"Keep It In The Closet"
(Part One: "Sometimes I Feel Like…")
Meagan waited for what seemed like four hours to wait for Kimberly Venkman to get done in the shower, after being slimed by her worst ghostly nemesis. She couldn't blame her for being in there so long, considering how funky that ghost's ectoplasm smelled, even from a far distance. It could still be smelled, even as Venkman was washing it off her body.
As usual, Meagan occupied herself with twiddling her thumbs, while sitting on one of the five beds in the room located next door to the kitchen on the second floor. Her illustration of the monster in her closet was sitting to the right of her, still generating an odor that she believed couldn't be nearly as horrid as the one that plagued Dr. Venkman.
Once she heard the shower in the bathroom shut off, Meagan quickly stood up from the bed with her cardboard illustration in hand. She anxiously watched the open doorway, as a shadow appeared on the door. And then, dressed in a white, cottoned bathrobe and rubbing a towel through her drenched red hair, Kimberly Venkman stepped out. After taking a few moments to completely dry out her hair, she moved the towel away from it and suddenly spotted the young woman in the room that seemed to come out of nowhere.
"GAH!!!" Venkman screamed in surprise.
"AHHH!!!!" Meagan yelped, surprised herself.
Kimberly snatched the nearest object she could to guard herself from Meagan with. Unfortunately, it was an unplugged curling iron. "Who are you? And why are you in my room?"
Meagan lifted her hands up high, feeling as if she were caught by a police officer. "M-My n-name is M-Meagan T-Tully! I'm one…one of the new recruits! Please don't hurt me!"
Venkman looked curiously at Meagan for a moment and then smiled. "Oh!" She placed the curling iron back where she found it and approached the recruit, shaking her hand. "Welcome to the program. I've wanted to meet one of you kids when I got here, but…well…as I'm sure you've heard by now…"
"Yes, I'm sorry to hear that happened to you, sir…I mean, ma'am."
Kimberly waved it off with a chuckle. "It happens all the time," she said, and then added with half of a frown, "way too often, in fact." She suddenly stopped and began to sniff, smelling something incredibly putrid. Sniffing the collar of her bathrobe, she wondered if another shower was needed. "Man! This stuff gets harder to come off by the week."
"Um…" Meagan sheepishly uttered, knowing full well where the smell came from. "It's not the slime that you're smelling. It's this…" She showed her cardboard illustration to Venkman, whom nearly regurgitated from its odor, which got stronger as it got closer to her nose. "I'm sorry that it smells so bad. I just couldn't afford to wash and ruin it, before I got the chance to show it to you guys."
"What's so important about it?" Kimberly asked, while holding her nose.
"Well, it's kind of complicated to tell…"
"The only thing that's complicated about it is that funky smell. Can you, like, put someplace where I can't smell it, while we talk about it?"
"Sure, but where?"
Kimberly pointed to the first thing she saw, which was the trunk that was sitting near the foot of Diana Zeddemore's bed. Meagan placed the odorous cardboard illustration inside it, and after closing the lid, it seemed like the object had never been there. Venkman took a deep breath of the somewhat fresh air of the room and smiled. "Never thought I'd be so happy to smell cigarette smoke and asbestos."
"The reason it's so important to me is that I've finally got concrete evidence of it."
"And what's 'it'?"
Meagan cautiously looked left and right, before she answered, "The monster in my closet."
"Ohhhh," said Kimberly, in mocked understanding, "The, uh, monster in your closet, eh?"
"You don't believe me either, do you?"
"No, no. I do. I'm a Ghostbuster, remember? Ready to believe you?"
"But you sound like you don't."
Venkman chuckled. "That's how I always sound, kiddo. It's, uh, part of who I am." She guided Meagan over to her bed to sit down with her, as they continued their conversation. "Now…tell me more about this 'closet monster'."
Meagan hesitated for a second, unsure of just how much of what she told would Dr. Venkman believe. But if she said that she believed her, then all she could've done was take her word for it. "Well…one night, after Miss Zeddemore and Dr. Stantz came over to check out my problem, he peeked out from there and said how he enjoyed eating the leftover food."
"Wait a minute," Kimberly interjected, "you keep leftover food in your closet space?"
A perplexed look registered on Meagan's face when she said, "Yeah."
And after a long pause, Kimberly responded, "Please continue."
"Well…after that, I didn't see him again, until about a year later…around the time of my eighteenth birthday…"
September 2006
It was twenty minutes past midnight. Meagan was having two slices of pepperoni pizza left over from her party a couple of weeks ago—a lot left over, considering it was only her and her parents who were at the so-called "party." The rest of it was placed in her closet, with three fans placed around it to increase the delicious smell in whatever direction that one-eyed monster came from. Sitting on her bed and looking towards the half-opened closet door, she waited intently on the arrival of her little "friend."
She was just down to her second slice, when she heard some munching noises from the closet. Putting down the slice of pizza, she went to the closet door and opened it the rest of the way, unveiling the two monsters that were inside: a tall brown one with small horns and a small green one with no legs, mop-like hair, and braces. Both were wearing blue hardhats that had an unusual insignia printed on them, and they seemed to be teenage monsters.
"Oh, no! We've been spotted!" The small green monster exclaimed.
