against feeling of intrusion. It was still a minor rebellion against his sense of decency to do it, but it took away the moral sting a little bit. If Kerren's increased capacity started to show signs that she didn't want him in there anymore, he would gladly retreat.

She didn't, however. It compelled him to keep talking until he was done, in a way; he felt like he was getting Kerren better by doing it, and that in turn made his effort seem worthwhile. Not only this, but the strength of their connection made him even more aware of his physical proximity to her. The thought of them actually meeting again in the physical world was starting to become something he found he wanted.

There was something familiar about her brain; at times he felt like he knew its contours, recognizing the way information would flow from one place to another. He thought this must be some remnant of her mother; Sarah and Harmon had shared a few late-night talk sessions, and he had been entranced by the woman's thought processes, not quite like anyone else's he had ever encountered. That must have been the origin of the familiarity he was sensing in this vast, internal space.

If Sarah had shown anything other than cursory interest in him, he knew, he could have fallen for her. But he had learned that relationships cultivated while leaning against a bar never grow into anything more, and she had been the source of this realization for him. Like everyone else, she had spent her time at the Deertail, and then disappeared into the world beyond the foot of the mountain. He had never again caught the same spark she had brought to his life, and never expected to.

Before he had seen Kerren, if someone had told him that the closest possible copy of Sarah was about to walk into his life again, he would have assumed that he would immediately transfer some -- if not all -- of his years of romantic disappointment into feelings for her, but for some reason that hadn't happened. He had approached her and her wife at dinner the previous night out of a sheer fascination at seeing someone who his fiction-addled brain had half-mistaken for his old love. Maybe it was because her romantic predilections were clear, or the fact that he was keenly aware of how much he himself had aged over the intervening years, but the kind of emotions he was experiencing were more like those that a teacher might feel for a promising young student.

Now he was speaking with no other impetus than to see Kerren's brain illuminating in new patterns, feeding off its own renewed energy. He couldn't entirely feel that he was personally responsible for the growth by adding his energy to the system; the only thing he could think of was that it felt like he was *inspiring* her. He had yet to see whether this new vitality would last, but for now he could feel its light, see its warmth, and it made his resolve even stronger.

With this in mind, he peeked at the world outside Kerren's skull. He didn't actually withdraw from her mind, only expanded his sphere of awareness. It was an aspect of his power that he hadn't really mastered yet, and was surprised to find how easily he could control it. It came with a strange sense of vertigo, however, a collision between perceptions of largeness and smallness. It was something like using a magnifying glass to examine a miniscule drop of water, and finding that there was an immense, bustling city inside it.

The group around Kerren were barely recognizable in their immensity and distance. They seemed to be segregated into two groups; on one side of his host's still-bound body were two women and a man. He immediately recognized Kerren's wife crouched nearby, but the others Harmon hadn't seen before. They were a blonde woman and a dark-skinned man, clearly a couple from the way they were standing close to each other. On the other side of Kerren's apparently miles-long body, Dale stood like a Titan, with Glenda in his arms. Harmon didn't quite like the way she was lying limply, or the way that Dale's arms minutely trembled, as if he had been holding her that way for a very long time.

Next to them was Carlos (whom he shouldn't have been surprised to see, since the cook's known cohort Benny was currently sitting with Harmon's body in his small room under the stairs). Between the two men, also not too surprisingly, was Bruce Casey. He was talking a mile a minute -- thankfully, the sound was too far away for Harmon to actually make any of it out -- and gesticulating his arms wildly; first, they raised as if to mimic climbing a ladder, then reaching out for something, and then gesturing to other members of the small crowd. They all seemed to bear the same expression on their faces: dismayed indulgence. The author clearly had the floor, but no one seemed to be happy about it.

When it was clear that no one was listening to Kerren (and he wasn't even sure that she was still speaking for him), he let his words trail off. The flashes of disappointment that cascaded like a blazing Niagara through Kerren's brain made him want to go on, until forever if she would let him. But there was something more important going on in the outer world at the moment, and so he turned his full attention to it.

-13.6-

If what Bruce was saying hadn't been matching up perfectly with everything he had experienced on this weird night, Carlos would have thrown the author out the door he had come in by, and let the monster out there have its way with its creator. But being the only one in the group who had physically touched the thing, and had also experienced Bruce's rambling, borderline-psychotic -- but undeniably accurate -- description of its makeup and powers, he had no choice but to believe everything the crazed man was saying.

Bruce's revelations came fast: in the book, the "Qoloni" -- a play on words, because the thing really was a sentient, bipedal "colony" of much smaller things -- was the manifestation of the fears and insecurities of the young woman it was pursuing. The connection with mirrors, then, was a necessary narrative association. Princess Ynarra saw her own imperfections when she looked into the mirrors in what would soon become her bridal suite, if the prince of the castle chose her as the one he wished to marry. Because he was royalty, the reflections were of a quality she had never experienced before, and seeing her own faithful image for the first time in her life messed with her head. It was her lack of faith in her own inner power that caused those thoughts to become the creature they had seen and been chased by.

Of course, all this exposition was densely couched in Bruce's ramblings. Carlos knew the man had been coming to the Deertail for years but had never met him before, and so was unable to tell if what that author had been through had changed his mental state at all; for all Carlos knew, Bruce had always been like this. To be honest, the effect was so off-putting that Carlos kind of zoned out for a little while, even though he knew he shouldn't have. Bruce was trying to explain, by yet another slightly different method, how the fruit he had seen in his dream-orchard had represented the little sub-world that the present group found themselves spun off into. Something about the confluence of coincidences has caused this little area of the world to split off into a looped, bounded mini-universe. Or something like that.

The point was, Bruce seemed positive that they could get themselves back into the main stream of space and time if they could destroy the Qoloni... by his reckoning, once the thing they had created with their collective imaginations was destroyed, normalcy should return. "It's like, the Qoloni is the stem," he was currently blathering, "the stem that holds this poisoned fruit we're in, to the tree! If we sever that connection--" and here, he used his hand as a samurai sword, bringing it straight down to bisect some unseen foe, "--we'll be free!"

Carlos looked uncertainly around at the others, and then said, "What if the fruit just falls from the tree?"

The author whirled around, so fast that he almost lost his balance. "What's that?"

Carlos twisted his neck to crack it, then sighed. "If we're the fruit, then won't separating it from the tree just imprison us here, with it?" He spread his arms out to encompass the tiny universe he was more and more coming to be convinced that they were in.

Bruce didn't seem to be able to track what he was saying. "No, you don't see... We're still a part of the tree, but *it* isn't. It's something else entirely. It's the personification of internal fears, can you not see that? It's... when the..." Bruce's words began to come too fast, piling over themselves in the rush to get out of his mouth.

Suddenly, Manoj spoke. They were the first words of his own that anyone could remember speaking since they re-entered the building. "I think I understand," he said. He waited a long moment while everyone turned to him, and Kelly's grip on his arm visibly tightened. "It has to go back where it came from," Manoj said. "Even if we don't understand exactly what it is or why it does what it does, that part makes sense. It was called forth from a mirror, and must be put back where it was."

No one moved, waiting to see if there was more, and after seeming to think about it for a long time, Manoj continued, "That's what Harmon was saying." He gestured down to Kerren, lying on the floor. "He's talking with... Benny, I think his name is?" He waited for an affirming, if shocked, nod from Carlos, then went on. "They've both read your book, Bruce, and they think they've figured it out. The thing has to be put back into a mirror, apparently."

Bruce looked stupefied. "Figured it out? But that's not what happens in the book. When I wrote it, I never destroyed the creature... the princess escaped, and rescued the prince. It was meant to be a twist on the usual fairy tale ending, although looking back I now have to admit that it's equally as trite. But... putting the Qoloni *back* into a mirror?"

