Chapter 6: Chapter 6 – STUDY

My shift at the plant went by like a dream, and the work day was over almost before I knew it.

I found myself hesitating at the door. As far as I knew, the Grey City couldn’t nab me if I never left the building. Or if I went home and never left again. Maybe that would have been the safest solution, but if I stayed indoors (and didn’t get my paycheque) I soon wouldn’t have doors to stay inside.

I checked my phone to delay stepping outside. I’d received a few texts from Huang—he’d given me his address and asked if I wanted to stop by and exchange notes.

I frowned and texted back. Think it’s safe to go wandering around the city?

After a few minutes, I got a reply: safe as it ever is. Wincing, I got myself together and pushed the door open into the cold evening.

Well, no extra-dimensional bullshit yet. I can take the subway and get there in like half an hour? That ok?

Yeah, he replied. I pulled down my hood and set off.

Huang lived in an apartment not too far from College Street, blessedly close to a subway station. That was a busy area, tons of traffic and tourist traps, so I couldn’t imagine what his rent was like. I found his number in the directory and stepped into a posh little lobby when he buzzed me in.

His parents had to be paying for it, or else Huang was really managing to make the most of his student loans. When I finally got up to the fifth floor and located Huang’s door, he opened it as soon as I knocked, glancing up from his phone.

I had a moment of disconnection when I didn’t recognize the guy standing in the doorway, wearing an old grey hoodie with his long hair tied in a bun. It was Huang, all right, but it was still so strange to see him outside the backdrop of the Grey City.

He raised his eyebrows. “What?”

You don’t look much like a dragon. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s cold.”

“Well, come in,” he said, stepping away. “Apartment’s empty for now, my girlfriend shouldn’t be back for a while.”

I stepped inside a neat, white-walled apartment, sparsely furnished like student apartments tend to be. It seemed more spacious than my place, but that could have just been the lack of clutter. There were nice little accents here and there: a few potted plants, hanging art, and some amateurish ceramics.

“Coffee?” Huang asked, drifting past me.

“Kinda late for coffee, don’t you think?” I asked. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, starting to feel a little awkward. There were some shoes neatly piled on a mat by the door so I kicked my snowy boots off.

“Well, I’m going to need it, don’t know about you,” Huang said in a monotone, glancing back at me.

“Sure, why not,” I sighed, feeling pretty exhausted myself. I followed Huang into his kitchen, a cramped space arranged tightly around a circular table. Some textbooks and notes were piled up on one side of the table, which Huang pushed aside as I approached.

I sat down while Huang moved around the kitchen, prepping coffee. “So,” I said, breaking the tense silence, “I guess we have a lot to talk about?”

“Kind of,” Huang agreed, scooping grinds into the machine. “But listen, I have something to say first.”

“What?”

He turned around and pinned me with a look. “I get you don’t trust me very much, but if we want to figure out what’s going on, we’re going to have to be honest with each other. Okay?”

“I’ve been honest,” I said defensively, not liking his tone. “Not like I have much of a choice.”

“Alright then, please answer this question for me: do you or do you not have some kind of new sense after entering the Grey City?”

I scowled. “… Yeah.”

“So you do.” He turned back to the coffee machine. “You wouldn’t give me a straight answer before.”

“Yeah, I do, okay? Sorry I didn’t say. It’s just very weird.” I fidgeted with my hands on the table. “But I haven’t had it for the past day or so. It sort of turns on and off without me trying.”

“That will even out eventually,” said Huang. “It happened the same way for me.”

“… You said that you can sense life, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. Like I said, it works better in the Grey City than it does here.”

“How about now?” I asked, interested despite myself. “What do you sense right at this second?”

“You and me, obviously,” Huang said, tilting his head slightly. “There’s twelve people in the apartments closest to us. Guy next door has a fish tank or something. There’s a pigeon on the windowsill.”

I couldn’t stop myself from getting up to check the kitchen window, to find that there was indeed a scraggly pigeon sitting there. At my movement, it jumped into flight.

“That’s… kind of awesome?” I watched the bird’s silhouette disappear into the evening sky. “Is it annoying? Can you turn it on and off?”

Huang snorted. “I can’t turn it on or off, but it’s like any sense—you can sort of stop paying so much attention to it at all times. Like how you stop hearing background noises.”

I turned back and sat down at the table. “Can you sense bugs?”

