Traveler

The swirling, twirling, multicolored lights are making Dale sick to his stomach. It feels as if he is falling, but the direction he is falling keeps changing. If this continues he’s gonna hurl.

Abruptly he stops falling and lands butt first, bruising his tailbone on the rock path, then his head hits making him see stars.

Groggily he comes to his senses thinking, What just happened? Where am I?

The sky is clear blue and the sun is bright in his face as he sits up to take inventory of himself and his situation. Yes, he still has his day pack on his back and his canteen still has water in it. His cloths are disheveled, but still in good repair as they were this morning when he set out on his walking tour of Mount Rushmore.

Looking around he sees there is a short wall on both sides of the stone path he is sitting on. There is no one around neither up nor down the path. In the distance down the path he can see what looks like a stone house, almost like a small fort. This definitely was not the same path he was on a few minutes ago; though, his memory of that is a little fuzzy.

Standing up he’s a little shaky but that is nothing compared to the shock he gets when he sees his true surroundings. He walks to the edge of the path and looks down. About twenty feet down is the ground and the green mountainous countryside rolls away in the distance. He is on the top of some sort of huge wall. Looking along the edge of the wall he can see it is not straight, but windy like a snake, following the contour of the rolling landscape.

It takes a few minutes for the enormity of where he was to sink in. The Great Wall of China! How is this possible? What the heck happened to him?

He rubs his temples and tries to concentrate to remember what the heck he was doing before he was falling. His head hurts and it’s hard to focus. Vaguely he recalls stopping to soak in the view of his hike to Rushmore. He remembers taking a drink of water and deciding to eat some trail mix. When he reached into his pack he remembers being surprised feeling an odd metal object. That was all he could recall, the rest hurt too much to attempt to focus on.

He removes the cap of his canteen brings it to his lips taking a long drought and pouring a splash over his face to cool off and help him focus. As he puts his canteen back on his belt he notices for the first time a tick-ticking sound coming from behind him. Turning around, the sound follows behind. It dawns on him that the it is coming from his pack.

Opening his pack the sound becomes clearer. Reaching in he feels a round metal object. Taking it out he looks at it, noticing that it looks kind of like an old-time alarm clock. It even has the bells at the top, but that is where the similarity stops. The face of the clock has numbers, but they are in a counterclockwise order and count down from twenty-four. There are two hands with what look like a minute hand that is moving too fast counterclockwise around the dial. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five… the clock starts to elongate and twist in his hands… three, two, one…

The swirling, twirling, multicolored lights are making Dale sick to his stomach. It feels as if he is falling, but the direction he is falling keeps changing. If this continues he’s gonna hurl.