"Wake up!" Devon was gently shaking the pale figure lying on the ground next to me as I was roused from sleep at the sound of his raised voice. He was tugging Partita's arm from beneath her curled-up body and working to release from her wrist the metallic clasp which had become entangled in her long black hair. He quickly turned to me as I got up and kneeled beside him over my friend's nearly lifeless body, and when he passed me the item he had removed from her arm, I paled too.
It was my turn to wear the accursed bracelet. Partita was nearly drained, and shouldn't have slept through the night with it on, but we hadn't yet worked out all the variables to determine precisely how the device charged itself from our bodies' energy. We only knew that one of us must keep it on at all times, or risk losing our link to the transport. How the device actually worked only Dr. Fielding had an inkling, and he had been separated from our party by an unfortunate turn of fate two transports ago.
Devon had now become our de facto leader after we lost the doctor, not because he wanted the role, but mostly in an effort to curb the decline of our morale. His inextinguishable optimism often was the only thing which kept us from despairing our bizarre predicament. We were beginning to lose track of how many transits we had experienced since the first night we had been whisked out of our own reality, and into this nightmarish plunge between worlds unknown, by way of Dr. Bergeron's gravitational tubes.
It was summer, 1905 in Downey, Wiltonshire when word of the first success of the professor's arcane experiments brought us together to witness the culmination of his life's work. Nearly twenty of us had been gathered by invitation from the most prestigious universities in the south—mathematicians, physicists, and their colleagues in related fields of academia, culled from the departments which had most closely studied the professor's theories on trans-dimensional displacement.
The demonstration had gone catastrophically wrong. What we were intended to witness was carefully described to us before the dynamos were spun up. At first, the phenomenon began as predicted. The zone of variability was marked in chalk-lines upon the ancient brick masonry of the laboratory floor. The test objects were securely ensconced within the projected field of the enormous induction coils surrounding the projector, but the professor and his esteemed audience stood safely outside the target area in a crowded arc of British intellectual curiosity.
The unusual bracelet the professor wore upon his left wrist escaped our notice that night, yet its mate was destined to play a pivotal role in what was to come. The first glimmer of light from the gravitational projector formed mid-air, suspended in a large circle in front of us, reaching from half a meter above the floor to just below the adzed beams of the cellar ceiling. It's circumference wavered and crackled with energy just within the curvature of the field coils, which themselves began to shimmer, as if bending the very light which illuminated them. The smell of ozone assailed our senses as spinning magnetos churned out incalculable pulses of energies to balance the feedback from the displacement field.
A growing sense of alarm rose from the root of my spine, that we must certainly be standing too close to this ungodly experiment. The fear must have been shared by some of my colleagues as spikes of incandescent energy began to arc out from the pulsing ring of light in front of us. A tunnel appeared dimly before us, snapped back into nothingness, then reappeared as a growing vortex of shimmering light that suddenly receded through the stone wall of the lab into an apparent infinity rushing quickly away from us.
I felt Partita's hand squeezing mine as our astonishment at what was transpiring stirred in us a mutual need to hold on to something substantial. The test objects immediately in front of us were forming luminous ghosts of themselves which were being sucked inexorably into the screaming vortex of the tunnel, thinner and thinner until they lost all solidity and disappeared as streaks of light into the abyss.
The sudden disappearance of the array of test objects and the lab stands upon which they were supported evoked a gasp from the shocked crowd as the apparent success of the experiment momentarily distracted us from the peril we feared. The professor beamed with pride at the outcome of the test, proving his theories to the assembled luminaries of science. I myself was momentarily relieved that the demonstration was transpiring as predicted, and the danger we felt was only manifested from our instinctive fears of the unknown. I smiled in relief, and squeezed my friend's hand even tighter in the shared elation of the onlookers.
But glancing down at our joined hands, the same effect that preceded the disappearance of the test objects began tugging wisps of light from our clenched white knuckles, stretching outward from our bodies towards the glowing tunnel. My fear rebounded, but before we could press back to escape through the now-panicking group of scientists behind us, the laboratory around us disappeared in a streak of light.
We abruptly found ourselves standing against a fierce wind on a storm-swept beach on the shores of some vast and unknown ocean. The rain pelted us, driving us to scramble up the shore away from the breaking waves before the undertow sucked the sand from beneath our stumbling feet. The stinging gale beat at our backs and we could not at first distinguish how many of us had been swept into this hellish place. The tunnel we had been sucked through disappeared the moment we tumbled onto this twi-lit shore.
Our first night in that unknown place was terrible. The strange maroon sky could not be imagined to be anywhere on the world we knew. The waves rolling in from the sea seemed to move much more slowly than any breakers any of us had ever witnessed. Their size was also unnaturally large, making them appear ominous, so we scrambled up the beach to escape them into a thicket of towering grass.
Whether night or day, we were never sure. The hours passed under the same sickly discolored sky while we huddled under the relative protection of the thicket of grass we had scrambled into to escape the ferocity of the storm-torn sea. Partita had never released my hand, and we landed upon the beach together, but the others could not be accounted for until the storm let up. The fronds of the grasses under which we sheltered were bowed over us so thickly we could not see beyond our outstretched hands.
The winds gradually ceased whipping the bent blades of grass around our hunkered bodies. We had hiked our collars up to shield our faces from the stinging lash, and pulled our hands into our sleeves, or our skin would have been as torn and excoriated as we found our clothing to be when the winds finally subsided. Upon our escape from the smothering thicket, we found the sea had calmed its assault upon the shore, but our whereabouts remained a complete mystery.
