Thirty Degrees Cattywonkus

"Thirty Degrees Cattywonkus" by James Bell is a science fiction story from the 1960s that drops readers into the strange life of Ernie Lane and his new wife, Melinee, in their perplexing home. The story is about the concept of alternate dimensions and altered realities, using a mysterious, vanishing door as the portal to a series of extraordinary events with their identities, and even their sanity, at stake. When Ernie discovers a door where there shouldn’t be one, his grip on reality begins to slip, leading him down a path where his home becomes ground-zero for an interdimensional experiment. The story escalates into a fight for his own reality, with an explosive climax that seemingly puts everything back to normal, but leaves the reader, along with Ernie, questioning what is real and what is not, blurring the lines between worlds in a mind-bending twist.