He gave me a weird look. “Uh… yes?”

“Is it true that there’s always a spider within three metres of you?” I demanded. When we were kids, Eli had teased me with that statistic for weeks, and I never knew if he was fucking with me.

There was a second of surprised silence, then Huang barked a laugh. I had to chuckle too when the absurdity of my question caught up to me.

“I’m legit curious,” I added.

“I’ve never thought about it,” he admitted. He poured two mugs of coffee and returned to the seat at the table that was scattered with books and notes. “I don’t think I can sense one individual bug. Their signals are too faint.”

“Just sayin’, I would not want the power to sense bugs,” I said with a grimace. Huang gestured to some sugar and milk as he set it out on the table and leaned back into his chair.

“Alright, so let me ask: does your sense work the same way?” he said.

I frowned. “No. Mine doesn’t work on anything that’s alive. It’s more like… sensing the space around me. I guess it’s pretty similar to just looking around, but I can also sense texture and like, structural integrity. And sometimes it shoots way ahead of me so I can see which roads lead where.”

“Interesting,” said Huang, resting his chin on both hands and staring at me like I was in a petri dish.

I scowled. “It’s not working anymore, so whatever.”

“It’ll start again,” Huang assured me. He took a sip of coffee and started sifting through the notebooks on the table. “There’s actually something that might help us with that… in here.”

I peered suspiciously at the notebook he pushed my way. The pages were crammed tight with small, neat paragraphs, each with a date beside them. The first began with an account of getting lost on a strange side street and ending up in a colourless dimension…

My eyebrows rose and I started to flip through. “You kept a diary of it?”

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“That’s one way of putting it,” Huang shrugged. “I kept up records for the past six months, in case it came in handy.”

Huang wrote in slanted, precise half-cursive that was hell on the eyes. As I squinted my way through his notes, I started to get the picture of what Huang had been going through for these past six months.

He had been sure to write clinically and matter-of-fact, but that couldn’t hide a lot of the just plain scary stuff he’d been put through. Huang’s first entry had been similar to mine, but the Grey City had spit him back out before the demons caught him. From there, he’d started to develop an extra sense and had to learn to use it, fast, to avoid being killed.

I skimmed over the next few paragraphs and flipped the page, to find a very strange sketch had taken up the next spread. Jagged lines formed a tall, narrow tower that seemed to be ringed with outward-facing spikes. Small buildings that barely rose to a quarter of the size of the tower had been penciled in around it, giving it a sense of massive scale.

I turned the book around to Huang. “Is this… the CN Tower?”

“Er… no?” He took the book from me, pointing to the spikes reaching out of the base. “This is a tower in the glass district I found pretty early on. I guess it’s possible it’s… like, based on the CN Tower somehow.”

“Looks, uh, spiky,” I said. “Why is it important?”

“It’s a sentry tower,” Huang explained, placing the book down between us. I peered at the tower and could see no entryway or staircase, though that could have been due to poor artistry. “At the top here, there’s a room. I can’t really explain how it works, because I have no earthly idea, but it interfaces with my life-sense and sends it out over a wide area.”

“And that would help us how?” I frowned.

“If it works for me, it might work for you,” Huang pointed out. “We could find out more about how things are laid out. Plus, if you want to learn how to control your sense so you can stay alive in there, the tower might be your best chance.”

I sighed. “I guess that’s the only lead we have. But what’s the point of learning to control that sense? If I can’t get to the waterfront somehow, I’ll never be able to defend myself.” There was still a crowd of demons camped out on the docks, surrounding that bell-tone—a bell-tone I could now reluctantly accept as the key to my survival.

 “Well, the tower should make your sense a hundred times more powerful,” Huang said, leaning forward, eyes gleaming. “If you can sense the whole Grey City, you could probably find another way to access the waterfront.”

I looked away. Maybe, when you were a dragon, it was easier to be excited about the adventure and not just plain terrified.

“…Sorry,” he said after a second, leaning back in his chair. “I… I’m not trying to be weird about this. It’s just amazing to actually make progress after so long.”

I took the diary back and started to flip through a little more slowly. After the first few pages about entering the Grey City and trying to figure out what the hell was happening, many of the entries were very short.

He shifted. “What are you looking for?”

“You kept these notes for a reason, right?” I asked. “Maybe there’s something in here that’s useful to me.”

“If there is, I’ll tell you. You don’t have to read the whole thing.”

