Glitch

  The blue line was my new sun—rising and falling as I orbited it.

  As I passed carefully through the darkness, I practised my counting. I counted the number of rings I travelled. I counted each room I crossed.

  When the counting got boring, I worked out a calculation for how many rooms I crossed as I wound every ring around the blue line. Then I dug out my calculus and figured out my time and rate of progress.

  I counted a lot of numbers. And every time I passed the centre line of a ring, I saw the blue light glimmering down the endless halls.

  I went from room 110 to 111 to 112. I traversed room 130, 140, and 150, travelling along my orbit, the blue light always punctuating the long stretch of darkness every time I passed it.

  After an eternity of marching, I reached room 210. Room 210 was like every other room, differentiated only by the room that came after it: room 211 was the centre-line of ring eleven.

  I entered room 211, and looked to my left, expecting to see the blue light glimmering down the hall.

  Instead, there was nothing.

  The blue light was gone.

  #

  Maybe I’d counted wrong.

  But I hadn’t counted wrong.

  Panic bubbling up, I turned around. I had to backtrack. Maybe I’d missed something.

  I ran into a wall.

  “Ah!” I clutched my forehead. It stung. I stumbled back. The floor turned beneath me. My mental compass spun left-right-up-down in what now was total darkness. No sun, not even that brief blue mote of light.

  I stretched out and probed for the wall. I misjudged the distance, and stumbled on my knees, reaching blind until I found it—the wall, safe and secure and unmoving.

  I drew myself into the wall, breathing hard. My ass wedged into the corner. I swung my head, as if trying to shake the darkness off. But the darkness stayed.

  I clung to the wall, not knowing where I was. I forgot the door I’d come from. I forgot the door I’d planned to enter. I forgot my plan. The darkness unmoored me. In my head the neat grids and numbers I’d devised to help me turned grey and brittle and fell apart, sinking into that endless dark.

  I closed my eyes. I opened them. It made no difference.

  Close.

  ...

  Open.

  Close.

  …

  Open.

  Blue light.

  Close.

  Open.

  Blue light again.

  What the hell?

  My hands patted for the wall behind me. I got a grip, and slowly pushed myself up.

  The blue light flickered down the row of rooms in front of me. I leaned in against the doorway and watched it.

  It looked like a blue star from here.

  It looked beautiful.

  Then the light flickered. It sputtered, almost like candle flame.

  The blue line hadn’t flickered when I’d been there. Was it—powering down or something?

  No, that didn’t sound right. When I’d seen it, that light looked like it could glow forever.

  Unless something was blocking the light.

  Unless someone was standing in front of it.

  I froze. The light in the distance flickered a final time, and finally glowed normally. If something was there, it had moved to the next room.

  I spun away from the light. An infinity of dark rooms stretched ahead of me.

  The reappearance of the light had re-established my compass. The light was south. I went towards my imaginary north. When I went to the next room I veered right on an imaginary west.

  I cut a zigzag through the maze of rooms. I counted every iteration of north and west. I wasn’t going to get lost again.

  My head didn’t know why I ran. If something or someone was back there, he or she or it might be able to help me out. Maybe those two guys had discovered me. Maybe whoever was in charge here had discovered me. Maybe they just wanted to help.

  But to my gut, that sounded too good.

  Something had followed me down here, the thing from the construction pit. The thing that stole Jonathan’s voice.

  I hadn’t heard Jon’s voice in years. I didn’t even look at the family videos anymore for fear of seeing him.

  After ten north-west zig-zags I broke into a trot. I couldn’t hear anything, but despite the movement, I began to feel cold. At fifteen zig-zags my stride lengthened to jog. At seventeen I was sprinting, and if I could see I’d swear my breath was fogging.

  I hit my shoulder on the edge of a doorway. I winced, swore, and hissed the pain out. On reflex, I looked back for the room with the blue light. But I’d lost it about fifty zig-zags ago.

  I gritted my teeth. A bead of sweat dripped off my nose and cooled. Why was it so cold now?

  “It felt cold.” I heard a muffled voice say.

