Curtain Call

     Harold and Alice sat alone in the darkened West Ocean City theater waiting for the featured film to start. For about five minutes the silence enveloped them in a calmness that provided a pleasant relief from the cinematic bombardment they had endured during the barrage of trailers when they had first entered the cinema.

     Then a deafening din assaulted their ears as a blinding light took over their visual senses. Of course, since the theater’s chief offering for this afternoon featured Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, one would expect the assault on their auditory and optical nerves.

     However, the screen remained blank and the afternoon’s cinematic entertainment had not yet begun.   What confronted Harold and Alice went directly, and personally, to their respective cerebral cortices. The horrific images flew only at these two particular theatergoers and didn’t seem aimed at anyone else in the film auditorium.

     In the next instant, the war of the ghastly images jumped from their psyches into horrible physical realities. Harold found himself inflicted from wounds in every area of his body, and Alice realized that the forces assaulting her suddenly began to age her mental abilities and her appearance.  The attractive 30-year-old saw her hair turn a drab shade of gray and her skin populated by age spots.

      Both the theatergoers also found they could not escape the new realities of existence in this far too genuine version of cinema verite–the force that had captured them, in fact, held them into their seats and incapable of getting away.

      It looked like the harder they attempted to free themselves from this horror the more imprisoned they became.

      For what seemed like hours they struggled to break free from a new multiverse that went far beyond the cinematic cataclysm they had seen portrayed on the previews of the latest adventure of Dr. Strange.

     How had a planned pleasant afternoon date at a local film venue at the beach brought the young lovers into the middle of a battle which could possibly take their lives?

     Harold, a software salesman previously based in Queens, NY, had relocated to Maryland’s Eastern Shore when his former college roommate and gaming genius Steven Duceton founded a startup and invited Harold to help him assemble his marketing team.

     On the Cape May-Lewes Ferry Harold had taken to peacefully contemplate his promising future he had struck up a conversation with Alice, a nursing student just completing her studies and on her way to Tidal Healthcare in Salisbury to join the emergency room staff.

     Their chance meeting on the ferry turned into a torrid love-making session that night in a luxury suite in one of the most upscale hotels in Lewes, Del.

      The couple saw the potential for a great future, but neither career neophyte believed the time was ripe to consider a more permanent living arrangement. So Alice settled into a graduate nurses’ residence in Salisbury while Harold put a down payment on an Ocean City condo.

      After six months, however, both of their careers headed in positive directions and the couple began to plan a future together.

       In fact, Harold believed that, if he played his cards right, after a romantic dinner following this evening’s movie, Alice would say “yes” to moving in with him and, perhaps, wedding bells would ring for them in the future.

      Now, they found all those plans, and perhaps even their very lives, at stake as they engaged in a brutal fight against creatures from another world. All this unfolding in what supposedly was nothing more than a movie theatre in the middle of a mall a few blocks from Maryland’s most famous beach resort.

     The backstories behind Harold’s new position and his “chance” meeting with Alice on the ferry held the keys to the true situation in which the young couple now found themselves.

     Steven, the so-called “gaming genius” who had enticed Harold to join his “promising new firm”, had, in fact, been experimenting for several months with travels to “other dimensions.”  During his experiments he had “opened a portal” to an adjacent universe whose inhabitants had been searching for new worlds to conquer in order to expand their power. They also wanted to establish a new base where those living in their world could escape from the predicted destruction of their planet from the nuclear explosion brewing below its surface.

      In return for Steven’s cooperation, they promised him a share of the large fortune in gold now being mined in an area of their planet “safe” from nuclear contamination.

      Steven had enlisted Harold because he had a number of connections in the software industry that could prove useful in helping the forces from the other universe to take over the earth’s cyberspace infrastructure.

      The otherworldly forces both wanted to keep close tabs on Steven and to cement Harold’s connection to the Eastern Shore, the future staging area for their takeover of Earth.

    They, therefore, transformed one of their chief commanders, Alice, into a beautiful Earth woman who would seduce Harold into doing their bidding. Because they had traced all of Harold’s movements, they knew when he would travel to the Eastern Shore and they set up the elaborate “hookup.”

     Plans called for a long-term romance between Alice and Harold. After kindling the romance she would go with Harold on the date and then take over his body and mind. As the couple waited for a movie about the worlds of the multiverse to begin life would imitate art with the launching of the battle. Alice also would be “attacked” in order to make the takeover of Harold more convincing.

     The multiverse forces, however, made the attacks much more brutal than originally planned. Alice banished in the attacks and could not relay messages on the overwhelming size of the Earth’s resistance forces to her comrades.

     When word of the attacks spread around the Eastern Shore the Earth’s defense forces wiped out the multiversers. 

      Later, the Interplanetary Court banished the multiverse leaders and Steven to a deserted planet the Interplantery Council used as a prison colony. There they would live out their lives.