The Aspen Experiments

Chapter 6

What if I did slide away? Nothing could happen right?

Wrong! Wrong! something in my brain screamed at me. Suddenly the tunnel scared me. What if my mind slid away down the tunnel, leaving my body behind? Assuming my mind wasn't totally cracked, of course, which this whole thing sort of argued.

I started to slide. I flailed around but there was only glassy smoothness around me. At the end of the tunnel I saw evergreens and grass and sky. Not like the pictures from before. There was a brisk wind blowing, bending the trees and pulling at my hair. It smelled wet and piny.

I spun out the bottom of my tunnel, and the sky and grass wheeled around and around. I caught a glimpse of people running between the pine trees, smeared in red. Other bodies lay on the ground. I was falling and I braced for impact, throwing out my arms and clenching my eyes shut. Before they closed I saw a boy lying naked on the ground, his throat cut, and an ax still in his hand. I screamed as I approached the ground.

I was falling and hit hard, banging my head on something and stubbing my fingers as I broke my fall. I shook my head and realized I was back in the doctor’s exam room. I'd fallen out of the chair onto the cold linoleum. I lay there, dizzy, looking at the cabinet door next to me. I heard feet coming quickly, and I shut my eyes. Too disoriented to deal with vision.

“-outage even faster than Vaughn! Check her vitals.”

Someone started feeling for the pulse in my neck, and I smelled coffee breath. I cracked my eyes open to see Dr. Shammas and Mr. Ringer leaning over me. Shammas shined a light in my eyes; checking my pupil response or something.  

“So, what, your sensors are broken?” I asked, sitting up and pulling away from the pen-light. I still felt lethargic, and I didn’t try to stand. “I thought the whole point of this was that your nifty computers could analyze my eyes automatically.”

Dr. Shammas squatted next to me, bouncing on the soles of his feet. “Well, well, there were some odd results! We'll have to analyze what happened. Now if you could tell us what image it was that upset you so much…?”

“Image?” I asked, “It was a bloody - " I paused, gathering my wits about me. John had obviously known this was going to be bad. I could deal with that fact later, but could I trust Shammas? I didn’t know what on earth had happened to me, but it had been real. Hadn't it?

I shook my head now, squinting, as if I was trying to recall.  “I don’t know exactly, I guess I saw some trees, and I thought maybe some blood. Is that one of your pictures?” I asked. “Because it freaked me out. You shouldn't use it.”

Dr. Shammas and Ringer exchanged a look, very unsubtle. I flexed my toes and realized the lethargy was leaving. I held onto the counter and pulled myself up, while the two men watched, undecided how to deal with me.

“Well, Dara, you looked pretty frightened when you fell out of that chair, do you feel alright? Maybe you should lie down in the nurse’s office for a while.”

 “I think I’d rather go sleep in my room. I don’t have another class until two,” I said, wondering if they would let me go. “Will this test tell you that my eyes are alright?” I asked, as if I was suspicious but still uncertain. Which I was. Uncertain, I mean.

“Yes,” Dr. Shammas said, still looking at me closely, but his posture relaxing, “I’m sorry you were startled, but it can show quite a bit about how your eyes are working. We’ll see if we can't find the reason for your nausea.” He looked at Mr. Ringer, who had been examining the chair while we spoke. “Feel free to rest the remainder of the day, I’ll inform your teachers that you’re excused.”

I left quickly, trying to look surprised, tired, upset (but not too upset), and annoyed. It was quite beyond my acting ability, so I hoped they just thought I was disoriented.

I really was disoriented. Something crazy had happened.  Now that I was away from the disturbing duo, Shammas and Ringer, my brain was reeling with the image of the dead boy.  I kept seeing his face in my mind, slack and bloody. And the other bodies circled in my mind too. I hadn’t seen them closely, but I knew they were dead. The feet running had been splashed in blood too.  Odd, I didn’t feel ill physically. I felt pity, but it was detached. I didn’t know who they were, where they were, or why they were dead. I felt sorry for them, but not nearly as much as I felt bewildered.  I didn’t feel like I could go back to my room right away. No way I could make normal conversation right now.

I stumbled my way into the relative dimness under the trees, in the woods behind the admin buildings. I hadn’t realized how erratically I was walking until I staggered like a drunk and caught myself on a tree trunk. What the heck had they done to me? I felt drugged, or possibly high.

And the tunnel, what was that? It felt solid. One moment it was rigid, like the inside of a diamond, and the next it quivered like a silk scarf in a pool of water. And the way the vision had wheeled around and around, as I fell...could you do that with a camera? I'd felt the leaves scrape my arms as I fell toward the dead boy and the running people.

When I felt a little more clear headed I went further into the woods. I didn’t have a destination so I wandered aimlessly, letting my mind circle around my experience.  Finally I stopped and sat on a small boulder.  I had a gigantic headache and no explanations. I knew I should head back to my room, but I was reluctant to go.  I shuffled my feet around in the dry needles on the ground and kicked a rock next to my toe. It bounced a few feet away, hitting another rock with a loud metallic ring. 

Huh. Weird. I leaned over and grabbed the rock. It was gray, almost black, and not a rock after all. It was a metallic spar of some sort, a rod about five inches long, and smooth at both ends. It was five sided, rather like an angular cylinder, and both ends were cut diagonally. It was the smoothness that first appealed to me. Each edge was distinct, but rounded ever so slightly. It gave the appearance of sharpness, but wasn’t. It was cold, but that was no surprise, it froze out here every night.  I rolled the shape around in my mind, enjoying the solidity and the soft precision.

It must have been from a building or something, I thought, looking around. I didn’t see any old construction site or farmhouse, but that didn’t mean anything. I looked at the rod again. All the edges were uniform. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I liked it. I stuck it in my pocket where it made a cold spot against my leg. The small find had distracted me from my problems, and my head felt marginally better. I staggered back down the hill, through the woods, and back to campus.

I skipped my afternoon class, passed out on the bed. I was surprised when Katie came in, after her last class.

“Hey Dara,” she said, walking in without knocking, “Are you sick again? That’s awful. Did they get your eye exam done after the power came back on?”

I looked at her blankly. “The power was off?” My alarm clock was blinking, 6:20. I hadn't looked at it.  My new cathedral clock was fine, it showed 4:15. “I didn’t know it went out.”

Katie looked at me quizzically, “Really? It was right at 10:00 or so, and the whole campus was out for a while. Anyway, it was a bummer because we were going to see a video in physics, but instead he lectured about how we’re too dependent on technology, or something like that. I mean, whatever dude, you’re a physics teacher. Get over it.”

I managed to smile and comment until Katie bounced back to her own room, while I reset my alarm clock.  Not likely that the power outage was related to my eye test, right? We hadn’t lost power in that building... but what were the odds of a random power outage right when I was having an out-of-body experience?