Chiron Academy

Strange Tales Issue #27: Through the Portal

Gary felt the wind blow grains of sand across his face. If he had been more awake, he might have appreciated that rarely was there wind in his apartment, let alone sand. He groggily tried to reach his hand up to wipe a stray grain out of his eyelashes. However, it did not move. After a minute, he finally registered it was because his hand was pinned underneath his stomach, caught between his torso and ground beneath him.

If he had been more awake he might have registered that the carpet in the lounge was much more comfortable than the parched earth beneath him and it lacked the small hard stones that littered the ground beneath him.

He hazily rolled himself over, to free his hand, only to find he had run into a large stone that had been just a few inches away. It was completely unlike anything in his family's small apartment with its rough granite texture. This finally rattled his sleeping mind to wakefulness.

He sat up bolt upright as his eyes shot wide open. All around him was a vast wasteland of brown rock. The sky above him was amber colored, the kind he was used to seeing at sunset, but there was no sun visible in the sky.

A cool breeze was blowing past him, making Gary shiver. The t-shirt and shorts that he'd worn all day had been very appropriate for the hot weather in the city but they provided very little protection against the wind.

Where on earth was he? Gary wondered to himself. Was it Earth at all?

The last thing he remembered was he sitting at the desk in the lounge, reading a book for English. Then there had been a loud noise behind him... and wind? It had seemed very odd; there was no window in the lounge, no way for a breeze to get in. He might have thought it was his imagination, just the air conditioner blowing and a neighbor's vacuuming next door to add the sounds, but it had not just been a breeze he had felt. It must have been a small gale blowing behind him, such as a terrible howl of wind and the force of the air blowing past him, pulling him backward.

That's right now, he could remember distinctly being pulled backward. He fell backward in his chair as the air irresistibly pulled him. He'd watched as the objects around him: his backpack, the papers he had strewn about on the desk, books from the shelves had swirled behind him as well, sucked into that peculiar force behind him.

And then...

He couldn't quite remember.

Gary tried his best to remember the next moments after that, but try as he might his mind came up blank.

This left him a bit forlorn, for as interesting as the sudden rush of a hurricane like winds in his room had been, it did not explain how he'd gotten himself where he was now, nor where exactly that was.

Gary again surveyed his surroundings. This could not be anywhere in the city, for where was the familiar skyline, the omnipresent stretch of steel skyscrapers, so noticeable even on the outskirts.

Gary doubted it could be anywhere in the area for that matter, for he had never heard of such a desolate place anywhere near the city.

And there was the matter of the sun being gone from the sky. That was decidedly strange. If the sun were truly setting, surely the sky would darken and the light would fade, but the entire time that Gary had been watching, the sky hadn't changed at all. It had remained the same dark amber color. Gary had a feeling that wherever he was, it certainly was somewhere strange.

Still, if he had come somewhere, it must possible to get back, even if he had come accidentally...

He glanced around the brown rocky patch where he stood. Nothing around him seemed to indicate that it would be useful in getting home.

Perhaps, he wondered, I should explore a bit further? After all, one never knows what one will find if one looks.

Picking a direction at random, for they all seem equally likely to produce a solution, Gary made his way up to a nearby hill, picking carefully where to place his feet amongst the loose jagged rock.

The hill was not very tall, and as Gary reached the crest of it, he was able to take in a wide view of the surrounding area from his new vantage point. He had secretly hoped that he would be able to see some landmarks or some indication of a way to go, but as Gary surveyed the surroundings, he was met with only more of the same: miles and miles of desolate brown rock.

The ever-present wind blew more harshly across the top of the hill, cutting through Gary's thin t-shirt and shorts. He suppressed a shiver.

Suddenly the ground beneath him began to shake, the loose stones around him rattling in place. A few tumbled down the hill, as Gary struggled to maintain his footing.

The rumbling reached its crescendo as something burst forth from the ground, sending sprays of rock shooting outwards. not far from where Gary stood shakily on the hill.

Gary could only describe it as a gargantuan green tube, with the end rounded. It poured out from the hole. It was ten feet... twenty feet... thirty feet long... appearing to grow longer and longer as the portion that was underground emerged into the fading sunset. It was thick, easily ten feet in diameter.

Finally, as the ground seemed to be shaking less and less as it creature had less and less of itself underground., what must be the other end of the creature popped out from the whole it was also rounded to a close. Gary wondered if it was some sort of giant worm, but isn't long enough but it looked so familiar. Gary paused his thinking when he realized that with nothing left underground there was nothing to keep the not worm creature upright. It had been moving very fast but when the speed ran out of speed, it must inevitably crash back down to the ground.

Gary watched but that moment never came. Instead, it seemed to maintain its speed and bearing, changing its direction only slightly turning its body westward almost parallel with the ground.

Now that he could finally get a good look at it, Gary wondered why the sight looked so familiar. It was too thin to be worm and it couldn't be a pipe... Suddenly, his mind flashed back to his biology textbook he'd been studying just the day before, for Mrs. Herwitz's class. They'd been studying single-celled organisms. It looked very similar one of the bacteria he'd seen in one of the pictures, shaped in a long tube shape with rounded edges. Only instead of being microscopic, this one was gargantuan.

The danger seemingly passed, with the creature growing more and more distant Gary stood for a moment, taking the sight of the giant bacteria flying through the air, backed by the low sun's twilight rays. It was rather majestic in a way.