Even if Monday nights tried their best, nothing could keep Toronto quiet.

It was after-hours at the Royal Ontario Museum. The place with dim with soft lights beaming over the building’s many artifacts and displays. Footsteps echoed throughout the building, courtesy of the place’s watchmen. Security personnel patrolled the floors, flashlights out in case one of them sensed something lurking in the shadows.

Seldom did anyone sneak in without giving themselves away with some foolish fumble, like touching a display case rigged with a sensor alarm. Guarding the ROM was an easy job, so a lot of the guys took to relaxing. Around the museum there were tables topped newspapers with chairs, if anyone wanted to take a load off and get caught up on the news.

The security office was in the basement. Vic, a middle-aged man with creases on his forehead, had his coffee cup in hand and his eyes on the many monitors taking in security footage from across the museum. He sat at the desk with the coffee maker and radio behind him, the radio blaring sports talk out into the concrete halls.

Two hosts chatted on the programme.

“Next Monday is Thanksgiving. I don’t know about you, but in my family, we always hosted the big dinner on a Sunday.”

“We do Saturday, actually!”

“I’d prefer Saturday, honestly, but it’s not my choice. I’m not going to pass up a Thanksgiving dinner because of a Sunday. My wife’s mom, she knows how to roast a bird.”

Vic turned the volume down when he saw Raul approach the door, a tall & lean man with a trimmed but well-rounded beard.

“How’s the night looking?” asked Raul, leaning into the door frame.

“As lively as my mom’s retirement home!” said Vic.

Raul caught that Vic was listening to sports radio and thought to stir up some conversation. “Hey– who you rooting for in the Nationals?”

Vic finished a loud slurp of coffee. “The Cubs. The Marlins traded in some guy named Spooneybarger. Spooneybarger– can you believe this? How am I supposed to take them seriously?”

Raul chuckled and lifted himself off the frame and went back out to watch the grounds, twirling a flashlight. Vic waited until Raul was twenty paces away before he turned the radio back up.

The museum was not an easy place to break into, but nobody was prepared for superhuman powers. Above the prairie animals exhibit, something rumbled in the vents. The subtle noise trailed down from the roof until hit a grille above a display case for prairie rodents. Through the blades of the gate, a purple liquid emerged and drained down on a roof of the case. Moonlight came in through the window and shimmered on the liquid as it poured out of the vent but instead of spreading over the surface and spilling over the edges, the puddle grew vertical, rising like bread.

As it absorbed all of the purple water flowing from above, the puddle rose and developed a shape. Out of its form, the figure grew arms, legs and a head. The liquid on the surface of his body and legs solidified to make a tank top and pants in the same hue appeared on its body and two eyes appeared inside its head.

He smiled. “I’m in!”

It was Kay, water being extraordinaire.

The boy hopped off the top of the display and hit the ground with a loud slap– louder than he felt comfortable with. You got to keep quiet, he told himself. He peered down the halls to see if there was any patrolling security guards around, but he couldn’t see anything. Nor could he hear anything. As far as he concerned, he was alone with all of the museum’s works for him to see.

He relaxed and strolled around the room, taking a gander at a stuffed buffalo– or was it a model? Kay thought he heard footsteps coming up the way but when he peaked out into the hallways, he didn’t see anybody nearby. Although, he could hear some voices in the distance. He would have to be careful.

He kept to the shadows and moved around the building, going down a floor to find the Egyptian exhibit. There was a security guard there so Kay waited in darkness until the guard took his walk away from the vicinity before Kay popped out and strutted around the floor, gazing at items around the room.

History and culture weren’t things Kay was interested in, but it was neat to be strolling through a famous museum when no other visitors were there. Aside from dodging security guards, he had the whole place to himself.

He saw one of those fancy Egyptian coffins laying down in a display case. He walked up to it, reminding himself not to touch anything. He kept his arms– two extensions of his fluid body– at his sides.

“Whoa,” said Kay with the volume a gentle breeze. “Fancy.”

He looked around the room at all the pieces of Egyptian culture. The Egyptian exhibit was heavily promoted back in grade five when his class went on a trip to the ROM. Kay had to miss out because he got the flu that week. After all those years, he found his way to the museum and the Egyptian display lived up to the hype!

Travelling around the museum, he turned a corner and found the section with the prehistoric man exhibits. There were some dioramas, man-made completely, but in some of the smaller cases an assortment of old tools, weapons and clothing were displayed– all of them sorted in varying glass cases.

