"Monochrome" - Part Three

Part Three

            “You’re bad people! You’re very bad people! And you’re thinking bad thoughts about me!” The angered Anthony raged, pointing his finger at Candace, the Doctor, and their companions.

            “You are an evil child,” the Doctor accused. “And you must be stopped!”

            “Doctor,” Candace immediately stepped in. “You’re not helping our case!” She then turned her attention to Anthony and calmly said, “We’re not bad people, Anthony. We’re only trying to…”

            “You’re lying!” Anthony snapped. “You’re a bad woman, and you must be sent away from here!”

            His finger fixated specifically on Candace.

            Before she knew it, she was no longer in the bedroom with Anthony, the Doctor, or the others. She found herself standing in a field of fog with the stars shimmering over her while random objects – an eye, a door, a doll, and a window that shattered repeatedly – floated all around.

            From the looks of it, Anthony had sent her into another dimensional plane.

            Candace wasn’t there alone for much longer. Soon, the Doctor and their friends popped up, all of them baffled and aghast over their current surroundings.

            “Where are we?” Barbara asked. “Where has he put us?!”

            “My guess: away from reality and into someplace in-between,” Candace deduced.

            “Good guess.” A voice outside their party spoke close nearby. They spotted a man in a black suit and tie, standing coolly amid the fog.

            “Who are you?” Alan asked him.

            “A guide,” the man said. “But you can call me ‘Rod’.”

            “Alright, Rod,” Ian remarked. “Is there any way out of this place?”

            “The key is your imagination,” Rod answered, shortly before an endless office corridor assembled itself around the group. Several white doors were on both sides of the hallway, providing them with unlimited choices. “Through one of these doors, you will find your way back to Anthony Fremont’s world. The other doors will lead you to others within the fifth dimension.”

            “You are mistaken, my boy,” the Doctor called him out. “There are only four dimensions. The fourth itself being time.”

            “There is a fifth one, and you’re standing right in it,” Rod said. “An entirely new dimension, one that exists beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”

            The fog around Rod became denser, shrouding his form from the outsiders.

            When it cleared, Rod had vanished.

            “What that dude said just now sounds very familiar,” Alan pointed out.

            “He also said that one of these doors will lead us back to Anthony,” Ian added.

            “But there are hundreds of doors, Ian,” Barbara indicated. “Any one of them could be where we started.”

            “Then we’ll just have to split up,” the Doctor suggested. “Candace and I will take one door, Ian and Barbara will take another, and Susan and Alan will also take another.” He then removed a couple of items from his coat that he handed to Ian and Alan. “Here, take these spare TARDIS keys, should either of you find it before we do.”

            And so, the six travelers divided into their teams.

            Candace and the Doctor entered through one door and stepped into a post-apocalyptic setting. A realm of Earth desolated by a nuclear blast of some kind, powerful enough to wipe out all life.

            Except for one man. A mustached man of small stature, wandering blindly amid the ruins. “Sir, are you alright?” Candace asked him.

            The man froze just as he heard her voice. “I-Is someone there?”

            “Yes,” the Doctor said. “Are you harmed, my boy?”

            “No,” the man acknowledged. “But I…I thought…I thought I was alone.” He took a step towards Candace and the Doctor, stumbling over a small pile of bricks. Thankfully, Candace caught him in time.

            “You’re blind,” she noticed.

            “Without my glasses, I am,” the man told her. “They broke when I bent to pick up one of the books I found in the public library. A library. Can you believe it? Still standing among all this devastation. You see, I love to read books. It’s a favorite pastime of mine. I would’ve read for ages with the insurmountable amount of books I found in that library. But now…without my glasses…”

            The man burst into tears.

            Candace’s hearts sank for him. “You poor thing,” she pitied the man. Unwilling to let him wander what was left of his Earth any further, she constructed a new pair of glasses for him to see by using the bottoms of two crystal-clear glass bottles and wires for the frames.

            The first thing that the man saw was the statuesque, helpful blonde’s smiling face, able to make out the few wrinkles it had. “I can see again,” he cheered. “Oh, thank you, ma’am! Thank you!”

            “You’ve very welcome, Mister…?”

            “Bemis. Henry Bemis.”

            Mister Bemis jubilantly departed with his new glasses, now capable of watching out for the fallen debris at his feet.

            “Why did you help that man, hmm?” the Doctor asked Candace. “He had no relevance to our mission.”

            Candace, still dumbfounded by how different this Doctor was apart from his future successors, told the old man, “Every life matters, no matter if it’s relative or not.”

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            The door Ian and Barbara walked through led them into a normal office setting, complete with a bookshelf and a desk with a couple of chairs situated in front of it. There was also a window with a view of a city that neither of them was able to identify. One thing was for sure: it wasn’t Peaksville.

            “Another dead end,” Ian stated. “Wonder if we should mark an ‘X’ on that door, so that we don’t make the same mistake.”

            “Ian, look at this.”

            Barbara picked up a large book from the desk and showed its cover to Ian. The only detail on there was a title that read, “To Serve Man.”

            “Quite an ambiguous title,” Ian signified.

            “It certainly is,” Barbara concurred. “Sounds like a cookbook.”

            Suddenly, they heard the knob to the office door turning, which signaled them to hide. They did so, with Barbara hiding behind the bookshelf and Ian beneath the desk. From her hiding place, Barbara received an eyeful of the person entering the office. To her shock, it was a nine-foot-tall alien humanoid, one with a bulbous cranium, wearing a long white robe.

            As much as she physically wanted to, Barbara refrained from screaming. She merely watched the tall alien being walk in, take the “To Serve Man” book from the desk, and walk back out. She went to Ian just as soon as he was out of his hiding place, hysterically clinging to him.

            “Barbara, what’s the matter?” he asked. “Who was it? What did you see?”

            “Oh, Ian,” Barbara wept. “Let’s just get out of here. And please make sure to mark an ‘X’ on the door to this world.”

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            The second her grandfather insisted on teaming her up with Alan, Susan could not have been more ecstatic. A tall, dark handsome young man with perfect muscle definition, Susan fell in love with him the moment she met him in that cornfield. He was brave as well, not even once fazed by the things they had seen that frightened Susan to her core.

            Even as they went through one of the strange doors, Alan kept his cool.

            They emerged out of the lavatory of a commercial airline currently in flight. A stewardess caught their entrance (or exit?) and said, “Please return to your seats. We’re experiencing heavy turbulence at the moment, and the pilot just turned on the ‘Fasten Seatbelts’ sign.”

            Despite not being passengers of the flight, Alan and Susan did as she requested, finding two available seats. Susan sat close to the window, looking out of it to see the horrible thunderstorm they were flying in. “Not the ideal kind of weather to be traveling in, don’t you think, Alan?”

            He responded with loud snoring, having apparently fallen asleep in his seat.

            Susan couldn’t blame him for taking a moment to relax from all the stress of the adventure. She let him be, returning her focus to the thunderstorm outside. She had a fantastic view of the left wing of the plane, soaking in the heavy rain. Between the flashes of thunder, she swore to have seen something moving in the darkness.

            She pressed her face close against the window to get a better look.

            There was something there…right on the wing of the plane.

            Another flash of thunder revealed it to be a bear-like creature, tinkering with the wiring under one of the engine cowlings that could cause the aircraft to crash.