*** SUBCUTANEAN ***

by Aaron A. Reed


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Each rendering of Subcutanean is different. This copy was generated from seed #50153 and is the only copy generated from that seed.
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PART ONE

DOWNSTAIRS





I am not yours, not lost in you, 
Not lost, although I long to be 
Lost as a candle lit at noon, 
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

Sarah Teasdale












I don't want to tell you this. I don't want to gut you, reach inside and pull things out, not again. Old wounds and sleeping dogs, you know. Tales better left untold. And you've heard this one, haven't you? Even if our stories, our endings, never quite agreed.

But that's why I'm sitting here, writing this. If it's only a story, maybe we can understand, make peace.

Pretend it's not ours.

Here's a story I don't think you ever heard. In sixth grade I had a brief friendship with a weird, indrawn kid with the same unhealthy imagination as me. He liked to _possible_. When you catch something from the corner of your eye, he'd explained, and it looks for an instant like something fantastic---a witch's face in a hedge, a huge monstrous far-off thing instead of a tiny nearby insect---instead of correcting your perceptions, you let yourself keep believing in that first impression for as long as you can. You _possible_ it. Hold it in your head, your mental model of what's real. Keep your mind from asserting the boring truth it thinks it knows and trust the one your senses first perceived. And I'd tried this, with him and on my own, off and on for a few weeks until I scared myself because I was getting too good at it. So was he: I realized it before long when he started scaring me with stories about the things he'd seen, and I think his parents or the school figured it out not long after, because they took him away and I got sent to a counselor for a few weeks just for being friends with him.

But you don't unlearn something like that. Not completely. I'd become an expert at seeing things that weren't there. Useful, sometimes, but usually, usually...

But it taught me an important lesson. Just because something isn't real doesn't mean it can't hurt you. I'll never forget some of the things I _possibled_, even if they never really happened. There's truth in first impressions, in fleeting visions, even if it's not the kind we're trained to trust. Stories make shapes, build structure out of shadows: calcified shells that linger long after muddled innards fade. They're not the real thing, as gloriously as they pretend to be. But still. Sometimes they're enough.

So. Maybe a story is a language we can speak. Find in the telling the truths that matter. Embellish, excise. Revise. Revision.

Although our story was never just a story. It happened. You still believe that, don't you?

Fine then. Here goes. You ready?

This is what happened when we found some stairs underneath my bed, and decided to climb them. Climb them all the way down.





Chapter 1




Right from the start things were wrong, but I couldn't see it. Maybe I didn't want to. Or maybe I'm being too hard on myself. There wasn't exactly a roadmap for what happened, a script to follow. But it's undeniable that even on that very first night, the night of the Russian dance club, everything was already wrong.

I hadn't wanted to go to the club. But Niko insisted. "Russian techno, man, one night only. That new place over by the old stadium. Lots of sexy people will be there, including us." I ran out the usual litany of excuses: I had work in the morning, I had Bio homework to do, I hated going out to clubs with a burning passion. He batted them all away without any obvious effort, and so that's how I found myself pressed up against a wall listening to music so loud it hurt, arms crossed, feeling miserable, wishing I was back home listening to a Dvořák symphony instead.

When I could see him through the crowd, I watched Niko surf it, laughing, gesticulating wildly as he somehow held conversations despite the deafening racket, and dancing his ass off, mostly with girls, and once or twice with guys, whether out of politeness or genuine interest I couldn't tell. I'd never really been able to tell. He flirted with everyone, flashed the same manic energy in all directions. I'd worn my rainbow pride bracelet at his insistence, the one I'd bought a few months back and mostly been too chickenshit to wear (it was a college town but a conservative state). I might as well have worn a bag over my head, despite Niko's assurances that The Gays were almost definitely very into Russian techno, he was pretty sure. "Or maybe all those pulsing Slavic rhythms will make some drunk straight guy want to get all experimental and shit," he said, waggling his eyebrows. "Never know."

I knew. And I was right: nothing happened. No one talked to me, or even noticed me, and standing there, I couldn't imagine why they would, why anyone would want to talk to an acne-faced geek in clothes that didn't fit, leaning against a grimy wall and wishing he were anywhere else.

From across the club, Niko caught my eye, and gradually danced his way up to me, strobe lights washing out his tawny skin, twisting through his dark curls. He arrived within the eighteen-inch earshot zone and shouted something.

"What?"

He put his lips up to my ear, shouted again. "Having fun, Ryan?" He pulled back with a cheeky grin, and cackled in delight when he saw my expression, grabbing my arm. "Come on, man," he yelled, "let's get some air."

Dragging me through the crush of people, still dancing, bopping his head to the music, waving at some people and smirking seductively at others, he somehow managed to maneuver us through an impossible blockade of bodies without stepping on any toes or getting stepped on in return, toward a back exit I hadn't even realized existed, all while making eye contact every few steps to make sure I was okay. I'd never figured out how he managed to do so many things at once. Sometimes even one thing at a time was too much for me.

We pushed through a metal door into a blessed pillow of colder, quieter air, where a handful of smokers stood around chatting. I took a deep breath, more relieved than I'd expected to be. Niko pulled a single cigarette from behind his ear---he'd quit; someone inside must have given it to him---and bummed a light from one of the smokers. We walked a few paces farther out into the parking lot, enjoying the night air.

"So what's wrong?" he finally asked.

I sighed. "This isn't really my scene."

"Leaving the house isn't really your scene, yeah, I get it." He blew smoke from the side of his mouth, raising one wry eyebrow. "But you have to take chances, man. Get out of your comfort zone. I mean what was the point of coming out if you never actually _go out_?"

"Well it's fucking easier for you," I said, feeling miserable. "You can sit next to some girl in class, bump into her on the street. Say sorry for spilling her coffee, waggle your eyebrows, and boom, long term relationship."

"Yeah, that's definitely how that works," he said. "So if it's that easy, Ry, how come I've been single for the last forever?"

"Your terrible fashion sense, probably," I said, looking down at my sneakers, although truth be told it was a mystery to me too. It had been almost a year since his last relationship. Still more recent than mine. "Okay, lame excuse. I'm just... bad at meeting people. And I don't get how you're supposed to do it when the music's so loud you can't even think."

He shrugged. "Serendipity is everywhere. So give it an excuse to happen to you. Get out there, take chances. I mean there's gay people everywhere, dude, even in this shithole state. You just have to man it up and figure out who they are."

I looked up at him, startled, but he was looking away towards the horizon, expression distant, thinking about something. I looked back down at the ground before he could see me looking. _Stupid._

"Should I take you home?" he asked at last.

"You don't need to babysit me." My mood was blackening. "I can look after myself."

"So do. No point making yourself miserable if you're not having fun."

"I thought..." I didn't know how to finish. I thought he'd wanted me to come. I thought if he were here, maybe I'd enjoy it. I thought I could pretend to be a person who enjoyed clubs, crowds, Russian techno. I'd thought, despite all evidence, that tonight would be different.

"You're right. Guess I should jet." Hoping my voice wouldn't betray what was welling up inside me, I looked up, met his eyes with the best fake smile I could muster. "Catch you later, man."

