Plot
A couple, Chris and Ruth, are awoken by the distant whimpering of their little girl, Tina. Chris slowly gets up to see what the trouble is. Their dog, Mack, begins to bark from their backyard. Chris finds Tina's bed empty, though he can hear her pleas for help. Looking around the room, he says, "I'm here, where are you?" Mack barks again in the backyard.
Chris crouches next to the bed while trying to talk Tina out from underneath it, where he thinks she is hiding. He looks under the bed to find nothing there. Chris can hear Tina (with a strange echo effect), and she can hear him, but neither can see each other. He explains to Ruth that even though they can hear her, their little girl is no longer with them.
Mack is now barking incessantly. Chris calls his physicist friend, Bill, for help and opens the door to let Mack into the house. The dog runs into Tina's room as Ruth, still in the room, watches him go under the bed. She bends over, calling him back, but becomes quiet when she sees he has disappeared. She can still hear the dog's barking (also with the echo now) and Tina's voice.
Bill comes over and examines the wall behind the bed. He taps the wall and finds an invisible portal to another dimension. He explains it by saying sometimes lines in our three dimensions end parallel with, rather than perpendicular to, the fourth dimension.
The adults try to call to Mack to guide Tina back, but their attempts fail. Finally Chris, despite Bill's warnings, reaches into the portal and falls into the other dimension. Chris lands in a hazy, foggy, abstract place, where space and shapes are distorted, turning upside down and sideways. When Chris calls to Bill, his voice also echoes. Chris sees Tina and Mack and tries to call them towards him, since he is standing right near the portal. On the other side, he hears Bill's voice telling him to hurry up. Finally as Tina and Mack close in on him, Bill grabs them and is pulled back into the bedroom. Ruth takes the girl to another room.
Bill explains that Chris was actually only halfway in, despite Chris thinking he was standing up in the new dimension. Bill was in fact holding on to Chris the entire time. He was telling Chris to hurry because the portal was closing, and had Chris remained there for any longer than a few more seconds, the bottom half of his body would have been in the room, with the top half in the other dimension. As Bill puts it to Chris, "Another few seconds, and half of you would've been here, and the other half ..."
Bill knocks on the wall, and it is solid.
Read more about this topic: Little Girl Lost (The Twilight Zone)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)