"Keep It In The Closet"
(Part Three: "Or Is It Just A Dream?")
At four o'clock in the morning, all boys and girls were sound asleep in the small suburban neighborhood within Baltimore, Maryland known as Trufull Heights. However, in one house owned by a decent, middle-class African American family, there came a rattling inside the closet of eight-year-old Damon, the only son of the couple who owned the house. When he heard the rattling, he was awaken from his peaceful slumber and focused on his closet door, clearly seeing it shift as if someone was trying to get out.
Recently, Damon acquired a fear of monsters in the closet—something most children his age were known to have. Even though his parents convinced him that there was nothing to fear, random noises in his room during the middle of the night still made him uneasy. And this particular noise had been accompanied by visible movement, noting that there was actually something in his closet.
Damon slowly crawled out of bed and reached under it, pulling out a baseball bat that was normally used for practice with his dad, but would be handled for different purposes that moment. Making his way over to the rattling closet, he kept his baseball bat held high, while maintaining a batting stance. I'm gonna kick this monster's butt once and for all, the eight-year-old bravely thought to himself.
When the closet door finally opened (as he expected it to), he watched as the monster crept out from the closet and poked its bulbous, blue head past the door. As soon as Damon saw it, he let out a tiny shriek and swung his baseball bat fast and hard over the monster's head. The bat practically broke on impact, and the monster's "head" came clear off. Damon stared at both the bat and the head, surprised by his own strength. But as he looked up at the monster, he expected to see its body now missing a head; but instead, he noticed how it seemed to have "grown" another one in the shape of a human teenage girl.
Unbeknownst to the eight-year-old, the monster was actually just that, as Meagan Tully was disguised as one to get past the real monsters at Monsters, Inc. in order to return to her world. But after what just happened, she realized how bad of an idea that was, especially as she felt another hard object connect with her body—this time hitting her stomach.
"You're goin' down, monster!!" Damon exclaimed, as he held his Xbox 360 game system high over his head.
Meagan tried to raise her hand in protest of the little boy's fierce attacks over her. Unfortunately, her hand was deep within one of the sleeves of her lab coat, which was in reality multiple coats stitched together, and was therefore completely obscured by the fabric. "No, wath! Mold mup!" She tried to verbally convince the kid that she meant no harm; but with a numbed mouth from that "Scream Extractor" machine, that was a little hard to do. Luckily for that numbness, she barely felt Damon's game system as it smashed right across her face.
As Meagan collapsed to the floor, Damon screamed over her, "Wolverines!" That was right before he remembered his copy of Marvel Ultimate Alliance was still in the game system, which he ejected as soon as he commenced in beating Meagan.
Needleman and Smitty were just about ready to remove the door they set up for their human "friend," after she went through it, thinking that their troubles were finally all behind them. That was when Randall Boggs appeared out of nowhere near them, scaring the wits out of both of them.
"Uh, duh-duh…hi there, Mister Randall!" Smitty stammered.
"W-What brings you here at our, uh, station?" Needleman nervously inquired.
Randall seemed very nonchalant as he addressed the two monsters. "Just wanna check and see how the 'new guy' is holdin' up. It's not every day I get to say 'Hello' to the fresh meat around here." He got in between Needleman and Smitty, putting all four of his arms tightly around them. "Speakin' of which, you fellas wouldn't to have seen our little 'visitor' around here, have ya?"
Needleman and Smitty exchanged a brief cautious glance, and then Needleman uttered, "Um, we haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about, Mister Randall."
The grip Randall's arms had around them tightened, nearly choking the life out of them. "You dimwits know very well what I'm talking about! You were standin' right there when I bashed her skull in! Now where is she?!"
"Honest, Mister Randall," said the quivering Smitty, "you asked if we didn't see any thing, and we didn't."
Randall got right into Smitty's face and glared heavily into his eyes. "Are you trying to make me angry right now?"
