The Portal

"How far until we get there, Daddy?"  The little girl brushed a stray wisp of hair off her forehead before wrapping her arms around her father's shoulders and nuzzling his neck.

"Not much farther, Angel."  He knew it was wrong for a father, but Tina was by far his favorite of his three daughters.  As hard as he tried, he couldn't help himself.  She always had an affectionate hug for him, a look of adoration, a sparkle of love in her eye that was solely meant for him.  Like his two oldest, by the time Tina reached ten, she'd probably be beyond the Daddy's Little Girl stage, so he vowed to cherish it as long as he could.

As ridiculous a notion as it was, this was the main reason that when five year old Tina said she'd had fun at the beach in the Bahamas, he immediately made plans.  Being of a wealthy family, such spontaneous trips weren't unusual for them, and while Katherine had reminded him how terrified she got whenever he flew the girls anywhere over the ocean, plans were set in motion, and they were soon buzzing forward in his Cessna.

"Sit down, Tina!" barked his oldest, Tammy from behind him.  "This plane is small enough without you moving around every five minutes!"  She glowered out the window when Tina didn't respond immediately.

"Do you want to sit here?" Tara asked the youngest, eager to be nearer her older sister.

Behind them, Tammy howled.  "Just stay up there and leave me alone!"

"Girls, can't we go anywhere without all the fighting?" their father asked, but grinned as he turned to gaze out his window so his girls would miss it.  He'd give anything to listen to it all
day.  Usually, Eric spent all his time cooped up in his office, going over some executive's report, running numbers, itemizing and trying to come up with solutions.  The arguing meant he was finally away from it all, with his three wonderful daughters, as disagreeable as they often were with one another.

Tina pecked him on his cheek and sat down next to Tammy again.  Tara peered back at her and said, "Might want to buckle up again.  We're over the Bermuda Triangle, you know."

"Daddy?  What's the Muda Tangle?" asked Tina.

"The Bermuda Triangle, Angel," he said.  "You're pretty young, but it's an area over the ocean that people like to blame for tragedies and missing boats and things like that."

"You don't believe it exists, Dad?" asked Tammy, her typical sour teenage attitude cast aside due to curiosity.

"Well, Pumpkin, I don't doubt that some strange things have happened above the ocean, but are they really any stranger than accidents anywhere else in the world?"

"I don't know, Dad," she said sincerely.  "There's lots of strange things in the world, sure, but I think the Bermuda Triangle is something to be wary of.  It always makes me nervous when we fly over it.  There's lots of things in the world that people can't possibly understand.  I think we need to respect those things."

Eric couldn't help but wonder when his daughter had become so gullible.  He scoffed under his breath at her words, and almost as if something powerful beyond his control was taking some sort of cue, the engine made a strange sound, and he looked down at the instruments on the flight panel to see the needles wildly spinning, and lights blinking on and off.

"Dad?" squeaked Tara beside him.

"Fasten your seat belts and put your heads between your knees!" Eric yelled at his daughters as he frantically tapped at the needles and instruments, praying for the safety of his three
treasures.  The plane bounced on invisible speed bumps and nothing was smoking out of the back, both engines still seemed to be working, and he didn't feel like he was losing altitude. 
Nevertheless, enough was happening to cause his throat to tighten and prayers to be mumbled under his breath.

Then, all at once, the beeping and whirring stopped.  The girls slowly looked up, for the turbulence that was felt had eased, too, so that it seemed they were gliding as smoothly as a swan.  Puffy white clouds surrounded the plane, and Eric took the chance to glance at his daughters, who were now gazing out the window in amazement, no doubt wondering like himself when they entered cloud coverage.

"Are we dead?" whispered Tara beside him.

"Don't be stupid, Tarantula," retorted Tammy, goading her sister with the terrible nickname.  Tara didn't even notice this time.

The clouds lifted, and while ocean still lay below them, so did something else that wasn't there before:  an island.  Their altitude had changed during the brief spell of unusual activity
in the plane, and as they emerged from the clouds completely, Eric found he had to pull up to narrowly avoid missing the treetops of the palms that filled the island.

"Is that it, Daddy?" squeaked Tina.

"No, sweetheart.  But, how about we check it out?"  He could hear his wife's cautions in his head as though she were sitting beside him, but he decided that he should take the opportunity to check out the plane before traversing past land again.  He circled the island once, and as the gages started to once again spin uncontrollably, he found the mouth of a river running through the center of the island and began to land.  The airplane sputtered
and sank low into the jungle.

Within minutes, they landed safely and he'd gotten the girls out onto the bank of the calm river.  The quiet of the island seemed to overwhelm them, except for the incessant chatter of his daughters.  Eric, who had opened the area of the plane engine, noticed his oldest was unusually calm.  She had always been the one to mimic her mother's worries aloud when she wasn't around, and yet, she hadn't said a word since they landed.

He glared at the engine, knowing full well that he didn't have enough mechanical knowledge to fix the plane if anything was wrong, and he doubted his cell phone would work in the middle of nowhere to call for help.  Why hadn't he thought to send a distress signal while they were still in the air, before the instruments acted up again?

"Dad!"  Tammy's scream caused him to jump and bump his head on the door that housed the plane engine.