  “We’ll call them off,” said another.

  My breath caught. The pounding in my ears had distorted the voices, but I recognized them anyway.

  “Did you hear that?"

  “This is wrong man. We obviously miscalculated. Let’s call it off before we lose someone.”

  I knew those voices. They belonged to Satchel Bag and Tape Measure Guy.

  In the room ahead of me, a beam of light wavered on the ground. After so long in the dark it burned my eyes. It was a flashlight.

  I bolted to it.

  “Help!” I yelled. My voice echoed around me.

  The flashlight stammered back and forth.

  “Hear that?”

  “Shit!”

  “Help!” I yelled again.

  “Holy shit what is that!?”

  I chased the flashlight beam. It led me to two silhouettes. I threw my arms up. One of them screamed, and slapped me across the face. I hardly felt it—adrenaline burned out the pain.

  “What the hell?” The screamer shouted.

  “Get me out of here!” I screamed back.

  “Who are you?”

  “Wait.” The guy with the flashlight—I think he was Tape Measure, even though the two men now lacked their defining tools—brought the light up to my face. My eyes burned with the sweet, holy, manmade light.

  “Who is this guy?” The screamer shouted. I think he was Satchel Bag.

  “Get me out of here.” I said. “Please please please. I won’t tell anyone about your hologram or

  whatever.”

  “Shit. How’d he get down here?” Tape Measure asked Satchel Bag.

  Satchel Bag didn’t answer.

  “Look over there.” Satchel Bag’s shadowed hands rose. A finger pointed behind me.

  I turned around.

  There was something about ten rooms down. Two tiny lights, the same colour as the blue line, almost like eyes.

  The lights blinked.

  “Crap.” Tape Measure whispered.

  The two guys bolted. I ran after them. Someone screamed and it might have been any one of us.

  I didn’t get it. Maybe the relief of finding people in the lightless dungeon had confused my emotions. I didn’t understand why the lights scared them, or why they ran down the doors that they did. If there was an order to the rooms they chose to go down, I didn’t see it.

  The two guys ran fast. They didn’t tire and they screamed a lot.

  It was even colder now. The fringe of my hair crinkled with frozen sweat. It hurt to breath.

  My feet dragged on the ground. I forced them to move. I forced my arms to swing and my body to keep close to these two guys. But I began to fall behind.

  After a while, I looked over my shoulder.

  The twin dots weren’t there. I stopped.

  “Come on retard!” Tape Measure shouted.

  We ended up in another room with a blue line. Tape Measure’s flashlight bobbed, wavered, and vanished. The blue line grew brighter. It cut across my vision and turned everything to blue, then to white.

  “It’ll be okay.” Jon’s voice said behind me.

  I felt warmth. Carpet underneath my palms. Blurry lig
ht.

  “What the—” a female voice said. “Who’s this guy? Hey, why’re you crying?”

  CHAPTER FOUR: BLUE LIGHT

  So much light after so much dark. So much noise after so much silence. So many people after so long alone.

  And Jon.

  Oh God, Jon.

  I was in a basement. It was a nice basement though: the kind of smoky, dusty, comfortable place where families put old furniture before renting a U-Haul for the final dump, the kind of place you could spill a beer and not have to mop it up, where teenagers could have sex on the sofas and not worry about getting caught.

  The walls here were wood-panelled. The ceiling was done in papery tiles with flower patterning. Some of the tiles were missing. The gaps revealed pink fibreglass stuffing and rusty iron pipes. The TV was on; a Wii hummed in front of it, next to an inactive Xbox 360 and a pile of fluorescent green game boxes.

  It was disorienting. My memory of the long dark, of the dungeon beneath the pit, of blue lights in endless rooms, crawled in the back of my head now, infecting my sight. The memory cast a shadow on my perceptions. It gave an unreal tinge to the room, and its occupants.

  I didn’t know if I should be scared.

  There were two sofas—smelling slightly of cat piss—next to a coffee-table with one leg superglued on at a wrong angle. Tape Measure and Satchel bag sat me in one of the sofas. They sat on the other. Without their implements Tape Measure became Laurent and Satchel Bag became Josh.