As soon as Smitty could have given some type of response to Randall's presumably rhetorical question, their discussion had been interrupted by Mike Wazowski, who showed up and asked, "Well, how is the newbie doing on his first gig, boys?"
The moment Wazowski appeared near the group, Randall camouflaged himself into nothingness, making it seemed as if he were never there. Needleman and Smitty were so focused on Mike that they barely even realized this. "Uh…h-he's doing great, Mister Wazowski," answered Smitty.
"Um, yeah…still scarin' up a storm in there." Needleman added.
Even through Mike's large green eye, it was bluntly obvious that he wasn't buying into the two monsters' lie. Just to humor them, he mockingly made them believe he bought into it. "Oh, yeah? That's remarkable, guys. So, uh, what 'Scare Total' would you say he's got right now?"
Needleman and Smitty hadn't once looked at the chart to see what the total of their friend "Megatron" was currently on, considering she was a fake Monsters, Inc. employee and was only working through one door. Curiously, they looked behind them to glance at the chart and felt a little sheepish to find out that "Megatron" was dead last with a score of "0".
Mike laughed hysterically as he told them, "Ya gonna have to do a heck of a lot better if you're gonna beat Sulley's record, boys!"
They watched as Wazowski began to walk away, wondering if they should have taken that chance to tell him about the girl who owned the door he so religiously enjoyed going through to have lunch. Unfortunately, they had to risk Randall being near them, as they blurted out their secret just after admitting they didn't know anything in front of him.
However, their problem seemed to have solved itself, as soon as the door they set up opened and Meagan clambered out. Her costume had been torn to shreds and she looked very battered and bruised, while crawling out from the closet door. Once she was out safely, she screamed to Needleman and Smitty (through clear speech), "Close it! Close it! Close it!!!"
Needleman immediately shut the door on Meagan's command. Soon after he did was when he and Smitty realized that Meagan's true identity had been exposed to all of the monsters in the room—and even Mister Waternoose in the control room.
"A human? Here?!?!" He exclaimed, before giving a direct order to one of the controllers. "Sound the emergency alarm…NOW!"
The controller pressed the large red button to sound the alarm, and all of the monsters down on the work floor stopped their activities, focusing on the human girl near Needleman and Smitty, who were wishing they could vanish like Randall right about then. Nearby, Mike and Sulley looked on the incident with mixed reactions of curiosity and fear, as a grown human girl had entered their vicinity. But it wasn't any random girl to Mike—it was the same one he met a year ago, during his lunch break.
"Oh, no," he muttered.
All of the sudden, a barrage of monsters clad in rubber yellow hazmat-type suits jumped in through the skylights, arriving from a large collection of helicopters circling around the Monsters, Inc. complex and shining lights all throughout. They surrounded the spot where Meagan was sitting, alarming her and everyone else in the room. Held in each of their multiple hands were bizarre-looking devices that almost looked like weapons to Meagan.
"Just relax, miss," one of them told her, in a somewhat electronic, static voice. "We are trained professionals and will have you back to wherever you came from in no time."
Meagan, already excited enough for one evening, reached down to her feet and removed the remaining canister that had been strapped to her feet. She stood up and welded the canister over her head in a threatening manner, causing all of the hazmat-suited monsters to back away from her. "I am not in the mood for this right now! All I want is a door that'll take me straight back to New York City! Is that so much to ask?"
Everyone in the room was deathly quiet, as they just blankly stared at her, obviously frightened by her presence. One of the monsters then broke the silence by answering Meagan's request. "Uh…I've got a door over here going to New York City."
Right at the second the monster uttered "New," Meagan dashed over to where the monster and the door were. She passed right by Mike Wazowski on the way, giving a quick familiar glance that he gave in return. Neither of them said a word to each other, letting the stunned expressions on their faces speak for themselves.