He looked straight back at me and I could tell he wasn't buying any of it.

Flicking the cigarette onto the asphalt, he ground it out with his heel, clapped my shoulder. "I'll come with you."

"No, you don't have to," I said, flooded by an awkward admixture of guilt and relief. "I'm fine. You go back in there and have some fun. Find some hot pixie chick with feathers weaved into her hair and go wild."

He shot me an annoyed look, brushing black curls back from his eyes. "Orion. I said I'm coming with you." He put an arm around my shoulder and guided me into the parking lot. "The hot chicks in there obviously have terrible taste in music, if that's what you could call what they were playing. I expect you might have some opinions about that."

"_Well_," I said, emphatic, and laughed, surprised at myself. At him. He had a way of turning things around like that. Defeat into victory. No into yes. Everything was better again, at least for now.

Talking, laughing, we struck out into the night for the long walk home.


#


We'd been friends since freshman year of college and best friends since the year after that, and by now felt like something more, placidly absorbing jokes about being joined at the hip, going everywhere together. We were; we did. Especially since his accident, we'd had a profound if unspoken level of companionship I'd never felt with anyone. Usually I was content with that.

In some ways we had so little in common it was astonishing we'd become friends, and that led to frequent arguments, sometimes rising to breakup levels of drama. At other moments it seemed like the universe had meant us to find each other. Over the years we'd grown together, like two plants in the same small pot. It had been an especially tumultuous four years of college---although I guess it feels that way for everyone---so shared roots twined us together now, half-remembered fragments of stories and selves: skipping a funeral to camp together in the rocky canyons of Brushwillow, sharing long silences amidst the lakes and pines; pulling all-nighters on mad projects with desperate stakes; driving to the next town over through a summer midnight, windows rolled down and air thrumming through, desperate to find fresh vegetables for reasons that seemed incredibly important at the time, buzzed from both caffeine and alcohol as in so many stories involving Niko. In our defense the alcohol was supposed to go in the ragu.

Walking back home from the club through the chill night air with him was a relief. The night felt endless, anonymous, an escape from daytime problems. In the fall we'd be starting our fifth year of college, neither of us particularly close to graduating with any particular degree, and for the first time that felt ominous. The future staked out before us our whole lives was running out. A blank canvas ought to have been exciting, but any direction we could imagine to go in seemed blocked off, already closed, inaccessible or unrealistic. Friends were picking already between the remaining well-flagged routes: getting careers, getting married, getting pregnant, getting gone to new cities, new lives, new starts. It would be our turn soon enough.

By the time we hit the top of the hill and saw the house, we were ready to be back indoors. We'd moved in a few weeks back, Niko and I and our friends, mostly his, students and lapsed students and a few brave graduates, still settling into the rambling old off-campus house we'd found in the newspaper. (Cast your mind back to a time when kids like us had figured out the internet but people old enough to own property hadn't, so instead of browsing classifieds our bandwidth went entirely to downloading all the music in the world.) I'd gotten ranty about real music on the walk back, and as we stepped through the juddering screen door, its metal-on-wood screech already a familiar sound, I had a half-dozen songs queued up to play for him.

Mentally, I mean: digital music players hadn't caught on yet back then, although it was still tragically too late for my records to be anything but anachronism. Vinyl wouldn't start making a comeback for years and was deader than dead. Maybe that was why I liked it. When we moved in I'd stacked my crates of LPs in the closet, so now as we tromped up the stairs to my room and dragged them out to hunt for the albums I wanted to play, we got annoyed at the lack of anywhere to put them. So that was how I ended up on my hands and knees, searching for a way to open up my bed.

"Bed" was generous: it was a mattress, thrown on a raised wooden platform built into a corner of the room. Mattress-sized, it had seemed like the sensible spot to put one, but it also felt as if it should have had some storage space inside. I'd never found any handles or hinges, but with late-night logic it seemed ridiculous that the thing couldn't be opened somehow, and because I can't leave well enough alone and because unsolved challenges annoy me, there I was on hands and knees fiddling with the paneled edges of the platform, shoving and kneading and banging on them. When something finally gave with a satisfying _chunk_, I whooped in satisfaction; but leapt back startled when the whole platform groaned and swung up, pencils and organic chemistry textbooks sliding off the mattress onto the pitted hardwood floor.

Underneath was a set of steep stairs down.

"Whoah," Niko said, "Jackpot."

They were carpeted in the same dark beige as the rest of the house, which looked like someone had redecorated in the seventies and died decades later unaware style had moved on. Twelve steps led down to a landing where they twisted right and reversed. Cramped, but bland and familiar: the walls paneled in that same fake wood as the rest of the house, lit by those same tacky wall sconces. All as you'd expect from the stairs down to a basement, except we were on the second story and the house already had a basement, which emphatically did not connect through my bed.

Niko laughed in astonishment. "What the fuck is this, man? What's down there?"

"Hell if I know. More secrets." We were grinning, because this sort of thing had already happened a few times since we'd moved in. The house had been my find. The group of us were getting older (or so we thought then) and were looking to move up in the world, so we pooled our resources to go in on a house in the pleasant tree-lined neighborhood a few blocks farther out. It was an old house, but big, in good repair, and, most important, cheap: we were all paying less rent than when living in pairs or alone. I'd claimed the funky second-floor patio room in a lumpy wing extending into the backyard, clearly a later addition, and Niko snagged a creaking and stuffy room next to mine which he dubbed "lovingly misshapen." A lot of the place was like that: a half-landing here, an awkward angle there, bits taken out and bricked over on some whim or other. The house had expanded and contracted over the generations, it seemed, in decades-long breaths.

The listing hadn't mentioned a secret passage. But it also hadn't mentioned the closet with a door in the back leading to a dusty, forgotten room (which now housed a dusty, forgotten game of Axis and Allies); nor had it mentioned the extra bedroom in the basement tucked away around a corner and behind an unlikely-looking door. These small discoveries gave the place a quirky, rambling feel, and I loved it. My whole life I'd had dreams about finding new rooms in houses I'd lived in, each time with a thrill of discovery, of learning your cozy domain still had surprises, things left to find. Maybe it came from moving around all the time as a kid. Or maybe it said something about me.

I still had them, the dreams. I didn't know they were about to get much worse.

Niko touched the angled bottom of the bed platform and looked at me, as if for permission. He gestured grandly downwards. "Well, Orion, should we check it out?"

I gave him a formal bow, feeling puckish, giddy. "Indeed, Nikolaos, let's fucking do it."

He grinned and tousled my hair, bounding over the lip. He stooped as he took the first few steps, black curls brushing the underside of the tilted platform.

"You going to fit down there?" I smirked. "This looks made for normal-sized people, not basketball players."

"High school power-forward Nick appreciates your validation of his identity, thanks," he called back, almost to the landing. "College dilettante Niko, though, wants to know if you're fucking coming."

I hesitated on the threshold, strangely reluctant.

He turned from the landing to look back up, arms folded. "I'm not _that_ tall, am I? I've only got like three inches on you and your---" He flailed a hand up and down at me. "Your demographically average carcass. Stop giving me complexes."

