The Frozen Best Friend

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.