When Meagan finally reached the door, she saw how old-fashioned it looked and seemed to have characteristics similar to a broom closet door. It was colored in a dark shade of brown and made out of hardwood, with a bronze-plated doorknob. It definitely wasn't the door to a child's bedroom—a possible mistake on the monster's behalf. But she would've cared less, considering how much she wanted out of that place called "Monstropolis."
Opening the door, she went inside the unknown closet and returned back to her own realm within New York City, never again hearing from any of the monsters she met that night.
Present Day
While listening to Meagan's tale, Kimberly dressed herself in her Ghostbuster uniform, preparing herself to join Alexis in hunting down Slimer and the Lonesome Ghosts to wherever it was that they disappeared to. Much of what the 22-year-old Junior Ghostbuster recruit told her was hard enough to swallow, and at many times during her story, she wanted to just come out and admit that she lied and didn't believe a word of it. But something in her sparked some interest, as it usually had with the people they met in their line of work, and she kept herself intrigued long enough for Tully to finish.
"And once I made it into the closet, I snuck my way out of the place it belonged to and went back home." Meagan concluded. "Since then, I've never bothered trying to get back into Monstropolis, mainly because my doorway there had been destroyed."
Venkman nodded. "I see. And, uh, what did you want us to do about it?"
"Well, there's obviously an existing line between us and those monsters, one of which tried to kill me. You've got to stop them, before…I don't know…they take over our planet or something!"
"The only thing I've got to do is find that little spud who gooped me for the third time in a row," remarked Kimberly, as she started looking around her bed, "right after I find my boots."
Meagan sighed in despair, having told her whole secret to a nonbeliever. As she watched Dr. Venkman move over to the nearest closet in the room, she suddenly recognized the door to it from that of the one she depicted in her story. It was then that she realized the door that served as her exit from Monstropolis was confined within the firehouse headquarters of the Ghostbusters.
"Oh, my god!" She gleefully cried.
Kimberly spun around in surprise at the moment the young woman cheered. "What? Did you find my boots? I know they can't smell that bad."
"No," said Meagan, as she went to the door. "This is it! This is how I was able to leave Monstropolis! It was this door that led me out!"
"Okay, now you're just blowin' smoke out of your butt, kiddo. Say if you were actually to walk out this door, don't you think any of us would've seen you doing it?"
"The people in the house I walked into were fast asleep at the time. One of them was really snoring up an earthquake."
Kimberly's eyes darted towards the floor after that statement from Meagan, and she rubbed the back of her neck nervously. She had often been told from her cohorts that she had a rather horrible snoring problem, keeping them up most of the night.
But how could this girl have known about it?
Meagan opened the closet door and revealed all of its contents, from spare uniforms and equipment to a few cardboard boxes. Kimberly's boots were there, as well as a yellow canister similar to the one in Meagan's story. Meagan smiled upon seeing the canister, and she pulled it (along with Venkman's boots) out from the closet to show her.
"See? I wasn't lying, was I?"
Kimberly looked at the canister for a brief moment and then glared at Meagan, snatching her boots away from her. It wasn't often that she liked to be proven wrong, especially being the one with the degree in parapsychology. And if this weren't enough to blow her ego, the light shining from the closet apparently was. She and Meagan looked deep within it, seeing how there was an adjacent room past all of the closet's contents.
Venkman could barely believe what she was looking at, and she could hardly understand why Meagan handed her a Proton Pack from the closet all of the sudden. She looked at her and noticed the goofy smile on her face, which apparently came from the giddiness she felt of proving the disbelieving parapsychologist wrong. Shaking her head, Kimberly strapped on the Proton Pack and slipped on her boots, before she and Meagan Tully headed into the closet.
After the door had closed behind them, Alexis Embers walked into the room, expecting Kimberly to be there waiting for her. But once she realized that she was nowhere around, a look of anger registered on her face as she stormed out and headed downstairs alone (which she started to feel herself becoming, after learning the truth of her teammates' thoughts of her own recruitment).