_Actually you're exactly four and a half inches taller than me. But who's counting._

He shrugged, continued down the next set of stairs and out of sight. "Later, skater."

I flipped his skinny ass off and followed him down.

Despite his complaints, Niko was in fact wearing a basketball jersey, but an ironic one from the thrift store, for some hopefully-fictional team called the Reagans. He wore a purple blazer over it, which I trust is all I need say about his fashion sense. Somehow, it worked. His horrifying ensembles always worked, whereas the clothes I'd buy, new or used, turned ugly, permanently wrinkled, and the wrong size by the time I got them home. "Dear Diary," I'd imagined writing in my nonexistent diary, "I get now that I'm destined to die alone. You can stop sending me signs." You used to put self-deprecating shit like that in diaries, back before social media was invented. Not bothering to keep the actual diary was about as unsatisfying as typing and erasing status messages without ever posting them; so if you do that a lot, I can relate.

Anyway. Niko had shrugged his shoes off when we'd gotten to my room, and now his bare feet sunk half an inch into carpet as he tromped down the stairs. His feet were hard not to notice: maybe it was all the basketball, or the Greek ancestry, but they were like statuary. Perfect.

The stairs were steep but otherwise unextraordinary. Around the corner, more of them dropped to a second landing. We stomped down, Niko's drunken excitement leading us on. Past that corner was one more landing and one final run of steps. They opened into a large, windowless room.

It was bigger than any other room in the house, maybe thirty-five feet across by fifty or sixty long. (Logically it ought to have been the same size as the house's footprint, but both the dimensions and orientation were wrong for that.) It had the same beige carpet and brown wall-paneling, tacky faux-bronze wall-sconces, and a plaster ceiling eight feet up. No windows, not even those awful basement ones that fill up with dead leaves and spider webs. A smattering of old couches and end tables lined the walls, along with the expected bits of floor lint, carpet stains, wall gouges, and other subtle remnants of long occupation. A cool, musty smell suggested said occupation had been a long time ago.

Five open doorways led out: two along each long edge, and one on the far wall opposite the stairs.

"Holy shit, Ry, this is fucking amazing!" Niko's eyes lit up as he walked a few paces in. He flexed his bare toes on the ugly carpet. "It's like a whole secret underground lair!"

I felt the same thrill, tempered with hesitation. Did our landlord somehow not know about all this extra space? Was it some kind of forgotten bomb shelter? Niko was already talking about throwing parties down here, cleaning up the couches. A secret basement hangout spot.

We called it Downstairs, big D, without really thinking about it.

The architecture was making my head spin, though. Someone else's bedroom was under mine. I felt an indignant vertigo, and made Niko come resolve this mystery before exploring any farther. We went back up to my room, then downstairs---regular lower-case downstairs---to reconnoiter. There was, in fact, an odd protrusion into the kitchen underneath and to one side of my room, and when we peeked into our absent housemate's bedroom around the corner, a mirroring blocky bulge in there. So together those two bulges explained the stairs, though not why you'd build a staircase in the middle of a wall like that. But the house was full of those weird angles and edges, so it seemed in character.

We went back Downstairs and poked around a few of the side hallways. Pretty cramped, but no worse than other god-awful basement apartments I'd seen students living in. Like some of those, there were no windows anywhere, which made sense: it felt too far down. Rooms opened off the sides of the halls (those cheap particle-board doors, those rattling brass-plated tin doorknobs). Some were carpeted and looked like they could be bedrooms; others had bare concrete flooring like a laundry or utility room. Most had a piece or two of abandoned furniture, all decades out of date, dusty, and anonymous.

The hallways branched at the end: we picked one and saw both ways passed more doors before making L-turns, each in opposite directions. Those crappy wall sconces were everywhere, so despite the lack of windows, it was almost too bright. They were all lit, and weirdly enough we couldn't find a light switch anywhere.

"Are we paying for all this electricity?" Niko asked, alarmed.

"We haven't gotten our first bill yet." I raised my eyebrows. "Good thing we're splitting eight ways."

We didn't exhaustively explore, beyond checking another hallway and seeing that it, too, branched and snaked off, shedding rooms left and right. Niko had started down that one, but I stopped, hit by a wave of unexplained dizziness, and put a hand against the cold wall.

He stopped instantly. "You okay?"

"I don't know." My head pulsed with another wave of nausea, this time with an undercurrent of dread, maybe from not knowing what it was. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"You drink too much at the club or something?" I shook my head. I'd had one beer. And this didn't feel like being drunk, or like a migraine, or like anything else I could label.

It just felt like something was wrong.

"I need to go lie down," I said firmly.

He tousled my hair again, but gently. "Okay, man. Hang on just one sec. I need to see the end of this fucking hallway and then we'll get you back upstairs."

I didn't want him to leave but couldn't think of any sane reason to stop him that didn't sound needy, so I nodded and let him go. Too many vaguely ill feelings were churning around inside me to sort them out from each other.

"I'll wait here," was all I could say, the thought of walking back up twisting stairs feeling for a queasy moment like a bad idea.

He was already halfway down the hall, but lifted a hand in acknowledgment. Moments later he'd turned the corner and was gone.

It was suddenly very quiet.

I sunk to a sitting position, knees at my chin, back against the fake wood-paneling. I tried to turn my focus inward, self-diagnose whatever was happening, but my thoughts slipped off the sense of growing unease like a car on black ice, unable to gain traction. Instead I focused on the feel of the carpet under my butt, the smoothness of the wall at my back. Tangible, external things. Safe.

_Please, please hurry back._

Something changed around me, subtle but significant. Head swimming, I couldn't lock on to what, at first, was different. I blinked, squinted.

The light. The play of light around me had changed, gone darker, even though none of the wall sconces in my field of vision had gone out or gotten dimmer.

We were at a T-junction, where the hall we'd come from, back to the big room with the five doorways, had branched in two directions. I was slumped against the wall facing the way we'd come, head turned towards the right-hand fork, the way Niko had gone.

I decided the dimming must have come from the lights in the hall behind me, the one we hadn't explored yet. They must have gone out.

Careful, still fighting nausea, I turned my head.

I've always had an unhealthy imagination. This has manifested itself in various ways over the course of my life. Staying under the covers reading comics instead of doing homework, or sleeping. Satisfying myself with vivid fantasies about guys I crushed on rather than risk asking them out in real life. Obsessions, where each new hobby would become all I could think about. Things get lodged in my head and they stay there, sometimes for too long.

The unexplored hall was dark. The wall sconces were unlit, and the dark brown walls sucked up the refracted light from the other two hallways, so that the end of this one, where it turned another corner, was right at the edge of shadow.

But there was enough light to see that someone was standing there.

I stared and
tried to unsee the human shape, to resolve it into a trick of angles and darkness: turn off my brain's over-eager pattern matchers, finding predators in a coincidence of edges. And at the same time, I could feel that old part of me fighting this, trying to _possible_, to keep seeing what it thought it saw the first time.

A person, standing there in the dark. Watching me.

It moved.

