The voice murmured out the construction zone. My ears pricked. Men’s voices, speaking low.
“No. Now come and spot me.”
“We can’t use this route,” The first man said. “It’s too public.”
A break in the panels further down revealed part of the pit’s insides. I edged closer to it and felt a fear ball in my stomach. I dealt with weird stuff all the time: artists painting with placenta, homeless people twittering their days out, muscled Santas accosting subway patrons. But those people all worked in public. This sounded like something secret.
“It’ll save thirty seconds, though. Haze is planning on using the church route.”
They didn’t speak with the easy, expansive volume of construction workers, and they didn’t sound like what television told me criminals sounded like. They sounded young—maybe graffiti artists?
“Haze always talks big. He won’t do it.”
I crept closer to the gap in the signs. I went slowly, but I didn’t have to bother. There was more than enough background noise coming from Bloor.
“But if he does do it, we’ll be ready,” one voice said. “The path here goes fifteen meters.”
“Fine.” The voice said something else but the wind drowned it out.
I crouched and planted my good hand on the cool asphalt. I peeked inside the pit.
It was a normal construction pit, the kind dotted all over the city. Everyone needed to turn parks into buildings and strip malls into high-rises. So yellow Tonka toys rolled in to dig up the dried-blood earth and dump in concrete, iron, and colour-coded string. The pit here was no different: a scaffold hung in the far end and a pile of PVC pipes lay at the bottom. Red and grey striations ran across the crumbling walls.
Two men stood on the pit.
And I don’t mean in, I mean on.
They were floating.
Two guys stood about twenty feet above the pit’s bottom. I looked for a sheet of glass, wires, or stilts. I didn’t see anything. They were floating.
One of the guys wore a scruffy beard and one of those sack-hats that hipsters like. He sported thick glasses that I suspect he didn’t actually need, and held a spool of yellow measuring tape. The measuring tape dangled just to his feet, where it stopped with his shoes.
This had to be a trick.
“Check the seal,” the other guy said.
Other Guy was dressed in jeans and a grey hoodie three sizes too large. A Blackberry case hung on the waistband of his jeans, and a dark blue satchel bag swung from his shoulder.
“Fuck you,” Other Guy answered. He looked at the sky and wrinkled his forehead like it bothered him.
Just to reiterate, he was floating. A pile of rocks lay piled below him, spoil from the clay. The rocks jagged in a series of sharp, pointy directions. If either of these men fell, they would die.
But they didn’t. They stood on a plane of their own choice.
Tape Measure Guy sighed. He wound up the tape measure and jogged near the wall of the pit to the left of me. His feet rang silent on the air. Somehow I’d expected them to clap like solid ground.
Tape Measure Guy ran a hand over He ran a hand over the wall.
A line of blue light welled up against the wall.
The light looked like an LED or a strip from a neon sign. My stomach, so much smarter than my brain if only I would listen to it, turned heavy and queasy. To my brain, the light looked like an accessory to a mystery. To my stomach, it looked like bad news.
Tape Measure Guy pinched the tape and fed it into the wall. I didn’t see a hole but the tape unravelled through it.
Tape Measure Guy pulled out the tape and inspected it. “Clean anyway,” he said. “For now.”
“A place like here is always clean,” said Satchel Bag. “No fucking point.”
“It takes three seconds,” Tape Measure said. “Also I’m still pissed you said that to Lena.”
Satchel Bag sauntered over to Tape Measure. Tape Measure braced both hands against the wall, like he was stretching.
“Maybe it was a dick move,” Satchel Bag said as he turned away, back to looking at the sky.
“Hey!”
The voice came from behind me. I spun and lost my balance. My back fell against the cardboard panel and rattled the railings above the pit. A dark figure stood in front of me, outlined by the sunlight streaming in from the construction project’s makeshift corridor.
It was the security guard from before, the one who had done his duty protecting his building from the Shirtless Santa.
The guard was a stocky man with a straw-coloured beard running down his cheeks and neck and a dark green lanyard running down his neck. He didn’t look happy. What did he want with me? Couldn’t he tell I was spying on wizards?
The guard’s eyes were grey and steely, deep-set in his head, wrinkles running from them like cracks from an impact crater. Was he with the people floating in the pit? Was he going to kill me?
“Are you sure you’re okay?” The guard pointed to my throbbing hand. “That guy whacked you pretty hard.”
“I’m—I’m fine,” I said.
“I saw you kneeling there...” the guard continued, raising his hand at me. He had a disarmingly friendly Canadian accent—soft and friendly. “And your hand.”
