On the last day of his camping trip, Grant Summers woke up in his bedroom.
Sitting up and looking blearily around his room, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, not immediately realising where he was. The night before, he had gone to sleep in his tent after an evening of marshmallows and beers - a lot of beers - with his friends in the Blue Mountains, yet somehow he had been moved to his bed overnight.
I knew I was drunk, but not blackout walk-home-in-the-middle-of-the-night drunk, he thought, throwing the covers off and letting out a yawn. Shaking his head and running a hand through his dark brown, tousled hair, Grant slipped out of bed, stretching his arms up to ease the kinks and cramps that he had accumulated over the past week of sleeping outdoors. As rational thought started to creep in around the edges of his sleep-addled mind, two things occurred to him. First, despite the rather large amounts of alcohol he had imbibed the previous night, he seemed to be completely hangover-free. While some people he knew could go all night and wake up fresh as a daisy, Grant had always been a lightweight and suffered from abysmal hangovers, yet today he felt better than he could remember for a long time. Second, and far more important, was that his house was over an hour's drive away from the campground they had been staying at, and they had spent over two hours hiking from the car park to get there. There was no way that he had drunkenly walked all the way to his car and then driven home with no memory of doing so, let alone not crashing or getting lost.
Grant frowned, his mind quickly shedding the last vestiges of sleep as the peculiarity of his situation began to hit him. Looking down he realised that he was also fully dressed, yet he was positive that he had gone to bed in just his underwear. Sliding into his slippers, he walked over to the bedroom door and flicked the light switch on, frown deepening as the room remained dark.
“What the hell,” he muttered, grabbing the door handle and flinging it open. The blaze of light hit his still-sensitive eyes and he grunted as he raised a hand to shade them from the abnormally bright light flooding the hall.
“Harry, Josh,” Grant called out to his housemates as he stepped through the door, eyes still half closed against the light, “Are you...”
Grant's voice trailed off as his eyes finished adjusting to the light and he took in the vista that lay before him. Instead of the hallway of his house, he stood in an empty stone amphitheatre, easily two hundred metres across, made of a dark, polished stone that glittered brightly in the mid-morning sun overhead. The entire arena, except for the stage he stood upon, looked like it had been carved from one block, with no seams or cracks to be seen. Medieval-style wooden torches, intricately carved to resemble hands rising from the ground, adorned the outside of each row of seats, lit with bright white flames that seemed to glow rather than burn. The light reflected oddly off the dark stone all around them, glittering and dazzling his eyes. There were dozens of rows of seats, arranged in a semicircle centred on the spot where Grant now stood, stairs breaking each row into three columns. Beyond the seats, he could see an outer set of stairs leading to the top of the arena. Looking down, he saw that the stage was made of a rich, deep wood, like ebony, polished to a shine so clear he could see his reflection as if looking into a mirror, yet the reflection of the sun above him was oddly muted. The wood seemed to glitter from within, the darkness of the sun in the reflection almost making it look like it was of a starry night sky instead of the bright day it was.
Blinking his eyes slowly, mouth agape in shock, Grant took another step forward without thinking. As soon as the heel of his trailing foot passed the frame of the door, a sudden wind whipped around him, shoving him forward and pressing him into the ground as he heard the door slam shut behind him. The gale died down as quickly as it had risen, and he quickly scrambled to his feet and turned to open the door and run back into his room, only to discover to his horror that the door had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a deep furrow in the stage where it had stood. In front of him now he saw a wall stretching across the back of the semicircular arena, made of the same dark polished stone as the rest of it. Dumbfounded, he waved his hand through the air where the door had been, feeling nothing but empty space and a cool breeze.
“Okay,” Grant said to himself slowly, turning back around to face the rows of seats, “Okay okay okay, clearly this is a dream. You're going to wake up back in your tent, probably still drunk, needing to piss.” Shaking his head, he slapped himself in the face a few times, the stinging only serving to further wake him up. “Now. C’mon, wake up, Grant, wake up.” Slapping himself harder, he turned on the spot, eyes closing as he began to mutter even more desperately.
“Come on, wake up, wake up wake up WAKE THE FUCK UP,” he screamed, panic finally beginning to override all other thoughts as his cheeks burned with pain and his ears began to ring from the force of his blows. At last, he stopped, bending over and taking rapid, panicked breaths as the bizarre reality of his situation sank in. Eyes still closed, he cupped his face in his palms and forced himself to take longer, deeper breaths, doing his best to calm himself.
Okay, time to work shit out. Clearly, he had been kidnapped and taken somewhere, somewhere with a huge amphitheatre constructed with strange experimental materials, where he had been given hallucinogens and left to run wild. Some kind of bizarre CIA-style experiment maybe, meant to observe his reactions and see how long it would take him to go crazy while a group of people with clipboards and lab coats took notes.
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Grant stood up straight, his breath evening out as the panic began to recede and the rational part of his brain started to assert itself and take back control. Opening his eyes, he stared blankly ahead as his mind raced, raising and then dismissing various scenarios to explain what he was experiencing. Unfortunately, after a few minutes of wild speculation, he couldn't come up with a more reasonable explanation than a hallucinogen-induced social experiment.
“Okay, focus Grant,” he muttered, the sound of his own voice bringing an unreasonable amount of reassurance, “Forget how you got here. Figure out where exactly here is first, then work backwards.”