The shadow took a step forward, slow and deliberate. Like a deer not sure if it's seeing a bobcat or a bush. I couldn't see its eyes or expression but it was facing me, looking at me.

And then I realized who it was.

Whether my eyes had started adjusting to the dim light, or the _possible_ in my brain was shifting into high gear, I couldn't say, but like the solution to a puzzle plunking full-formed into my head I recognized, now, who was standing there at the end of the hall.

It was Niko. Obviously.

A wave of relief crashed over me. "Jesus, man, you scared the shit out of me." Something was still wrong but I didn't want to think about it. "I, uh. Probably need to head back up," I added, keeping my voice cheerful, looking down at the carpet, looking anywhere but him, still standing at the end of the dark hall. Everything probably made sense, if I could just see how: why he hadn't said anything, why he was standing there. Did the hallway he'd left down even connect to that one? I clutched the carpet under my hand, feeling for the solidness of it, an anchor back to reality.

Silence. I looked back up, unwillingly. The face was still dark but I recognized the way the body held itself, the silhouette it made, the shoes. Unmistakable. I knew the shape of his body as well as I knew my own.

I squinted into the darkness, seeing something else now. Something barely visible, even deeper in the shadows.

There was more than one of him.

The second stood just behind the first, so I couldn't see its face either: but it was the same silhouette, the same height, the same shape. It was another one, identical. Another Niko. It had been there all along, hidden behind the first, and I could only see it now because 
they were moving again, lifting up the other foot, still slow, still hesitant, following the double in almost perfect synchronicity. Like they were glued together.

They put the feet down, gentle, soundless on the thick carpet.

Another pace closer.

I wondered how many more were stacked up behind them. How many more I couldn't see, each pressed up against the last, a line vanishing into the darkness, stretching back god knows how far, patient, waiting for something I could never understand.

I wondered what they wanted.

I wondered how fast they could reach me if they started to run.

"What you looking at?" Niko asked from behind me, and I _leapt_, fucking leapt to my feet like the floor was electric, whirling around to face him, body in full panic as all the building adrenalin flooded through me in an instant; panting and overwhelmed with terror and nausea and a terrible, stabbing relief at seeing him, seeing a him that was familiar instead of a thing that wasn't.

"The lights back there went out," I said, gasping, not looking behind me. Also, more certain: "I need to throw up."

He clapped my shoulder, grim. "Let's get you back upstairs."

I let him shepherd me away. I didn't look back down the hall.

But as we left, his arm protective on my shoulders, he frowned. "Pretty sure those lights were out when we first came down here, man."





Chapter 2




Turned out Niko hadn't found the end of the hallway. It had twisted a couple more times, he said, then split again. I'd felt fine after a good night's sleep, but neither of us seemed in any hurry to head back Downstairs the next day. It might seem odd that we didn't go back down there to map the whole thing out right away. I can't really explain it, unless Niko was already feeling the same irrational foreboding as me.

Another thing my overactive imagination had ruled out for me was horror movies. I'd realized this at some point in high school when they were still a kind of macho rite of passage. One of the last ones I watched was a terrible direct-to-video job about a creature that lived in the woods and hunted down the teenagers who kept blithely wandering in. When you finally saw the monster it was a huge let-down---terrible make-up on an even worse actor. But before you saw it on screen, you heard it, and the movie's whole gimmick, its thing, was that the creature would parrot back anything said to it, in the original voice, flawless. It wasn't clear if it understood the words, or just mindlessly mimicked the sound. But while it was slaughtering each hapless cheerleader it would repeat her terrified cries for help back to her, perfectly. Would keep screaming in her voice even after she'd died.

That concept settled into my brain and ate away at me for weeks, though I couldn't explain why it was so terrifying. Why should the worst thing to hear from a dark woods at night be not snarls or growls or witchy laughter, but your own voice, yourself? And yet it was. A few weeks later I jerked awake well after midnight certain something was standing in the shadows of my room, and as I reached out frantic for my lamp I knocked it off the nightstand and it crashed to the floor, the bulb shattering with a tinkle, and I stupidly called out "Is someone there?" and as I did I realized if I heard it repeated back to me from the shadows it would be the end of me, a clean break through my sanity, even if it was a joke or a prank or a hallucination or, dear god, a _possible_ my brain had decided to believe in at that precise moment, and as I clutched my blanket too terrified to go to the light switch on the wall I prayed, pleaded with my brimful imagination not to choose that moment to overflow, to improvise, to believe in things that weren't really there, like it had each time I'd read too much into smiles or gestures, each time I'd watched vivid movies play in my head sprung from single sentences in books or looked at clouds and seen, really seen, fantastic shapes in them, and I'm pretty sure that was the exact moment I decided horror movies weren't for me.

Anyway. I knew there wasn't really anything down there, Downstairs, and as the memory faded so did the lingering terror. Replacing it was a giddy sensation like having too much candy. There was a whole huge secret basement under our house that only we knew about. It felt good to have a secret. Another code in our personal dictionary, something only for us.

Niko was terrible at keeping secrets. By next afternoon, all the other housemates had seen Downstairs too, as well as a couple of his lacrosse buddies and one or two of his closest board game buddies. (He'd made a point of changing majors and hobbies once a quarter for the past year, while continuing to swear up and down to his immigrant parents he was still majoring in Economics.) I tried not to take the betrayal personally.

But the strange thing was that no one seemed much interested. Everyone agreed Downstairs was a cool find, and made for a sick hangout spot, but no one cared to venture too far outside the big central room, or spend too much time down there. Everyone other than Niko and I would get bored, start talking about other things, eventually drift back upstairs to whatever they'd been doing before.

Odd, in hindsight.

We did end up dusting off a couple of the old couches down there, and moving down a half-dozen boxes of my records, and made the Big Room available as a kind of secondary hangout space, quieter than the crowded front room with the TV and people always coming and going. Some of the empty rooms off the big one turned into overflow storage for everyone's miscellaneous shit, but remained otherwise unoccupied. 
An old bandmate of Niko's who'd dropped out of college to start an art collective got really excited about free studio space, moved in a bunch of junk for some unfinished sculptural masterpiece ("I'm going to need at least twice this many fishbowls," she apologized), then never came back again. Maybe it was a con.

I liked most of Niko's friends, but I don't think the feeling was mutual. I'm sure they all wondered what he saw in me.

Sometimes, I did too.

Once, on a bad day, I'd been sitting on the roof of the sciences tower, crying. It was supposed to be off-limits but we'd figured out how to get up there one night: another shared secret. Keeping me company was a rusted-out telescope, a hulking cube of HVAC, and a ten-story drop. I wasn't seriously considering anything but took some morbid comfort from having the option at hand.

The access door creaked open and I looked back with a guilty start, ready to be reprimanded or maybe arrested. But it was only Niko. He came over to sit next to me, pulling out two cigarettes and angling one at me. Uncharacteristically, I accepted.

We sat there smoking for a long time.

"How did you know I was up here?" I finally asked.

He shrugged. "Came home and you weren't there. Kinda had a feeling."

We sat there looking down the gently sloping hill of campus, its landmarks and avenues made abstract and manageable. A miniature city you could wrap your arms around, contain. Everyone in the world tiny, except for us.

