Story: 'Triangles', II

(Part I , III )

Can you imagine being swung through the fifth dimension like a feather through an ice cube? Or swimming through a sea of yellow alphabets? Or the queasiness of seeing yourself stretch away into infinity like a rubber band at breaking point? All of these sensations, and none of them, smashed into Delores Grey's brain as she traversed the triangular rift and got sucked elsewhere. Finally, as reality became so tenuous that it hardly existed for her at all, everything condensed into one blue triangle of nothing, a microcosm of a world before she blacked out entirely.

Many hours passed. Many minutes then also passed. Then a few seconds trickled away too, like cheese on toast slowly melting.

Finally Delores began to rouse herself and looked around at the landscape she had suddenly found herself in. It was a twisted, savage version of Aberystwyth. The promenade was still there but deformed and twisted slightly askew. There was still a beach, and it was still as rocky as ever, but the water was a mass of overlapping whirlpools, spreading apparently chaotic patterns and waves. With so many drains for the water it made no sense that there was any left. No sense at all. A great red blazing triangle of a sun was low in the sky. A triangular sun.

Turning from the prom to look back at the town, she was barely impressed by the changes at all. So much strangeness had left her dazed. While the layout of buildings and streets was the same, the structures themselves were different, and there were no people out. The roads zigged and zagged and the buildings barely seemed to obey physics. Some where inverted pyramids while others curved where they should have pointed. The most apparent difference, though, was that there were many more triangular surfaces. Triangles were everywhere! In Delores's world there had been squares, or more properly 'quadrilaterals' everywhere; four-sided shapes dominated, but here there were triangular and even fairly common hexagonal designs.

It was overwhelmingly strange. Delores almost fainted again and swayed but pulled herself together. She couldn't understand what had happened at all. Nothing happened when you touched the triangles, everyone knew that. Why would she suddenly be transported to this strange place? Or had she been transported? Maybe the world had... changed... somehow. Suddenly troubling thoughts cascaded in on her and she gripped her rucksack straps tightly until her fingers went white. At least her fingers were normal, even if nothing else was. Her clothes looked normal too, as did the rest of her that she could see. She was still Delores.

No triangles were in sight, and no floating apertures of any kind could be seen in fact. Something was wrong. Her stomach made its presence felt and suddenly her path became clear. Food. There must be food soon, and water, or this experience would end before she made it home to that distinctly less pointed world she knew. To that world without ridiculous triangles everywhere, except the floating ones, and people and that bizarre murk that some people still hadn't been trained to not see.

She had to get home. Because somehow she knew that things were going to happen in this strange place. Dangerous things.


To be continued... indefinitely...