Glitch by Amir Ahmed
About five minutes from the construction pit, the sky flashed white in my camera. The false night vanished and the clouds returned.
I returned to the pit again. Nothing had changed there, but I had a hunch.
Once more, I walked in a different direction. After six minutes, the sky flashed white, and turned normal.
My camera only showed a night sky about five minutes away from the construction pit. The pit lay at the centre of the anomaly.
Very interesting.
The ticker at the bottom of my camera screen said I had twenty-three minutes of battery life remaining. I turned off the camera and headed back to the pit. I popped out my SD card and pushed in a second one. I wanted to upload the footage as fast as possible.
I returned again to the construction pit. The clouds had deepened and the shadows inside the pit had sprawled even farther, swallowing the bottom. I could barely see anything down there—just the tops of pipes and rocks jutting out like trees emerging from a dark fog.
I pulled out my camera and laptop. I set the camera carefully against the railing so that it faced the pit. I sat cross-legged next to the camera with my back to the railing where I’d nearly died yesterday.
I set my laptop down and booted it up. My WIND Internet stick flashed red in the USB port.
I started typing notes into my computer.
Note 1: The anomaly affects digital cameras and camcorders. Should test with chemically developed film.
Note 2: The anomaly only affects digital equipment within a certain range of Bloor and Ossington. Leaving the area negates the anomaly.
Note 3: The “stars” that appear in tapes do not appear to be normal stars. They look like grid lines, squares.
As I hit the enter key to write out Note 4, my camera beeped. At the same time, my computer made a grinding, stuttering sound. My laptop has a row of LEDs at the top of the keyboard. As I watched, they winked off one by one. The screen flashed, and went dark.
I played with the keys. It didn’t come back on.
Cold air pricked the back of my neck. The wind became a whisper.
I realized I was alone on the street.
Knowing I shouldn’t, I checked my watch.
Blank screen.
What the hell was this?
I stowed away my stuff and zipped up my bag. I started to hear a sound—a quiet, high whine, like a dog whistle. The sound was so high I could hardly hear it. It struck a frequency that made my head feel full and dizzy.
I held my hands to my head. The sound faded and my vision blurred.
I leaned against the railing and shut my eyes. My gut turned. I was going to vomit. I was going to vomit.
I didn’t, but God it hurt.
After a few deep breaths, the sensation passed. I felt my fingers shake without telling them to. My knees trembled against the railing.
The queasiness came back, but I didn’t pay attention to it. Slowly, I withdrew another pen from my pocket. I grabbed the railing, leaned against it, and threw the pen inside the pit.
The pen dropped.
And stopped.
It sat floating on the air.
Yes.
My stomach twisted, but whatever warning it had for me came too late. I grabbed the railing with my good hand and hoisted myself up.
Overhead, the sky darkened.
CHAPTER THREE: LEVEL ZERO
The railing felt cold and dusty on my palm. I tightened my grip, and pulled myself up.
I didn’t stop to look for witnesses. I didn’t wonder what the drivers on the street would think of me. I didn’t even worry the police would come and arrest me for general strangeness. I just climbed.
I hugged my injured hand under my armpit and let my legs do the bulk of the climb. I hooked my feet one at a time into the steel diamonds, pushed myself up, and slotted my free foot into the next diamond. My good hand kept me stable. I moved it up one diamond at a time—quickly so I didn’t lose balance.
The climb felt easy. I’m not an exercise junkie but Stranger Danger lent me some cursory athletics. I also knew the proper technique. I climbed fences in elementary school, and there were tricks: how to swing up and ease the impact on your feet, how to tense your legs at the right angle to propel you upward.
My pen still hung in the air where I’d thrown it. It lay horizontal, just a few feet out from the edge of the pit. The drop loomed beneath it, but the pen didn’t give in to gravity. I watched it, willing it to stay.
If the strangeness vanished, if the pen disappeared like those two men, that was fine. Just take me with you first. Just please let me come along.
I still couldn’t believe it was real.
My camera and laptop lay bundled and tucked into the railing below me. The equipment was useless without batteries, and if they got stolen I didn’t care. All that mattered now was the pen, floating in the air.
I reached the top of the railing. I gripped the top rung and looked below me. The street was suddenly empty. A fat man in a suit was talking on a cell on the other side of the street. The distance and elevation made him look small, like a windup toy. Funny how a little perspective changed things.
I brought my foot up and the railing rubbed dust against my jeans. Down the street, I heard the pock-pock-pock of a crosswalk, the murmur and babble of footsteps, the quiet sounds of quiet lives.
I reached the top of the railing and balanced both feet on the edge. I pulled myself to the railing hard to keep from slipping. My armpit squashed my injured hand. My hand was frigid on my chest.
Below, my pen floated in darkness. Flecks of dust sketched out the invisible barrier like dirt on glass.
I breathed. My heart beat a drumroll in my throat. Goosebumps scrunched my skin.
I swallowed.
And jumped.
Only as I pushed off, only as I felt my stomach lurch and the wind roar in my ears, only as I felt my momentum turn irreversibly away from the railing and from safety, did I wonder if I’d done something stupid.
