Chapter 2: The Rogue Vortex

For a moment, Violet just stared at the door. She wasn’t sure if she should believe what she had just seen.

“Hello?” Sylvia said annoyed that she was being ignored. “Violet?” Sylvia asked now concerned.

“Wait here,” Violet said as she slipped between the book carts. Sylvia noticed that Violet’s pace was a little more hurried than normal but decided that it was just the stress of the renovation.

“It wasn’t blood,” Violet told herself. “It could be anything.” Even in her head she sounded stupid. “Ok, well say it is blood. There could still be a million simple reasons for a person to be drenched with blood,” Violet tried to apply logic to the situation, but she couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t make the hair on her arms stand up on end.

Violet felt her heart rate increasing as she scanned the parking lot. She saw her car and Sylvia’s. In the farthest of the library’s handicap parking spots was her brother. He was cradling something in one arm and bending over a machine that looked like the offspring of a typewriter and a telephone switchboard.

“Sven?” Violet said running over to her brother. “What’s going on?”

Sven ran his fingers roughly through his hair. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered.

Violet tensed. “And why are you covered in blood?”

Sven clutched the thing close to his chest, and Violet’s stomach turned queasy as she noticed that the bloodstains on his arm were spreading up the white sleeve. The machine began to beep at a mournful pace.

“Sven! Tell me what’s going on!”

Sven carefully laid a severed hand in the grass next to him. Violet gasped and looked to be sure Sven still had both his hands attached to his wrists. They were there. She looked around the parking lot again. She was sure that at any moment someone would jump out screaming and bleeding from the wrist, but no one else was around.

“It’s impossible that a vortex could go rogue like this,” Sven said looking up at last to acknowledge his sister.

“What are you talking about?” Violet refocused her attention on her brother, but she knew that if she stared at all this blood for too much longer she was probably going to be sick.

“Damn it, Violet! Is your TV broken? Did you forget how to read?” Sven raked his hand through his hair again and stood up. “Lately the portals have been opening for about half an hour then disappearing, and they haven’t popped up in the same place twice.”

The machine’s rhythmic beeps were starting to speed up.

“At about 3:07 this morning a portal opened around here for thirty-four seconds. Five minutes later it reopened here for eighteen more seconds.”

“Sven, it’s one thing for a scientist to chase hurricanes or even tornadoes, but you’re chasing portals? And stealing people’s hands? Do Mom and Dad know?”

“Are you kidding me?” Sven felt the old sibling rivalry rising up in him again. “Focus,” he told himself, “don’t get angry.”

“Another scientist came with me this morning,” Sven said quieting his temper and returning to his story.

“Who?” Violet asked.

“Don’t interrupt,” Sven snapped. His temper flared again. “We were trying to see if there was anything different about this area that would cause the vortex to behave abnormally. A high number of radio waves or a lack of something in the atmosphere,” Sven rubbed his eyes and looked down at his feet. Violet fidgeted with her glasses while she waited for him to continue.

The beeping tempo continued to increase. The air picked up a slight chill. Both went unnoticed by the squabbling siblings.

“The machine was just warming up,” Sven gestured at the typewriter-switchboard thing. “The portal didn’t even fully open. I’m not really sure what happened. The other scientist got pulled into the vortex, but it closed too soon. His hand was left here.”

Violet looked down again at the pale hand now resting in a shallow puddle of blood. She gagged and shifted her view to Sven’s right shoulder, the parts of his coat that was still a clean white.

Sven still couldn’t believe the story he just told could be true. Less than an hour ago he had been sent out with a man named Robert Nickel. He and Robert were making notes on the area. After a blur of confusion Sven had found himself holding Roberts bleeding hand. Sven had retreated back to the machine in shock.

“What’s causing this?” Violet was frustrated at how little she still understood.

Sven sighed, shook his head, and turned away from his sister. He wasn’t about to give her any top-secret information. He didn’t think she would be able to understand it all anyway.