“I was just getting something off my shoe, haha.” I grinned manically. I couldn’t see into the pit anymore. Fuck fuck fuck.
The security guard was staring at me like I was weird.
“Haha?” I tried.
For a long time the guard didn’t respond. He seemed to be wondering if I was worth dealing with. Finally, he put his hands behind his back.
“I called the police. If you want to give any evidence for that guy, you should stick around.”
I told the guard I needed to leave. He waited, seemingly for me to actually get up and go. I stayed there.
The guard shrugged, turned, and left. He whistled as he headed back to the building. The tune went out of sync with a set of silver keys clinking in his back pocket.
When he was gone, I bent back down and stared into the pit.
The men were gone.
Once again, the pit looked like every construction project ever. Just a hole. A hole that would become a building. The guys were gone. My story was gone.
Fuck.
Fucking fuck.
I stared at the suddenly normal pit in this suddenly normal world. I gritted my teeth.
I had two options.
I could pretend this never happened. I could go home and acknowledge my defeat to the Internet. Next week I’d do something easier for my blog, like making toffee. That was option one. Option two involved me being crazy.
My stomach liked option one.
My stomach was a pussy.
I shot my head up to the cardboard panels. The steel railings blocking the pit made a pattern of metal diamonds. Easy to climb.
My awareness of my surroundings goes up when I do stupid stuff. At a glance, I could listen for the footsteps of witnesses, find the high-tech shine of security cameras, and take in the intangible, psychic lure of the other side. The last bit was important. It was what helped me remember the one important fact in my life: I’d never had fun acting normal.
The railing rose about three feet above my head. I tested my injured hand; I could close it with only a little pain.
I planted a foot on the railing and grabbed a bar overhead. I pushed myself up and grabbed another. The top of the railing came closer and closer. I came eye to eye with a cardboard ad displaying oversized well-dressed rich people. The rich people were hugging each other and laughing.
I hooked my elbow around the top of the railing.
“Sam!”
I turned my head. It was Greg, running towards me. His heavy black camera swung with his stride. His thin wireframe glasses bounced up and down his nose.
“Hey, Greg,” I said.
“What—are you doing—up there?” Greg panted. His feet stuttered to a halt. He cl
utched his side and gasped out: “I got—the Santa!”
I pushed against my foothold and rose higher above the railing. I took out my good hand and wrapped it on the top rung. The metal felt cold in my palm. I pulled myself up so my chin came over the top, and I peered into the other side.
A construction pit looks small when you pass it on the street. That’s because they’re usually next to the skyscrapers or the gigantic yellow diggers or the red and white cranes. Even if a construction pit is deserted, it looks small because of context: one day it’s going to be another boring office building neatly set with normal-sized rooms and normal-sized lives.
Climbing on top of the guard railing, the construction pit was not normal-sized. It yawned, larger than life, like a predatory mouth, like a monster breaking out of the earth to feed. I felt wind on my face and could imagine that the pit was breathing, sucking me in.
The pit was huge. I was small. It was dark. I needed light. If I wasn’t careful I would break my skull on the bottom, and the pit would not be harmed.
I put my other hand on the top rung.
“Sam? Sam?” Greg shouted. “What the hell, man? Get down—I got the Santa.”
“This isn’t about the Santa,” I said. I pulled my chest above the top of the railing. My arms shook with the effort. Pain burned in my bad hand.
“Get down!” Greg seethed. “What if someone comes?”
“So what?” I asked. Greg’s preoccupation with societal backlash was endearing, but sometimes it made him hard to work with.
I planted a foot on the top of the railing and my balance wavered back and forth. The pit grew deeper and darker. It stretched to fill my vision. I clutched the cold metal. I couldn’t feel my fingers.
Carefully, I brought my foot down to the other side. I hooked it into the diamond railing notches and began my descent
“You’re gonna fall,” Greg said. I grunted, and took another step down.
“Hey,” I said as I drew level with Greg.
I swallowed. Climbing down, fighting the lure of gravity and a horrible, horrible death, was much harder than climbing up. “Think you can bust me out of here?” I grunted.
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 hell, 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.
“Fuck!” 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.”
“Fuck you!” I screamed.
I scraped the clay wall with my feet and sent scraps 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 hell, 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 massive 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 glasses 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 ach
ing hot and burning with shifting, 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 button and a video played on the computer.
The vid showed the Shirtless Santa turning, walking, raising his foot at the camera. I winced when I saw the door fly open and strike my hand. The image shifted 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 ass 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 Shirtless 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…