Time slowed down. I felt the fall in slow detail. The feeling of the railing vanishing from my feet as I jumped above it, the feeling of gravity wrapping around my navel, the feeling of wind, building building building.
I didn’t know anything about how the floor worked.
My velocity could cancel out whatever sci-fi mechanism held up my pen. I could fall right through the barrier, smashing my knees to pulp, twisting my pelvis and snapping my rips like twigs. Death would occur.
And if the barrier held, I just jumped from four metres. If the barrier held, I’d still break everything below my waist.
The pit hung like a dream below me, a dream becoming real.
The pen didn’t move below me. I was hurtling to it. The darkness of the pit expanded. It bubbled up like dark water on cracked ice. And just like cracking ice, the darkness gave a brief but true glance of an unknowable, unforgiving depth.
I was probably going to die.
Fucking finally.
Faster now. I abandoned myself to the momentum. Faster to the dark. Wind streamed past my face. The world blurred. I closed my tearing eyes.
I stopped.
I didn’t feel impact. I didn’t feel anything. Speed cancelled out. Force cancelled out. Physics turned my brain accepted it. I didn’t even feel dizzy.
I expected a crack, s crunch of splintering bones, or of rupturing blood vessels. Instead there was silence, and it was total.
I opened my eyes.
A pen floated in the air, right next to my feet.
Darkness, forgotten PVC pipe, and a long way down lay below me. Proving that I have no survival instincts, I pushed my weight down hard onto the suddenly solid air.
My feet didn’t budge.
I kneeled and pressed my hand down.
My hand didn’t budge. I didn’t feel resistance. I just didn’t feel anything. Physics just didn’t extend below my feet.
“Oh my God.” I said.
This was like the glass floor at the
Amazing.
I looked up.
The sky was full of stars.
#
“Oh my goodness.” My breath billowed in white clouds, and I noticed it was cold—like a winter night.
The old sky was gone. Instead of clouds I saw an inky void, chequered with small, blinking stars. The stars shone in neat lines, like God strung them there.
“Oh my God.” I said again. I was laughing.
I whooped. My voice echoed in the pit.
I had to call Greg.
The sidewalk rose to the height of my shoulder; the fence rose a million miles above it. I ran over to it. The streets had turned dark, and empty.
My stuff was gone.
I looked down. It had gotten dark; I couldn’t see anything below me. I stood above a black hole.
It had gotten very quiet.
Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.
I took a long look at the fence. I gingerly reached up—
—and whipped my hand back.
It was cold, like ice.
I took a long look up the railing—black diamonds drawn on a dark sky. Impossibly high and impossibly cold.
I wouldn’t be able to climb back up.
I looked around. Sheer clay walls rose around me. Opposite the railing rose a brick wall. No way could I climb it with my hand.
I had a bad feeling about this.
“You don’t have to be afraid.”
The low, calm voice came from all around me. It resonated from the brushed steel railings, the popcorn-textured clay, the empty sky.
I breathed in sharply. The cold air felt thick in my lungs. I coughed it out and thick, noxious clouds drifted around my head like cigarette smoke.
That was Jonathan’s voice.
It was colder now.
Kkkkch.
A sound like breaking rocks rumbled in the darkness beneath me. I had a sudden, crazy memory of the garbage masher scene from Star Wars. I instinctively checked the walls. They weren’t moving.
Kkkkch.
My feet tensed, ready to run, but nothing happened. I smeared my palms on my pants and they still came up clammy. Pins and needles prickled the back of my throat. The sound of breaking rocks continued.
Kkkkch.
Maybe not rocks breaking, maybe bones crunching. Maybe a giant grinding his teeth.
“It’ll be okay.”
Jonathan’s voice again.
Jonathan died seven years ago.
I breathed out. Fuck. Fuck.
I waited in the darkness. The sound kept coming up from the depths below. My breath billowed around me in a smoky halo.
Sweat cooled off my neck and back. The cold had hardened. It bit my fingers and drew them into fists. My cheeks stung. I blinked. The fabric of my jeans stiffened in the cold.
“It’ll be okay.” Jon’s voice said again. Except the voice came from beneath me. It sounded deeper than before, with reverb like a twanging string. Except that wasn’t Jon’s voice. Human voices didn’t echo have that harsh, static buzz.
There was a blue line on the wall.
I didn’t notice it before. But it looked as if it had always been there. It hung on the clay wall, a neon blue strip running from where the barrier began, up to about my height. It made no sound, it made no change. It had just appeared.
The crunching noise crackled below. It sounded louder. Closer. My legs shook. I breathed in cold air and shivered.
The line glowed bright. So bright I wondered if one of those strange, geometrically-arranged stars had fallen into this pit. The light blazed through me, eclipsing the stars. It cast the world in an electric, alien blue.
“It’ll be okay.” Jon’s voice said, just like he said before everything went wrong.
The temperature dropped. I felt the cold curl around my body and squeeze inward, driving the heat from me.
I couldn’t see anymore. And the blue line glowed brighter.
Brighter...
#
It was dark.
And quiet.