No one did end up moving Downstairs. Zero natural light is kind of a downer, even for well-adjusted people. Niko made some noise about bringing a girl down sometime. ("Dude, it's a secret make-out lair. You're doing college wrong if you don't get some action down there.") But we both knew he wouldn't actually do it.
It was too quiet, for one thing.

It felt a lot like the rooftop. Forbidden, charged with risk, with dangers from within and without. But also with a tense electricity of connection. A bond. Like if I went down alone, he'd know I was there. And vice versa.

Like we were the only people who knew how to get there.

Maybe because of that, definitely because of day-to-day distractions, maybe also because we enjoyed prolonging the sense of mystery, and, okay, because I was sulking, more than a week passed before we got around to scoping out the place in depth. Niko spent a day in an extraordinary funk of fierce depression followed by an equally intense reversal, like he'd do from time to time, and I took advantage of his high to prod him into going to poke around the rest of Downstairs. He took to this plan eagerly, and seemed pleased when I told him I'd been waiting so we could do it together. "Ryan," he said fondly, "in an emergency, you know, you can do things without me. I'll allow it."

"Well, I kind of thought this was like, our thing, you know."

He fell onto one knee. "Oh, my noble Orion," he intoned, "canst thou e'er forgive such rank betrayal, breaking this our vow of secrecy? Will thy gentle heart recover---"

"Okay, okay," I said, waving my hand. "Get over yourself."

He leapt up with a wicked grin, made himself a pot of coffee, put on a truly awful and unseasonable Christmas sweater, and headed Downstairs with me to map out what was down there.

Except we couldn't.

We'd grabbed flashlights in case of dark corners or burnt-out bulbs, but didn't need them. Every hall was lit by those cheerful bright wall sconces, and most of the side rooms had a single bare bulb in the center of the ceiling. But it was the damnedest thing. We couldn't find an end to the place. We picked one hallway and wandered around for maybe fifteen minutes, through T-junctions and ninety-degree corners, past dozens of doors and half-furnished rooms. The same wood-paneled walls, seventies carpet, and wall sconces were everywhere. Downstairs was aggressively bland but disturbingly unbounded. It went from weird to surreal to sort of frightening, how much of it there was.

I'd poked my head into a room with an enormous old bureau---empty, like all the furniture---and a nook at the far end, a wooden dowel running along the top---like a doorless closet, maybe. I wandered over to investigate, hoping for a few dusty hangers, the remnants of an old calendar, some comforting sign of former human occupation. No such luck.

I mean, the place looked like people should have lived there, but aging furniture aside, there was almost nothing around to prove it. Anonymous marks scuffed the walls, the odd piece of lint dotted the floor, but there were no height marks penciled on door frames, no piles of old magazines, no bright squares on dirty walls where pictures once hung. Not a single old candy wrapper or forgotten sock. I ran my hand across the wooden dowel and wondered who had put it there, if anyone had ever hung clothes from it.

I turned around and saw Niko hadn't followed me in. I felt a moment of disorientation. The door seemed a long way away.

No---blinking, I realized it wasn't that. When I'd turned back toward the doorway, it wasn't there.

I frowned. The doorway was on the other side of the room from the one I'd instinctively turned to. I thought I'd walked along the wall to get to the nook, that it and the door had been on the same side. But the door was on the opposite wall, diagonally across from me.

I closed my eyes, suddenly dizzy. I remembered keeping the faded white wall to my right as I crossed the carpet to the closet nook. But when I looked again, the door was still where it was, in the opposite corner.

Obviously it hadn't moved.

_You're doing it again._

_Don't see things that aren't there. You fucking idiot._

Pushing away the uneasiness, I crossed diagonally across the carpet to the door, unable as I did to shake the sensation that I was tracing a different path than the one I'd walked coming in.

That this door led somewhere else.

I pushed my head out into the hallway. It looked just the same. Of course, they all did.

"Niko?"

No answer.

_Perfectly fine and normal_, I thought, keeping a firm grip on myself. I walked down the hall in the direction we'd been headed, peeked around the corner.

More hall, more carpet, more doors. No Niko.

I shouted his name again, louder.

Nothing.

It was so quiet.

I started down the hall, then halfway down thought maybe I should go back, not forward; then stopped in confusion. If you're lost you're supposed to stay put, not wander around.

_I've never been lost in a basement before._

The knob on the nearest door started to turn.

My heart tried to jump out my throat. The door thumped. The knob turned the other way, faster, more violent.

With a shuddery squeal the door burst open, Niko's shoulder leading the rest of him out.

"Stuck," he said, jiggling the knob. "Oh, goddammit. I spilled my coffee."

We looked down at the new dark stain on the carpet. He licked droplets from his fingers, inspected a candy-caned sweater cuff. "Thank Christ it didn't stain the cashmere."

"That is _not_ cashmere," I said, rolling my eyes. "Hey. Don't wander off on me like that."

I didn't want to admit how spooked I'd been, and thought I'd done a good job hiding it, but of course he knew me better than that. He stared into me and seeing those emerald eyes full of concern was enough to melt my fear, transmute it into something infinitely better.

"Okay," I laughed. "You're not in trouble. Just stay close, yeah?"

"Sure, and sorry, but hey." His eyes had a mischievous glint. "Come check it out. I found

stairs."


#


The new stairs led down into darkness. From the top we could see about twenty or thirty steps before things got shadowy, and enough of the shadows to tell the stairs kept descending for a while after that.

Niko had been excited to show me, but now he perched uneasily on the top step. I got out my flashlight and switched it on, pointing down. "Come on. Maybe there's some answers down there." He still looked hesitant. I put on my straightest face and my best P.I. voice. "Don't you want to get... to the bottom of this?"

"Mmm." He frowned in concern. "I just wouldn't want your boyfriend to get jealous, me spending all this time down here with you."

This was a little joke of his. I didn't have a boyfriend.

But he flicked on his own light, waved me on. "After you, amigo."

There were maybe ninety steps. Other than that, and the fact that we were lighting our way with flashlights, they seemed like any other stairs in a house built during the Ford administration and sinking into senility. That same damn carpet. They must have bought up the whole factory.

The wall sconces were still there, but no longer lit. Still no light switches anywhere.

When the stairs finally gave out, it was into another hallway, nearly identical to the ones above. This one felt a bit smaller, and the carpet a darker shade, looking more brown now, though maybe both impressions were a trick of the flashlights.

More rooms opened off this hall, though these had more variety. A few doors were locked, which we hadn't encountered on the upper level. I searched the walls in vain for colored tacks with ripped corners of posters still attached, or even a crumpled gas station receipt. It wasn't like the place was sterile. Another room had a drain in the floor with stains running up to two big utility hookups on the wall, and the faint smells of dust and moths and yellowing wallpaper glue were everywhere. What was missing was anything personal.

The weirdest room, though, was the kitchen. It was too big for a kitchen, for starters, and had too much stuff in it: too many oven hookups, too much haphazard ceiling ventilation, red-handled water valves everywhere, and a dozen jumbled stove tops with holes where the burners should be. There were parts of appliances but no whole ones: bundles of wiring, even a kitchen sink. Niko tried the faucet and we both were startled when water came out. It was like a half-assembled restaurant kitchen with all the equipment jumbled together, rather than a row of stoves here, a row of dishwashers there.

