Dorian opened his eyes, and Stephanie disappeared. For a moment, he imagined the couch moved, as if the floor was the surface of a black lake, but that feeling faded, leaving him with the memory so vivid of her pulse in his fingertips and the way her lips parted when she laughed that he wondered for a second if she’d actually been there before him.
“It’s beginning,” an elderly woman in the couch next to him said again. Her arms looked frail, but her voice was firm.
“What?” said Dorian.
“Shhh!” she said, and hunched forward, all her attention directed out the window.
At first Dorian thought the mountain was catching fire. A flicker of red glinted from the middle of a cliff. Then it spread over the length of the rock, a brilliant, deep red like an electric ruby.
“My God,” someone said. Someone else sighed.
The red spread to neighboring cliffs, but now the center glimmered with yellow, and a few seconds later almost all the red had been replaced by the yellow glow.
Leaning toward the woman next to him, Dorian said, “What is that?”
“Just spectacular,” she said.
“No, what is it?”
She didn’t look at him. “Refracted moonlight on the crystals. It’s only this good a couple times a year, and only from this spot. No other mountain in the world does this, and if this room were any other place, we wouldn’t see it. The moon has to be in the right phase.”
Now the yellow light enveloped the entire mountain, except at the bottom, which had acquired a purple tint that crawled up the cliffs until the yellow vanished. Purple was Stephanie’s color, the color of amethyst.
“There were clouds in the spring. We missed it,” the old woman said, then she started crying.
Dorian sat with his hands in his lap, unsure of what to do.
“My husband was with me then. We’d never been here before.” She wiped her tears before looking at him for the first time. Her eyes reflected the purple from the mountain. “It’s just a superstition, I know, but they say if you see the lights with someone you love, they will be with you forever.”
Gradually the purple vanished. The edges of a few of the larger rock faces glinted green for a moment. Finally, the mountain looked like it had when he entered the room. People rose from the couches and headed for the exits. Many were couples holding hands. The old woman didn’t move. She’d wrapped her arms across her chest, as if she were hugging herself. Her knuckles were large and arthritic. She said, “I hope you come back when it isn’t cloudy. I hope you come back with someone you love.”
A chill swept the back of Dorian’s head. “I’m looking for her.”
She shrank a little deeper into her chair. “Not me. I’m waiting.”
At the other end of the room, a bellboy bent to talk to a young couple still sitting. They smiled back at him, then each showed him a small piece of plastic. In the room, lit only by reflected moonlight, Dorian couldn’t tell what the plastic was. The bellboy moved to the next lodger, who also showed him a plastic card. There were only a few people between Dorian and the bellboy when Dorian recognized that they were displaying their room keys. His own key didn’t look like the ones they showed.
“What’s the problem?” said a woman as she put her key back in her pocket.
“Nothing of concern, ma’am. A security issue, misplaced guest.”
Dorian slipped out of the room and into a passageway. Half of the wall was transparent, like the entrance bridge near the transition, except the ceiling glowed to provide dim light. He followed the gentle curve and had walked for several minutes when an acetylene-bright brilliance flushed the hall into overexposed surfaces and shadows. He blinked against the glare before shading his eyes. From the mountain’s base, the light grew more intense, until, soundlessly, a rocket, balanced on a flaming pillar, rose past him and streaked into the night.
He heard the people in the hall before he saw them, but short of turning back the way he came, there was no way to avoid them. They laughed and joked loudly. At first Dorian thought they must be going to a masquerade. All wore bulky suits and carried helmets under their arms.
“I’ve never been outside,” said a young man with glasses and a moustache.
“Just don’t sit on something sharp,” said his motherly-looking companion. “And be sure to listen to the safety procedures. Depressurization is nothing to fool around with.”
They were too preoccupied to acknowledge Dorian as they clumped past.
When they vanished around the curve, Dorian stopped, put his hand on the glass wall, and looked out again. The stars never had seemed so sharp and unblinking, and, he noticed, there was no vegetation he could see. None at all. The landscape was as desolate and bare as the—he paused as he made the comparison—as the moon, but there was the moon, nearly resting on the horizon. He shivered. Every transition at Mount Either took the guests to an exotic location, but it had never occurred to him to wonder how exotic. This is Earth, he thought, isn’t it? Clearly Earth! But what happened to it?
The mountains weren’t just dead. They were swept clean and bare, like a planet’s skeleton, solid, smooth, dry and with no ability to shrug themselves into life. He pressed his forehead against the glass and shut his eyes. Where was Stephanie? She’d be taking pictures. She’d be stopping at every new view, her head cocked a little to the side, as if she were measuring the world for a painting. She’d tell him about what she’d found, and if he was quiet for too long, she’d say, “What are you thinking?” and genuinely want to know.
Dorian pushed away from the glass and continued walking, slowly at first, but soon with a purposeful stride. At a junction he chose the hallway whose stairs led toward the lobby. An elevator took him up, and when the doors opened, a bellboy stood on the other side. The bellboy, wearing a silk vest that sported a shiny name tag that read, NED, CAN I HELP?, held a personal digital assistant in one hand with Dorian’s face on the screen.
“I’m Dorian Wallace.”
The bellboy checked the image in his hand. “Heavens, you are Dorian Wallace! Thank goodness, sir. Your wife has been worried sick. Everyone has been looking for you.”
Dorian’s hand flew to his heart, and he clenched his shirt in a fist. “You know where Stephanie is?”
Two short hallways later, they were in the lobby; the same long window that seemed so familiar looked out on the moonlit mountains. Dorian’s pulse pounded and his face felt hot. The same cliff face covered with plants made the back wall, and, Dorian thought, the same concierge, his handlebar eyebrows pointing upwards, waited at the reception desk. But he wasn’t the same. Similar, but not the same. Shorter, perhaps? A little broader in the shoulders?
Stephanie stepped out from behind the concierge.
Wordlessly they embraced. Dorian held her tightly, his cheek pressing against the side of her head. She trembled in his arms. For a moment, all centered on her, on the feel of her breathing against him, of her fingers on his back. The smell of her skin. The texture of her blouse.
For a moment, all was perfect.
But she stiffened–—he could feel it in her muscles—and she pushed away.
Stephanie looked at him, her hands still holding his. Dorian studied her. Where Stephanie’s hair had been curled, it now hung straight. Where her eyes had been blue with tiny white spokes, they were now blue with tinges of green.
“Who are you?” the woman asked.
“I’m Dorian. Who are you?” He released her hands, and they hung in place where he’d left them. She took a single step back.
“Oh, no,” said the concierge. “This is distressing.”
“Where’s my husband?” the woman said. “Where’s my Dorian?”