Story: 'Triangles', IX

(Part VIII , X)

Was this a step she should take?

Delores knew she could be at the portal in one step and then through to a whole new world, maybe even her home. It would take longer to say 'Ping Hippopotamus!' than to take that step. Could she afford not to? Probably not. The food seemed to be edible but wasn't sustaining her well. In this land of slightly different physics the food was not QUITE compatible. She was getting weaker and weaker. Or was that why the locals were dead? Was the food poisoned? Was that thing in 'her' bed even the local Delores? Was there a local Delores?

Her mind shifted its pieces and she realised the thing in her bed wasn't a local at all. The man in the National Library's video recording had looked human. The thing in the bed had not. It was something else entirely, and didn't belong here any more than she had. A fellow traveller which hadn't made it? From some dimension or just some other planet? Or maybe here there weren't just humans but other sentient species. Who knew what could happen when triangles were somehow more important in the grand scientific scheme of things?

Whatever happened, she wasn't going to expire in a bed not her own, in a deserted town far from the world she knew and loved. So far that the distance was measured in millimetres rather than miles and spanned galaxies.

Delores took the step, reached out to the circle, and nothing happened. She passed through as if it were just an illusion, just as she had so many times before in her own world before that one touch that changed everything. That was her one trip and she'd be stuck here forever? Maybe it would be best to take her chances in one of the whirlpools or find a bicycle and try to make it to Lampeter--

Delores's thoughts were interrupted as a hand reached out of the portal, grabbed her by the shoulder, and yanked her into the portal. Delores Grey crossed the boundary layer and twisted into somewhere else entirely. Within the world of the Transition, that strange existence between realities, all you can do is observe and try not to panic. Your atoms twist and turn as you cross through into a labyrinthine pocket of space-time and speed up to many times the speed of light before popping because there is no light. You can see anyway, the great swirls of non-space trying to break into your little gap of existence which is somehow shielded from all the most obscure forces. We know what a town looks like, and a continent or a planet. We even know what a galaxy looks like and that the universe is unfathomably big. We can see it from the inside after all. The words for how a universe looks from outside haven't been invented yet.

Our traveller reached the mid-point and felt the intangible slowing down and realignment. All round her she could see the rippling sheets of space-time vibrating in the void. It was enthralling. And there were little filaments connecting them all, that she could see now on this second journey. It was all so incomprehensibly beautiful... and then it was over as she was squeezed through an aperture smaller than anything she could possibly know and landed rather ungracefully in a fountain in a large room which was far more desolate than what she had seen through the portal.

"What?" Her voice still worked. The fountain was actually quite comfortable, like a shower.

"Behind you, miss."

Squirming around in a watery mess, our traveller saw someone unexpected. "You?!" It was the kindly bearded man.

"I'm afraid I diverted you. I rather need your help. Plain chocolate biscuit?"


All that follows is of course bizarre...