Glitch

  The clock changed to 13:20. It was counting down.

  I exhaled weakly. Yes. It was moving. I’d survive this. The Stalker Men watched me, its pale, drawn face still like a wax mask. It would leave. I knew it would leave. This was just a nightmare.

  The clock was at 13:15.

  I strained to breath. I could take in just enough air to keep from panicking, but only if I gave it all my concentration. After a while, breathing became exhausting. A thin sheen of sweat appeared on my forehead, and when my scalp tightened I realized that it was freezing in my hair.

  13:10.

  I stopped breathing, just for a bit. My lungs felt full of coal, slowly lighting.

  13:09.

  Pain was too much. I pushed, pulled my lungs to breath again. They did. The fires dwindled. But my chest was so heavy now. I was so heavy and so cold beneath the Stalker Man’s eyes.

  13:08.

  It never stopped staring.

  13:07.

  A wave of nausea ripped through my chest and pooled behind my eyes. Stars burst inside my vision. The weight on my chest grew. I sucked in air but it was all so cold now.

  13:05.

  The coals in my gut crackled, hissed, popped. Tongues of heat licking up my throat, roaring against the cold.

  13:03.

  No more. I looked out to clock, straining my eyes.

  13:00.

  Just pain, just pain, but it was okay—it was just a dream. And it would end...

  Now.

  12:59.

  The Stalker Man didn’t move.

  I tried to get. I tried to scream. I couldn't, so I screamed inside my head. I stared at my lifeless body and willed it to get up and run.

  I didn’t move. Why didn’t I move?

  The Stalker Man stared, its face a perfect blank. Its blue eyes shone so bright they torched whorls of colour in my vision.

  “You.”

  The voice came from the bottom of the Stalker Man’s chest. It sounded like it was squeezing several organs to make that noise.

  My fingers twitched. My legs shuddered. I wasn’t moving them.

  My feet swept across the bed. My hands pushed me off my back and to a crouch. Light. Blue blinding light.

  This was a dream this was a dream dreamdreamdreamdream. I tried to get up. Why wasn't I getting up? I needed out. I needed to run.

  I fought. I strained. But then my lungs opened up, taking in a rich, cool breath of air; a realization like poison bloomed inside my head.

  I wasn’t in control. I never had been.

  The Stalker Man rumbled. “Rise.”

  CHAPTER TEN: NIGHTMARE

  The Stalker Man rumbled. “Rise.”

  The tiny muscles in my spine twitched, then pulled. My back stiffened. The still and silent room with its piles of books, tech, and clothes spun in my vision as my legs swept across the mattress and I lurched out of bed. My arms hung at my sides—dead weight.

  My lungs opened. Sweet, cold air rushed in, banking the fires in my gut. Sweet, yes, but also sour, tinged with the Stalker Man’s gross scent of chemical sweat.

  The Stalker Man hung above me, still straddling my bed. I turned to look at it, except I didn’t turn. I didn’t move at all. All I could see of the Stalker Man was a thin, milk arm cast in reflected blue light.

  I tried again to turn, to move on my own. I couldn’t.

  I took another breath and I realized I wasn’t controlling it. An instant revulsion walloped my gut, demanding I throw up. But the only reaction my body showed to this puppeteering was a tickling, gagging feeling in the back of my throat.

  I felt like the Stalker Man’s cold, long, baby-soft hands were reaching inside of me. I felt like they were snaking along my nerve centres, caressing them, smoothing them out, and twanging them like guitar strings, playing my body how it wanted.

  The Stalker Man’s head shifted—I could tell by the shuffling light. A patch of cold settled on the back of my neck and I knew it was staring at me.

  “Move.”

  My foot rose. It went down. I couldn’t stop its fall any more than stop a speeding truck. But still I tried. I pushed on my disgust like a lever, trying to break the thing’s hold. But all that did was worsen the gagging sensation at the back of my throat.