The author began to pace back and forth, hunching forward and clasping his hands behind his back, suddenly seeming to have the clarity of thought you might see in a philosophy professor given a juicy ethical dilemma. Manoj spoke to him as he continued to walk, "They say it's the logical endpoint, if you look past the one you actually wrote. In saving both herself and the prince, Ynarra effectively left her fears behind her..."

Bruce abruptly halted his walking and looked up at the man, thunderstruck. "Instead of putting them back where they came from! Of course..." he gasped. "Their way makes so much more sense. I was so out of my mind when I wrote it, I was just trying to make a resolution to the story that no one would see coming. But the elements were all there. Why didn't I see them?"

"Wait a minute," Carlos said, jumping in and turning to Manoj. "Did you say that *they* figured out what the book's ending should have been? You mean Harmon *and* Benny? Benny's okay?"

A puzzled look crossed Manoj's face. "I don't know. It was Harmon speaking for them both. But there was something strange in the feeling I got when he mentioned Benny, an implied silence..."

Before Carlos could question further, Bruce spoke again. "Do you think... maybe the fact that I didn't see the ending correctly, and that others did... gives potency to the story itself?" He seemed to be starting to ramble to himself again. "That the ability of our combined imaginations to conjure it forth was magnified because I took the story somewhere other than the way it naturally wanted to go?" He took a long look at the woman lying wrapped on the floor. Kerren looked exhausted despite her immobilization, and turned her tired eyes to meet the gaze of the shuffling author.

"What do you think, dear? It was your mother that inspired the story in the first place. Consider this -- there are two people here, myself and Mr. Gough, the Lodge director, who have had dreamworld visions of her. I wrote the story after meeting her, and at least two others here have read my words. Quite a confluence, wouldn't you say? My God, you look so much like her. Is your presence here the catalyst for all this?"

There was no answer that anyone could provide, for one reason or another. Carlos looked to each of them in turn, trying to figure out where he fit into this group. He had never read this book that some of them had, nor did he have any interest in Bruce Casey, or relation to his muse. Was he the only one who had no idea why he had been chosen to stay behind in this place?

Carlos immediately began to look around, breaking the stalemate. "Are there any mirrors in here? Anything we can use?"

This seemed to galvanize the room's occupants, and the ones who were able to started combing the two supply rooms for the Lodge's stash of reflective materials. Carlos called out to Dale, who was simply wandering with Glenda in his arms, casting his eyes over the myriad shelves, "Dale, the mirrors in the rooms must get broken every once in a while. Any idea where they keep the replacements?"

The security guard's voice came back hollow. "I don't know. It's been years. Last time, it was a fight between a couple, something got thrown. I think we had to special order a new mirror at the time. And I remember it took a whole crew to get the old one down and the new one in place. They're fastened down pretty securely."

"So we can't just dash into one of the rooms and grab one," Carlos muttered as he continued his search. "Great." For some reason, when Manoj and Bruce had been discussing the prospect of using a mirror to banish the dark Qoloni, the thought had entered his mind as something that should be easy to accomplish. But why had he thought that? There were no mirrors here, and getting one out of the rooms wasn't something he had considered. So why had he...?

Realization crashed against his mind. "In the hallway!" he blurted out, causing heads in both rooms to turn his way. "The big sunburst mirror at the top of the stairs! The avalanche must have dislodged it. I almost knocked it off the wall when I grabbed the vases to throw at that thing!"

-14.1-

The five of them stood in a tight knot around the doorknob, waiting. Sheryl looked pensively from one to the other, feeling how tightly their collective muscles were wound, how thick the air felt. They had no idea what was on the other side of the door, or if their plan had even the slightest chance of working.

She had lay down on the floor next to Kerren as the others were starting to scour the shelves for things they could throw at the Qoloni, hoping they might had an effect similar to what Carlos claimed. He said that the heavy crystal vases had halted it temporarily, as its strange qualities of mass-distortion affected its movement. Could the objects they were pulling out -- wrapped cakes of soap, spare bundles of cutlery, even a small paint can or two -- do the same? Did weight or size matter when it came to that thing? Apparently, not even Bruce knew the answers.

Sheryl tried to keep in her mind the resolute look that Kerren had given her as they lay side by side on the hard wood floor, intimately pressing their foreheads together. It was only because of this positioning that Sheryl could tell that Kerren was speaking to her amid the clamor of preparation: "Let me out of this. I can help." The words were thready, and still bore a rasp that made her not quite sound like herself, but Sheryl smiled at knoinwg she hearing her wife's true voice again.

"There's no time," she replied. "I didn't really think about how we were going to get you out of the rug when I was figuring out how to get you in." If they had more time, or a sharp enough cutting instrument, she might have given it a try.

Kerren thought about this, then nodded slowly, rubbing the skin of her forehead against Sheryl's. "We're just going to get that mirror from the hallway, and then come right back," Sheryl repeated, hoping that it would give either one of them a bit more courage. "We'll all be carrying ammunition. Kelly and Carlos are in charge of getting it down off the wall and carrying it back. I'm backup for them, really. That's all."

Kerren accepted this wordlessly as well, and then Manoj was calling for everyone to take their places by the door. Sheryl kissed Kerren once, as strongly as she dared, and then hopped up off the floor. They looked for one more moment into one another's eyes, and then Sheryl turned to follow the others. On the way out, she ran her hand lightly across Dale's shoulders. He was sitting on the floor now, close to Kerren, still holding Glenda. He had turned the body against his, so her head leaned against his shoulder. It would have been an endearing pose, if one didn't understand the tragic reality of what she was looking at. At this point, he was too deep into his grief to help, and Sheryl wondered just how long he was prepared to carry his love's burden; through the time when they lost this battle, and the two of them were reunited somewhere beyond?

The others -- Carlos, Manoj, Bruce, and Kelly -- were already in place, their tiny missiles clutched in their hands. On her way over to them, Sheryl scooped up a few of the extra randomly-strewn objects off the floor that had been deemed appropriate. She ended up with a heavy glass salt shaker and a tightly-rolled bath towel, bound with a thin rubber band, light but bulky.

She took her spot, and the quintet waited to see who was going to be the one to turn the doorknob. No one seemed eager to free up a hand to open it, however. In a moment of exasperation, Sheryl lifted the towel to her mouth, snagged the rubber band with an incisor, and yanked. The rubber snapped audibly, and she felt the loose, whipping ends of the broken band feebly lash her gums. The towel loosened in her hand, and she shook it out before flipping it back over her shoulder like a short-order cook and grabbing for the cold metal knob.

She wrenched it to the side, and opened the door onto the dark hallway. Because of how the others were arranged around her, she only had to open it partway to see that the length of it was empty, although they could only see a little past halfway, where the faint light coming up from the lobby threw the shadow of the balcony railing against the wall.

"Can you see it?" Carlos whispered, but there was no need. Square in the middle of the lit section of corridor, facing the top of the lobby stairs, was the long end-table Carlos had snatched the vases from, and above it hung the circular mirror. It was perhaps three feet in diameter, judging by the amount of gray lobby light it reflected up onto the ceiling above it. They could also see the starburst frame around it, consisting of dozens of long wavy metal tines that radiated out from it for at least another foot.

"It looks heavy," Bruce muttered.

"I bet it is," Kelly said. "All that metal and glass. It'll take both of us to get it down, if it isn't fastened too solidly."

"It's not," Carlos insisted. "I almost knocked it down when I bumped it before."

"Just because it was loosened by the avalanche doesn't mean it'll be easy to pull off the wall," Kelly noted. "It's you and me, right, Carlos?"

The cook nodded. The roles were clear. The two of them would retrieve the mirror, and the other three would be ready to hurl projectiles to drive back -- or at least stall -- the Qoloni if it turned up. Sheryl noticed how Manoj shifted one of his objects, a small paint can, into the crook of his arm in order to squeeze Kelly's wrist. She leaned against him momentarily, and Sheryl suddenly wished that Kerren hadn't been hurt, and they could storm out into the hallway together Butch-and-Sundance style, as this couple was about to.

