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“Very well.” He fished an envelope from his briefcase. “My fee.”
Numbly, I nodded, and barely managed to write him a check for the outrageous amount of money he charged. My hand trembled when I shook his while seeing him out.
Finally alone with Thor, I sat down at the edge of the bed and stared at him while tears ran down my cheeks. “Thor.”
Despite all the excitement,I managed to get some sleep that night and in the morning my mind was already on the presentation, which might be why I have such a hard time explaining what happened next.
One moment I was exiting my hotel room, about to close the door, the next, I felt as if a giant vacuum cleaner had sucked me inside a giant funnel, like a dust particle, where I tumbled and spiraled through a vortex of nothingness and darkness.
Until, with anoomphpressed from my lungs, I landed on hard ground.
My fingers still clutched the straps of my oversized bag which held my laptop, wallet, papers, and pretty much everything I held dear in my life.
Gone was my edginess over the coming presentation, gone were the jitters in my stomach over having to address fifty colleagues many years my seniors. Gone was the fear of being ridiculed. All my hard work suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore, just as I had heard other people say who had experienced a brush with death.
Wait, is that what is happening here?Did I have a brush with death, I wondered,or am I still in the midst of it?
I was too dizzy from whatever just happened to try and make sense of it or where I was. Because wherever that was, it most definitely wasn’t the Starfyre Hotel in Geneva where I had been about to leave my room. A room I had spent the past two years of my life in.
Stunned, I stared at the rich vegetation surrounding me, took in the white-peaked Jura Mountains in the distance, and could have sworn they looked just the same as they had from my hotel room where I had prepped for my speech earlier.
A chill in the air made me long for my sweater, which was lying forgotten on the bed in my room. Slowly, I got to my feet to take stock of my body. My back hurt, but other than a spell of lingering dizziness, I felt okay. Filled with trepidation, I turned in a circle to grasp the expanse before me and realized I stood in the center of a meadow, enveloped by thick forest.
I licked my dry lips and wondered with a rising heart rate if somebody had put something in my morning coffee to make me lose consciousness, then somehow taken me out here. It seemed the only logical explanation because nothing else made any sense. Why would anybody do that, though?
My heart skipped a beat as multiple ideas flashed through my mind. I turned in another—this time more frightened—circle, scanning my surroundings for the person responsible. Was this some kind of sick joke or game? I tried to recall if I had heard anything about serial killers in Switzerland lately but drew a blank.
Cold spread through my veins when I remembered an episode from my favorite TV show, where a serial killer had forced his victims to strip naked before chasing them through the woods, and subsequently killing them. I dismissed that theory as a possible explanation for my current situation because,thankfully, I was still dressed in my smart business suit and high heels.
“Hello,” I called out tentatively. I didn’t feel like calling the hypothetical serial killer’s attention to me, but I also hoped somebody else might be out here hiking or something. Nothing but the wind answered.
“Hello!” I called again, more forcefully, while tears gathered in my eyes.
Where the hell was I? What happened?
I turned in yet another circle, but there was nothing. No hotel, no cars, not even a sidewalk, yet I would have sworn on my life that straight ahead of me was where the Starfyre’s parking lot had been.
I was good at memorizing my surroundings, a result of having been lost once when I was a kid. It hadn’t been for long, but from then on, I always took note of certain landmarks, like buildings or mountains, to know exactly where I was. And from where I stood, looking straight up at about six flights high, would have been the door to my hotel room.
I knew how incredible this sounded. Even if I had been inexplicably beamed into another dimension, I never would have survived a fall from the sixth floor. Definitely not as unharmed as I was.
The memory of the sensation of being sucked by a vacuum cleaner came back to me unbidden, but I pushed that thought away, unable to deal with it right then.
This had to be some kind of sick joke. It had to be. Nobody got sucked up by giant vacuum cleaners only to be transported into another dimension or… time. Not that I thought I was. That was an absolutely ridiculous notion—those kinds of things didn’t happen in real life, just like there would be no sexy Scot in a kilt in the woods somewhere.
“Hello,” I called again, without much power to my voice, as my throat continued to tighten with each passing second.
Alone!
That word choked me even more.
Wherever I was, I was alone.
Had I fallen and hit my head?
The chilly breeze made me shudder, indicating I was very much conscious. An eerie screech, something that sounded like a mix between the roar of a lion and the cry of an eagle, made me raise my head. Only to rear back at the sight of a giant bird circling in the sky high above me. No, that wasn’t a bird. It was far too big for a bird. That looked more like… a… dragon!
No, I thought.No, that can’t be. It’s not possible.