  I shouldered the door open and swung into the hallway. The light from my room blazed behind me. I couldn’t see anything but colour-burn. I moved blind, but I moved. I swerved around furniture I didn’t know was there. I stepped around floorboards I didn’t know squeaked as my track pants swished across the floor. I danced through the living room, across the kitchenette, and up to the front door. At the door, my elbow flew up in a crude, broad swing. The blow smarted. Impact rippled up my to my shoulder.

  The door creaked open. I’d somehow hit the lock.

  I stepped barefoot into the hallway. The carpet prickled my bare soles. I walked down the hall, into the darkness.

  Without the Stalker Man’s searchlight eyes, I couldn’t see where I was going. But I kept on walking. I passed dark windows, fractured with lines of traffic-light. I passed gently humming air vents and still, silent doors—each one staring at me with a tiny brass peephole.

  I came to the elevator. I twirled; my palm smacked the call button.

  The elevator arrived instantly. I stepped inside and the floor turned to cool granite tiles the colour of static.

  My elbow swung back. It jammed a button I didn’t see.

  The doors closed behind me. The elevator jerked down.

  I stayed facing the back of the elevator.

  The elevator halted. The doors opened. I walked backwards out of it, never stumbling.

  I crossed the lobby. The lights were on but the security desk was empty. Where was the guard?

  I came up to the heavy, plate glass front doors. My hands rose and I pushed them apart. Usually I needed both hands to inch them open, but now the doors swayed apart for me. I shuddered at my easy strength.

  Outside was colder, but my skin was still so numb that the air felt almost warm. It was a regular sort of night. Cool air brushed against my face. Crickets chirped far away. Streetlights shone for no one in the ring road around the apartment.

  I walked across the empty road, passing the light of a streetlamp and mounting the curb onto the circular lawn around the apartment. Damp grass pricked my bare feet.

  I moved ahead, finding even ground like magic. When I sat in the middle of the lawn, away from the streetlight’s reach, I stopped. Turned around.

  My lungs lifted by themselves again. The breath felt perfectly measured: just enough to keep me from death.

  I waited, staring. The apartment shot up in front of me, a column of black studded with gold light, piercing an inky blue sky.

  It is a strange thing, to see a building that you know at nighttime. To me, the apartment looked like something wild. The concrete, rutted and stained, the windows, smudged and distant, the balconies, filled with junk, old beach chairs, piles of faded toys, seem less man-made and more like some desolate cliff where humanity was upended, and left to unravel.

  In this darkened land, on a window fourteen stories up, blue search-lights lit up—columns of blue erupting from a dark room, reflecting in the walls and raising shadows where they passed.

  The Stalker Man.

  The lights bobbed. A gigantic, white hand slunk out the window, trailing stark shadows beneath it. Long, thin fingers spread out on the concrete walls.

  The fingers tightened across the stone. The Stalker Man’s pale, thin head emerged and then its body, extruding snakelike from the window.

  It crawled out.

  The Stalker Man scurried like a spider—fingers and toes gripping the walls impossibly tight. Sometimes, the thing’s arms turned at unnatural angles, full hundred-and-eighty turns that would snap a normal person. And its movement looked off to me: either too fast or too still, like a jerky claymation puppet.

  The Stalker Man’s glowing eyes scanned back and forth as it walked dow
n the sheer wall. Except it didn’t move its head like it was trying to look for something; it moved like it was smelling. It moved like a wolf moves.

  The nightmare crawled, bound for me. And I couldn’t turn away. My breath still came and went, calm and measured. Even the gagging at the back of my throat was fading, and I realized I probably didn’t control my heartbeat. The Stalker Man owned it. It held my own heart in its grip.

  The Stalker Man’s skeletal hand touched the ground. The other came down as well and it righted itself back to regular gravity.

  The Stalker Man rose. Its limbs stretched out, its double-joints unfolding. It was tall: twelve feet at least—taller than the trees. How could something like that fit in Level Zero’s tiny rooms?

  The Stalker Man strode towards me, eyes blazing blue, arms sweeping across the lawn, legs snapping, twitching, stopping in their horrible, shuddering way.

  Scream, I thought. You have to scream.

  The Stalker Man’s feet pattered across the grass like rain. Its legs advancing like a thresher rolling closer and closer. The Stalker Man’s headlight eyes fixed on me.