The machine‘s beeps gave way to a high-pitched siren. Sven dove towards his machine. He began twisting knobs and flicking switches. Violet felt the fear twisting inside her.

“I assume that’s not a good noise, is it?” Violet asked wincing.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was going crazy like this?”

“What? It’s your machine!”

The siren continued to wail. A narrow strip of paper covered with number began to stream out the side of the machine like a cash register rejecting all the receipt paper.

“No! No! No!” Sven yelled at the flashing yellow light at the top of the machine. “A screw must have come loose or the software got corrupted,” Sven thought. “I must have miscalculated. The probability of this actually happening is at best 1 in 71,457,084,753.2.”

“What’s going on?” Violet asked.

“This can’t be right! There must be a mistake!” Sven said looking back up at his sister.

Sylvia kept looking for Violet to come back in the door. She knew there had to be a good reason that Violet would disappear right when the thickest books in young adult section had to be moved. She pushed the loaded cart over to the formerly empty section and began to unload the cart. She glanced over her shoulder at the door. Sylvia wondered if something could have happened to Violet. She had been acting strange when she left.

“Unlikely,” Sylvia thought. “Unlikely, but possible. I’ll just check to make sure.” Dragging the bare cart behind her, she went to the large windows by the front doors.

Sylvia looked out.

“Oh my God,” she whispered not wanting to believe it could be true. A thin, hazy line was ripping in the air beside Violet. A portal.

“Violet!” Sylvia screamed as she shoved open the library doors then heard the sound of tearing fabric.

Violet turned in time to see the last panicked expression on her friends face before her head slammed down against the concrete. Sven grabbed Violet’s hands as she was yanked into the portal feet first.

Sylvia ran forwards to the point where the blurred line had dissolved the images of her friends. The sky was clear and the parking lot still empty but for the two cars. No one else had witnessed the disappearance. The machine quit shrieking as soon as the vortex closed. The paper stopped spilling out of it, and the lights turned off. It began to hum as a fan spun deep inside it.

Sylvia stretched her hands out hoping there might be something in the air she could grab to unzip the portal and retrieve the pair of now missing people. Her hands closed around only air. Defeated, Sylvia dropped her head. The severed hand laid open by her right foot. Sylvia screamed then passed out cold.

Inside the portal there was no feeling of movement, just a constant pressure closing in on all sides. Chunks of grass and soil hung around them. A shrill grating noise like fingernails on a chalkboard filled their ears. Violet screamed out in pain but was over taken by panic when her lungs couldn’t draw in a new breath. The small amount of gas that did enter her lungs felt cold. It was laced with an overly sweet scent, like burning sugar cookies.

Sven forced his eyes open. If he lived through this experience he knew he’d have to document it. His eyes couldn’t focus. Swirls of neon yellow and electric green passed in front of him. It was so bright that his eyes began to burn.

“I must know. I must see. For science!” Sven thought ignoring the aching in his lungs. He wasn’t even trying to breathe. Violet’s nails cut into his hands as he held on to her.

The temperature of the space around them spiked to a deathly high. Sven lost his hold on Violet. After an unbearable moment, the pair fell up.

Violet landed with a hollow thud on a hard, curved surface and gasped for breath. Her ears rang and her skin felt burned. She felt like her skull should have cracked open. She could hear her brother coughing a few yards away. Violet opened her eyes to see what she was draped across. “Well, here’s the mailbox,” she thought, “don’t see the bench anywhere though.” Violet rubbed the side of her head as she slid down onto her unsteady feet. The air was humid and smelled strangely of salt and leather.

Sven continued to cough but didn’t stand up. Violet leaned against the mailbox until she trusted her legs enough to support herself. She wished they had found Sylvia’s bench instead of her mailbox.

“I guess this means I won’t be able to go out with Sylvia tomorrow night,” Violet muttered to herself. “I hope she can handle the library on her own for a while.”