"Ready?" Kelly said, then took three quick breaths and slipped through the doorway without a sound. Carlos followed as quickly as he could, with significantly less grace. Sheryl choked down the fear that was rising in her throat and followed, trying to slip through sideways like the decidedly more athletic woman did.

After the hard surfaces of the supply closet, the plush environs of the hallway was incredibly quiet. Sheryl was suddenly aware of the sound of her breath, strove to minimize it. They had all left behind whatever footwear had protected them in the snow; their bare footfalls were all but perfectly silent. As a group, they crept forward.

No one had been entirely sure that Bruce should come out there with them. The danger of him turning into a liability if the creature should show up was a real one, but leaving him behind would also include someone else staying to keep him restrained, and Dale was otherwise occupied keeping watch over Glenda and Kerren. Besides, the author was intent on facing his creation.

Without planning it, the group fanned out across the entire width of the hall, Manoj along the wall that would end at the stairway, Sheryl and Bruce in the middle, and Kelly and Carlos heading for the spot where the mirror hung. They all held their projectiles cocked at shoulder height, ready to throw them at the first sign of anything otherworldly. Sheryl focused on the very end of the hall, past the mirror and into the darkness beyond. Something told her that if the thing were going to come, that was where it would be from.

She crouched slightly, trying to keep her head perfectly level as she stepped down the hallway, keeping her center of balance squarely between her feet. Her senses felt sharper than she could ever remember them being; she swore she could hear the tendons in her companions' feet as the muscles flexed and shifted weight.

Her thought that the thing would come from the far end of the hallway was proven wrong. She momentarily looked away from Kelly and Carlos, who had started to head for opposite sides of the end table, flanking the round sun-mirror that hung over it. Because of that, she only perceived a dimming of the wash of gray light that invaded the upper hallway from the lobby. The thing leapt up over the railing, making it appear that it had come up directly from the lobby floor fifteen feet below, dragging along with it the chilled air that the large broken window had allowed to flood in.

It rose up like a horrible, giant bird, horns and arms spread in greeting, blocking the light.

-14.2-

Manoj hesitated. Not for long, perhaps at most three seconds. His progress down the hall had been even with everyone else's until the moment he passed the open door, but he could not resist the pull of his curiosity and he looked in. It was the room where they had found the oddly humped, empty coverlet on the bed, and he had realized they were the only souls left in the Deertail Lodge.

Beyond, the view out the large patio glass was unchanged. It was this he was most interested in, to see if anything had changed about the frozen world beyond this small, toroidally-looped section of the mountain. From this distance, it appeared that nothing had.

It was this momentary hesitation, however, that put him at a safer distance than anyone else when the thing appeared. The horns came first, rocking forward as the Qoloni leaped up from the lobby below, silently arcing up and over the railing that ran from the top of the stairs to the wall opposite. Manoj had fallen a good eight feet behind everyone else, and thus was the only one who didn't have to turn their heads as the dark shape rose into view.

Even before it cleared the balcony railing and landed lightly on the floor, missiles were already on the way to meet it. Manoj watched them arcing through the air, noting that they had probably come from Sheryl and Bruce, because Carlos and Kelly had already been in the process of setting their tiny burdens down on the end table, needing free hands to lower the mirror from the wall.

Manoj felt an electric burn of fear shoot through his body at the sight of the thing's shadow falling across Kelly. She was intent on putting down her mini-weapons and focused on the mirror on the wall opposite, so she didn't react right away. When her head whipped around -- her shortish hair flipping outward with the moment -- it appeared to Manoj to move in slow-motion, as if everything were suddenly underwater. His inability to breathe perpetuated the illusion. He was sure that she was not going to have time to grab her objects and throw them in her own defense.

He prepared to throw his own projectiles -- he had opted for things with extra weight when he had selected a small can of paint and a wooden rolling pin -- and took a few extra steps forward to catch up with the others. He hadn't counted on how that heaviness would affect his feet, though, and found himself stumbling forward as he tried to fling them. He stepped out into the light as the paint can flew from his right hand, and while it was an accurate throw, he was getting too close to the horned thing for his comfort. He tried to get his feet back under himself, to pull up short -- and then the can hit its target.

It wasn't the first thing to hit the Qoloni, but it was the largest, and Manoj was fascinated by what happened when it did. Instead of impacting the thing's shoulder and knocking it away, the can seemed to instantly liquefy, wrapping itself into a flat shape that slid across the thing's shoulder blade and disappeared around its back.

Manoj had precisely one instant to remember Carlos's description of what would happen to objects that came into contact with the thing; because it could not interact with material objects, anything touching it would appear to change its shape, but would remain unaffected in terms of weight and momentum. And true to form, the Qoloni was wrenched to the side, wheeling it around so that it turned in Manoj's direction. One of Sheryl's missiles -- a salt shaker -- almost simultaneously hit it in the face, and made it turn even more sharply.

That pivot, coupled with the forced downward tilt of the Qoloni's head, caused its horns to swing down and back the way it had come, and Manoj realized too late that he had stepped out between their crazy branch-like network and the top step of the lobby stairs. The curved backs of those forward-pointed antlers were coming at him, looking decidedly more solid than the body of the Qoloni itself.

At the moment of collision, his mind split in two. At the same time that he felt space distorting where they touched him, bending his body around their humped shapes, he also felt an insistent push from within them, as if he and they were opposing magnets being forced toward each other. If he had been properly balanced, he might have been able to withstand their repulsive power, but in this case, he had no way to get his feet back under himself, and stepped backward.

His eyes caught Kelly's as his foot came down on nothing. It dropped farther than he thought it would, onto the penultimate step of the lobby stairs, before coming to a stop. But by then it was too late; his momentum wasn't allowing him to stop, and he had to draw back his other foot and try to get it down on a lower step. The horns were still against him, pushing him farther back, and Kelly's shocked, horrified expression was suddenly eclipsed by the top of the first step as Manoj tipped back and fell even farther below the level of the second floor.

He reached out for the banister, the only thing within grabbing distance of his pinwheeling left arm, and found his hand already wrapped around a thick piece of wood -- the rolling pin, which he had neglected to hurl at the Qoloni when he had the chance. Even if there had been time to release it and take hold of the banister rail instead, he wouldn't have been able to convince his hand to let go of the only thing that was secure about his position. He realized this as his body tipped back, and back, beyond horizontal, until the wide windows at the front of the lobby were starting to enter his field of vision from above...

His falling body hit the stairs in six places, hard: twice on his legs, three along his spine, once on the back of his head. More light than he had seen since re-entering the dark Deertail Lodge exploded in his skull, and then he was tumbling down the rest of the long flight, which seemed to stretch out to infinity, pummeling him at every point on the way down.

-14.3-

The door clicked shut behind the hallway expedition, and utter silence fell. The only sound that remained was that of Dale's nearby breathing, heavy, mournful, and slow. He should have gone with them, Kerren knew. As much as she admired his unwavering sense of duty, he should have concerned himself just as much with the living. She wished she could summon the breath power to tell him this, to help him to move on.

Perhaps she could help, in a different way. Long ago, while she was being wound inside the rug, Kerren had enough forethought in her pain-dazed state to lift up one hand and cross it over her chest, the fingertips resting on her collarbone. In the time since her binding, she had been worrying that wrist back and forth as her tolerance for pain would allow, trying to gain some kind of physical control, even if it were merely the ability to slip her arm back and forth inside of her constraints. She now could feel the cool air outside the winding rug on her fingers, and knew that she had been making progress. It might be the time to see if she could push it free. But even then she still would need help.