"Quick! Close the door!" The tall brown monster suggested. "Maybe she didn't see us!"
And, following the command of his companion, the small green monster reached over to the doorknob and quickly shut the door closed. However, Meagan immediately opened it, hoping the monsters would still be there. Fortunately, they were, having their hands over their heads and their eyes tightly shut, pretending as if they were not there.
"I can still see you guys," Meagan informed them.
Slowly, the two young monsters opened their eyes and realized that they were still inside the closet, with the box of fresh pepperoni pizza still sitting in between them. The tall brown monster then complained to the small green one, "I told ya we shouldn't have used the door, during shredding hours!"
"But I was so hungry!" The small green monster pleaded his case. "And Mister Wazowski said this was the best closet to get lunch."
Meagan reacted to the name the monster uttered with much interest. "Mister Wazowski? Is that the little green one-eyed monster I saw in here last year?"
The two monsters exchanged a brief, stunned glance, before turning to Meagan and asking in unison, "You know Mike Wazowski?"
"I sort of do." Meagan answered. "He came by here one night, ate a Big Mac left over from several months ago, and gave his compliments before vanishing." She then mustered the courage to ask them, "Uh, w-where is it that you guys go to, once you've…um…scare people?"
With that question, the two monsters became increasingly stunned to the point that they screamed in terror. Meagan jumped in surprise from this, nearly tripping over some of the cluttered items on her floor. The two monsters in her closet began to scurry away, tossing some of the things in there (from the pizza box to a busted Playstation 2 game system) at the confused Meagan.
"W-Wait! Don't be scared!" She told them. "I won't hurt you!"
"She knows too much of our secrets!" The small green monster cried.
"This is why we never scare people over the age of thirteen! Too curious about things they don't understand!!!" The tall brown one shouted.
While dodging all the items being thrown at her, Meagan noticed a white light emerging from within her closet. She never noticed it before, when these creatures were in the confines of her personal area, possibly due in part to the huge cluttered mess that blocked it. There wasn't much of an assumption needed for her to realize that this white light had to be the portal to their world on the other side of the closet.
She knew this would be the one and only opportunity to see where exactly did these monsters came from and how they were able to perform their disappearing act so flawlessly. While she watched the two current monsters begin to make their exit through the light, she dashed towards her closet and practically dived right into it, allowing herself to be engulfed by the light. She felt a funky, tingling sensation come across her body, as everything went completely white.
Meagan half-expected to fall comfortably onto a pile of dirty clothes, doubting that she even made it through the beacon of light. However, when she felt herself hit a hard surface, there was no longer any doubt in her mind. She made it to her destination, following the two teenage monsters. The familiar aroma of her bedroom, from the corn chips to the perfume she often tried to cover it up with, was no longer moving through her nostrils. Instead, there was still a scent of corn chips (definitely a popular snack treat), yet it was accompanied by that of coffee, wood, and fur.
Her eyes had been closed during the journey between her room and whatever she ended up in, and she finally opened them to see that she was lying in some type of factory with strange machines, a series of skylights that displayed the starry night sky outside, and a large two-way window that showed a control room. It wasn't exactly what she expected it to be—a magical land of pixies and mermaids (in other words, Neverland). This looked like her world, only twice as blue collar.
All of the sudden she heard the sound of a buzz saw, shredding what seemed like wood to her ears. The scent of sawdust entered her nostrils, and she turned her head to see the two monsters shredding what appeared to have been her closet door…or an exact duplicate of it.
"Never again will we use this door!" The tall brown monster declared.
"But what if Mister Wazowski asks any questions?" His friend inquired.
"Then we keep our mouths absolutely shut and pretend like he didn't say anything!"
As the upper half of Meagan's closet door were shredded into a mixture of dust and tiny fragments of itself, the two monsters dusted off their scaly hands and turned to exit the room. But they quickly realized that Meagan was in the room with them and went back to freaking out, just as before. Meagan stood up and once again tried to calm them down, while they were screaming their lungs out over her presence there. It amazed her a little that these monsters found her frightening as it, in her understanding, should've been the other way around.
Curiously, she asked them, "Why are you guys so scared of me?"
"Because you're human!" The tall brown monster remarked.
"And you know all about Monsters, Inc., without the proper authorization procedure!" The small green one added.
Meagan pondered over the company name, with a small grin crept across her face. "Monsters, Inc.?"
BLAM!!!
She suddenly felt a hard object come over the back of her head and instantly became dazed, her legs turning wobbly and the world around her getting blurry. Falling back down to the floor, she began to slip into unconsciousness. A purple, lizard-shaped figure loomed over her, holding an object that she could only assume was what it attacked her with—a four-foot long, yellow canister.
The purple lizard turned to the two monsters in the room and said in a snake-like voice, "You two didn't see a thing, right?"
"Duh, um…R-Right, Mister Randall, s-sir." One of them responded.
"Well? Get out of here!!" Randall sinisterly demanded, and the two monsters didn't hesitate to carry it out, leaving the area immediately. The lizard then focused his attention on Meagan, as things began to fade to black before her very eyes. The last thing she heard was Randall saying, "Let's have some fun, shall we?"
To Be Continued…