Chapter Twenty

Luke opened his mouth as if he was going to say something, but was interrupted by the flashing purple lights on the dashboard of the motorcycle. He squinted his eyes, and gave a confounded look at the odd little lights. “What the bloody hell…?”
“What? What happened? Did the door get destroyed or something?” I asked, slightly nervous.
“No… that door… the one we came in through is fine…”
“So shouldn’t we go to it soon? I mean, I think the city is done… burning and being destroyed.”
“No, that’s not the odd thing,” he said. “The door just looks like a door, but it’s actually an inter dimensional portal between two alternate dimensions, it can’t be destroyed by fire or toppling buildings or things like that.”
“Than shouldn’t we go?”
“No,” he said. “No, you see, there’s… well, according to this… but there can’t be…”
“Are you just going to go on like this mumbling to yourself, or are you going to tell me what the hell you are talking about?”
“There’s another door.”
“What?”
“Yeah. There is some other door.”
“What are you talking about? Didn’t you just tell me that there was only one door in this dimension?”
“Yes, that’s what I said, but apparently now there’s another door.”
“What d’you mean? Who builds these doors, and how can there just suddenly be another one?”
“They’re not built by anyone, they’re just there. But how come this one has never showed up on my radar or in my research before?”
“Maybe the universes knew you were in trouble and decided to just pop! Create a new one or something.”
“Highly unlikely,” he said. “But… what other explanation is there? As far as I know, there is no way to manually create this doors… I mean, if I gathered the energy of the motorcycle, I could probably. But I haven’t ever done that. It’s much too difficult. It’s just a whole lot easier to go to the pre existing doors than to just randomly break the walls between barriers and create a new one.”
“So where did this one come from?” I asked.
“I really have no idea.”
“Well… is it closer to us than the island? Because we could use that door instead. And we’ll be moving forward instead of moving backwards.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “I mean… for all we know, we could be walking into a dimension with no oxygen. Or a dimension that will lead us right into outer space. Or a dimension that could be located at the center of a star, causing us to burn to a crisp before we even have a chance to close the door before it blinds us.”
“Whoa. We have this risk with every single door that we open?”
“No, because I know the doors that we’ve opened. I know which dimensions they lead to, and I’ve been through all of them before. But if there is just some random new door, how am I supposed to know what’s behind it?”
I frowned. “So are we not going to go through this door?”
“I’ve got to see if it’s safe first. If it’s not, then we have to go back into the island.”
“Well, where is it located?”
“Believe it or not,” Luke turned around, “it’s inside the light house.”
And before we could look at each other to verify that we were both thinking the same thing, we ran towards the light house door and opened it.
“See? The stairs go lower than the ground floor,” Luke said. He looked back at me. “Are you sure you want to come? I don’t want to see you get hurt. And we could always go back.”
“Yeah…” I said. “I want to come.”
“All right. It’s your choice.” He smiled again. And then he looked down at his watch and began fiddling with one of the little knobs.
“What are you doing?”
A light sprung from it, and it hit the door.
“Doing a scan,” he said. “It’ll give me an analysis summary on what’s actually behind that door. It’ll let me know if there’s anything dangerous, or nothing at all.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It is. But since it’s so small, it takes forever to analyze things. And then report to me a summary. Bloody hell, this thing needs to be fixed or something.”
“Um, Luke?”
“Yeah, Caity-cakes?”
“I just have a question.”
“Go ahead. I’m free until this stupid thing starts working.”
“Well… just out of curiosity… what do you plan to do after this?”
“Plan? I don’t usually plan anything. And what do you mean after this?”
“I mean, once we stop this bad guy. What do you thing you’re going to do?”
“You mean, like, life plan, or immediately after this?”
I shrugged.
“Well, my life won’t change much. I’ll still be the keeper of dimensions, and if anything like this happens again, I know I’ll be strong enough to handle it.”
“And then immediately after this?”
He looked up at me and raised one eyebrow. “Honestly, I’m thinking of getting you back home and hooking up with that one cute blonde girl that was in the pub a couple of days before I met you.”
I looked down at the ground and only just realized how dusty it was. “Oh,” I managed to spit out.
“But I did promise to take you to that one dimension you wanted to go to,” he said. “The one that was unseemingly like your home one, and you wanted to figure out what the difference was?”
“Oh, right,” I said. I had almost completely forgotten about that at this point. I was surprised Luke had remembered. “It’s not that important, I guess. Since now that I know that all the difference is just that I’m dead there, and alive here.”
“Yeah, and also the fact that the chocolate cake in that dimension is phenomenal. You know what? We probably should stop by there, jut to grab a slice. I think it’d be worth it. And you can poke around as you’d like. Do you agree?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Luke’s watch started beeping. “Aha! Hm. Okay. Well, honestly, it just looks like there’s a regular town on the other side of that door. It doesn’t seem like anything is too dangerous. Shall we go through?”
I didn’t say anything, and walked in front of Luke, and pushed the door open myself. I almost felt like slamming it behind Luke as I walked through it.