Kerren had known that her mother had fond memories of the Deertail Lodge -- hadn't she been the one to suggest that Kerren and Sheryl spend their conciliatory anniversary trip there? -- but she had no idea that Sarah had made such an impression on the people who frequented and worked there. To hear it from Bruce, any man she came across back then was suddenly struck with artistic inspiration. Kerren had always suspected that her mother had a kind of special energy around her... hadn't she herself spent many insecure adolescent nights wondering if any of it was ever going to rub off on her?

Now, it seemed like that collective inspiration Sarah had created here had gathered somehow, been collected and... what? Brought to life a supernatural creature from a book? She would hardly known what to make of that, even if she hadn't been currently immobilized and in pain, injured in an avalanche. The surreality of it all, she supposed, was the very thing that made her not immediately reject the idea that Harmon was capable of telepathically communicating with her.

With this in mind, she now called on Harmon to help her; she could feel that he had not fully retreated from her mind after he spoke through her lips. He had left some kind of mental door open, just a sliver, and through this she put out a mental entreaty for him to return. What she had in mind was going to take not only physical strength, but mental as well. Perhaps he could lend her some.

She found him lurking inside her prefrontal cortex, present but distracted. There was something else going on that he was focused on, but she needed him, and she thought of increasingly more surreal mental pictures until the random flashing of her synapses got his attention. When it did, she found it easy to transmit her request on pure thought.

The response came faster than she expected, and the sheer volume of information he was able to pass to her in the span of half a second made her breath catch.

Out in the exterior world, Kerren's fingers finally managed to slip across her collarbone and out of the binding rug. From there, she could swing her arm up and out with less resistance than she expected. What she didn't expect was the pain the motion caused in her broken legs, as if the slight change in the way her body was balanced on the stabilizing board was enough to irritate them. She bit her cheeks to keep from crying out, and extended her freed hand toward Dale and Glenda.

The security guard didn't see what she was doing until Kerren's hand came to rest on the top of Glenda's head. His eyes flicked up from staring at the deceased woman's face, and found Kerren's. She tried to whisper something that sounded approximately like "It's okay," and then closed her own eyes in concentration. He looked wary, but otherwise didn't object.

With Harmon's guidance from downstairs, it wasn't too difficult to enter. The method seemed obvious once he told her how it was done, but she knew that she wouldn't be able to do it without his assistance. At least, not without more practice.

Having never been inside another's mind before, Kerren didn't know what to expect. Even so, she knew that was she was seeing was a once stunningly beautiful system gone horribly wrong, distorted beyond repair. Glenda's mind, devoid of flowing oxygen-rich blood for so long, had totally collapsed in on itself in places. Sections the size of cities had gone dark and withered, and in other places arching voids stretched out for light-years. Kerren had never experienced such an overwhelming physical sense of loss, of a place once filled with truth and beauty, now irretrievably stolen forever.

Somewhere deep, deep in the recesses, there were still a few tiny surviving glimmers of light, and Kerren instinctively pursued them, moving-but-not-moving with a technique that Harmon had passed to her in mere milliseconds, but had been unable to fully prepare her for. She swung past entire lobes of thought that had dwindled to almost nothing. The only way she could handle the sorrow was to distance herself with feeble humor; she recognized the areas of Glenda's brain as she passed them and mentally listed their statuses like a sci-fi battle damage report. Language: gone. High-function capability: gone. Comprehension: barely active. Life support systems: obliterated. Even as she tried to distance herself from the devastation, it almost made her want to turn back. She had to push on, though, if there was going to be any light left by the time she reached deeply enough into Glenda's cerebellum, which seemed to be the only partly active place left.

There. She could just make out the brightest patch remaining, although it was fading even as she approached. The light was retreating farther and farther as usable tissue continued to die off, back toward Glenda's brain stem. Once it got that far back, Kerren knew there would be no more communication. It felt like diving after a person who was sinking in the ocean, desperately chasing her as she disappeared down into the dark.

Glenda...

The response was barely a flicker, but whether it was in recognition or just some dissolving mental process, she couldn't tell.

Glenda, it's Kerren. Are you still here?

The flicker came again, and this time there was also a word.

Yes.

-14.4-

Kelly's mouth dropped open when she saw Manoj fall from her sight down the stairs, but no sound came out. Her first instinct was to run after him, as if there were any possibility of her reaching him in time, but the ponderous mass of the Qoloni's thorny antlers -- the very thing that had knocked him back and down -- stood in a deadly thicket between them. Her felt her heart turn cold when she heard the first sound of his body hitting the stairs; in the strange silence that accompanied the thing's attack, she clearly heard the air being forced out of her boyfriend's lungs as a horrible series of meaty tumbling sounds began.

The creature, for its part, didn't even seem to notice that it had swept one of its foes off the field of battle. It was still reacting to the heavy weight that had hit its body, the fat, cylindrical object seeming to flatten and slip around its form, emerging unchanged from the other side. Kelly had to force herself not to be fascinated by this process, garishly backlit by the light coming up from the lobby below, where she could hear Manoj's body continuously bumping, as if it would never come to rest.

Sound returned finally, a furious and animalistic howl that she only dimly realized was hers. With it came the extension of her arms, the sudden claws at the ends grasping for the tiny things she had brought with her and set down on the table's edge -- a chunky red napkin holder and a heavy spray bottle of cleaning solution. She turned and threw, adding them to the barrage. She wished she could have landed a solid hit right in what passed for the dark thing's face, but the bottle was oddly weighted and errantly flipped end over end, right past its shoulder. The napkin holder, however, was more true to the mark. It hit the Qoloni squarely in the center of its chest, its bulk immediately spreading across the thing's entire torso.

Once it its chest had been coated, the creature belatedly started to recoil, backing up toward the balcony railing that it had just vaulted over, and Kelly couldn't help but watch as the spreading, flattened shape of the holder opened up like a donut, the flat red plastic shooting out from the darkening center like ripples on a pond. She intuitively realized that an instant after it escaped her view, the holder would emerge, completely re-integrated, from the center of the thing's back, and sail out high over the lobby. The Qoloni was like the physical embodiment of a funhouse mirror.

The mirror! She remembered she had a mission to fulfill, no matter how badly she wanted to pelt the creature back over the railing with her revenge. Her head whipped around, and saw that Carlos had not deviated from their original plan; he was already reaching up and starting to rock the big round mirror back and forth on the wall, sweeping a pale searchlight of reflection across the hallway over and over again. She reached up to join him, the end table thumping painfully against her hip, and tried to catch a few of the wobbling sunburst tines in motion, so she could add her force to getting the thing down from the wall. She didn't notice until together they began seesawing the mirror back and forth that her eyes were clouded with tears.

Unfortunately, she had been right about the mirror; the avalanche had loosened it from its mounting, but it was still somehow attached to the wall. It could rock wildly back and forth, but doing so was only bumping its edges against the wall and doing no work toward prying the mount loose. Still, the only thing she could think to do was keep at it, and yell across the table to Carlos: "Harder!"

As if in response, from behind her Kelly heard Sheryl scream "Take this, fucker!" and produce twin grunts of effort as she hurled her own handheld missiles. From the Qoloni there was no reaction; it remained perfectly silent, whether the projectiles ended up hitting their mark or not. Kelly was sure that she would feel the razor tips of the thing's bewildering antlers pushing their way between her ribs any second, and at the same time was just as certain that she and Carlos were only going to succeed in crushing their fingers between the edges of the mirror and the wall, if they kept with their current process.

She let go, and ran around to his side of the table, wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of the sweaty ski jacket she had kept on. She had to get this to work, if for no other reason than finding out what happened to Manoj. Fortunately, Carlos seemed to know what she was coming to do because he nodded, lifted his grip higher on the tines at the mirror's edge, and pressed his side hard against the wall, making room for her to stand next to him.