I found what was clearly the plumbing for a toilet hookup in the middle of one wall, and had to put my foot down about this making any sense at all.

"Maybe a wall was supposed to go up here?" Niko shined his light between the bathroom plumbing and the nearest stovetop, but the kitchen stuff extended to either side.

"Who puts a toilet in the middle of a kitchen?" I didn't get it.

He shrugged.

Just the one door, too, and nothing nearby that might have been a dining room or pantry. A few doors down was a long, narrow room paved entirely in yellow bathroom tile and graying grout. A rust-pitted shower head, two immobile handles, and dirt-clogged drain clustered at one end, thirty feet away from the opposite wall.

"You get the feeling whoever built this place didn't exactly know a lot about architecture?" Niko's voice was hushed in a kind of reverence. "Everything down here's off, you know? Like, who was that old lady in California who built that house with all the doors that went nowhere and fake hallways and everything?"

Sarah Winchester. I told him. Except her house is now an internationally famous tourist attraction. And this place was bigger.

Someone should have known about this.

Niko was thinking along the same lines. "Seriously, though. Who the fuck built all this? And why? For what?"

"No clue. But if there's any explanation, it's probably down here somewhere." I even half-believed that, which felt nice.

"I feel weird walking around a crazy person's house." His eyes darted around the empty room. "Not that I expect, like, pit traps and rotating blades. But it feels sort of... unsafe."

He kept glancing at me like he wanted me to say something that would make him feel better, to save him, so I tried my best like always. "You ever notice old horror movies have lots of really improbable architecture?" I babbled. "I want to meet some of those architects. Probably all dead now but I still want to grab them by their ghostly lapels and ask why the fuck they built all those crawlspaces and secret torture rooms and basements without proper lighting."

"You're freaking me out, man," Niko said. He held the light under his face, washing it out to a ghostly tan as his eyes rolled up into his head. "Vreeaking meee owwwwt."

"Attractive."

"You would totally date zombie me. Rotting flesh and all. Don't pretend you wouldn't."

"You're half-skeleton already. There's barely any flesh to rot off you."

"Come on." He grabbed my shoulder and propelled me down the hall. "Let's keep going." The rough of his hand shocked some courage back into me. My shoulder felt cool when he took the hand away.

A few more paces down the hallway, it opened into an octagonal room, a closed door in each wall other than the one we'd entered through. We tried a few. Each door opened onto another staircase leading down.

"But _seriously_," Niko said, alarmed. "This cannot possibly be here. It doesn't make sense." He looked towards me, desperate. "Ryan, help."

"Okay," I said, grasping at straws. "Maybe it's like a whole underground network. All the houses in the neighborhood connected together. People used to smuggle drugs or something. Underground railroad."

"Decor's too new," he countered. "And we haven't found any other stairs back up."

"Bomb shelter. Last owner decided to modernize. Dreamt of turning it into the ultimate student housing complex. Collapsed from construction debt before he could get rich off desperate kids willing to live in windowless asbestos-lined death traps."

He shook his head. "Let's go back, man. I don't like this. Something's not right."

"It can't go on forever," I said. "And whatever's deepest down will be most interesting, right?"

I talked him into it. After all there was nothing dangerous down here: it wasn't like exploring an abandoned mine shaft. Everything was in perfect repair even if no one seemed to have been here for years.

Big as it was, it was only architecture.

The staircase we picked dropped down for a few dozen steps, then turned at a weird angle and dropped some more. It wasn't necessarily smaller but felt more claustrophobic. Maybe that was my brain reminding me how deep underground we must be getting. At most of the landings a new hall branched off, each at a different angle. We kept going down.

After four or five weird angled twists the stairs ended, opening up into another corridor. Everything felt exactly the same, despite being stories deeper underground. It was as bland and anonymous as office space in a skyscraper.

There were more doors.

We shuffled past them, flashlights glinting off doorknobs and---_there_ was a difference---instead of the wall sconces, fake candelabra now. You know the ones, with those awful faux-candles that flicker orange and don't fool anyone? They weren't lit now, anyway.

We stopped less to try side doors now, eager to get to the end of the hall, or the end of something, at least. Find some answers.

For a long stretch there were no doors at all, just wood paneling, so that when we did come to another door it was a relief, like exhaling held breath. Niko tried it, and it swung open onto a room unlike anything we'd seen so far.

It was concrete and tall, with rounded corners at the bottom. The ceiling was higher than the walls, like we were in a pit dug into a bigger room. In the center of the concrete floor was a drain.

Niko, intrigued, grabbed the bottom of a short ladder that ended around shoulder-height and pulled himself up to the top of the pit, flashlight swinging wildly. I clung to mine, keeping it steady like a candle I was afraid would blow out.

I felt afraid, without quite knowing why.

He shined his light back down at me. "Yep," he said, "it's a swimming pool."

That made sense, by some incredibly loose definition. "What's up there?"

He turned away from the lip, moved out of sight. Patterns of light swam across the ceiling as he swung the flashlight around. Something rattled. "Another kitchen." His voice bounced oddly off the rounded concrete. "This one's all furnished, though."

I was getting more and more unsettled, unaccountably so. "Any more doors?"

The reflections of light moved to and fro, like something alive. "Nope. And there's no place to sit and eat, either." He paused. More scuffling. "Funny. The fridge is locked. Like, there's a keyhole on the fridge and you can't open it. Who does that?"

The door we'd come through, I noticed, was the same as all the others: cheap particle board, regular brass-plated knob. Not especially waterproof. I bent down, pushed it shut. Sure enough, there was a gap between it and the top of the carpet. Like you'd expect for any regular door not, you know, at the bottom of a swimming pool.

"Hey, Niko?" I straightened up, keeping my voice steady. "Let's go back." I wanted to add _I don't like this_ or maybe _I want to get the hell out of here right now_, but some irrational fear gripped me that if I showed any weakness, he'd be the one who wanted to keep going down.

Going deeper.

Something rattled up there, wood scraping wood. "There's silverware in these drawers," he called, as if he hadn't heard me. "Cups in the cabinets too. Super seventies. I think Barbarella had these cups."

His voice was starting to seem unreal. I felt how tenuous a connection I had to him: a voice, the glints of his flashlight on the ceiling above the empty pool. Echoes and shadows. The distance between us seemed vast and growing vaster, maybe already unbridgeable.

And then. Maybe I imagined this, between the weird echoes of that concrete pool bottom and the nerves I'd worked up. But I thought I heard muffled voices. Faint. Coming through the wall.

Coming from the other side of the closed door back out.





Chapter 3




"Nikolaos," I hissed, trying to be loud and quiet at the same time and stumbling away from the door. "Get the fuck back down here, right now!"

He must have heard something in my voice, because seconds later his head poked over the edge, and he slid down the ladder and dropped the last few feet onto concrete. I could see him, I could suddenly even smell him, and that tangible reality felt overwhelmingly reassuring. I grabbed his arm and even his awful not-cashmere sweater was comforting.