How many hours had passed since our traverse through Professor Bergeron's apparatus we could not count, only our numbers could be reckoned as our fellow refugees gradually emerged into the open again. At first count we numbered twelve of our fellow academicians. Some staggered out from the weeds on their own while others were dragged, beaten unconscious by the storm. Our clothes were in tatters and a few of us were bleeding, lacerated by the whipping grasses when clothing offered too little protection.
We began searching our new surroundings, finding nothing familiar, save a few shiny objects half-buried in the sand. We dug them out to discover them to be the test objects from the experiment, whisked away from the laboratory only moments before we ourselves were. We gathered them into one place, hoping something among them could prove useful in our current circumstance, but little offered us any hope of escaping this unearthly place.
It was Dr. Fielding who investigated our findings, while the rest of us tended to those who were only now regaining their senses. Devon's assistant produced a flask of spirits which he proffered to the weakest of the recovering members of our group. A couple of the women coughed and sputtered at the potent distillation, but it succeeded in bringing them to their feet. The world around us offered no comfort, but a few of our number who were better off than the rest, sought to assuage the fears of the most despondent and downcast, and get them up to face the daunting task ahead of us.
It was then that Dr. Fielding managed to pry open a latched steel cage found among the recovered test objects to reveal a small house-cat sequestered inside. Around its neck, he discovered the bracelet. No ordinary collar, the adornment looked a practical thing, more device than jewelry. The cat was barely alive and made no protestation when the doctor gently removed the unusual circlet from its neck. The intricate bracelet he then examined turned out to be the only useful article recovered from the assemblage of otherwise inanimate objects.
Two groups of mathematical symbols were etched into the metallic surface of one of the bracelet's links, and the other sections seemed un-naturally warm to the touch, but yielded no other clues as to the nature of the device. Dr. Fielding guessed that it was placed around the animal's neck as more than mere identification, and postulated that it was put there to function as a locater to bring the feline back to the lab at the completion of the experiment.
That theory was the only hope we had of ever finding our way home, and the bracelet soon focused our collective attention on divining its function. It became apparent that the mechanism had no operable controls, for the cat would not have the capacity to effect any changes which would bring about its retrieval. So we were hesitant to disassemble the device for fear of damaging it, and possibly defeating any avenue of being rescued.
The doctor put the bracelet on as the logical conclusion was that its function depended upon being worn by a living subject since it was, after all, incorporated into a piece of jewelry. After several hours of speculation, it dawned on some of us that our immediate concerns were more properly devoted to our survival—food and shelter. Those of us with more practical skills set out to look for both.
Partita and I became part of the group attending to our immediate needs, since no easy escape from this place was forthcoming. We introduced ourselves to the rest of our castaways and found we already knew some by reputation and others by association with mutual colleagues. Being experimental physicists by and large, our party was ill-equipped to apply our training to the practical issues of survival, but we managed to find a few edible plants and shelter more hospitable than the stinging grasses.
Dr. Fielding became more discouraged as the day wore on, and his mood turned into an unaccounted for lethargy. There was no real darkness here as day and night were not clearly differentiated by the light in the sky. There was no bright sun overhead, just a milky haze that dimmed and brightened mysteriously. Only our own diurnal clocks remained to signal cues for sleep and activity. Even so, The doctor's energy levels continued to wane, and he very nearly lost consciousness until we realized that the bracelet itself was the cause.
It became clear to us that the bracelet was somehow powered by drawing energy directly from its wearer. Whether this was electro-magnetic, or some other method of transfer, we didn't immediately determine, but we began taking turns wearing the bracelet in shorter intervals so that none of us were drained like the doctor nearly was. What we still had to determine was what the energy derived from our bodies actually enabled the device to do. We found out within a few hours.
Our internal clocks were still set to Greenwich Mean Time. The biological need for sleep overcame our anxieties at being marooned on a world unknown to us, and we succumbed to exhaustion. Not knowing what dangers lay beyond the grassy fields, we slept in the relative safety of the beach, with two of us standing watch. One to wear the bracelet, and the other to take over for them when the bracelet became too taxing. But perhaps it wasn't by accident that the two who volunteered for the first watch were married to each other.
Whether it was the muffled groans of Mrs. Pruitt, or the gentle breeze that suddenly gusted off the ocean, I was suddenly awakened from a sound slumber with Partita close beside me. I gave her a nudge and she popped her head up to see the Pruitts humping breathlessly only a few feet down the beach. Neither of us had ever seen two people engaged in sex right in front of us, so we both watched discreetly, while a few others around us were also roused by their activity.
The Pruitts seemed to be completely oblivious to the rapt attention of their audience, or of anything else around them because neither of them seemed to be aware that the bracelet she wore was glowing brighter and brighter as her sexual excitement approached its peak. When she reached her orgasm, two things happened that none of us were prepared for. The bracelet flashed in a brilliant strobe of light, which expanded into a shimmering ring directly above them.
The wavering circle floated in the air above us, just as its predecessor had in Professor Bergeron's lab, but instead of a tunnel expanding away from the glowing ring, the tunnel appeared as a distant point of light far out over the ocean, racing toward us until its circumference locked onto the ring of light floating in the air in front of us. The completed vortex hummed with energy that sizzled mere inches above the sand. Desperate not to miss the opportunity to escape, we all scrambled to our feet and ran towards the tunnel.
One by one we dove into the vortex, hoping the conduit would convey us back to Professor Bergeron's lab, and home. There was no time to consider our options. The aperture might disappear at any moment. It was a leap of faith, and before we could even count the passage of time, we emerged one-by-one from the other end of the tunnel and tumbled to the ground. We didn't end up in the lab, however. We didn't know where we were, but it only took moments before we realized that our complement was missing Dr. Fielding.