  It was definitely them: the men from the pit. And they looked just like I remembered. Laurent was still a hipster in plaid, tight pants, and generic smugness. And I think Josh was wearing the very same stormy grey hoodie I saw him in yesterday.

  There were two others here—a Sikh guy with a patchy beard named Amrith, and a girl named Lena. Lena had gone upstairs two minutes ago, and still wasn’t back.

  Laurent and Josh kept quiet. They may have been trying to scare me, but that was hard with Amrith playing Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii.

  Josh broke the silence first. “Who are you?”

  “What?” I asked. “Who are—”

  “How’d you get here?” Laurent cut in.

  “Jesus guys,” Amrith sighed. He lazily swung the Wiimote up, causing Mario to pound a Koopa Troopa. He looked over at me. “Hey, are you any good at Mario Kart?”

  I shook my head.

  “Got them!”

  The girl named Lena came back down the stairs, cradling five misty bottles of Mountain Dew Red. She sidestepped the sofas and laid the Mountain Dew down on the coffee table.

  Lena had four gold earrings on her right ear—the only remarkable feature on her otherwise plain face. The earrings were all identical: solid, golden rings. For no reason, they reminded me of the rings I’d seen punched in the back of an old Chinese sword at the Royal Ontario Museum. The rings on that sword were iron, but they had the same thickness, the same utilitarian plainness.

  Lena got up and grabbed a Wiimote from the fireplace mantle.

  “Did you find the star?” She asked. Amrith clucked and shook his head. “Oh you suck.”

  “Love you too.” Amrith replied, flicking the Wiimote.

  “Let me, I know where it is.” Lena said.

  She started to say something to me, but stopped. For a second, her eyes flickered like she was scared of something. But the look vanished, and was replaced by bland disinterest.

  “There’s enough Dew for everyone.” She said.

  “You take over,” Amrith said to Lena. He unstrapped his Wiimote and laid it on top of the TV. Lena took control of the plumber onscreen.

  “We should pretend we’re gonna kill him or something.” Lena suggested as she navigated Mario through a new level. Amrith picked two Mountain Dews from the coffee table. He passed one to me.

  I took the bottle and cleared my throat. “I—”

  Amrith sat next to me. As he did, he caught my eye and something on his face shifted from polite curiosity to hard fear. But, like Lena, this expression faded.

  “Do you know what Level Zero is?” Amrith asked softly.

  Josh and Laurent stared. Lena turned to stare. The volume of the room dropped.

  “Do you know what that was back there?” Laurent said, even quieter. He sat up and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Have you ever been there before?”

  “The dungeon?” I asked.

  “Yes, how’d you get down there?” Amrith asked.

  I told them about the invisible floor on Bloor and Ossington, the sky full of stars, and my jump into oblivion. I told them about the dungeon, the blue line, and how I’d lost it. I didn’t tell them about Jonathan’s voice. They didn’t need to know that.

  “You jumped into the pit?” Laurent asked me when I finished.

  “That’s sort of... crazy.” Amrith added.

  I did not refute this claim.

  No more questions came. Lena kept playing Mario. The others sat back. I sipped the Mountain Dew. It tasted like cherries, having freaky sex on my tongue.

  Josh clapped his hands together.

  “So we gonna blank him now or what?” He asked.

  “Look at his eyes.” Lena said to the TV. She paused the game, unstrapped the Wiimote, and placed it next to Amrith’s on top of the TV.

  “What?” I asked.

  Lena turned off the Wii with her big toe. She trotted past us and vanished up the stairs leading out the basement.

  “We can’t blank him,” Amrith agreed.

  Laurent pushed himself up from the sofa, planted a hand on the coffee table between us and bent forward like a man inspecting a dead animal. He frowned. Deep cut wrinkles spread on his forehead, tickling the tops of his thick, black glasses

  “Ah crap.” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  Josh got up too, he stepped on top of the table and came down with one foot still on it. He leaned in close. He smelled like unwashed hair.