As she moved next to him and placed her own hands on the same side of the mirror, she heard shuffling on the carpet nearby. Things had been oddly quiet since Sheryl's triumphant yell, but now her feet -- and Bruce's, since he was the only other person left in the hallway -- were scuffling. Kelly wanted to turn to look, but understood that knowing what was going on would only make her lose focus. She began to push against the mirror steadily, trying to lever it away from the wall, and Carlos immediately followed suit. Their combined effort made an immediate improvement in how far they could push its edge, and Kelly hoped that this would be enough to finally snap whatever the mirror's back-mounting was made of. She heard Carlos start to audibly groan with effort next to her.

Meanwhile, a new sound erupted in the sound-deadened hallway. "Stop!" Bruce's voice sounded even and strangely in control. "You will harm none here! Get back!" Silence fell again, during which Kelly distinctly heard a dim, dull crack from somewhere deep within the wall.

Bruce continued. "As your creator, I banish you! You are a sloppy, nonsensical excuse for a villain, the mere product of too many pills and a hard deadline." He grew calmer as his admonishments picked up steam. "If your intention here tonight is solely to harm, then there is no one but I that you wish to harm here. So why do you hesitate? Turn your hellish horns upon me!" Kelly wouldn't have imagined such flowery phrases coming from someone who she had only seen as a jittery psychotic, but she could also tell that he was starting to channel his authorly voice.

A low, promising creaking sound began, closer behind the mirror this time. She and Carlos dug their feet even harder into the plush carpet, and the mirror's edge came out another half-inch farther from the wall.

"What is it that you're waiting for? An invitation?" Bruce antagonized his monster. "Here!" He must have thrown one of the small objects he carried, because the thin sound of rushing air followed, then the strange effect of that sound being pulled out of existence. An instant later, the sound was back, farther away. Sheryl could only imagine that Bruce's thrown object had done much the same that her own had.

Before Bruce could throw his next projectile, a final snap came from the back of the mirror, and it fell with a thud onto the hard top of the end table underneath it. Carlos's fingers lost their grip on it, but hers did not.

-14.5-

Carlos didn't expect the mirror to just fall off the wall without warning, so its impact on the table jarred it out of his reach. He tried to lean forward, to get his hands back on its tines, but he couldn't move much with the way he had forced himself up against the wall, so that Kelly could lean on him. He felt the tips of his fingers graze it, but then the force that he and Kelly had been imparting into it made it start to roll. It made a strange, clock-like ticking sound as it started to walk itself away from them across the tabletop, each tine tapping on the wood in turn.

Kelly, who had managed to keep partial hold of her section of the heavy mirror, was trying to keep the metal object from getting away by twisting it to the side. Its march-like steps faltered and its heavy weight tilted, threatening to tip the whole thing off the side of the table and onto the hallway floor. Carlos was more desperate than ever to keep it from doing this, not knowing whether the carpet on the floor would be enough to keep the glass from breaking and making this whole endeavor worthless.

He was still mostly pinned to the wall, though. Kelly was bracing herself against him, trying to counterbalance the tipping weight of the mirror. Her hip ground against his stomach, forcing the air out of his lungs. He grunted, and this might have been the distraction that made her finally lose her battle with gravity, and swivel the mirror off the table. It swung at the end of her arms like an overweighted pendulum, and when it touched down on the canted floor, she lost her hold completely. He heard the tines ripping through the fabric on the floor before she totally lost her it, and then she snatched her hands back, clearly fearing for their safety. The whole thing continued to roll farther out into the hallway, drunkenly wobbling like a huge, demented coin that's hasn't decided its heads-or-tails fate yet.

This motion sent reflected light bouncing off the walls, the mirror becoming a tiny lighthouse scanning all the dark corners of the hallway. Carlos found his eyes turning to the Qoloni, who was still on the other side of Bruce. The author had stepped in between the thing and the three remaining occupants of the hallway; Carlos couldn't see where Manoj had gotten off to.

Bruce was still launching a verbal tirade at the thing. "I will send you back to the forest!" the author was saying firmly. "Now that I have been there, walked its paths and seen its secrets, I know how to put you back there! I've learned the true ending to your story, the one I should have seen from the beginning!" The writer's words broke off here, however, because his attention was being drawn toward the same place the Qoloni's was -- the large mirror slowly wobbling its way across the carpet near his feet.

The rolling object broke whatever stalemate Bruce had been able to broker with his creation; he no longer had the Qoloni's full attention, nor the words to hold it at bay. The pair fell into fascinated silence as they watched the mirror's progress. Carlos noticed that while Kelly's were still extended, blindly reaching after it, she was not pulling away from him or the wall in pursuit, as if she were afraid to take even a step closer to the horned creature.

Carlos caught movement in the monumental rack of horns itself, realized that he was seeing a magnification of the Qoloni's act of glancing back and forth from Bruce to the mirror, as if calculating something. He dully wondered why the thing should have any interest in the drunkenly rolling metal object, and then it struck him, the thought springing into his mind as if it had been spoken aloud.

It knows what we want to do with that mirror. It knows we are going to try to get it in there.

For the third time that night, Carlos felt utterly helpless. The first had been when Benny had been buried under the snow that had piled in through the kitchen window, a microcosm of the avalanche outside. The second was when they had been pinned inside Harmon's tiny room, the Qoloni trying to press its way through the door, and Carlos sure that it would only be a matter of instants before it broke through and devoured them both. In one case, he had been able to act, to do something to turn the situation away from tragedy, and in the other, he had no choice but to sit and wait. In the surreal vividness of this present moment, he didn't know whether he was seeing a new example of the first moment, or the second.

Without realizing it, he started to push away from the wall, throwing both himself and Kelly out into the center of the passage, chasing after the mirror. She stumbled along with him, her feet seeming to take up the pursuit before the rest of her was aware she wanted to. At the same time, a marked tilt in the overhanging cloud of antlers betrayed the Qoloni's sudden movement, and suddenly everyone in the hallway was watching the mirror's progress.

Carlos didn't know if the thing knew the supposed power this rolling object had over its existence, but when its hands reached out its intentions became clear; it was going after the mirror too. The thought of seeing anyone trapped and speared by that mass of thorny chitin was unbearable to him, so he used Kelly as a speed assist, pushing her to the side as he launched his feet forward. She spun off in a less effectual direction, and Carlos was just about to try to wedge his fingers into the spinning tines when the mirror hesitated, then swiveled and changed direction. Its motion was maddeningly random under the dictates of gravity and invisible gradient changes in the carpet. This time, it headed straight for the Qoloni.

Carlos almost fell over trying to match his trajectory to the mirror's, but managed to keep his feet barely under his center of gravity and swerved close after it. His stretching fingers were just anticipating the buzz of the spinning tines against them -- and then the mirror changed again, coming to a sudden, absolute halt and springing up into the air.

Carlos fell forward, having put too much stock in the idea that the mirror would soon be bearing a bit of his weight, and his stomach and groin simultaneously hit the carpeted floor with a loud smack. His head came down hard, landing on his right temple, and the strength immediately left his arms. His eyes insensibly registered what was happening, as the Qoloni straightened up, two of its horns wedged in between the mirror's radiating tines, lifting it up and away from him.

It hoisted the flat object up into the air, exposing it to more light from the lobby. It appeared to be trying to inpsect it, fascinated by its shine, but this only caused its horns -- and the mirror imprisoned by them -- to tilt farther up, causing its head to tip back even more. Carlos abstractly marveled at how the thing seemed to be unconscious of its own body, as if it were still figuring out how it worked.

There was no breath in Carlos' lungs now, and answers to the question of whether he could still move his legs were slow in coming. He was able to see Kelly's feet as she bounded over him, returning from the detour he had sent her on. She ran straight to the Qoloni and jumped up, reaching for the raised mirror, arms held apart to catch onto either side of it, looking very much like a gymnast in the process of launching into an uneven bar routine. She landed precisely where she intended, gripping tines on each side and swinging her legs up underneath her.