"What's up?"

"I thought..." The noise had gone; I felt foolish. "I heard someone out there."

He walked to the door, pulling away from me. "No don't!" I hissed, but his hand was already on the knob, he was already turning it, pushing the door open, stepping out into the hallway. Shining his light left, back the way we'd come. He turned, to shine it to the right.

And for an instant I was sure

	something

around the corner was going to grab him and in the same instant with nightmarelogic certainty I knew it was my fault for imagining it, for possibling it

	for making it real

but nothing happened. He shrugged.

"I don't hear anything, man."

Neither did I.

"Let's get back anyway," he said. "I'm not even sure how long we've been down here. Your boyfriend's going to kill me."

As we walked back up the hall through the zone without doors, I looked behind me. I noticed with a frown we'd left the door to the pool room open.

It felt wrong, somehow. A bad omen.

But no way in hell was I walking back to shut it.


#


We lay on my closed-again bed and stared up at the ceiling, giggling. We couldn't help ourselves. It felt good to be out of there, to have the whole ridiculous mystery literally at our backs. Even an old mattress felt like shield enough.

I'd felt better with each upward step. The earlier rooms were familiar as we hit them in reverse: the octagon with its stairs down, the bright yellow light of the upper halls, Niko's coffee stain ("so typical," I told him, "you've marked this place with your distinctive musk") and the big empty room with its couches and piles of everyone's junk. By the time we'd climbed the final stairs to my room and swung the bed shut, we were giddy, flushed with excitement, brimming with explanations and theories.

"It must run under the whole neighborhood," Niko was saying. "Connect to other houses, or maybe it only used to. Maybe no one knows about it any more." He grinned. "Except us."

"It doesn't make sense," I was still protesting, but it felt more silly than sinister. I shook my head, embarrassed by my freak-out earlier. I was spooking myself for no reason. If someone else was down there, wouldn't they have come to say hi?

_Maybe they did._

I shook my head again. It was cool, and nothing was going to get in the way of that.

I did some legit research in the next few days, in between shifts at my job in the admin offices working through an endless backlog of filing---this was back when you could still pay tuition at a state college with a part-time job. Our landlord stopped by to see how we were settling in and reassure us he'd fix the things he said he'd fix before we moved in, which he clearly wasn't going to fix. He was a younger guy with kind of a stoner vibe, on the whole not very plausible as a landlord. When I casually asked how he'd come to acquire a hundred-year-old house in a rather nice college town, he said he was trying to make a living off rental properties and we were the first students to move into this one. He mentioned he'd gotten a good deal on the house because of the maintenance it needed (embarrassed cough) and because the city sold it at auction and they "weren't allowed to play bidding games and shit" with it.

"So the city repossessed it or something? Do you know who owned it before?" I asked, practically exuding casual nonchalance.

"Old dude," he said, "no heirs. Just the house, though, not the whole estate. No furniture." I remembered that from when we moved in: it had led to a lot of scrambling at yard sales and favors involving friends with vans. "Real weird guy," my landlord added when he saw I was interested, warming to the subject. "Had lived here since forever, I guess. Kind of a shut-in."

"Oh yeah?"

"What the neighbors said," he confirmed, and waggled his eyebrows while circling a finger near his ear, but apparently didn't have anything more specific to add.

I didn't ask if he knew anything about a secret basement the size of a city block, because I was afraid our rent would go up.

Down at city hall I looked up the property history, which I'd hoped would be more interesting than the chemistry I should have been studying. The house had indeed been built about a hundred years earlier. The records were aggressively boring. Certainly nothing about enormous sub-basements or a fleet of mining vehicles. I even hunted through microfilm of the local paper for anything unusual the week of construction. No dice.

After that, the trail went cold because I had another acne flare-up, a bad one, missed a shift at work and got chewed out by my supervisor, and felt generally miserable about myself for a couple of days. I finally pulled myself together enough to get some groceries and refill the expired prescription on my acne cream. I was in the bathroom, rubbing it on my pockmarked face and thinking about how much I'd been lied to as a kid. _Oh, that'll clear up when you get older._ Also _You'll figure girls out eventually_ and _There's someone out there for everyone_. Classics, all.

Niko popped his head around the corner. "Dude. Phone's for you." He blinked at me. "You realize when you do that, it looks like you're rubbing jizz all over your face."

I didn't really see it. The last thing I thought about when looking in the mirror was anything sexy.

He must have guessed what I'd been thinking, because he punched my shoulder. "Dude, get over yourself. You're not Quasimodo." He sighed. "We need to get you a boyfriend."

"Store was fresh out," I said, but grimly resolved to start wearing my pride bracelet out in public again. "Who's on the phone?"

"Some lady from the local history society? I thought she had the wrong number, but she asked for you by name."

I had in fact called the history society a few days earlier, and the voice on the phone belonged to an elderly woman who breathlessly said she'd love to chat about the old houses in our neighborhood, and invited us over to the society office for a cup of tea. The office turned out to be her living room. We sat on a sun-faded couch sipping something tasteless while she fawned over us ("so _wonderful_ to see young people take an interest in local history"). It was awkward. I asked if she knew anything interesting about our address or any people who used to live there. She wasn't familiar with the house, although the mayor had once lived on our street, she told us, and she thought most of the houses near there had been built around the same time. Flailing, I asked if she knew anything about tunnels or underground rooms around town. She spun a not-very-interesting story about how during Prohibition a local bootlegger had dug a tunnel that led from his basement all the way to a poplar in the neighbor's backyard---nearly fifty feet long. I smiled and nodded demurely until I found a way to excuse us.

Meanwhile Niko had been making excursions on his own. I got kind of upset when he told me---I'd wanted it to be our thing, something we did together---but he said he'd come get me the instant he found anything interesting, and didn't make too big deal out of it. It really bothered me, though. I thought about going on my own too but it felt wrong without him there. I itched with overwhelming curiosity but also a certain dread that kicked my heartbeat up a notch when I thought about walking too far down those halls, those stairs. I told myself I was being stupid but my pulse didn't listen.

Niko spitballed the idea of making a map, but figured it would be tricky. "A lot of those angles are non-standard," he said. "Those funny twists on the stairs down from the octagon, right? They're more than ninety degrees but less than the next sensible unit---one thirty-five or whatever. I have a feeling if you measured them they'd be fractional. Like one twenty nine point two three eight three eight." He laughed. "Three eight three eight three eight three eight three---"

"Quit it."

He smirked. "Irrational."

Some of the halls sloped up or down, too, enough that you could feel it when you walked them. Keeping track of what level everything was on would add to the confusion. I dragged discussion back up to the bigger picture. "It has to be mostly running east, doesn't it? Because of the hill. That big stairway doesn't go down far enough to get under 12th Street."

"I don't know." He visualized with closed eyes for a moment, then shrugged and opened them, shaking his head. "Hard to keep a sense of direction down there. We'll bring a compass next trip. You think those new GPS things for hiking would work?"

"No, they need line of sight to the sky. We could leave breadcrumbs, like Hansel and Gretel."

