6. Tempi
CHAPTER 6
TEMPI
N othing takes me away while I’m sleeping. Thank god that it doesn’t. Nothing sounds more disorienting than waking up in freefall or worse, being dropped into the ocean half asleep. I don’t wanna know how that feels. Luckily, when I check my computer, three more days haven’t gone by either. It’s only the next day, and I know I’m off work now for a few days thanks to Patty. So I do the only thing I can think of.
I use Google.
I type in “Blackholes” and get pages upon pages of science talks that have nothing to do with what I’m experiencing. So I erase that and type in “Magic portals”. Now I get only results about fictional works and fairytales. I add in “real world” in front of “magic portals” and hit enter. This time I get a few leads for people talking about being abducted by aliens but when they describe what happened, many of them describe something similar to the blackholes I’ve fallen through.
Thus begins my deep dive down into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and bigfoot stories. There are so many. At some point, I wind up on a website talking about all the missing people from the last year. The numbers have skyrocketed apparently and many of them have never been found. They just disappeared into thin air. I scroll down a long list of suspected victims. There are so many missing people. The forum is open, so people have added notes here and there, some describing seeing the person actually taken away, some turning around to find them gone. There are notes from family members desperately seeking answers, begging for help. It all stems from something called the “Merge Conspiracy”. There isn’t much information on what it is exactly, or what happens once people are gone. It only mentions that people are being sucked into rifts between worlds. My immediate instinct is to dismiss that as silly as bigfoot theories, but I’m reminded again of what I’ve experienced. I could dismiss some of them, but the one where I was dropped into the ocean probably was the most terrifying. There’s no way to explain that one away. I’m not just dehydrated. I’m not hallucinating.
There are others who’ve experienced it for themselves.
I click through the names of contributors, searching for one tagged with New York. When I finally find one, I’m surprised to see that he’s a professor at a local community college and fairly easy to contact. I could drive there easily. I could ask him some questions to see what he knows. The forum is full of his comments. Maybe I can figure out why weird things keep happening to me.
My decision is practically made for me when I see the memo about a missing elephant from the zoo and how no one seems to understand how he got out. Zippo didn’t break any fences. He just vanished.
I grimace. “I hope you at least got put back in Africa or somewhere nice, Zippo,” I say, clicking off the link. Fingers crossed the elephant I saw didn’t get dropped into the grand canyon or something.
I print out the Professor’s information and study it. If I head out now, I can get there in about an hour depending on traffic.
Without waiting to second guess myself, I grab my keys and head out the door, hoping next time I come back, it’s not to find another three days have passed me by.