Her resulting kick would have taken off the Qoloni's head, if it were made from any kind of physically sane material. Instead, both of her bare feet plunged into the massed darkness of its face, the fleshy color of them immediately spreading across its surface and nudging the creature backward. From his vantage point on the floor, Carlos could see how the thing's stance faltered and it began to stagger backward toward the railing it had initially sprung up over.

He could also see the way Kelly's arms tensed, and he could tell that her original intention had been to push off of the thing's face, throwing herself and the mirror backwards, away from the swaying spikes. Having grappled with the creature himself, however, Carlos knew that this tactic, which would have worked with a real foe, was doomed to fail. Kelly was not able to give herself any backward propulsion off the thing's blank countenance. Instead, she swung listlessly with it as it stumbled back.

A howling shape vaulted at the Qoloni from the darkness, coming in at a low angle to intersect the thing's middle. Carlos recognized it as the same way he himself had chosen to assault the thing, and at almost the exact same moment saw that the attacker was the only person who had witnessed him do it -- Bruce.

The author rammed his shoulder into the Qoloni, with apparently no other motive than to grab onto it. If he had, he no doubt would have realized how close his creation was getting to the railing. Carlos knew exactly what the author was feeling on impact: that slippery buzzing feeling against the skin, the utterly alien feeling of one's own flesh changing shape, stretching, flattening at the molecular level while utterly retaining its integrity, the mind cringing with anticipated pain that never comes.

The trio of them -- the Qoloni, Bruce, Kelly still swinging from the captive mirror -- took one step too many back toward the railing, and then the whole top-heavy conglomeration began tipping even further back, Carlos powerless to move but watching every centimeter being lost to momentum and gravity. He saw the tipping point passed, witnessed the way the Qoloni's legs passed seamlessly through/around the slats of the railing, and the way Bruce's body came up hard against the same barrier, sending the author that would not let go of his prey flipping up. He also saw Kelly try to bring her flailing feet down on the railing, flailing for anything to prevent her from going over the edge with the black thing, but finally being able to bring them down on nothing at all.

The three of them went over/through the railing and disappeared from sight. Immobilized on the floor, Carlos saw it all.

-14.6-

When Bruce grabbed the creature he had brought into this world, he could feel its sense of betrayal. The way its skin, the vibrating pieces of horrible thoughts stitched together, buzzed in a way that almost seemed like a language. The tighter he grabbed it, the clearer the message became... This is what you brought me here to be, it said. Why are you trying to stop me?

The author made no attempt to answer, only knew that he had to prevent this blasphemous creation from hurting anyone else. Bruce was keenly aware that he had done more physical damage to the inhabitants of the Deertail Lodge that night than even this dark antagonist, and wanted it to stop. If that meant he had to do all he could to throw his Qoloni back into the fictional world it came from, then he was going to figure out a way to do just that.

Watching first Carlos and then Kelly fail in their attempts to gain control of the mirror, Bruce felt he had now been forced into a singular course of action, one where the words that served him every day were no longer sufficient. He had seen Carlos physically attack the thing as a delay tactic, and it had saved his own life. Now, he had to do the same for the others. What he had not prepared for was the utter revulsion he felt at being so close to the creature, to feel its distored reality against his hands, shoulder, and face; more importantly, to feel the way it changed *him*. It was warping him, taking him out of rational three-dimensional space and pulling him with peculiar, dark gravity into becoming more like itself. He could feel his body changing shape, yielding more than he thought possible --

His legs and hip hit wood. He had managed to push the creature through the slats of the balcony railing and out the other side, and now its unfathomable heaviness was pulling him into the dimly-lit void on the other side. At the last instant, he tried to pull back, to let go of his creation and allow it to fall on its own... but his hands were sunk too deeply into its weird flesh. They had too far to come back from the amorphous state they clung to. He was carried forward with it, helpless.

Although the lower half of his body stopped, the top part refused. The Qoloni continued moving out and downward, and Bruce felt his entire body pivoting, his feet leaving the ground and being flung up behind him. He was dimly aware of Kelly next to him, her arms outstretched and clinging to the mirror, riding the plunging beast through the air right next to him. Bruce went entirely upside down, now feeling as if he were plummeting upward, spinning through the cool air of the lobby, feeling it against his face--

Then, spearing pain. Both legs were neatly impaled in various places with the horns of the thing he had designed. When it hit the lobby floor, the Qoloni landed on its back, with Bruce's body most of the way through the process of flipping up over its head. It took him several seconds of stunned agony to realize that there were horns sticking into his back too, though not as deeply. He was basically looking up at the lobby ceiling, suspended about three feet above his personal Frankenstein's monster, inverted on the rack of its razor-sharp horns.

Had he heard a crashing somewhere nearby? Through the horrific pain, he wondered if the mirror had survived the fall along with himself, the Qoloni, and Kelly. Was it still intact, and would it still serve its intended purpose even if it wasn't? Then the Qoloni began to stir, and Bruce couldn't help but let loose a scream as that slight movement threatened to rip his legs in half. He could feel the grooved antlers scraping against bone in multiple places. His monster continued to try to right itself, to rise from where it had fallen. Blood pounded in Bruce's head, just as much from the agony as the fact that his flayed legs were now slightly above his head.

From out of the corner of his upside=-down eye, Bruce caught some motion. It was Kelly, standing upright far above him, apparently hardly the worse for wear after swinging down to the lobby floor along with the tangled mass of man, mirror, and beast. She had landed on her feet, tucked herself into a ball and rolled a short distance away, and now was back at the mirror. She had taken a new, firm grip on the spiked metal frame, trying to wrench it from where it was stuck -- like Bruce himself -- on the Qoloni's antlers. It was this tugging that was causing him such unbearable pain. His scream did not seem to deter her, because it seemed that she had almost gotten the mirror loose.

Bruce tried to speak, no longer caring if she got the mirror free or not, only wanting for the ripping feeling deep in the muscles of his legs and lower back to *stop*. But he could only let out a guttural exhalation, conveying nothing. His eyes filled with tears of pain and horror. He wondered if Glenda felt had anything akin to this after he accidentally stabbed her. And yes, he did consider it an accident, because Dale had been his intended target. Action with and without intent were defined with perfect, separate clarity in his pinwheeling mind. The only thing the two actions had in common was that he wished his only experience with them had stayed in the pages of his books, not out here where there were consequences... so many consequences.

Tears spilled up his forehead, catching in his eyebrows. His throat gasped for air, but there seemed to be none left around him, as if the plunge off the balcony had thrown him out into cold, airless space. He tried to lift his hand, to wave it and get Kelly's attention, so she could help him, but found his arm stuck, similarly impaled in a way that he hadn't even noticed yet. Thus, he had no means of warning Kelly that the Qoloni was, just outside her peripheral vision, reaching up from where it lay on the floor and extending its dark fingers toward her...

The mirror finally came loose, and Kelly stumbled toward Bruce, unwittingly bringing herself even closer to the rising black arm. A smile spread across her face, but as she began to turn toward Bruce, it fell away just as quickly as it came. He was only marginally aware that he was seeing her reaction to the state he had fallen into. The mirror in her hands lowered in her distraction.

Two things happened in rapid succession. He saw the tips of two of the Qoloni's fingers touch the surface of the mirror in its feeble attempt to grab it. When they did, they immediately extended, as if being forcibly pulled through the mirror to some unseen point far beyond. It was an effect that Bruce had considered when writing his story, but never put in the book: it stood to reason that, while the Qoloni was able to reshape physical objects, mirrors were the only thing that would reshape its own body, drawing it in as dirty water swirls down a drain.

Secondly, the thing felt what was happening too, and yanked its hand away. It was just able to retract its fingers from the powerful pull of the mirror, and doing so seemed to cause some kind of drag on the mirror itself. It shifted in Kelly's grip, and her distraction tipped it almost out of her hand. She felt the change just in time, and stepped back, but when the Qoloni's fingers left the surface of the mirror completely, the resistance was gone and she suddenly was pulling too hard. She overcompensated and lost her grip entirely, the mirror spilling out of her grip again. It fell, and when it landed face-down on the wooden area of floor they had come to rest on, a loud, crystalline crack filled the otherwise silent lobby.