Nodding to himself, he looked around the amphitheatre again, trying to figure out his next move. He seemed to be alone, the sounds of his distress not having provoked any kind of reaction from anything he could see. The emptiness was simultaneously unnerving and comforting, letting him know he wasn't in danger but also meaning there was no one around to talk to or confront and demand answers. Walking to the edge of the stage, Grant jumped down and began to examine his surroundings more closely. Looking first at the stage he had vacated, he realised that the entire stage was merely the trunk of a colossal tree, larger by far than any he had ever laid eyes on, at least twenty metres in diameter. Running his hand across the bark, he found it perfectly smooth and even, lacking any kind of mark or inconsistency marring its dark surface. The outside of the tree had the same odd reflection as the inside, images appearing clear and crisp as a mirror, yet the light from the torches behind him was far dimmer than it should have been. Turning around, he walked over to the nearest light and studied it. As he approached, he realised that while the lights were clearly flames, they didn't give off any heat whatsoever. The light in front of him burned at waist height, on top of an intricately carved wooden torch - normal wood this time, not like the weird black trunk behind him - in the shape of a skeletal arm rising from the ground. Looking further down, he saw that the wood seemed to transition smoothly into the black stone floor, almost as though it had grown from the ground. Hesitantly, he raised his arm and slowly extended his hand into the centre of the white flame. Expecting pain despite the lack of heat, Grant was surprised to feel absolutely nothing, even with his hand fully submerged in the flame. Waving his hand back and forth, he noticed that the fire did seem to react to his presence, tendrils of flame licking over his fingers and almost adhering to his skin a little as it passed.
He withdrew his hand, fascination and excitement now beginning to war with the uncertainty and panic lingering in his mind as the otherworldly nature of his environment brought up memories of his favourite books and TV shows. The lack of burns on his hand seemed the best evidence yet that there was an answer to his situation beyond hallucinations or insanity, an answer that lit a fire within his inner child’s heart.
Calm down Grant, he told himself as he began to move up the stairs, there must be a rational explanation for this. Gonna need to gather more evidence before proclaiming that magic is involved.
Yet, try as he might to suppress his excitement, something within him was certain that he had encountered something magical. Emerging from his room, the otherworldly materials and their unusual properties, the fire that didn’t burn, the door that disappeared - for reasons he couldn’t explain he felt sure that it wasn’t a hallucination. Somehow he had been magically transported from his room to this place, not to mention somehow waking up in his room in the first place. The panic that had overwhelmed him just minutes ago now seemed a distant memory as the fantastical nature of his situation sank in.
Unfortunately, as a responsible (okay, semi-responsible) adult, his brain kept throwing up uncomfortable truths about the implications of such a scenario. What would his friends think when they woke up to find him missing? Given that they were in a National Park, there would likely be days of searches conducted, involving dozens of people, and long agonising hours of uncertainty for those closest to him. For the first time since it had happened, Grant felt glad that he had lost his parents 6 months ago, imagining the devastation they would experience if he went missing like this.
He took another deep, steadying breath, trying to focus his mind. Looking around one last time, he began to climb the stairs between seats, reasoning that he would be able to get a better sense of his surroundings at the top of the structure.
No matter what had happened, the best thing he could do was to figure out where he was, how he got there and try to figure out a way to get home. Who knows, he thought, maybe I just slipped through some freak wormhole and I'll be home by dinner. He sniggered a little. ‘Just’ a wormhole. That says a lot.
Stopping near the top of the rows of seats, Grant turned back and looked around the vast amphitheatre one last time to ensure he wasn't missing a wide-open doorway leading somewhere familiar, or a convenient 'you are here' sign. Satisfied that nothing else of interest was present, Grant began to ascend the outer set of stairs towards the edge of the structure. The amphitheatre was even larger than he had first realised, and it took him over two minutes to climb from the outer row of seats to the edge of the structure.
Reaching the top of the arena, he paused, gazing out for the first time at his surroundings. To his surprise, the amphitheatre turned out to be set below the ground in a deep pit, rather than a building rising from the ground. The top of the stairs met the edge of a lush green field, knee-length grass covering an expanse that went on for miles, stretching towards distant snow-capped mountains. Now that he wasn't hidden behind the slope of the seating, sounds began to reach him, pleasant spring melodies of bees buzzing, crickets chirping and the grass rustling in a gentle cool breeze. However, the picturesque landscape was marred by the presence of dozens of buildings. Various types of structures encapsulating the entire history of human architecture dotted the field seemingly at random, some even sticking out from the ground at bizarre angles, as though they had been scooped up and thrown from the sky to land wherever they may. There seemed to be no logic to the positions or styles of the buildings - the closest one, only a dozen metres in front of him, was a Victorian-era cottage with cream walls and a thatched roof, but the one beyond that looked like an apartment building ripped straight from New York City, and in the distance he could even see a grand, medieval-style castle with banners flying over an honest-to-god drawbridge and moat. Despite the presence of buildings, there seemed to be no roads or paths linking them - in fact, the only break in the grassy plain was a circular patch of dark loam surrounding each building.
Grant looked around in disbelief, the picture before him even more fantastical and disorienting than the fire that didn't burn or the wood that glittered. He was now certain that he was not in a normal situation - no place on Earth could have looked like this, not to mention the lack of any sign of civilisation, or the fact that none of the buildings showed any signs of habitation. There was no fire rising from the chimneys, no lights illuminating any windows, nothing.
Until, that is, the door of the cottage opened and a woman stepped through.