  The light grew brighter. It washed out the Stalker Man—turning it into a stick-man as it came closer. Before my vision vanished completely,  I realized that the stars ran in neat grid-lines.

  The Stalker Man shook in front of me. Its head, blazing blue came down right in front of me. The light burned inside my eyes. It felt like the light was burning away my body like a fire burns the rock away from metal. It felt like deletion. It felt like metamorphosis.

  “Open.” The Stalker Man said.

  My hands reached into my pocket. I felt something. The handle of a knife.

  It was burning my palm.

  #

  Yellow lights.

  Yellow lights, floating like dandelion fluff.

  “What the hell?” I whispered.

  The lights didn’t answer me. They just floated in the intangible breeze.

  I was reclining against a wall, breathing stuffy air. The wall felt warm on the back of my neck—body temperature, like a toilet seat someone just sat on.

  A shivering fit shot through me, then passed. I curled my hands into fists.

  I could move again.

  And for a while, that was enough. The simple joy of control gave me hope in the sudden darkness. I squeezed my hands. I relished the pain of my fingernails digging into my palm.

  I pushed myself up. My bare feet felt perfectly comfortable on the floor of Level Zero’s womblike warmth. Of course this was Level Zero.

  Now, how did I get here?

  The lights swayed in random motions. They reminded me of the violets I’d seen before—only these were smaller, and unmoored.

  One of them drifted past my eyes. I held out my hand to catch it and—

  “Ow!” I pulled my hand back. The light flew up and away from me—faster than before. It bounced off the ceiling and glided towards the other end of the room.

  I inspected my hand in the mottled light. No marks. But there’d been pain. Heat. Like touching a bare light bulb.

  I stuck my palm inside my mouth and looked around.

  This room was like all the Level Zero rooms. Same four corridors. Same endless darkness. The only difference was the lights—and Lena said a long time ago that they became more common depending on the time of month.

  There was no gate in this room.

  So how’d I come here?

  The Stalker Man.

  I’d blocked out the events just a few minutes before. The memory returned now. My mouth turned sour thinking about the details, about the puppet I’d become.

  But the Stalker Man wasn’t here now. It was just me.

  I noticed a digging sensation in my pocket. I still had the knife. I pulled it out.

  I didn’t get what had just happened, but I had the knife. That meant I could create a gate and go back home.

  I unfolded the blade. The Konami Code caught in the faint dandelion-light. I grinned.

  It didn’t make sense to lock me in when I had a key out.

  You’re right, a voice inside my gut said. That wouldn’t make any sense at all.

  One of the dandelion-lights bounced off the back of my head. It burned. I swatted it away with my free hand. The light zoomed away. It collided with another. Then both the dandelions went off in a whole new pattern.

  But the dandelions didn’t matter; I was getting out.

  I turned around. I propped one hand on the wall and pressed the knife against the wall. The metal shuddered in my hand. I scraped the blade across the warm, black material.

  No blue light. The wall remained black, blank, warm.

  I stabbed it again.

  No light.

  Again.

  The blade folded. The metal bit the flesh of my fingers. I grunted and sucked the cut. Tasted like rank copper.

  Shit shit shit shit. I breathed deep. Had to stay calm.

  I inspected the blade. A thin skein of blood marked the top end of the edge. As I watched, the blood slowly changed colour—neon purple, then green, then yellow.

  I’d used this knife to open a gate in Level Zero just three days ago. It had done it then, it could do it now.

  I got on my knees. Another dandelion bounced off my cheek. I yelped. I tried to punch the thing but it got away from me.

  Okay.

  I knelt over the floor with the knife in front of my chest, held out like I was going to fence with the floor.

  Keep calm keep calm keep calm.

  I scraped the blade across the floor.

  No light, just a miserable little shck sound as the blade went across the warm, plasticy material.

  “Huh.” I said.

  Don’t panic.

  Shck.I tried again.

  No light.

  Don’t panic don’t panic.

  Shck. I tried again.

  No light.

