Glitch. Part 2

Greg didn't laugh.

I took one more step down the railing. I felt gravity pulling me down-couldn't let it.

If I fell I'd die. If I fell I'd die.

So I wouldn't fall.

I took another step down. I'd used up the last of the railing. There was just a sheer wall of clay beneath me now. I couldn't climb down that.

"What the h.e.l.l, Sam!?" Greg asked me through the steel bars. He was pacing, hilariously unhinged.

I looked down: about thirty feet of nothing. Nothing down there but a bad, bad fall.

But two men had walked on it.

I lowered my foot. It swept through empty air.

"Sam? Sam!" Greg shouted.

The muscles in my arms groaned.

The invisible floor must be a bit lower.

Those men walked on air-just a bit further down.

Pain built in my injured hand like gas before an explosion. I could hold it. I just needed two more inches.

Crick.

Something snapped along my wrist. I screamed my eyes shut. Wind whined in my ear and now I was swinging in the air. I felt my feet skating on nothing. A bar smacked my kidney. My body lurched away from the railing, toward the pit. Towards the fall. My good hand began to slip on the cold metal beams.

"f.u.c.k!" Greg screamed. I felt a hand grab my arm. "Sam, get up!"

I threw my injured hand up. Greg caught it by the wrist.

"I'm okay," I said. "I'm okay."

"You're too fat," Greg grunted. "I'm gonna lose you."

"f.u.c.k you!" I screamed.

I sc.r.a.ped the clay wall with my feet and sent sc.r.a.ps of mud flying. I was going to die. I was finally going to die and I hadn't even made a hundred hits on Stranger Danger.

Somehow I got more purchase on the clay. I kicked up and hooked a foot on the bottom rung of the railing. I hugged the fence with my chest. My head went dizzy. I felt like I was falling back, like the entire world was falling back into that pit and its mystery.

Out the corner of my eye, I imagined I saw a line of blue light-thin and hard like the line on a razor.

"I won't let go," Greg said. "Just come up."

"What?" I asked.

"I won't let go, so stop whispering *don't let go'." Greg gritted his teeth and pulled my arm harder.

"I'm not whispering that," I said.

"Fine. Just climb."

I did as I was told. I shambled up the rungs. This wasn't fun anymore. Solid ground was fun. I came over the railing a second time.

I tried to make a slow, careful descent onto the sidewalk, but I got tangled halfway down and fell a few feet. I skinned my elbows against the concrete.

"What the h.e.l.l, man!?" Greg shouted above me.

"Wanted to test something," I murmured. I felt the ground beneath me. I gripped it in my good hand. I loved ground so much.

"Test what? You could've died."

"I saw something." I flopped my hand over to the pit. "Invisible floor. Invisible floor there."

Greg raised his eyebrow. He looked around, grabbed the paper bag I'd rescued, and tossed it through the steel railing bars.

The paper bag sailed down the pit. It landed in a puddle at the bottom.

Now why didn't I think of that?

Greg kicked me lightly in the ribs.

"Come on," he said. "I've got the footage. We have to write the post."

I rolled over. The asphalt beneath me felt so stable, so wonderfully stable. I wiped a gritty sleeve against my face. The sleeve came back wet and salty.

How strange.

"Fine," I said. I got up and pain lanced up my arm. I winced. "First though, where's a hospital?"

We found a hospital willing to take us in a few blocks away.

It was an old clinic named Lady of Fatima. It operated in a building with an aged Victorian veranda outside but a modern, yellow-tiled office inside. The waiting room was small, cramped, and on the brink of being overcrowded. A patient filled every green-padded seat. A slim Filipino woman in dark purple scrubs sat at the reception desk, working between several ma.s.sive monitors.

"What do you think of this sentence?" Greg asked me as we waited in the green-padded waiting-room chairs. He adjusted a pair of thin blue reading gla.s.ses and read off the netbook balancing on his knees. "There are few mysteries left in the world: human adventurers have scaled the heights of Everest-"

"Let me read it," I said. I pulled the laptop over to me.

We have cracked the atom, we have cracked the human soul. With all of that under our belts, we should be able to find Santa. But, ladies and gentleman, in the Toronto subway systems...

"I don't like *ladies and gentleman'; it's too long to read," I said. I pushed the computer back to Greg. "Do you think they'll give me painkillers?"

Greg elbowed me in the head.

"Tell me about the invisible floor," he said.

I didn't.

"Fine," Greg muttered. He clacked a few more words out on the computer. "I'm nearly done. Give me your phone."

"What?"

Greg held out his palm. I pulled my phone out.

Greg twirled the Samsung in his thick fingers. For a short, stubby man, he always treated machines with a delicate flair. "Your SD card might have gotten video footage before it broke. I wanna see if I can retrieve it."

I closed my eyes and leaned back into my seat's green foam padding. I groaned; my entire arm throbbed with low, feverish pain.