Rubbing his head, he turned and saw her pointing at another Cessna, this one apparently having no survivors, since it hung precariously amongst the nearby trees lining the river.  As he stared, he realized this wasn't at all what Tammy yelled about, but rather the five or so people now creeping out of the jungle towards them.  "Over here, girls," he ordered, moving to stand in front of them.

The strangers approached, and while they carried spears and had their faces painted in various colors, he saw that they were smiling.  Even stranger, they didn't appear to be undiscovered natives.  Their hair was shaggy, the two men had scraggly beards and they all were as unkempt as could possibly be.  The clothes they wore were shabby at best, but more than that, they were remnant pieces of civilians clothing, in various sorts.

The man with grayed hair nearest them wore what appeared to be a military uniform of some sort, and he approached slowly, a hint of a smile playing upon his lips.  "You're lucky you landed safely.  Many don't," he added, pointing to the plane hanging into the treetops.  "We were lucky, though.  We managed to save Kyle here from that crash."  The second man gave a slight nod of greeting.

"Tell me, have you got any chocolate?" asked a tiny blonde woman.   "It's one of the things I miss most."

Eric was stunned.  "I... I'm not sure."  He stared at them for what seemed countless minutes, his daughters tucked behind him. 

He felt one of them shift and move.  A moment later, Tammy was easing forward, a brown item in her hand held forward.  She gave the woman a Hershey bar that she must have had tucked in her purse. They watched as she greedily tore open the wrapper and took a bite, and then headed back into the trees with her gift.

"Do any of you know how to fix an airplane?" Eric asked, sure he'd made friends from his daughter's selfless act.

The people in front of him just laughed.  "Kyle knows how to fix planes, but it won't do any good, Mate.  Let me guess - the instruments acted crazy and then you decided to land it?"

Eric nodded and they again twittered with chuckles.

"You're here to stay, so you might as well get what you can out of your plane and come with us to set up camp."

"Stay?"  The word seemed foreign to him.  "I can't stay.  My wife's in Florida, we've got a hotel booked in the Bahamas, and my daughters -"

The man nodded in understanding.  "I know.  My story was quite the same.  Your girls will be safe here with us, but you really should give up your pipe dream and get your supplies.  It's not good to stay put too long."

Pipe dream?  He wasn't fantasizing anything; he had a life to get back to, and so did his girls.

A woman with curly brown hair stepped forward.  "Maybe, Ned, it would be helpful if I introduced myself?  It might aid in his understanding a bit more."  Ned consented and the woman stepped forward, arm outstretched to shake Eric's hand and said, "Amelia Earhardt.  Good to meet you."

Eric gazed at her, wondering if that was supposed to mean something.  After several seconds passed, Tammy approached and tugged on his sleeve.  "Dad, we studied her in history.  She was the first woman aviator to cross the Atlantic solo, and she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937."

"The Pacific?  Well, then she must be lying, because we're in the Atlantic."  The date of her disappearance didn't faze him.

The woman claiming to be Amelia sighed and shook her head.  "It's always hard to understand at first.  Ned's right, though, we really need to move you and your children back to camp before..." Her words drifted off as they heard a distant crash through the trees ahead of them.  "Follow us, now," she ordered.  "Your things will be safe here and Ned and Kyle can return for them later."  Another crash, a bit closer, punctuated the end of her order.

Tina, her eyes wide, grabbed her father's sleeve and yanked.  "Let's go, Daddy.  I'm scared."

He nodded and they all turned and followed Ned, who seemed to be the leader for the people in their midst.  After several minutes, Eric caught up to him and asked, "What's that noise back there?"

"Trust me, Mate.  You don't want to know."

Eric hesitated, then asked, "Well, where are we then?"

Amelia, directly behind them, said, "We're no where."

"No where?"

"You've experienced the effects of the Bermuda Triangle, I'm afraid, which is the way most people come here."

"But you disappeared over the Pacific Ocean."

"A few years ago, we had another in our midst.  He was the last of the locals surviving here, and explained it to us.  In the world around us, there are four elements."

Tammy interrupted.  "Fire, earth, air and water, right?"

"She's a smart one, that girl," Amelia complimented.  "That's correct.  There's certain places that are portals to another world, this world, from the existence that we know.  One is the Bermuda Triangle, which is caused by the water element of the balance of things.  If you were suddenly transported here from Stonehenge, you would have experienced the phenomena of the earth element.  The air element opens from a mountaintop deep in Asia, and the fire element from a volcano on an island in the Pacific Ocean.  My plane crashed there and I climbed the nearest mountain, which turned out to be the dormant volcano, and found myself suddenly wandering the jungle here.  No one understands exactly how it works, but I believe it has something to do with the moon phases, and particular places on the island that unlock the combination of the portals.  The locals would never tell us the secret."

Amelia seemed to be the only one open for discussion, and Eric then asked her about the loud crashing noise.  "We're not sure exactly what it is, but we know some of our party have
encountered it before, and we've never seen them again."

"Maybe it's a way back, then!" Eric shouted in desperation.

"A way back that walks through the jungle, smashing trees?"  Amelia saw the look of frustration on his face, and told him, "Look on the bright side of things.  No one ages here.  Death only affects those who come across the mysterious thing in the jungle and the locals, who are all gone now."