This was from two days ago.
I bounced my foot on the floor. I went back to Josh’s profile—not thinking of Josh in the dreams I didn’t forget. Josh with his stomach full of fire, spreading like a cancer, blackening skin.
Fuck. I bounced my leg harder.
Josh, in my dreams, burning. Dying.
But dying was what people did. They lived, they died. They were more like machines than anything else. People were, and then they weren't. They came, and then they went away. All the time.
People like Jonathan.
If I could make it right...
But I couldn't make it right.
The Stalker Man knew that much, I felt. The Stalker Man had seen that. Dust. He'd called me dust. I was dust. We were all dust that scattered in the wake of its red, red eyes.
Red eyes staring at me.
WHY HAD IT'S EYES CHANGED COLOUR?
I stepped outside the HR office. The TEB hallways with their flourescent lights and beige paint-job suddenly looked too much like a corporate Level Zero: the same room and same people repeated again and again in every direction. I had to get out.
I took the narrow, empty hallways by the interview rooms, and skirted over to the elevators. A group of three interns—two girls and a guy—were chatting next to the elevators, each holding folders, papers and official-looking crap. One of them was Gary Geare. He raised his hand to me as I walked past.
The elevator lobby was empty, but it was close enough to lunch that I could fake a trip down to the Mr. Greek at the bottom of the building. I just needed to get some fresh air.
I took the elevator down. No one joined me, and when the doors parted on the bottom floor I jammed my pass-card onto the turnstile and pounded for the closest exit.
It was hot outside; the sun was out and basted my forehead. I started sweating right away. I unbuttoned my shirt and threw it down.
Just needed fresh air, right?
I unhooked my belt and slipped it out of its links. I fed it into a trash can.
I'd paid seventy dollars for that belt, what the hell?
The TEB building exits into a little brick plaza that looks out onto Square One. A Wal-Mart greeted me as I walked further and further from the building. Traffic was steady on the street in front of me.
I flipped out my keys and looked around for the underground parking entrance.
Couldn't find it. Thinking some more, I realized it was probably only accessible from the elevators inside.
I wasn't going back inside.
I headed out in no direction at all. I just wanted to get out.
#
I'd chosen to perform some hyperventilation in a brick plaza near some restaurants.
There was a fountain in the middle of the plaza. Its bottom shone with rusted pennies.
I didn't want to return to work. Something told me that I'd passed the limit of strange shit there forever anyway. I'd ignored the three calls from my supervisor, and answering a fourth one would probably only get me chewed out. And even if I deserved some discipline for freaking out on company time, that didn't mean I'd walk into it.
The restaurants in the plaza were dead—two weren't even open, and the others had about two people in each.
The only store doing well in this little plaza was an Arab grocery store called Botros Mart. I'd tried calming down by going inside there to buy a snack; the store smelled of pot-pourri and flour. Everything seemed to be either made of dried fruit or dried fruit stuck inside fist-sized blocks of nougat.
So I sat on the edge of the fountain, smelling the chlorinated water and trying not to flinch from the drops of cold water pattering on my back. I held my head in my hands. I felt hot. It was too bright out.
And life sucked so much.
I had bad dreams that night
Not dreams where a Stalker Man hovered above me, but a bad
dream.
I dreamt of Josh
And how I killed him.
#
“What are you doing with that Josh?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” He asked.
My eyes saw in black and white and grey. They saw squares of white dots, chequered out on a black sky. My ears heard static. Every sound came in distorted like someone had hit the world’s whammy bar.
Except it was all so clear.
“The knife behind your back.” I said. My voice echoed in the altered soundscape, and stretched like pulled harpstrings.
“What knife?” Josh asked. His voice was close. Right behind me.
“The knife you’re holding out.” I said. “The knife you’re ready to—”
I leaped ahead. The edge of a knife prodded my back but didn’t even break my clothes. I spun.
Josh, etched in black and grey, stood with the white, white knife out in something like a fighting stance.
“It got you,” Josh said.
I flipped out my own knife. I don't know how I moved so fast.
Josh jumped forward. He swung the knife level with my throat. I jumped back. I turned and ran with the open blade against the pavement. The scriiiitch of metal on asphalt rang out in the
silence. The light of a gate opened on the ground.
Except it was red.
“Fuck,” Josh said at the gate.
A sound like falling rocks echoed from all around us.
“Sam stop,” Josh said.
I felt hunger. But I felt strong. There was thunder in my chest. The emptiness. It felt good.
I ran at Josh.
“It's here!” Josh screamed.
My head was blank. There was just purpose and intent. I was movement abstracted from reason, like an equation relating the movement of a bullet. Didn't matter what I was doing, just mattered that I did.
I put out my foot. It hit Josh's side. The blow threw him to the side.
Josh was on his back, but he got up right away. I kicked him in the teeth.
“Oofh!” Josh recoiled. He cupped his mouth and blood seeped out. “Shhhchit.” His voice was slurred.
I sat on his chest, and grabbed his collar.
“Oh crap.” Josh moaned. “Oh crap.”
Red light everywhere.
I didn't remember this dream when I woke up.