  Don’tpanicdon’tpanicdon’t—

  “FUCK!” I roared. I threw the knife away. It vanished through the doorway opposite me, and I heard it clatter.

  “FUCK NO!” I screamed. I beat the ground like a toddler. I punched the floor and the pain just made me madder.

  There were rules. And they told me if I followed the rules I could get back to my normal life.

  I screamed. Tears mingled with the sweat on my cheeks. I tasted salt and blood. I spat and it dribbled down my lips.

  So much for rules.

  My breath shook. My chest rattled. My nose ran. I wiped it against my shirt. I pushed down my fear and my anger into a ball, deep in the pit of my stomach where it could be focused like a laser beam.

  This room, like all of Level Zero’s rooms, had four doors carved into the sides. I chose one at random and took it out of the room.

  Whatever the Stalker Man wanted, I wasn’t going to do it. I wouldn’t disappear in Level Zero.

  There had to be a gate somewhere here.

  #

  The dandelion-lights were in every room now. Sometimes a room had only three lonely lights, sometimes they held flurries of them. I walked through them all. They burned, but not for long before they bounced off of me.

  After about half an hour of random walking, I heard a sound.

  Zzzzzzzz.

  It came from the room to my left—a room filled with dandelion-lights. Going in would burn like a bitch.

  I tucked my arms inside my shirt and rode up the neck to cover the bottom of my face. It looked retarded but the fabric would protect me from the burning lights. Thus equipped, I walked in.

  Zzzzzzz.

  The light-balls parted as I walked through them. My exposed ears stung.

  I saw the light that didn’t move.

  A square of yellow light, hanging in the air. It buzzed like bad lighting.

  When I approached, it flashed off, and reappeared three feet away. The dandelion lights bounced off of it.

  I took a step towards the square. It shuddered. It flashed away another foot, near the wall
. It turned blue.

  Cool.

  I headed back through the other door.

  As I continued into Level Zero I saw other squares running around. They all backed away from me as I came near, but never left their rooms.

  The squares didn’t behave like the flower-lights. They seemed to move how they wanted to, rather than to some sort of pattern. They didn’t seem to like me.

  I walked. My mind grew hazy.

  What did the Stalker Man want?

  In the crazy lights and the growing heat, my mind did funny things.

  The lights grew larger. They made music, good music. Like an improv jazz band or a really nice day at the park. The dandelion-lights chimed and the light-squares croaked like exotic birds.

  The tap-tap of my feet fell into step with the music, or maybe the music changed to suit my walking. It didn’t matter. The music helped me move. After so long inside the dark with no goal and no direction, it buoyed my legs to keep walking.

  In fact, after a while I felt stronger. The rhythm and the clanging melodies of the sparkling darkness enervated me. They stretched out my muscles, they filled my lungs and pumped into my blood.

  If every room looked the same, I started to think, then every room really was the same. Same dimensions, same ecosystem, same absence of gates. So I’d spent an hour or more inside the same room.

  My stomach panged. When had I last eaten?

  What was Level Zero? Junk data—that’s what Lena said. But what junk data looked like this?

  No—the world wasn’t a computer program, at least not in the way the Level Zero crowd and their hobo leader thought.

  Come to think of it, I’d never heard Haze’s thoughts on Level Zero, just Josh’s.

  I didn’t think junk data looked like this. The endless stretch of rooms more resembled some extraterrestrial prison, or maybe purgatory, or cells in an organism.

  So what did that make me?

  Prisoner.

  Sinner.

  Sickness.

  Then what were the Stalker Men?

  I kept on walking. I felt even more disconnected from my body now. Maybe I wasn't even walking anymore.

  I took a deep breath. I'd forgotten I had lungs for a second. And where were my feet? I couldn't see them in the dark, and the glowing lights shone just enough to make themselves known.

  I felt like a presence within Level Zero—not a human one, just an entity of thought. Almost as if the borders of my self were dissolving.

  Maybe it wasn't my body walking. Maybe the world just had a bunch of states—movement, force and thought. Maybe they were all just variables controlled by physical objects. But maybe if you could just manipulated the variable, you didn't need to actually move.