THE DOOR
18 October 2017
The Coach House, Hilary
Place, University of Leeds
Dom (questioing
and acting)
This is the story
of a woman in her twenties called Julia.
It begins at the
end of summer and the beginning of Autumn on a Friday at 10am.
Julia is on her
way to work at Trinity, which is a hospital in a village called Leeds, which is
between the town and the countryside. She is travelling by bus and is still 20
minutes away from work, having only just left her house. The bus is on the main
road to Leeds. Julia works in the hospital as a nurse.
The weather is
windy, rainy and sunny.
As the story of
The Door begins, Julia is reading a book and listening to music on her phone
with her headphones. She has Alice in Wonderland on her Kindle and the music is
on iPlayer. She does not notice, but underneath her feet on the floor of the
bus, there is a small door, big enough for her body to fit through, wooden,
round and red.
Julia hears some
whispering voices and at that moment, the door opens and she falls down. The wind
is blowing outside the bus. The first thing that happens is that she thinks ‘I
am going to die!’ because she is worried that she has fallen under the bus.
However, she somehow realises that she is now in another time and place,
because there is now a totally different atmosphere.
It is completely
dark there, except for a yellow torchlight, which she thinks is close by, but
is actually far away. She decides to run towards the light because there is
nothing else there, but after an hour, she is tired and she stops.
The moment she
stops, she realises that there is another door on the right. Even though she
cannot see it, she realises it is a huge stone door, because she can hear
someone knocking.
*She tries to
open the door because it is the only accessible way, and as it’s an automatic
door, it takes her two minutes and a further ten minutes to push the door open.
She finds herself in the office of the hospital where she works. She decides
that she must go and tell her best friend what has happened.
Her best friend
is in the Psychology Department, a person called Peter-Nick, who was frozen at
the age of 13, 17 years earlier. Julia became best friends with him over the
last year because she was lonely and talks to him. He was taken to the Psychology
Department so that experiments could be conducted on him to find out, when he
wakes up, whether he has the mind of a 13-year-old or a 30-year-old.
However, Peter-Nick
is now missing. Instead, Julia finds a black hole in the mirror of the unisex
washroom, a hole about the size of an adult handspan, which she finds out about
because there is black smoke coming out of it and a very deep, desperate voice
is calling out ‘Save me!’ Even though Peter-Nick has been frozen the whole time
Julia has known him, she recognises his voice from her dreams.
Julia decides she
needs to stop the smoke coming from the hole because it smells bad, like
gasoline, so she puts her hand up to the hole. But the hole grows instead, now
a couple of feet in diameter, and a frozen, green hand about the size of Dom’s
hand pulls her into the whole. It is Peter-Nick’s hand.
Outside, there is
sunshine and lightning.
**Peter-Nick is
there on the other side of the black hole. Julia finds herself in Frozen, and
she has become Anna from Frozen. Peter-Nick has recovered from being frozen,
and he now has the appearance of Julia. She is frozen and green, like
Peter-Nick was.
As the story
ends, Peter-Nick goes off to find other people to freeze, so they can swap
places with Julia. Julia becomes queen, but remains frozen.
The sun shines
and it is snowing.