Kay walked up to a diorama with a couple prehistoric men attacking a woolly mammoth. For a second he wondered if the mammoth was a taxidermied one like the one upstairs but then he remembered that mammoth went extinct long before taxidermy was a thing. Kay read the plaque in front of the arrangement: Before agriculture, human tribes relied on hunting and foraging to survive.

He looked at the mammoth, its front legs up– ready to crush the men attacking it with spears and stone axes.

Kay chuckled and turned away from the display. He pictured an imaginary crowd and put his hand out, imitating the mannerisms of a scholar. “Here we have early man hunting a mammoth, providing enough food to last them until the medieval age.”

The boy smirked. He really had a knack for being funny when nobody was around. The boy’s smirk dropped and he looked around the museum, everything still and dead. He suddenly felt the emptiness of the place.

Vic went over to the coffee maker to get himself another cup. The radio hollered in his ear as he took the cup underneath the spout and let his cup fill up with a black pool. The night was young so he kept his hands off the sugar and milk. Black as a midnight pool, but at a higher temperature. Vic took a good sip then went back to his seat, staring off into space as he got the skim on hockey.

“Looking ahead to the 2003-2004 season,” said the radio host, “the Leafs are adapting to the switch-up nicely, says new GM John Ferguson Jr. With Quinn fully focused on coaching, he hopes to take the Leafs to the cup.”

“When you got the guy that won Canada gold at the Olympics,” said the other host, “that’s where you want him. On the ice, with whistle in hand.”

Vic nodded, taking a sip from his coffee. His eyes scanned the monitors, but everything seemed fine. No artifacts out of place, and men walking their patrols. All the guards had their flashlights on, keeping the area safe. All but one, actually. Vic got up and looked closer at the fella walking through the Greek display: he was a little small for a security guard.

Wait, he wasn’t a security guard!

Vic grabbed his radio. “Report. We have an intruder wandering the Greek section.”

“On it,” replied another.

Vic kept the radio in hand as he watched the situation. He gazed at the perp: the intruder didn’t look like he had a real head. His arms danced in the light, too. Was something wrong with the camera, or was the museum under attack by some kind of spectre?

Kay didn’t have a furious interest in ancient history but it was hard not to be wowed by the many pieces of Greek art occupying the gallery. He walked through the showcase and let his eyes feast on the many aesthetic pleasures. Even the walls were decorated with murals. The most impressive sights were the statues though.

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The watery lad looked over a headless statue. Ancient Greece might have been old, old times but somebody knew how to put a statue together, even if that statue lacked a head.

Greek culture sure was nice when it wasn’t being pushed in Kay’s face.

The aquatic boy went up to a vase with art painted on the side. It was a nice vase and the art was eye-catching. Between the man painted on the vase fully exposing himself and a particular statue of a lady with no clothing on, Kay could imagine there would have been some smirking and snickering on that fifth grade trip he missed.

“Hey you!”

Kay looked over to the gallery entrance see Raul, a security guard with a flashlight tight in his hand. The man approached.

“Shooooot!” said Kay. He looked around for an escape and saw a vent in the corner above a cabinet of glassware. It was time to scram. Kay took off running, taking a mighty hop over a floor case full of Greek tableware.

Raul went at Kay with a heavy dash and a fierce expression but that dash slowed to a stop and that expression of ferocity loosened as the man got a better look at who he was chasing. The intruder’s body looked to be made of some kind of plasma. Raul had to rub his eyes as watched the intruder sink into a ball and then blast up on top of the cabinet, its purple form shining in the light like a pond underneath the moon.

Isaac, a middle-aged guard of shorter stature, came running in the other entrance, flashlight away and ready to grab a punk. He saw the perp moving across atop the cabinet. “Get down from there!”

He was wondering why Raul was staring and not doing anything but then Isaac got a better look at the creep and saw that the creep’s face and arms were looking more like slime than flesh, with light passing through the wobbly shapes. The creature hopped up into a vent, pushing itself through the gate and out of sight, at least that was until the slime creature dropped back out, falling on the cabinet.

That vent was blocked with a seal Kay couldn’t squeeze through.

Kay reformed into his personable form. “Nuts!”

Isaac walked up to the cabinet and got Raul’s attention with a hand-wave. “Help me up.”

Raul took Isaac’s side and held his hands out for Isaac to step upon. Raised up to the top of the cabinet, Isaac had the intruder at arm’s length but when the man got a look at the creature– the humanoid stranger with a body made of some kind of alien substance– Isaac lost his nerve. He didn’t want to touch that.

“Grab it!” said Raul, struggling to hold up the weight of his co-worker.

