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The thought of someone going through my papers was enough to
send shivers down my spine. I knew of few in London who would
be able to understand more than half of what my paper was describing
and fewer still in the whole of the Commonwealth who would be
able to understand all of it.
Of course I couldn't sleep for the rest of the night and when
dawn broke, I had already gathered all the necessary items for
our journey. I sent a message to Charlotte to join me. She arrived
in a blue dress and a rugged overcoat stuffed with all manner
of tools that she was sure she would need. I did not argue with
her, since I now more than ever felt that we needed to be prepared
for anything.
We placed ourselves symmetrically on the chest, she on my left
side and the clock in the middle, it's complex web of hands showing
the variables and their progression as I turned the dials facing
me. I had soon set all the dials to their correct position and
it was time to go.
Charlotte looked me straight in the eye, placed both of her hands
upon mine on the clock and we could both feel the mechanics inside
winding up. Our excitement was tangible now and we were both expecting
something spectacular to happen.
We could both feel something starting up. Something was tingling
over my skin, the world around me started to look washed out and
unreal somehow. The angles on my desk did not seem right and I
concluded that the dimensions must have started to shift. The
effect was slightly nauseating as the inner ear was trying to
compensate the apparent rotation in our vision. I started then
to hear the sound of waves, like an ocean far away breaking against
the rocky shores of an island.
The washed out colors of our surroundings suddenly returned with
an audible bang and my small apartments had been replaced with
the sunlit shores of a tropical island, lined with palm trees
and populated completely by exotic birds.
The sun was beating down on us as we sat mesmerized by the realism
of our surroundings, as if we had expected the alternate dimension
to be unreal somehow. But we could smell and feel the closeness
to the ocean.
Then Charlotte screamed and her face turned pale. Her gaze was
fixed upon something behind my shoulder. I turned around and was
faced with a ghastly sight that turned my blood to ice and made
my head swim with horror. On the ground just a few feet from our
feet laid a corpse of a woman, long dead, her decaying flesh searing
in the sun.
PART II
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