Light #1 Rathole

Here's the first:

The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment. A distinct and sunny glow was what he had been expecting—clearer, cleaner, more a final goodbye to the dim. This last gasp afterglow sort of fuzzed the transition from the tube of darkness into the not very light open spaces. 

Then Garth realized he had come through shortly after nightfall. Now that was a surprise. He’d entered that mouth in the mountain at highway speed. At noon. On the day of the summer solstice. And he would swear (if swearing weren’t a sin) that he had been inside the throat of that tunnel for only five minutes.

“Where does the time go?... he giggled nervously. There had to be a rational explanation, or even an irrational one, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear either.

“It was the time version of a wormhole,” explained a low voice from a back seat that had been empty when he’d entered that tunnel. “Sort of.”

Damn, thought Garth, in an unguarded moment that was a little more out loud than he’d have preferred or was aware of before he continued musing. If I had to cross the line into an alternate verisimilitude, why did it have to be into SciFi? I hate that stuff. I would much rather come out in a San Francisco alley in the Twenties, wearing a trench coat and a fedora. A broad-brimmed fedora. The coat not quite disguising the muscular breadth of my heavy shoulders.

“Don’t give up hope yet, sweetheart,” came the voice. 

"How does it do that?"

“It’s easy to read minds when you are in Urban Fantasy,” said the voice. “You’re just misreading the tropes. Or just learning them. This story is still waiting to land up somewhere and somewhen, and it could just as easily be San Fr….  Nope. Your wormhole was actually a memory of the Rathole--looks like you get Edmonton. In a blizzard. With a snowblower.”

“I haven’t a CLUE what he’s on about,” Garth mumbled, swinging into an uncharacteristic for him but strangely natural feeling illegal U-turn in a school zone. At lunch hour ("How does it keep doing that????"). In a crosswalk. "But I’ve got to stop …."

“Not here, not now,” insisted the voice. “We haven’t even got to the part where you get groped by the leggy red-headed hitchhiker, yet. And we would both hate for you to miss out on that bit of development.”

My own Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Garth imagined. 

“Not quite,” the voice sounded uncomfortably closer, just a breath past his neck. “We’ve got business, you and I. Take the next left and stop under the Mausoleum carpark. That’s where we’re partying.”

“The Mausoleum?” Garth checked to make sure he’d heard correctly. 

“Yeah, that big hockey arena looking thing in the heart of downtown. That's what my friends call it”

“But it isn’t finished yet. And it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to party there.”

A large, reddish-furred paw pressed on his shoulder. “Something along those lines, yeah.”

The last sound was a crunch, but Garth didn’t exactly hear it through his gurgled, choked-off scream.