-14.7-

Kerren kept heading deeper, toward where she sensed some essential remnant of Glenda still reamined, but it got progressively harder the further she pushed into the denser medium of the brain stem. It had no physical analog, of course, but mentally it felt like trying to dig down through snow that kept getting heavier and slushier. To maintain contact, she kept repeating the fading woman's name:

Glenda?

Yes? came the response each time, as if by rote, the only reasonable response when a person's name is called.

I'm here. It's Kerren. And Dale is here. Do you remember Dale? He's still with you.

For once, he response sounded puzzled, as if struggling to fit the disparate information together. I remember Dale, Glenda finally answered. His eyes are beautiful. I like the way they look at me.

Kerren tried to keep her composure. There was so little time left, and she had entered Glenda's mind with no clear plan of how to utilize it. He's holding you now, Kerren said. He hasn't stopped holding you since you were hurt. It wasn't exactly true, but she didn't see the point in trying to clarify.

I remember the hurt, Glenda answered, and the pain in the memory was evident. I didn't like that. It's what is taking me away.

Kerren found she wanted to reach out to her, for once realizing the few deficiencies in communicating without bodies. I know, was all she could say. And I'm so sorry.

But the hurt is over, Glenda said. Feeling better. Feeling... less.

Kerren had to get to what she had come for. Dale, she said flatly. I need your help with Dale. He won't leave you, but we need him. He has to come back to us. You have to let him.

Dale? Glenda asked, as if he were being mentioned for the first time. I know Dale.

Yes, Kerren repeated, trying not to let her panic show. Every second, she could feel the connection continuing to deteriorate, becoming ever harder to maintain. We need Dale's help, but he won't leave you. Can you help me tell him that it's okay to let you go? She hadn't realized how hard the words would hit her until they were out.

A long pause, and then Glenda replied, fainter than ever, Okay. But first...

For a moment, Kerren was worried she had lost her forever, but then more came floating back along the weakest of mental tethers. My boys.

That was right. Someone had mentioned that Glenda had three sons at home. Yes? Kerren asked, fully aware that if she had corporeal form, she would have been unable to physically speak the words through sobs. What do you want to tell them?

Tell them... Glenda began, and seemed to really be making mighty effort to think about it before saying, They're so good. They're my best things. But they need to help each other. They fight too much. Less fighting. Then they will be okay. Tell them. Please.

I will, Glenda. I will.

And Dale, the desk clerk went on without prompting. Tell Dale. Thank him, for loving me back. But he's a helper. He has to help. I don't want to be the one to stop him.

Okay, Glenda. I will tell him. Thank you.

The spellbinding weight of this responsibility suddenly felt like too much, and Kerren wondered if she would be able to bear it when she drifted back to her frail, injured body. How would ever be able to convey to Dale what she saw when Glenda spoke about him, the multi-faceted fireworks of love, desire, and friendship that erupted from the woman's dying consciousness? And beyond that, how could she ever tell three young, grieving boys about the all-encompassing glow of warm maternal awe at their existences that she saw when their mother spoke her last words about them? Was this the sort of thing that could ever be communicated, or was being inside someone's mind the only way to know? Kerren wondered if what Harmon had taught her could be given to just anyone, or if there were some kind of special connection that had to be present.

Hello? Kerren had assumed that she had heard the last she would from Glenda.

Yes? she replied, barely able to see the final flicker that had been Glenda's light sliding away, far below her. She gave one last push, and just managed to hear a final phrase as it died out entirely.

Tell him, it's not his fault.

Suddenly, Kerren found herself surrounded by more nothing than she had in her entire life. There was not even the slightest glimmer left, nothing but structures that served only to outline the voids that lay within them. Glenda's mind suddenly seemed like a haunted place, and Kerren wanted to be out of there as soon as she could manage.

Come on, child, Harmon said from somewhere nearby, as if he had been there the entire time. His inner voice was resonant with new understanding. I'll lead you back out.

-14.8-

Harmon was sitting right next to him, but was not there. The man had only said a few distracted words of reassurance -- "Hold on, I'll be right back, she needs help" -- before pulling his presence out of Benny's mind altogether. It wasn't until he was gone that Benny was able to grasp how much Harmon's presence had helped him hold his own brain together; keeping his thoughts ordered had grown exponentially harder, proving how vital his friend's presence had been.

Now Benny was alone in his own head again, and increasingly unsure that he would be able to function for long. Thoughts seemed to skitter away from him, like marbles spilling across a table. In trying to gather up as many as he could, he was losing nearly all of them. The only thing that remained constant was the polished metal logo in his crabbed hand, its smooth surface and familiar shape grounding him.

He was dimly aware of some kind of commotion going on outside Harmon's small room: first a faint creaking of the upstairs floorboards, then shouting, followed by an erratic, violent series of bumps and bangs that traveled across the slanted ceiling of Harmon's room (even in his compromised state he could tell that something heavy had just been knocked down the stairs), ending in a series of upstairs thumps of a widely varied and pitched array. And, just when Benny thought it was all over, a horrific crunching crash that seemed to explode just outside the door. It wasn't until Benny heard the scream, close, desperate, and male, that he decided he had to act.

There was no way he could make it all the way to the door without Carlos around to help prop him up, so he decided he would have to crawl. Using Harmon's currently-vacant body as a launching point, Benny started to artfully angle himself so that he could fall to the floor with as little damage as possible. It took every ounce of mental effort he had to do this, and he was mostly successful -- meaning that he ended up facing the door, with the Deertail sigil still firmly gripped in his hand, and Harmon still sitting upright on the cot. Benny counted this as a major victory.

He then began the process of dragging himself toward the door, which meant thrusting the logo forward, thunking it against the floor, and using its weight to pull himself in the direction he wanted to travel. If he had currently owned the capacity to think about it, Benny might have realized that the metal shape was not heavy or hook-shaped enough to really aid him, and that his progress was more due to his ability to envision its help than anything else. But through whatever means, the door drew closer.

He was almost there when he heard another crash, and a tinkle of glass. The sound seemed out of place to Benny; he couldn't imagine that after so many windows had been shattered that night, that there were any glass in the world left to break. It made him all the more obsessed with glancing outside to see what was happening, regardless of the possible danger, and what helped him levitate his free hand up to the knob, to grasp and turn.

The weight of his hanging body was enough to ease the door open a few inches, and his misaligned eyes struggled to make sense of what was happening mere feet from him. On the familiar floor of the lobby lay what seemed to be a huge black mass of pointed branches, and a man lay on his back atop them, facing the ceiling, supported and run through in places by them. He was continuing to make smaller iterations of the scream that had galvanized Benny's trek across the floor of Harmon's room, and he seemed to be simultaneously trying to simultaneously get up and hold as still as possible.

Both of these goals were hard to attain, however, because the mass of branches was also shifting under him, as if they themselves were struggling to rise up off the floor. Benny only gradually became aware of a dark shape lying in their midst, and it physically hurt his mind when recognition of the thing snapped into focus. It was the dark figure with the crazily massed antlers; The Qoloni from Harmon's book. The very thing that had pursued him and Carlos into the very room in which he still lay. If he had the strength or the leverage to pull the door back closed in that moment, he would have. But in his current state, all he could do was watch.

There was a woman on the other side of the dark body lying on the floor. She was hunched over, as if she were trying to back away but couldn't quite do it. She kept scooting forward, darting her hands forward to snatch at the thing, and then retreating in reluctance. Meanwhile, the Qoloni was using one of its hands to ward her off, wagging its elongated fingers at her each time she came near. Benny had no idea why she was taunting the creature this way, until she managed to grab onto the thing that clearly was her goal.