This was not the pit at Ossington. This was someplace new.
I couldn’t hear my breathing, just ringing in my ears. I couldn’t see anything but a rioting afterimage of the light—crazy colours looping across my eyes, morphing into half-shapes, sizzling and panning out in a wonky kaleidoscope.
The air tasted warm and fried, like it came from a radiator. My muscles twitched and I realized I was cold. I breathed and the heat filled me. Delicious heat. I’d never leave you again.
I didn’t know where I was, but I felt safer here. Silence was better than noise. And warmth was better than cold.
I refused to think about Jonathan.
I stood for a long time waiting for the afterimages to clear. After a while, I could see a shining blue line.
I’d begun to secretly hope this would all turn out to be a dream sequence. No such luck. I bent down to feel the floor. It felt like plastic. It felt warm. Behind me the line of blue light glowed just enough for me to see it.
On my hands and knees, I crawled towards the line. I reached out and felt a wall.
The wall felt the same as the floor. Same material, same temperature.
I crawled along the wall, trailing my hands on the floor. At a few metres, I felt a corner. I crawled around some more, and felt an opening into somewhere else.
I circled the room for another minute. I scanned as much as the meagre light allowed, and passed my hands everywhere for any sign of where I was.
The room was about ten metres across—the size of my kitchen, and enough to do a cartwheel in.
The afterimage cleared from my eyes. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I could see the outlines of the room sketched by the blue light.
The room had four walls. One of the walls—the one behind me—housed the blue line. The other three had doorways out.
I felt around the doorways. They were made of the same smooth, warm material as everything else, and they fused perfectly with the floor.
Starting on the wall with the blue line, I hugged the wall, afraid of everything, and gently entered the doorway on the right. The light from the first room filtered in, but only barely. The rest was darkness.
This room was made of the same material and same dimensions as the first one. It had an exit on every wall, leading into pitch blackness.
I edged ahead. The dark fell around me. I held out my hands and felt myself pass across another doorway.
For a long time, I clutched the doorway’s arch. My knees shook. My breath came quick and shallow. I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to go forward. I wanted someone to lift me by helicopter and take me home.
I loosed my grip, and ventured into the new, dark room.
I felt around tentatively. This room was the same dimensions as the others. It also had four doorways in each of its walls. How many identical rooms were down here?
I backtracked to the blue line, stumbling in the dark. When I found the original room, I bent down, and sat cross-legged on the ground for a bit. I calmed my breathing, and wondered what to do.
I wanted to believe this was a nightmare, but with my luck it probably wasn’t.
“Stupid.” I put my face in my hands. “Stupid stupid.”
I’d jumped into an open pit. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. And now I sat trapped in some sort of weird dungeon thing.
Except this dungeon-thing didn’t feel dangerous. It felt more like a supply cabinet, or maybe a furnace room. It felt somehow useful. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t understand furnace rooms either.
The pit hadn’t felt useful. The pit just felt scary.
I shivered as I breathed out the last scraps of cold, absorbing the warm, toasted air.
I got up. My shoes squeaked on the strange, alien floor.
The blue line behind me didn’t react to my rising. I leaned towards it, and i
Panic had rattled my reasoning skills, but I reached a conclusion about the line, and this dungeon.
The blue line had appeared in the pit, then I appeared here.
Yesterday the line had also appeared, when those two guys vanished.
Presumably, the two guys had wound up here. They didn’t seem afraid at the time, so this place was probably harmless.
If I wandered around enough, I might find those guys. I might find another blue line. Maybe blue lines marked the entrances and exits to this place. If I wandered around enough, I might find a way out. Then I could go to my bed and freak out.
Yes, freaking out sounded like a very good idea.
I swallowed. I really didn’t want to return to the pit, where Jon’s voice spoke with dark, static edges. So I turned away from the light of the blue line and rested my head against the smooth, warm wall.
I closed my eyes and started really thinking.
Each room seemed to lead into another, identical room. If that was true, they’d look like a grid. I pressed the image of a grid into my head.
If I wanted to find an exit, I’d have to explore as much as possible. To explore as much as possible, I’d make rings around this room—the one with the line—as a starting point, and as the central axis of the rings I made. I’d complete larger and larger concentric rings around the blue-line until I found something. The blue line would keep me anchored, and if I got confused I’d just have to find it again by counting the number of rings I’d made.
To my rattled logic, this idea beat Einstein.
I started from the room to the right of the blue line. Inside that room, I used the dimmed light to find the left doorway. I entered that new room, felt around again, and once again found a doorway on the left. I went through it. I moved slowly. I didn’t know if anything lived here. If something did, I didn’t want to meet it.
I made careful steps through the dark. I counted every doorway knowing that if I lost my bearings I’d drown in a sea of identical rooms.
Sometimes, I stopped to pass my hands over the walls. I tried to feel for any changes in the rooms. They never grew larger, and they always housed four doorways cut in the exact middle of the wall.
I kept on counting, and I kept on moving. I didn’t move blind: the blue line glowed bright when the only alternative was darkness. If I was in a room with doorways that aligned with the blue line’s light, I could see it, even thirty rooms down.