You will discover the details of your task by frequent visits through your television screen. It is easily activated through…”
I heard a knock on my door.
“Raymond!” it was Mrs. White again, “Raymond I just finished baking some cookies if you’d like.
Impatiently, I got up and opened the door for her. “Thank you, Mrs. White,” I took the plate of steaming hot cookies.
“I thought it would make you feel better after that spider, oh! But I best not remind you of that I suppose.”
“Don’t worry about it, I feel a lot better. I just need some sleep,” I smiled to her.
“Yes, you do that! I will see you tomorrow, good night dear,” she walked away.
“Good night,” I locked the door and rushed back to the message.
“Let’s see… It is easily activated by pressing seven, seven, eight, five on your remote control. Pressing those numbers will activate a portal that will only close when you successfully enter it. After your task is completed, you will be handsomely rewarded and peacefully left alone.”
I took out my phone and wrote down, seven, seven, eight and five. Then I sighed shaking my head left and right. I bit down on my lip really hard and read the whole thing again.
After a loud, displeased groan, I began flipping channels. Nothing was working. I hit the remote a few times, and still nothing. Oh right, I had closed it earlier. I pushed the red button to turn it on again. I was back at the movie channel. After a few taps on my remote, I reached channel one… then channel zero… and to my dread, it went down to channel minus one. The worst, most unpleasant chills went through my spine. I put my head down to my knees and clutched my fists. There was a bold red timer – seventy two hours, thirty one minutes and forty six seconds and counting.
So I had three days before I had to go back in, or I die. Maybe I should just die?
No, maybe it might not be so bad. I might end up in a kids show, right? Could that happen? Or a comedy movie? Maybe it’s not so bad?
Or maybe that was all wishful thinking.
I flipped a few channels forward to get the timer out of my face, and then I picked up my phone and dialed up a number.
“Hello? Bob? Put on your jacket, I need a drink, right now.”
Chapter 2
My name is Raymond Smith. I am a thirty two year old above average looking guy, at least, I’d like you to believe I am. When I was young I saw my first ever ground breaking film, ‘Magenta Man’, who was a purple super hero. The movie was quite idiotic now that I think about it, but it was what started my craving towards the unnatural and the creative. I started out the same way any boys would – by pretending to be the hero, or pretending to be beside the hero and defeating bad guys along the way. As I aged, rather than dropping the ‘pretend’, I evolved it. I started creating things, like illustrations and written out ideas.
Fast forward to today, and a few hundred fiction movies later, I am now me – a self-made, dare I say, locally famous fantasy writer. Albeit now, I was a very, very traumatized fantasy writer.
I sat across Bob with a faceless expression. My eyes were fixed upon a random spot on the table as I fiddled my thumbs over the cold glass of whiskey. Bob was quite cliché. He was a chubby comic book nerd around my age – thick frame glasses and slightly curly hair. His knowledge of the Seventeen Realms of Marigale was more extensive than of… taxes. Our love for fiction was the same, but mine ended up being professional, and his obsessive. I generally dressed branded, and he dressed with his favorite heroes on his t-shirts.
“Hello?” said Bob, “Earth to Raymond, do you copy?”
“Copy that Bob,” I said unenthusiastically.
“We’ve received a satellite signal pinpointing your emotional instability and are trying to lead it to a pit of sanctuary.”
I furrowed my eyebrows for a moment and looked up at him. “What?”
“That’s my question to you, man! You haven’t been this down since the time you tried to show off your back summersault in front of the girl you liked and she didn’t see it and you ended up hurting yourself and the only thing she saw was everyone laughing at you. And then you called me and you said ‘hey Bob, put on your jacket we’re getting ourselves some energy drinks’.”
“Well it’s way worse now!”
“So what is it?!”
“I can’t tell you!”
“Why not?!”
“Because!!”
A waitress came up to us, “would you like anything else?”
“No, sorry,” I shook my head left and right.
“Okay!” she pranced away.
“So why this bar exactly?” Bob asked me.
I stared at him for a moment, then shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know, the whiskey’s good here.”
“This is where you had your first date with Emily?”
“No, this is where I met Emily,” I corrected him.
“Are you sure it’s not about her though?”
“Nah, Emily is long gone. I never quite stopped to think about what she’s doing. Anyone that calls our favorite stories crap doesn’t belong three meters in my vicinity.”
“Yeah,” Bob corrected his thick frame glasses.
“I mean I make a living out of it, right?”
“Yeah,” Bob nodded.
“And you know, it’s fun, it’s crazy, it’s innovative and… what do normal jobs have that mine doesn’t, you know?”
“Yeah,” Bob kept agreeing with me. I was getting defensive about what that woman said to me. I had become ice cold since then but sometimes it still irritated me.
“Okay, I’ll be frank with you,” I nodded while pressing my lips together. “Or maybe not yet.”
“Come on!” Bob raised his hands in the air before dropping them down.
