Glitch. Part 5

I was probably going to die.

f.u.c.king 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 G.o.d." I said.

This was like the gla.s.s floor at the CN tower-except it wasn't. I jumped up and down and every time I came down my acceleration just stopped.

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 G.o.d strung them there.

"Oh my G.o.d." 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 p.r.i.c.kled 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. f.u.c.k. f.u.c.k.

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 tw.a.n.ging 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 it didn't react to that. I reached to touch it, but I left my fingertips hovering just a foot away; I was trying to psyche it out.

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.