The Elias Anomaly

Five

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Joseph walked for a couple of hours before spotting the lights of a small settlement in the distance. It was dark and he was unsure of his way. He calculated that when he arrived he was half an hour away from the small town he was now approaching. Until he had crossed the summit of a nearby hill he could not see it at all.

The only reason he could see it now was because of a number of weak lantern lights hung from eaves throughout the town. He hadn't ever considered the strength of sodium lighting before. That had a tendency to tinge the horizon pinky-orange way up into the sky.

The glow of these lanterns, oil lamps or similar, was enough to stand out brightly in the pitch black. It helped Joseph make out his immediate surroundings but that's where its utility ended.

This left the next awkward question. Where the hell was he that it didn't have normal street lighting? There were no electric lights visible in the town and none on any of the roads that approached it. Joseph realised that the situation he found himself in was entirely his own fault. He had taken a jaunty stroll down a strange coloured tunnel and found himself in parts unknown. He, somehow, hadn't expected them quite to be this unknown, he supposed.

His right foot stepped off the turf and onto a harder, smoother surface. Joseph looked down and was overjoyed to note that he had found a road. This was excellent news. He got himself onto the roadway, which was not very wide and made of cobbles, and proceeded on his way toward the small town.

Before his anxiety about the low tech nature of his surroundings could return his attention was once more diverted. Now that he was less than quarter of a mile from the town he thought he could discern somethin in the distance. The something was a faint column of rotating light that stretched up to the sky. It nestled somewhere in the streets and alleys of this settlement.

Joseph had to fall back on guessing wildly to make sense of this. His imagination appeared as good a tool as any in strange times. If there was a geometric design on a wall in Dewsmonk that could bring a person... Wherever the hell this was... Then maybe in this place there was a second design that could take a person back.

In an instant Joseph was overwhelmed. A completely unwarranted wash of relief made Joseph's nerve endings tingle. He ignored the worry that the sensation was not dissimilar to that morning's bout of pins and needles.

Thinking back to this morning reminded Joseph of Eva. This brought him, naturally, to the problem of what he was going to tell her about why he was late home. After all his wife was having difficulty processing the thought of him being mugged. How could he tell her he had discovered some kind of geo-spatial anomaly in a back alley behind the department store?

He would have to think about that on the drive home. Right now he was approaching the edge of town, and what a town! The houses were all much shorter than what Joseph thought of as houses. Each constructed in a mock-Tudor style, except possibly without so much of the mock.

If Joseph reached up he could touch the bottom of the window-sills on the upper floors. The head clearance on the ceilings must have been terrible, no more than a couple of inches for someone of average height. If you were far north of six feet tall then you would perpetually have to stoop in one of these houses.

Had Joseph stumbled into some sort of living history museum? Such a scenario appeared to be the most likely. After all an Occam's razor approach to this madness would urge him not to make up unnecessary axioms to explain his situation.