Stranger Tides by Jack Castle

Author:Jack Castle [Castle, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781548989071
Published: 2018-08-09T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

This is not my house

A severed robot head.

This was the first thing George Stapleton saw when he awoke. It was propped up on a chair across the room and was just staring at him.

As his vision began to clear, he realized the severed robot head wasn’t a robot head after all; in fact it was one of those old diving helmets.

Why does that seem familiar?

The room wasn’t like any he’d woken up in before. It wasn’t an underground hospital room, or a commercial airliner surrounded by giant sunflowers with human faces, nor was it a Russian Cold War submarine. No. This room was nothing like any of those rooms. It was totally normal. That in itself made it entirely abnormal.

A set of clothes were neatly folded on a nearby dresser.

Lying on top of the covers, he realized he was wearing old boxers and a white t-shirt that reminded him of the G.I.’s in the 50’s. Not that he was old enough to remember them, but he had seen the undergarments in the movies. To add to the illusion, his dog tags jangled about his neck when he moved. Examining them, he saw that they were in fact his dog tags and not part of some historical costume.

He groaned as he threw his stiff leg over the side of the bed. Tentatively, he put some weight on it. Testing it, he found it was painful, but manageable.

As far as bedrooms went, this one wasn’t bad. It was kind of like the one he’d grown up in as a kid. A bird chirping drew his gaze outside the window. He didn’t see the tweeting bird, but he did see the leaves of the trees dripping with water as though from a recent downpour.

Wait, this isn’t right. I was on a deep dive…underwater. More images began coming back to him. I remember something about a malt shop. And…I was running out of air.

As though confirming this, the dented, beaten helmet continued to stare silently back at him. A modified diving suit was draped over the back of the helmet’s chair. It would’ve been far too heavy for the thin metal-wire hangers that hung in the closet like skeletons.

Metal wire hangers…I forgot about those. I haven’t seen those since I was kid. Modern hangers were plastic junk.

The modest room was sparse when it came to furniture. Aside from the single bed he woke up in and the chair holding his helmet and dive suit, there was only a night table and a midsize dresser. George noted his clothes were neatly folded on top of the latter.

He stood up and a sharp pain shot through his leg. Wincing from it, he decided to move a bit more slowly, at least until he got the blood flowing into his limbs once more. He stared at himself in the dresser mirror and saw his normal visage, wearing boxers and a t-shirt, staring back at him.

He waited for someone to come in. When they didn’t, he put a hand on the door knob of the six-panel door.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.