What's behind the door?

 

Swerve stood looking at the red door. It was a door, but not a door. At first sight there was nothing remarkable about the Bungalow Post office in Cairns. It had the standard red mail box out the front and people were coming and going doing business. A normal person wouldn’t have stood and looked at the red door like Swerve did. But then few people considered Swerve normal. He didn’t care. Normality was for the boring and those who cared little about what went on around them. But Swerve cared. He cared a lot and the red door was a problem.

Outside a dozen rows of business mail boxes stood a prefabricated metal wall. It was there to protect the boxes from the elements. In the wall were two red doors. They were spaced ten feet apart. One door went from floor to ceiling and had a standard round metal knob. The other did not. It was a half door. It started at the top and stopped waist height for a man and the knob was rough, metal and battered as if great force had been applied to it. Anyone passing by, if they had cared to look and wonder at the difference between that two doors, may have pondered at the reasoning of the half door. Swerve wondered how many hands had touched that battered handle, turned the knob and were never seen again.

He blew out a breath and ran his hand through his dark red, shoulder length hair. He had forgotten how humid the tropical heat of Cairns could be. He reached into the back pocket of his red Billabong board shorts and pulled out a leather cord, trying it around his hair to get it off the back of his neck.  He contemplated his options. Turning the knob on the half door would answer a lot of questions. “But what would it release? And where would it take me?” Swerve was not one to fear the unknown. However the thought of getting sucked into what he suspected was a powerful vortex and not being to get back again was pointless to what he was trying to achieve.  

He placed his palm on the painted surface of the door. It was as he expected. Cold to the touch. Everything else in the tropics was hot and sticky yet this half door was not. “Bloody time lords.” Swerve loathed them. As far as he was concerned time lords were not at all like the charming and quirky Dr Who of television fame. Time lords were dangerous meddlers who travelled from world to world and cared little for others. Their lives were dedicated to the pursuit of adventure, uncaring what happened when their peccadilloes affected the rest of the world. Which they did. A lot. As for time lords trying to make him and others believe they did it all in the name of science? Bullshit. They did it for the treasures and the power they could amass. 

“What to do?” Swerve muttered to himself. A time portal was dangerous thing to be left out in the open in a public place like this. If it was a less than public place he would have set an explosive charge to it and blown it up like he had done to others. But this portal? That was not possible and he wasn’t about to cause fear or harm anyone in his need to rid his world of time lords.

He contemplated gluing the door shut. That would work as an interim measure until he could consult others of his kind into the best way to handle this. While it annoyed him not to be able to think of a quick, effective solution, he wasn’t arrogant enough to think he knew everything. He didn’t. There were things in the universe that defied even Swerve.

From the same back pocket Swerve pulled out his cell phone and dialed in a number. “Yeah, Jim, it’s a portal.”

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