Kay looked around. He saw another cabinet against the wall across the room he could jump– although it would take a mightier kind of jump. He compressed himself down, his body features dissolving into a ball of water, then sprung out, firing himself across the room and over to the wall.

“Oh for the love of Pete!” said Isaac.

He hopped down from Raul’s grasp and the two ran over to Kay, Raul rotating his arms to twist out the pain he garnered holding up his co-worker.

Kay walked down the top of the sectional wall, passing over pipes and ducking under vents. The Greek section was on one side of the wall with the security guards closing in on Kay’s distance from below, and on the other side was another gallery although Kay didn’t have the time to see which theme it was going with.

“You there!” shouted another security guard, looking up at Kay from the gallery below, “Stop!”

More security personnel were gathering and it was only going to get worse the longer Kay stayed. He saw another duct with its opening hanging above the gallery. The water boy swung off of a pipe onto the top of that vent’s end, rattling it with his body weight. He had to arc his body down into the grille, but he pushed his aquatic body through the slots and after his head rematerialized on the other side, he saw that nothing was blocking the vent, so that was his way out.

The security guards looked up at a monster, its body pressing through the shutters. It was a couple metres off the ground; nobody was going to be able to reach it. Isaac looked around and saw a ladder resting by the water fountain. He took it over beneath the duct and snapped out the legs so that it could be placed. Raul and the other guy pressed down the hooks to sturdy the apparatus and also to volunteer themselves to hold the ladder, leaving Isaac the one who would actually climb up and nab the creature.

Isaac was regretting not taking that job at that pig farm out of Listowel.

Kay had his head in the vent, but getting the rest of his body inside was going to be a challenge. If he dropped his legs, it likely would have pulled him out of the vent and had him crash to the floor. Not ideal, especially since bickering was heard below and it sounded like the security guards were right there waiting to capture him.

What to do… what to do…

If he concentrated, Kay could melt his body so that he could slip right into the vent and get out of there. He wasn’t good at doing something so intricate with his watery form and he was feeling the heat coming up from below, so he didn’t have the time to pull off that maneuver. Instead, he put one of his arms– his shoulders still outside the duct– up to the gate and let it seep through to join his head inside the vent. He gripped the vent as best as he could from within– pushing his arm up into the top corner of the corridor– and snapped his other arm through the gate. There wasn’t a lot of room in the vent but when you were composed of magical water, getting squeezed together wasn’t as uncomfortable as it would be if flesh.

His legs, liquid feet planted on top of the duct, were curved around the edge of the vent so tightly that his feet lost grip, slipping off the edge of the top of the vent and flopping out over the room.

The vent churned and Kay yelped, the weight of his legs pulling his body out of the vent.

Isaac took another slow step up the ladder, ready to grab the plasma being hanging out of the vent– kicking its legs in all directions like a chicken with its head cut off. He didn’t know what he was going to do if he actually got a hand around the creature’s body, but that was a problem for future Isaac. At the moment, he was still climbing steps.

Kay pushed his arms out and pressed against the duct corners hard to slow his fall out of the vent. With the grille sliding up his torso towards his head, Kay raised his knees to the gate, but couldn’t get them high enough to enter the gate. Even pressed hard against the walls, his body drifted out of the vent.

“No, no, no, no!” said Kay.

In one final try, he whipped his knees up and let them break apart into a liquid splash so that they smacked on the gate and melted into the rest of his body. The weight dragging Kay out of the vent relaxed and he was able to climb himself back up into the duct while his melted legs drained through the gate. Once most of his form had passed through into the vent, he let his entire body melt into a slime ball and he glided through the vent, looking around for an exit.

Isaac sighed and climbed down from the vent. Raul kept his ears open to hear where the intruder was going but the vents quickly went silent. The spectre has disappeared.

The other guard got the radio. “The intruder slipped into the vents, heading up to the roof.” He put the radio on his belt and ran off, leaving Isaac and Raul behind.

The two guards couldn’t believe what they had seen. Was someone pulling a prank on them? Was it a magic trick or some kind of new hologram technology?

Isaac looked around at the room, looking over the gallery’s assortment of statues, jars, and art. He gestured a finger around the room. “Y-you don’t think one of these things could be haunted, do ya?”

“I don’t know, Isaac,” said Raul, placing his hands on sides and looking up above the gallery, retracing the path that the intruder took on its way out. The thing moved like a living ball of Silly Putty.

Isaac remembered when he walked in the Greek gallery Raul was standing there, staring at the creature. Isaac slapped Raul on the shoulder. “Hey! You got a good look at it. What did it look like?”

Raul shook his head, staring into space. “I don’t know. It was some kind of ghost thing!”