He opened the door to find her standing there, crying. They hadn't spoken about the incident in weeks, no one could figure out what the right thing to say was. Their child was gone, disappeared into a void where they knew they could not follow. They had been married for so long that they understood there was grief in the silence, and still, no one knew what to say. It hurt, every time they thought of Eddy and the wild experiments he kept building in the basement.
Honestly, Ron had gone down there every night since Eddy's disappearance and tried to recreate the system that took his son away. He quickly realized that he had no idea how to fix any of these machines, or what possible coding could have been used to open up the portal.
He walked away from Rebecca without saying a word, and once again made his way down into the basement. He pulled the string to turn on the light swinging over his head and then looked around once again. What was he going to do? How could he possibly fix this? He had no idea, but he was willing to keep trying.
He shuffled through the papers and diagrams, wishing any of it would start to become clearer to him. He pounded his fist into the table, angered as the rush of stupidity washed over him. He was a janitor, dropped out of school and never really pursued any kind of education. Now, he couldn’t understand a single thing in front of him.
The computer dinged loudly in front of him. He shuffled over to it and frantically pressed keys, trying to turn the system back on. After a moment, he realized the monitor was off. He pressed the button and watched it turn from a hazy orange to a bright blue. The screen took a moment to clear from the wild amount of dialogue boxes, each one running some sort of program. A large message box popped up.
Mom, Dad? It’s me, Eddy. You have to come see this. I am going to open the portal for you. The message blinked and twisted, begging for attention.
“Rebecca! Get down here…it’s…it’s Eddy!” he shouted loudly. In a flash he heard the scuttering of frantic footsteps as his wife flung the basement door open and threw herself down the steps.
“What? What is it?!” she shouted. He moved to the side and let her see the screen. She shook her head in disbelief.
A whirring sound unleashed in the room, and they covered their ears to keep any idea of coherency. The whole room seemed to buckle in on itself. A large blue doorway appeared, the air around it seemingly being sucked into it. Slowly, the door opened, and the matching blue portal shone brightly as they stood before it.
“What do we do?” Ron started to ask. It didn’t matter, because Rebecca was already halfway into the doorway before he started moving into it himself.
The screen flashed again, another message. It flashed red, and then deleted itself, and appeared again. This time a new message appeared.
Mom, dad…I didn’t send that message. I don’t know what is going on, but don’t come here, it isn’t safe. I’m sorry.