I didn't want to be here. The waiting room was too hot. And the horrible silence of the other patients jagged my nerves. I wanted to be back at the pit. I wanted my hand whole and healed, not aching hot and burning with s.h.i.+fting, squealing pain.

I wanted to know what had let those guys walk on air. If it wasn't an invisible floor, it was a magic trick. If it wasn't a trick, it was some sort of hologram. But for what?

"Haha, we have something." Greg turned the phone over to me. He clicked a b.u.t.ton and a video played on the computer.

The vid showed the s.h.i.+rtless Santa turning, walking, raising his foot at the camera. I winced when I saw the door fly open and strike my hand. The image s.h.i.+fted up as the phone sailed through the sky.

What the- Greg thumbed the track pad. "That's weird," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

The camera showed a sky full of stars. At noon.

The video ended with a crunch. We saw a flash of sidewalk, and then black.

"Maybe..." Greg opened up the video file's info to look at the details.

Greg shook his head slowly. "I have no clue why it's doing that."

There were definitely no stars when I took the footage, but the other parts of the video-the Santa, the security guard, the swinging doors-played exactly as I had shot it.

The nurse at the front called my name.

"The doctor can see you now," she said.

The doctor, a big Indian guy with two thick gold rings on his right hand, poked my wrist a couple of times. He held my arm in an uncomfortable way, and then gingerly tried to twist it. I screamed.

After that he put his thumb down on my wrist and knuckle. His fingers felt warm and dry, like leather, on my sweaty skin. He prodded up and down my arm.

"It's a sprain," he announced. "Several sprains. Pretty bad."

The doctor said I should put ice on it and take an aspirin. If I couldn't move it in three days it was probably a fracture. Thanks, doc.

"Think of it as a battle wound," Greg suggested as we descended into the Ossington subway to head home. "And the five readers will love the photos."

I'd seen Greg's photos. They were good. After encountering me, the Santa had run down Bloor Street. Greg was recuperating on the sidewalk when the Santa came by. He took the shot as the Santa sprinted across the street. Maybe being a lazy a.s.s wasn't so bad after all.

The photo was saturated with bright noon colours, looking down onto the street. Greg said he'd jumped on top of a bench to get the angle. The picture mostly showed street, with a focus on the red figure in the centre. The s.h.i.+rtless Santa, frozen in a leap, pom-pom hat swinging, fake beard and chiseled abs gleaming with sweat.

The picture didn't show much sky, but when I looked closer at the top edge of the photo...

I noticed something.

The sky was black.

Just like in my video.

Strange.

That Monday, I walked into work in my standard getup of khakis and my uncle's dress s.h.i.+rt. The clothes clashed and hung way too loose on my frame. But they clearly conveyed my feelings regarding corporate culture and HR's clothing policy.

The dress s.h.i.+rt's white sleeve hung unb.u.t.toned around my right hand-the good one. I couldn't b.u.t.ton it with my wrecked left hand.

I work as an HR slave at the TEB Financial interns.h.i.+p program. It's my job to hire applicants for the program and grill them hard when they come in. I took the job because it seemed stable and I didn't have to take my work home with me. The only downside was the dress code: no casual Fridays for HR reps. We always have to dress up for interviews.

It may have been my imagination, but as I walked through the hallway to the HR office, it felt like people were staring. At first I thought it was my arm-it had turned pale and veiny overnight-but I calmed myself by telling myself the injury wasn't noticeable. It wasn't like I'd ruined my arm and would drag it around my waist forever, a crippled wad of crumpled bone and mangled flesh that would scare children and eventually inspire a teen slasher film.

No, it wasn't like that at all. The arm was fine. I ignored the not-staring and entered the HR office.

"Sam. Your arm," Sarah said as I came in through the door.

Coincidence.

The HR department takes up two offices and a cubicle hub on the fourth floor of the TEB Financial building in downtown Mississauga. I work in the smaller office with three other HR people. The office has a water cooler in it, and a whiteboard with inspiring quotes on it.

Sarah Hu, a Western grad with a tendency for floral print dresses, had already clocked in. She was sitting at her desk, her organized, clean desk, waiting obediently for some email from management. The model of corporate affectation.

"What happened to you?" Sarah asked as I set my backpack down at my desk. Right across from Sarah's, my desk painted a different picture of office life. Lots of junk. Lots of pencil stains from scribbling and erasing ideas for Stranger Danger stuff. I also had a much less sophisticated filing system than Sarah-I don't file.

"Just an accident," I said. I bent down and turned on my computer.

"It looks purplish," she said, leaning over to look. She brushed a hair from her eyes and squinted. "And it's twitching."

On second inspection, I could admit that my hand did have a sort of purple hue to it. A perfectly healthy purple.

"Can you move it?" Sarah asked.

"I think." I held out my hand and moved the fingers. Sarah choked a bit.

"You need a doctor," she said.