I pinned him with a look. “Maybe I’ll notice something you forgot.”

He gave a heavy sigh. “Fine. Whatever. I didn’t know anyone else would be looking through this, so sorry if things don’t make sense.”

I turned my attention back to his scrawl. In July, about a month after he’d first entered the Grey City, there was a short entry that read rather strangely. It said simply: Normal routine was interrupted today. A demon caught me, one of the sentries. It waited outside the range of my sense until my guard was down and attacked.

Before it could kill me, I sensed something that I had never sensed before in the Grey City. I can only describe what I sensed as musical or inviting, but I don’t really have the words to describe it further. This strange presence filled my senses completely, until I couldn’t see or hear anything else.

I experienced a sense of increased awareness. After that, my memory of the event is spotty, but I now have the ability to change into a large monster, like the demons themselves. I’m on even footing with them now. I can’t help but feel this should cause some degree of distress or bodily disassociation, but so far I have only felt relief. Now I will be able to defend myself.

“Huh,” I said. “You sure pass over the dragon thing pretty quickly.”

“It’s not easy to describe,” Huang replied. “That’s why I was hesitant to just tell you about it when we first met. You’ll understand later.”

I sighed and pushed the book away. “I haven’t been willing to admit it because it freaks me out so much, but… it would be a relief to be on even footing with those monsters. Being hunted, with no way to defend yourself, is awful.”

“We’ll get there,” Huang insisted. “Next time we end up in the Grey City, we’ll find each other. I’ll get us to the sentry tower, and we can give my idea a shot.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” I suggested quietly.

“We’ll think of something else. I’ll distract the demons and you can make a break for the waterfront, I don’t know. Once you’re able to transform, our biggest hurdle is over. Together, we might be able to take them all out.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay. Yeah. That’s what we’ll do.”

“Did you, uh,” Huang flipped through his book, “have any more questions?”

I felt like I should have about a million, but nothing specific came to mind. I closed my eyes and mentally scrolled back through all the crazy stuff I’d experienced over the past few days. One thing stood out that we hadn’t yet discussed.

“Since we’re trying to be more honest,” I said, “since this started, I’ve been having… dreams. I think they’re related to the Grey City. I keep seeing this monster with white eyes.”

Huang tilted his head. “Interesting. Do you mind describing it?”

“Er, well… they started pretty vague and weird, like normal dreams. I don’t remember when I had the first one, but it must have been weeks ago.” I hadn’t brought my dream journal, but the dreams were etched into my memory even without it. “They’re always underwater, I know that much. The morning before I actually entered the Grey City, this monster showed up in the dream, this crocodile-dragon looking thing. It has white eyes like the demons, but I’m never scared of it. It always seems like it’s intelligent and wise, unlike the demons, which always feel… wrong.”

Huang nodded slowly. “What happens in the dreams?”

“Not much. I swim around. Last time I dreamed I found a sword, but it was too big to hold, and then—” for a second I could see it with vivid clarity, the dragon’s face right in front of me with those enormous white eyes piercing into mine. “Uh, he got up in my face and a voice said something about me not being able to run.”

“That’s… very interesting,” Huang said.

“Well? You get anything like that?”

“Nope,” he said, to my dismay. “Maybe I’ve had a couple nightmares since all this started, but nothing like what you’re talking about.”

“Okay. Huh.” I leaned back in my chair, feeling stupid. “Maybe I’m losing it?”

“I don’t know. It can’t be a coincidence that you started seeing this dream before you entered the Grey City, with the white-eyed monster and all.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “Before this, I didn’t really dream at all. And these dreams seem to pick up from where the last one left off; I don’t think that’s normal.”

“I don’t know what to say, except you should write them down and see if we can get anything useful from them,” Huang said, rubbing his chin. “Maybe something is… trying to talk to you somehow, to communicate in a way that it can’t with me.” His musings were interrupted by a yawn.

I valiantly managed not to yawn myself. “I guess. Listen… I should probably get back. Got work tomorrow, you know.”

“Yeah, I have a test,” he said dismally, glancing at the stacks of books on the table. “So, that’s probably going to go well.”

“You have my sympathy,” I said, for once glad I never went to college. Studying all night on top of all this extra-dimensional craziness was not something I could get behind. “So, uh… see you later. Whenever we end up in the same place again.”

He showed me out and I went back into the cold night.

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