“It’s complicated, I don’t even know myself what that was,” my voice lowered. “I got… taken to this place, full of very weird things. And I got stabbed through my chest,” I motioned it with my hands, “and then I got lifted up, like by a hook.”
“Okay…” Bob furrowed his eyebrows.
“And then,” I shivered and coughed, shutting my eyes tight. I cussed under my breath.
“What?”
“It’s hard to think about it. Something ate me. It felt like a giant insect with strong limbs and very loud clicking sounds.”
“That’s terrifying,” Bob had a sip of his beer.
I knew Bob wouldn’t question me about it. He’s a good listener, which is what I needed in my childhood, all the way up till now. For what felt like a long time, there was silence between us.
“Look,” I broke the silence. “Thanks for coming out for me tonight, I really needed it.”
“Don’t mention it,” he nodded to me.
“How’s your work going?”
“Oh,” he gestured with his hand, “fine, it’s going perfectly fine.”
“Got a girlfriend yet?” I asked him.
“Hah, I should be the one asking you that. You’re the abnormally good looking one here.”
“This drunk face?” I pointed at myself. We both laughed.
I had a slow walk back home. All this time I was wondering, why did I turn around and walk away from those animal people? I could have stayed with them. Had I did, would I have still been in that world? Was dying the sole factor that got me out? Was all that even real?
We always try to come up with some justifications for our actions and never really stop to reflect, was I just wrong?
There were so many questions and so little answers. I began wondering if I upset anyone in my life that karma was getting back at me now. As a very idealistic person, it wouldn’t have surprised me if that was the case. A sort of, self-imposed punishment through my subconscious.
I disobeyed my parents when I was young, pursuing the slippery path of being a fiction writer. Things weren’t working out for the longest time, but I stood by it, and, well, I proved them wrong, but that didn’t exactly m
ake things better.
Maybe sometimes, losing is winning?
No, come on Raymond, stop thinking subjectively. What happened?
I unlocked the door of my house and quietly came in. It was lonely here.
Dreadfully, I looked at the flat screen TV in my living room.
I came up to it with an attitude in the way that I walked.
“So?” I spoke to it. “Are you real, or are you fake?”
I got no reply.
I looked behind me and left and right, then very cautiously came up to the television to poke its corner with my finger. Then I flinched back, expecting a reaction, but nothing happened.
Reluctantly, I picked up the remote, sitting down on the couch.
After lightly tapping on it for a whole minute and doing absolutely nothing, I sighed out and turned it on.
Channel two came on, the last channel that I left it on. I remembered that much for sure. Alright… I went to channel one – then to channel zero, and then I took extra-long before pushing the button again.
The TV went to channel minus one, and a big red timer ticked in my face. Sixty eight hours, fourteen minutes and nineteen seconds.
In disbelief, I shut the TV off. This time, there was no white message. I wish I had taken a picture of it, but instead I just wrote down those four numbers.
The next morning I checked to see if the timer was still running. To my dismay, it was. I had my morning coffee with a heavy heart.
Can you imagine my state of mind had I been transported to a friendlier movie? ‘Oh I can’t wait to get back inside! That was fun!’ probably.
I stepped out into the morning sun for a little while. My lawn was small, but it was something. The streets were mostly peaceful with barely any people walking around. I mean, you can tell – my neighbor bakes me cookies from time to time.
As a shut-in author, my life is pretty much in two places; in my own thoughts, and online. Standing out in the sun like that was quite uncharacteristic of me, but it was my way of escaping an incoming event.
Back in college, when I had to study for an exam I suddenly began noticing how dirty my dorm room was. I had to clean every speck of dust and make sure all my shirts were ironed and neatly stacked.
Then I would check to see how my groceries were doing. Oh no! The milk carton is only half full, I better go to the shop and refill. After that, let me call Bob to see how he was doing.
By the time I finished doing all my errands, I would sit down to study for half an hour before getting sleepy and calling it a day.
A ball landed on my lawn out of the blue. A bunch of children looked at me curiously, wondering if I would throw it back or not.
With a delighted smile, I picked up the ball and yelled out ‘catch!’ before throwing it back at them over my fence. It was a small good deed, but it was a spark that ignited the rest of the good deeds to come.
That day, I picked up my wallet, called a cab, and went around the city. What did I do? I spread my kindness. The sun was definitely some kind of virus. It made me want to do nice things for people.
I bought random bags full of clothes, full of food and any other useful items I could find. Then I went around finding homeless people to give it to them.
They asked me why I was giving them free things, and I honestly did not know how to answer that. Why was I? I just felt like it! It made me happy, it made me feel productive. I felt like I was cleansing myself of karma, maybe.
Seeing the empty faces of simple people being turned into the brightest smiles that even the best actors in movies could not replicate – there was magic in that.
I was always a firm believer of, the more you give, the more you get. It was a nicer way of saying an eye for an eye.
After all, my very own character in one of my books had absolutely nothing in his life, and yet anything he managed to get, he gave back to someone who needed it more. And then a magical fairy came up to him and said, ‘I have been watching you, you have been good’ and she took him to a mystical place.