  “What colour are your eyes?” Amrith asked. A clomp-clomp-clomp came down the stairs. Lena emerged with a green hand-mirror.

  “My eyes are brown.” I said.

  “Yeah.” Amrith said. “I bet.”

  Lena shouldered past Amrith and Laurent. She handed me the mirror. I took it.

  My eyes in the mirror were a bright, electric blue.

  “You’ve been marked fucko,” Josh said.

  #

  It was dark outside, and cold. But it was normal dark and normal cold, the kind I could deal with. Luckily, the sky was black with clouds. I didn’t want to see stars for a while.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Amrith gently pushed me forward.

  They had taken me outside the house, into the driveway.

  Funny. I’d started at Bloor and Ossington, but I’d come out in a tiny suburb. It was quiet out here, not like my apartment in Etobicoke, or downtown: just chirping crickets, buzzing lights, and the sound of kids playing basketball a few houses down.

  The driveway held a white Pontiac and a bright blue Yaris. Flower beds lined both sides of the driveway; the soil looked neatly tilled for spring.

  Lena opened the door to the Pontiac’s shotgun sear. I got in. She shut the door behind me.

  In the rearview mirror, my eyes shone bright blue. Bright cyan LEDs plugged into a confused, frightened face. They were glowing now.

  I looked away.

  Where was the hospital ceiling? Where was the wake-up call? This had to be a bad dream, or a coma from when I jumped into the pit. So where was the crappy “it was all a dream” ending? Where was my family, waiting by my bedside?

  Amrith took the wheel and Lena took the seat behind him. Laurent and Josh got into the Yaris. I leaned my head on the window. The glass felt cold on my forehead. Too real for a dream.

  “Where are we going?” I asked again.

  “To Ossington,” Amrith said. ”You found something dangerous, and we have to take care of it.”

  Amrith pulled a set of k
eys from his pocket. His keychain was the Companion Cube from Portal. ”Seat belts.” He said.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t wake up. There was just an onslaught of clear and healthy sensory perception. The way the heating blew lukewarm air in my face, the way Amrith’s keys jingled against the Companion Cube, the feel of the car seat on my ass.

  I opened my eyes. Still here.

  “We also want to look at your camera,” Lena added. “Your footage could help us understand a lot more about Level Zero—what you called the dungeon.”

  I took a shaky breath, and swallowed.

  “I understand, I guess.” I said. ”But why‘d you handcuff me?”

  Lena and Amrith both shrugged.

  I tried for the third time to pull the handcuffs apart and release my hands from my back. The bindings held.

  Amrith and Lena didn’t try to stop me from struggling. Lena scooched behind me and pulled my seatbelt on. It clicked into place, and she went back behind Amrith.

  Beside us, the Yaris started up. Laurent and Josh pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street.

  Amrith started the car. Lena pulled on her own seatbelt.

  I gave up trying to break free. “Where do you even get handcuffs?” I panted.

  “Sex shops,” Lena said. “They’re surprisingly strong.”

  I pulled at the cuffs again. The metal dug into my wrists. The chain links creaked, but didn’t give.

  “Don’t worry,” Amrith said. He checked his blind spot and backed us out of the driveway. “We’ll let you go as soon as we take a look at your camera. Then you’ll never have to see us again.”

  Lena pursed her lips at Amrith. He raised his eyebrows. There was another conversation there, one I wasn’t getting.

  Amrith took us down the street. The headlights passed over the dark streets. It was garbage day tomorrow—raccoon-proof garbage cans, bundled eco-waste, and one sofa lined the driveways.

  “What happened to my eyes?” I asked.

  No answer. The car rolled forward. Far ahead, I saw a copse of shadows crouched like a wild dog ready to leap. As we got closer, it turned out to be a bush.

  Lena took out a Blackberry, one of the new ones with a touch screen. She slid behind me again and held it out in front of my eyes.

  “Here,” she said. “Imagine the world is like this Mario game here.”

  Two points of blue light glowed in the Blackberry screen. A scream caught in my throat when I realized the lights were from me.