CHAPTER TWELVE: DISAPPEARANCE
I rang the doorbell, and heard a three-tone ding-ding-dong on the other side of the door.
The sun baked the back of my neck. For the past two days the hot weather had continued. It was making my rounds around the city difficult. I'd cranked up the AC in my car, but it didn't help.
I hadn't been to work in two days. I hadn't called them in two days. Whatever, I could look for better work later. Just now I had work to do.
I didn't know much about the Level Zero crowd; I didn't know where they lived, where they went, or even what they'd eat at McDonald's. This made it difficult to find out what had happened to them.
But I had one memory: Lena Arshun's house. I remembered what it looked like as they'd led me, handcuffed, out of it on that first rainy night when things went fucked up.
After scouring my apartment's floor yesterday I'd located an old couple who still owned a phonebook. I'd wrote down all twenty-five addresses for Arshun in the Toronto area. This address was number twenty-three.
No one answered the door. I looked around.
The house was normal-looking for the neighborhood, a bunch of small, semi-detached, red-brick tenements. It had a balcony, a narrow driveway, and roses blooming along the lawn. It looked like it belonged to someone's grandmother.
The lawn of this house was browning. I saw an old sprinkler disconnected from a nearby green garden hose running through the brittle grass. The roses' petals were limp and brown.
Aside from the sunburn, this house was exactly as I remembered it from my first night in Level Zero.
This was the house I'd arrived at when I first met Josh and Laurent down there.
The door still didn't open. I resisted the urge to scratch away
the flaking white paint.
I rang the doorbell again. Lena's parents, if they lived here, were probably at work.
I heard footsteps.
A click in the lock.
“Hello?” A woman's voice asked.
At the door stood an old woman. She had graying hair cut short like Justin Beiber and wore a huge white tank-top and men's cargo shorts. She didn't look like she'd throw me out.
“Hi,” I said. “I'm a friend of Lena's.”
The woman's face sagged. She looked old now: the lines of her mouth deepened, and drew dark patterns around her eyes. She placed her hand on the doorframe and her posture subtly shifted so that she relied on it for weight. Her body language was clear; I'd obviously upset her.
Awesome.
“This is her home?” I asked.
“Yes.” The woman said. “Yes, I'm Debbie. I'm Lena's Grandmother.”
I couldn't grin, not with this person in front of me looking at me for all the world like I was going to tell her something terrible.
But she remembered Lena. She hadn't just vanished.
“Are you from the police?” She asked. She pointed at my clothes—business casual for good first impressions. “They said they'd send someone.”
“No Debbie,” I said. Had to say her name, had to look in her eyes, had to look trustworthy so she'd tell me everything.
“I'm a friend.” I repeated. “I've been trying touch with her, but I can't find her, or any of her other friends. I finally figured...”
Sound natural, sound like a good guy. “... Well, that I'd just come down and check out what was going on.”
“Lena's been missing.” Debbie sighed. Her voice wheezed like a squeezing sponge. “So's her boyfriend. We're worried something happened to both of them.”
Debbie's shoulder's shook. She wrapped her hands around her sides.
“Uh, uh, can I come in?” I asked.
Debbie made a small noise at the back of her throat. She nodded, and held the door open for me.
The house was exactly as I remembered: it even smelled of the same pot-pourri. Same blue carpets, pictures of boats, family, china figures and doilies.
“Rachel and Arman are both at work,” Debbie said as I entered. “I'm at home all day so I've been waiting for news from the police.”
She closed the door behind me. “And there've been other people coming to look for Lena.”
“What happened?” I asked her.
Debbie wandered past me and into another room. She didn't look at me.
I went to follow her and bumped into a side table.
There was a card on top of the table. The card was emblazoned with the crest for... was that Ryerson?
I picked up the card. It was the Ryerson crest. The name on the card read: Daniel Thornton, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University.
I slipped the card into my pocket.
I joined Debbie in the other room. The lights were off and the light from outside was just enough to keep me from tripping over something. Debbie sat on a floral-patterned sofa like the one I remembered from the basement. I sat on the one facing it. It gushed vanilla scent.
“Lena wasn't here one morning,” Debbie said. “We think she went out to see Amrith, but when she didn't come back...”
She shuddered. I tapped my foot. Come on old woman, I didn't have all day.
“Amrith wasn't there,” She said, her voice high and scratchy. “She wasn't there. We don't know what happened to them. And we called the police and—”
Debbie cut off. She was breathing heavily like she was about to go into a fit.
“Has anyone else come looking for her?” I asked, thinking for some reason about the card.
“And of her other friends?” I continued. “Any... men?”
Long hair, poor diet, no fashion sense. If I was right...
“No friends. Just you and—there was a man,” Debbie choked out. “He was so strange. Fat, with a big beard and dressed all in tweed and—”
Bingo.
“Hairy knuckles?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Debbie sniffed. She reached beside her for a box of Puffs tissue with a picture of kittens on it.
“Spotty hands? Sort of a—a loudmouth?” I asked.
“He was very forward.” Debbie said to the tissue. She dabbed her eyes and nose with it.
“And what was this man's name?”