That place was like an enormous magical garden, full of fruits and berries. Each fruit and berry did something special if you ate it – an apple that made you look younger, a peach that boosted your kindness, a raspberry that gave you intelligence, and my favorite of all, a rose that made you fall in love.
So the fairy asked the kind man, which fruit will you eat first?
The man smiled at the fairy and said, ‘I will not eat any. Instead, if you will allow me, I would like to plant the seeds of these fruits beyond your gardens so that more people may become happier.’
It is then, that the kind man was taken away from the garden and sent straight to heaven instead.
It was a short story that I wrote two years ago. I really wanted to send a strong message to my readers to keep giving, and keep giving, and keep giving. I dare not be a hypocrite and not follow my own advice.
That day, I made some friends. Homeless or not, they were people, and they were kind.
A barista at a coffee shop got attracted to my smile and asked if I was free for dinner. I politely rejected her, but then came straight back to the café with some flowers to make sure she was joyful.
Now, that’s what I call a productive day. All that cash coming in through my books every day, and apart from paying my bills I never quite find anything else to spend it on.
It was evening, and I felt like dancing. Man! Today was a good day. I got back home extremely satisfied. Maybe I could finally continue my latest novel after such a long writer’s block.
And then it stared me in the face. This dreaded thing…
I understood then, that I was full of crap. I understood that I went out to help people because I was running away from something.
And guess what? With a push of a button on the remote control, I revealed to myself that the timer never went away. The numbers had just become smaller, and nothing has changed.
No matter what, it is pressuring me into dialing those numbers to get back into the digital world for some crap or the other.
Like why even me? Couldn’t there have been someone far more capable than me? I bought this TV in an electronic shopping center not on an alien spaceship.
It’s easier to live in sweet lies than bitter realities. My current reality was such that, my paranoia of my death earlier was driving me insane and keeping me reluctant from risking going back in there.
But my reality was also such that, much like a college exam that you’re trying to avoid, the time will come sooner or later. How prepared you are for it is up to you, and you alone.
Makes you wonder about – death. We don’t think about it until the timer is close to zero.
Dear Lord, have mercy.
I stood several meters away from the television behind my couch, with heartbroken eyes. I will do it now. I hate not knowing what will happen if it has already been decided that it will happen.
If this is a prank and nothing happens, then I rather find out sooner than later.
I put on an innocent romance comedy movie based in modern New York.
“Seven… Seven… Eight… Five.”
The TV released a massive pulsating energy. The screen with the timer disappeared – there was no screen at all, just the frame of the television. I could see a void inside the frame, as if I could jump right into it and fall straight through.
A shimmering light passed by within that void, almost like a small star, about the same distance as a star would be. Another one aimlessly passed through my field of view, and a few others remained quite static and motionless. There were vibrant bright orange specs of light among those stars, and those specs of light randomly exited my TV and floated out into my living room.
The light was literally – pixels or photons. This was how I imagined pixie fairy lights in my fantasy novels would look like, except they were more perfect and uniform.
They lightly vibrated in their place while moving a couple of centimeters per second throughout my r
oom.
I felt a cold chill emit from the void in front of me. There was no way for me to tell where it would take me. Or was there? I could just barely see something in those stars – almost like there was a hidden image in them. Darn, it was so vague, I couldn’t make out the picture. But something was definitely there.
I slowly walked around my couch to sit back in front of it. And then I observed – I observed the uniform amount of photons twinkle gently in the setting sun light through my windows. With the remote gripped firmly in my hand, I pressed the power button. It did not do anything. Neither did the channel and volume buttons.
Sighing deeply, I placed the remote down on the table in front, and relaxed my shoulders, staring at the TV.
I shook my head left and right, and smiled. My smile turned into a chuckle, and then a very sorrowful laugh.
I must have waited a few hours now. It was completely dark outside. The pixels gently bounced off my walls and kept the room vibrantly lit – it was a perfect display of entropy.
And then another hour passed…
I stood up, and cautiously walked away from the living room and into the kitchen. A lot of the photons filled up this area as well. While making my coffee, I poked one of the floating lights. It wobbled a little and then went about its business.
Coming back with my coffee, I continued staring into the void. The little stars inside were not getting any clearer.
“I’m finishing this coffee,” I said out loud, “and I am going in!” I nodded firmly.
After the slowest drinking of this delectable beverage without which my mornings would be hell, I got up to face my fears.
You know, turning around and going into the dark forest instead of staying with the animal people, that was not courageous. I did what I did because my circumstances influenced me, and my logic and reasoning were not in tune at that moment. It was an impulsive decision, almost like jumping in front of a car to save someone else. That is not courage.
If you knew the car would hit another person a whole minute before it did, and you had the time to think to yourself that you will jump in front of it to save them despite potentially dying yourself – that is courage. It is the willing thing to do something despite being terrified of doing it.
The Portal Page 2
