Glitch. Part 4

Time for Plan B.

I unzipped the front pocket of my bag and pulled out my camcorder.

My phone had caught a starry sky at noon. Greg's photo had found the same. If some mysterious force fooled with recording equipment here, maybe that was my story. Even if the invisible floor was gone, even if physics was still depressing and boring and f.u.c.king conformist, a starry sky at noon was pretty cool. Stranger Danger would be up to ten hits in no time.

I powered on the camera.

For a second, I was worried. The video and photo from yesterday had weirded me out, but it was possible it would go the same way as the pen at the bottom of the pit. The video could have come from the damaged phone, and the photo could have been my own imagination.

It could be that the strangeness was a one-time deal. An adventure I'd missed out on.

The muscles in my jaw twitched. A cold, hard ball palpitated in my throat. The camera hummed on. I flipped out the recording screen. The Kodak logo blinked on. LEDS fired up.

Please please please let there be stars.

The screen flickered on.

It showed the street. A normal street. There was light. There were people. There were trees. There was light on the ground and shining in the street signs.

But the sky was black and filled with stares.

"Thank you, G.o.d," I whispered.

I moved the camera around; the image held. Despite what my eyes told me, the camera showed a starry sky.

I forced myself not to be surprised. I was a journalist. I needed to doc.u.ment the facts before I went into a joy fugue.

"The time is twelve-thirty p.m.," I said into the camera mic. "And the date is March thirteenth. My name is Sam Flautt, reporting for Stranger Danger."

I spun the camera around and the stars wheeled.

"My location is Bloor and Ossington, where an unknown effect seems to be tampering with recording equipment," I said. A teenage couple that should have been in school walked past me, staring. "The source of the effect remains unknown."

My guess was holograms now, or some kind of super-advanced digital media thing. It tied together the people walking on thin air, their creepy disappearance, and the bugged-out footage.

I panned to the ground and gave a good long view of the regular landscape interposed with the strange darkness.

"The interference doesn't prevent light from appearing on the ground," I added. "Just the sky. This is not CGI, and I invite anyone with a camera to come down and try for themselves."

I might edit that bit out later. I didn't want more people on my story just yet.

I headed down Bloor with my camera tilted up.

It had to be just a local anomaly. If every camera across the world, or even just the city, had gone haywire, someone would've noticed by now. If it was local, I had to find out how far this field spread.

After about five minutes of walking, the camera screen flashed white. I froze.

The camera's recording screen showed overcast clouds now.

I backed up two steps. The screen flashed white again.

Black sky now.

I looked around. I stood at an intersection next to Domino's Pizza. A green park bench knelt against the Domino's and a beaten parking meter stood at the edge of the sidewalk. The street across had a music store and a tree. No sign of a top-secret holographic projector.

And yet...

I stepped forward. Flash. Grey, normal sky.

"What's he doing?"

I looked down. A little girl with black pigtails and a pink Dora jacket looked up at me. She clutched her mom's hand.

The mom pulled the girl behind her.

I tested out the change a few more times. Every time I took a step back, the clouds vanished and the sky turned black. Every time I stepped forward, the clouds reappeared, and the normal day rea.s.serted itself on my camera.

The Domino's manager came out and shouted at me to go away. I headed back to the construction pit. Nothing had changed, and when I pointed my camera up, the sky was still black.

I set off in a different direction from last time, once again holding the camera above my head.

I noticed something interesting as I walked: the stars in the camera weren't normal stars. They ran in straight lines across the sky, like grid lines. I wasn't an expert, but I knew that the Little Dipper should've been somewhere.

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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d it hurt.

After a few deep breaths, the sensation pa.s.sed. 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 gla.s.s.

I breathed. My heart beat a drumroll in my throat. Gooseb.u.mps 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.