“I don't remember. He left his card.” Debbie tucked the tissue into her sleeve and wiped a drop from her nose. Thank goodness she was too grief-stricken to care about my questions. “I don't know.”
I got out of there as fast as I could, but politely in case I needed something from Debbie later. I made up some story about knowing Lena from school and just being concerned on behalf of the Prime Minister or some bullshit I forgot as soon as I headed out the driveway.
Daniel Thornton, I read again on the card as I drove back to my apartment and to the phonebook that could tell me where he lived.
It looked like one member of the Level Zero crowd hadn't disappeared.
#
It was nearly sundown by the time I turned off of Bloor street looking for Daniel Thornton's home.
The heat hadn't let up, and I had my AC up all the way so that cold air blasted on my neck like the cold breath of a stalker man.
Professor Daniel Thornton, of course he was a professor—only an educator could be as obnoxious as he was, lived in Mississauga where Bloor street began. There was a school nearby, and one or two apartment buildings. For the most part it was ranch-style houses though, with sprinklers and flower gardens and one or two tasteless lawn ornaments. I even saw a pink flamingo-thing on the way over.
Well, he was an associate professor—probably couldn't afford more.
I turned onto McCall Drive; the houses suddenly turned a lot more trashy. The sidewalks turned to gravel sides, the driveways became narrow strips of asphalt cutting across unmowed lawns.
Two kids rode by on bicycles. They were wearing purple hoodies that I'm sure they thought were cool.
Thornton's address was 344 McCall. I was at 232.
I swerved away from a white boat someone had parked beside their house and ground up against the gravel shoulder. A wave of dust kicked up and rocks tapped the bottom of my car.
I didn't know what I'd say to Thornton when I found him. It could be that he knew as little as I did about the disappearance of Lena and the others.
But he didn't know about the red eyes, and about Josh.
I'd probably ask him more about the Stalker Men first.
Maybe I'd ask him why the hell a PHD in Metaphysics called himself “Haze.”
The numbers rolled up to 340, 342, and finally 344.
344 sat on the curb of McCall and another street called Chatham. It was probably the best of the houses on this street; it had a hedge on the curb side, and the grass was green and only partially blanketed with weeds and dandelions. A wilting mulberry tree slumped beside the hedge, and the grass was stained purple around it.
The driveway was empty. The front door was open, revealing a closed screen door.
I pulled in. The car grumbled to a halt.
The house was quiet. No lights on. No sign of movement inside.
I got out of my car and shut the door. I flinched at the noise.
I took a few steps through the lawn. The long, dry grass tore as I walked through it. As I got closer, the house didn't give any indication of life.
I pulled out the card. I checked the address again. The number was correct, and Google Maps couldn't have lied to me.
Had Haze vanished too? I bit my lip at the thought.
I went up to the door and rang the bell.
“Haze!” I called. “Haze are you in there!?”
I could see a bare hallway through the screen door. No people.
“Haze!” I called. “Daniel!... Professor Thornton!”
No response, no sound. My voice sank into the house like water on dry
earth.
The entire street was quiet. There weren't even summer crickets chirping their fuck-songs.
Without thinking, I pushed at the screen door.
It swung open. A long creak whined out the rusted joints, ending in a deep, long groan.
Well that was creepy.
“Haze?” I called again.
It was too dark to see inside. I went to use the flashlight app on my cell phone, but remembered I didn't own a phone anymore. That fucking Santa.
I took a careful step inside. The wood creaked under my foot.
Nothing stepped out to eat me. I took another step inside. I held my hands to the wall for balance and took yet another step. Dust came off on my fingers.
The darkness swelled like a physical presence. I edged forward. I hoped that Haze didn't fill his house with bear-traps or something.
This house smelled odd; not bad, but not normal. It didn't smell like indoors, or all the domestic hallmarks that made a space livable. No Febreeze, no fading odour of food, no vacuum-cleaned carpet. For the most part it smelled like the air outside, except with an acrid undercurrent, like rot.
Why did Haze keep his house like this?
My fingers found a light switch. I flicked it on. A bare bulb flashed above me. Light burst into the hallway, illuminating the entire thing.
The light stuttered. It flickered over flaking paint, sagging plaster, and cracked drywall.
My stomach tightened. This wasn't normal.
This house was a ruin.
I took my hand away from the wall. I saw graffiti over it in black magic-marker. The graffiti said something about Donnie P being awesome and Brittney J being a slut. A lot more of it was just drawings of symbols and stick-figures, like paleographs.
The entire hallway was wrecked: a long fissure ran up one wall, revealing the junctures in the drywall. The wooden floor was flecked with dirt and chipped. Dust and crap lined the walls and a torn table leg jutted out the nearest doorway.
Who'd put a house like this on a business card?
Homeless guy. Eccentric guy. Crazy guy. My head reeled through a string of words. It finally settled on one that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Liar.
I was about to go ahead when I stopped. There was something just ahead of me.
I bent down to look. Buried beneath the dust was a line of debris, running from one side of the hallway to the other. I brushed away the dust. The stuff beneath glimmered.
Broken glass.
I shivered. The trap was obvious, but its presence unnerved me. Was it to keep out dogs and raccoons? Or was it a warning?