It had been hidden from Benny's view because he was lying on the floor like the Qoloni was, but the woman managed to grab it without letting the dark thing touch her, and pulled the object up as she stepped back. It was immediately familiar to Benny, a gray stellation of metal that was almost as wide as the span of her arms. She picked it up and, once she had gotten a safe distance from the rocking creature, examined it. Benny could see that although there had once been a mirror filling one side of the central portion of it, it had been shattered in the fall he had heard, and only jagged pieces remained around the edge. She appeared to be incredibly upset by this, knuckles whitening around the tines as she shook it in frustration. Then she was looking at the twitching Qoloni on the ground, intently watching as it struggled to lift itself off the ground, its grasping hand still reaching for the mirror, or maybe for her. It would soon succeed, Benny suddenly realized. It would lift itself up, the extra weight of the man stuck on its horns or not, and then it would get her.

There was a vague groaning sound from somewhere else in the lobby. The woman's eyes flicked toward it, focusing on something beyond the imminent threat in front of her, and Benny saw them widen in surprise, and when she saw it the look on her face was so conflicted and genuine that Benny just had to see what she was seeing. He turned his tortured eyes up to his hand, which was still wrapped in a death-like grip around the metal of the doorknob, and pulled. He managed to lift his upper body a little off the floor and a little forward, and when he lowered himself back down it levered the door a few more inches farther open. Now his eyes were almost over the doorjamb, and he could see what -- or rather, who -- the young woman was reacting to.

A dark-skinned young man was stumbling toward her, apparently having been the one who loudly thumped down the stairs only moments before. Lit from behind by the broken lobby windows, he didn't look much better than Benny felt. He limped as he progressed slowly, but with purpose. How he had managed to get himself upright after a such a tumble, Benny couldn't imagine, but it was doubtful that he was going to be able to stay that way for long.

He walked cautiously, with gritted teeth, skirting around the bramble tangles of horns, arcing toward the woman who was still watching him with dropped jaw, mortal concern furrowing her forehead. The young man, for his part, was getting closer to the grasping hand of the Qoloni, although whether he realized this was not clear; he never looked away from the woman as he went to her.

He stopped before her, just as she swung the mirror in her hands to the side so he would not be in danger of its glittering points. Swaying, he stepped up to her and did not stop until his lips were pressed against hers. Benny noted that the young man's cheek had been split in his fall, and blood dripped off his chin. In that injury Benny saw kinship, his own battered head hanging heavily from his neck as he lay there in the doorway.

His exhausted eyes sinking toward the floor, Benny noticed that the arm of the Qoloni was creeping dangerously close to the couple. It seemed to be reaching up for the now-forgotten mirror at the woman's side...

Benny thumped the metal logo in his hand against the floor, hard. Twice, then twice more. The couple broke off their kiss and looked his way. The man found Benny's gaze quickly, but the woman first noted the creature's extended reach and started to back away from it. On the floor, the Qoloni began to sit up, the man impaled on its horns crying out anew as his weight redistributed and he began to be turned upside-down. The dark thing's torso was rising up from the ground, hinging upright like Nosferatu rising from his sarcophagus in the hold of a doomed cargo ship.

Benny did the only thing he could, with the only weapon he had. He lifted his hand as quickly as he could and hurled the Deertail logo in the direction of the young man, who was looking at him. Benny watched, fascinated, as the thing he had clung to so tightly flew out of his grasp so easily, spinning end over end as it sailed away, flinging off random sparks of midnight illumination. The young man reached for it and, as if by the collected will of the two men at either end of its journey, snatched it out of the air.

Then he was diving on the dark horror, slashing down at it like a divining rod, the fork at the top of the triangular piece of metal catching on the ends of a few of its horns. The young man let the weight of his downward thrust carry him to his knees right next to it, pinning that side of the creature's horn rack back down to the floor. He looked right into its eyeless face as he did, his and the monster's countenances not more than a foot apart.

This tilting motion brought renewed screams of pain and rage from the man stuck on the Qoloni's horns, who had been in the process of being crucified upside down as its body rose from the floor. Now with the additional twisting of its head under the weight of the logo, he was pivoted atop it and thrown off, landing gracelessly in a rubberized heap near the creature.

Meanwhile, the woman holding the broken mirror was dealing with the grasping arm, swatting at it with the frame. On the third or fourth attempt, some shard lodged in the corner must have snagged the Qoloni's skin, because its arm became attached, stuck fast as a remaining point of reflective material began to draw it in. Encouraged, the woman began pushing forward as if the mirror frame were a shield, trying to bring more of the Qoloni in contact with it.

Benny reached his now-empty hands out toward the couple; they had stalled the thing for a moment, but he knew there was no way they could stop it. It was eventually going to turn its horns the other way, and overpower the weight of the metal logo, or it was going to snatch its hand back from the mirror and slash at them both with it. And he had already expended every last ounce of energy with the actions he had taken so far; he couldn't even turn his head to look away. One person already lay broken and bleeding across the floor in front of him, and two more would soon follow...

Then a downrushing of air came, a blur of motion falling vertically down onto the struggling mass, accompanied by a howl of rage so loud and pained that Benny wished he had the strength to clap his hands over his ears. The blur solidified as soon as it hit the floor, transforming into a hulk of dark security outfit rooted to the ground by two battered work boots, topped with a feral rictus of flashing teeth.

-14.9-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-14.10-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-14.11-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-15.1-

Silence that fell across the lobby, virtually indisinguishable from the deadened ambience the group had experienced working their way from the storeroom to where Sheryl now stood, looking down over the second floor railing. She had watched every second of Dale's attack, seen the Qoloni evaporate by degrees until there was nothing left, but hadn't thought about whether she should run down to join in. She kept looking at the other, smaller pieces of the mirror lying scattered around on the floor, and could have done so at any time.

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

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

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

The sensory change from hall carpet to cold storeroom wood was sharp against the soles of her feet, bringing her back to herself. Her pace picked up as she stepped through the second doorway, finally coming to kneel next to Kerren, who was still sifting her fingers through Glenda's hair. The desk clerk's face was even paler now than it had been against the snow in full moonlight, and Sheryl shivered with more than cold at the sight of it. Dale had made sure to lay her down gently, lovingly, and she looked at least more comfortable, if not more alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

-15.2-

Bruce.

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

Bruce. The voice, more insistent now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-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 held their positions 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 setup for one final jump scare, just to make them walk away wondering if sleep really could 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 relax (so tired, and there was something faintly grating deep within one of them), and straightened out 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 clatter-thunk 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, and 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 town 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 precisely 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.

-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 informing those who participated of 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 his body 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 as they passed each other, the way you would silently congratulate the quarterback after a winning game, but Carlos wasn't sure the man even noticed 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, after 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 who 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, burnt hair and scorch marks, eyes unfocused, his lower lip hanging down ponderously. It was hard to believe that he could have aided the fight at all, much less fling the Deertail sigil accurately 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 sliding to the floor. He ended up half-sitting next to the injured man lying across the threshold.

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 and take it gingerly in her own.

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, but boldeterd by the thought that he was the onyl reason Benny wasn't in the same condition, he quickly turned his attention back to his comrades.

Kelly had just finished 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 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 with noise. 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 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 becoming familiar with foreign ground he had already tread upon. Either way, the tangle of misshapen, star-sized electric storms and vast mental continents with cracks 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 it turned out that 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 physical 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 varaied scales, or so it seemed -- he had yet to find the boundaries of the ability. 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 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, 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 his for the taking.

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. In the end, this had been his undoing. 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 without the Lodge's computer system up and running, 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. 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 tempered 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 them he could find 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. If he had, it was small, 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. Given time, he could continually study her face, finding pieces of Sarah, pieces of himself; the angle of an eyelid, the swept-back shape of an 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, hovering somewhere above her.