A married couple, Chris and Ruth Miller, are awakened by the whimpering of their little daughter, Tina. Chris goes to see what the trouble is. Their dog, Mack, begins to bark from the backyard. Chris cannot find Tina either in or under the bed, even though her pleas for help seem to be coming from nearby, yet far away. He calls Ruth into the room, and she is similarly mystified. Chris phones his physicist friend, Bill, for help, and opens the door to let the incessantly barking Mack into the house. The dog runs under the bed and disappears, but can still be heard barking, again close, but far away. Bill arrives and helps Chris move the bed so that he can physically scan the area where it was, marking the legs with books. When this proves fruitless, Bill examines the wall behind the bed. His hand passes easily through the wall and to another dimension, and draws marks on the wall outlining the apparent boundary. He explains to Chris and Ruth that sometimes lines in our three dimensions end parallel with, rather than perpendicular to, the fourth dimension. He warns them that they know nothing of what's beyond this portal, and should they follow Tina into the fourth dimension, they would only become hopelessly lost as well, since it is not manifested like the third dimension. Chris calls to Mack to guide Tina back. Mack leads Tina to the source of Chris's voice, but they still cannot find the entrance. Despite Bill's warnings, Chris reaches into the portal and falls into the fourth dimension, an abstract, crystalline landscape which seems distorted, and constantly turning upside down and sideways. Bill advises him not to move. Chris sees Tina and Mack and calls them towards him. Bill calls for him to hurry. When Tina and Mack close in on Chris, Bill grabs them and pulls them back into the bedroom. Ruth rushes Tina to another room. Bill explains that Chris was only halfway through the portal, despite Chris' perception that he was standing up in the new dimension. Bill was in fact holding onto Chris the entire time. He was telling Chris to hurry because the portal was closing. Bill knocks on the wall, and it is solid. The portal has closed. Bill tells Chris, "Another few seconds, and half of you would have been here, and the other half..."
Closing narration
Production notes
The opening is slightly altered beginning with this episode. The graphics and words are the same, but there are subtle differences in the acoustics for the theme music. Matheson wrote the short story based on a real-life incident involving his young daughter, who fell off her bed while asleep and rolled against a wall. Despite hearing her daughter's cries for help, Matheson's wife was initially unable to locate her daughter. The voice of Tina in the alternate dimension was played by voice actorRhoda Williams, who was then 32 years old. During the opening narration the outline to the fourth dimension is behind Rod Serling, indicating that the opening narration was filmed last.
Critical reception
The critic Camille Paglia calls "Little Girl Lost" the "first great script" of The Twilight Zone in Sexual Personae.
Theoretical basis
Although not intended by the writers, the hole into the other dimension was later given as an example of a "Riemannian cut", which is a type of wormhole formed when two spaces join at the same set of points.
