This is an Unexpected Bump for Sure -- 20
It was a hallway -- a corridor -- couldn't see the walls, but it was nonetheless a corridor -- couldn't move left or right, just straight ahead.
Then ended.
In the reddish landscape. Just POP!
Then there they were: Chloe and Ralph and Brian and Tom and Dick and Harry and Ahmed and Raphael and Jacques.
Ralph?
He was standing out there in the dirt. The rest of us were right in front of doors.
Ralph motioned to Chloe to move to him. She did. Her door hummed. He motioned to her to move back. She did. It hummed again in a slightly higher tone. Motioned to each of us, we moved forward and back like Chloe and our door hummed in the same manner. Then he motioned to me to hum, then Chloe and so on down the line, and our hums were, as I had thought, as octave of a musical scale.
"Ralph!" I said, "How'd you get here?" Ralph was the old decrepit looking guy at the old decrepit house.
"Just walked through the door," he answered.
"But . . . " I started.
"I can do it too," he said, "What? You think some old vagrant couldn't do it?"
I was silent.
"And thanks for going to that beach! That was great!"
Chloe looked embarrassed.
"Okay," Ralph said, let's try something.
He had us move, and, like keys on a piano, he was playing a song with us. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Mary Had a Little Lamb, This Ol' Man, He Play One. Then he had us doing it in unison and we were chords. Then he had us move forward and back and we were sharps and flats. We could play a lot with that little octave.
Then he had us move and there it was! The notes played on Close Encounters of the First Kind. I was sort of freaked out -- maybe a mother ship would land, maybe Ralph would turn into an alien right before our eyes.
But nothing happened, except that Ralph was just about bowled over laughing.
I walked away from my door.
"Ralph,: I said, "you knew about this all the time?"
He looked up at me, and a horrified expression came over his face.
"You broke the continuum!" he shouted at me.
Then everyone else was milling around the two of us.
"Our doors are gone!" they said.
And sure, enough, all eight of those doors had disappeared.
"Now you did it!" Ralph shouted.
"Now you did it!" everybody else shouted.
"Did what?"
"Yeah, did what?" they asked Ralph.
And then we noticed in the distance vehicles coming toward us.