"We might have to, if it's much bigger." His eyes widened. "Can you imagine getting lost? Like some estate agent's nightmare. 'My god, I'll never be able to replace all this carpet!'"

We had a party down there. By unspoken agreement, the housemates didn't advertise the extent of the place: I put police caution tape from the dollar store across all the doorways out of the big room, as a joke, though I suspected I wasn't really joking. It was fine if everyone just saw a chill basement hangout spot. Much levity was made from the fact that you had to climb in and out of my bed to get there, or to go back up and take a piss.

We brought down a foosball table, some Christmas lights, lots of booze, and the stereo. I protested that my record collection was for archival purposes, not playing at parties, but I was overruled. It was an okay turnout and everyone, for all the usual reasons, focused on getting good and drunk. My usual social ineptness kept me from truly enjoying myself. Some girl tried to hit on me; I was so startled by this I blurted "Actually, I'm gay," which was even more awkward out loud than it sounds written down, and she laughed noisily and commiserated about the tragic ironies of dating for a few embarrassing seconds before vanishing, and only too late did I think to ask what the hell had compelled her to talk to me in the first place, because certainly whatever it was had never worked on any guys.

Not that I'd figured out how to go to parties where guys who'd be interested would hang out, anyway. I hated dance clubs and the couple gay bars I'd stepped into had given me massive anxiety attacks; I still felt a rush of panic when I thought about walking through the door of the tiny LGBT center on campus, even after years of passing it on the way to classes. I'd always thought things would get easier in college. At my enormous high school there hadn't been a single out queer person my freshman year, and I'd had no intention of being the first. Not only because of crippling shyness, self-image issues, and fear for my actual life, but because I literally did not know how to come out. Ellen hadn't done it on national TV yet when I was in high school; Kevin Kline hadn't done it at the movies, let alone sultry-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal; not enough gay teens had been famously killed or killed themselves to inspire anyone to tell us It Gets Better. Gay people basically did not exist in my universe, and yet there was I, somehow, gay regardless. College was supposed to have been an improvement. But once I got there, I failed to blossom into a beautiful flower. Maybe I should have moved farther away, to an actual big city, rather than somewhere close by and familiar and still red-state as fuck: but the problem wasn't my environment, I came to realize, it was me. It wasn't that I had issues with being gay: the internet had given me plenty of opportunities to come to terms and feel okay about it. I just didn't know how to be it in public, with other people, on any level but especially a romantic one, especially after what had happened in high school.

Meanwhile the straight people were having a nice party. Niko, wearing a blue bowling shirt with "My Name is BONG" stitched into the lapel and a pair of tight-fitting lime-green jeans, was shadowing some girl he'd been trying to hit it off with. It wasn't going well. They got into an argument early in the evening (Dear Diary: I tune out when I hear the phrase "That's _not_ what Marx said") and she stormed off up the stairs. Niko fumed, then stormed off himself, reappearing minutes later in a Linkin Park t-shirt and torn jeans and carrying a bottle of tequila, which he used like a police baton to corral me into a corner to do shots with him.

"Said I dress too fucking weird for her," he said with a hollow Ashes to Ashes sort of intonation. "Is _this_ fucking normal enough? Whatever. The hell with everyone." I could drink to that. We threw back a shot, sitting on the carpet with our backs to the paneled wall. Niko was always swinging between extremes: at high ebbs he wanted to be friends with everyone, at low ebbs I was the only person in the universe. He was busy furiously ignoring the rest of the party, which I wasn't feeling much connection to either.

He sniffed. "You know when we first moved over here I didn't speak any English?" I nodded; I'd heard this story before. "My parents thought it'd be cute to dump me into third grade like that. You know, _full immersion_." His face twisted.

I poured him another shot, thinking I probably shouldn't, but by then I already had.

He leaned back against the wall, looking worn down. "I tried so fucking hard to fit in. To get to where just opening my mouth didn't mark me out as a freak. By the time junior high started none of the new kids even knew. Master fucking performance." He tugged at the t-shirt, a corner of his mouth twitching. "Meanwhile the fam all expects things to be exactly like we'd never left. Like America's just a little rest stop, like of course I'll want to go back to Greece and have a million kids as soon as I graduate. My aunt asked me at Thanksgiving why I wasn't married yet. I reminded her I am twenty-two years old and still in the middle of fucking college. I didn't say fucking." He held the shot glass up to the light, squinting at it suspiciously. "Anyway. She said neither of those things stopped my uncle."

I was staring idly at a dark-haired girl and a bearded jock flirting on the couch across the room, words swallowed up by the thumping of the stereo. Thinking about the music echoing down all those empty halls. "I can't even imagine getting married."

"Yeah, neither can the government."

"Not just that, asshole." I side-kicked him, then frowned, trying to figure out what I wanted to say. "I don't know. I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend the rest of their life with me. Or that I could believe someone would say yes, if I wanted to with them."

I closed my mouth, feeling stupid, but he was nodding. "Yeah, I dig you. Thinking you could be that for someone. Believing in yourself that much." He was frowning. "I can't believe in anything they fucking want me to be."

He tilted his head back, eyes closed. "Well, you ever make it there, you got a best man lined up at least." He opened one skeptical eye. "Or are there two best men? How would all that even work?"

"I don't know." I closed my eyes, too. _Dear Diary. Figure out how all that even works._

We listened to the music for a minute, surrounded by people who naturally knew how to Saturday night, without training. It was kind of nice being near them, at least.

Niko said, very quiet: "Can't get married till you go on at least one date."

"Thanks," I said. "Good tip."

"For reals, though. You need to put yourself out there, man. Get over whatever hang-ups you got going on."

"New topic." I moved to pour myself another shot. He grabbed the bottle, held it out of reach.

"Nuh uh. Confession time. I went, now it's your turn."

"Fuck you."

"Seriously, man." He sat up straighter, fixed me with that look that told me I wasn't getting it. "I know you've dated before. In high school, right? Wasn't his name Brandon or something?"

"Bradley," I said against my will, something inside me deflating. I still didn't want to tell him, but realized I was going to.

"So what happened? Bad breakup?"

I closed my eyes, not wanting to rip open these scabs. Not on a Saturday night I'd almost been enjoying.

"I broke up with him," I said quietly, but it was enough for it all to start coming out. "Yeah, okay. The story. So I knew him from band, and he cornered me after practice one day. Someone told him I was into weird old music too. He's got all these bizarro cross-genre mix tapes in his backpack, pulls some out to play for me. Adorable. We hung out in the band room listening to them for hours after everyone else had gone home."

I sighed. "It took me a while to figure out the signals he was sending because I had no idea how to, like, receive them. But we figured it out in the end. It was, you know. All that first love stuff. Sneaking out at midnight. Lots of giggling. It was amazing. At first."

"Uh oh." Niko slouched back down, settling in for the long haul.

I tried to keep talking even though I could feel myself clenching up, chest muscles trembling. "It just became apparent pretty quick that he was way, way more into me than I was into him. He _loved_ me with every part of himself"---I could feel Niko's eyebrows waggling but I pressed on, knew I couldn't stop the story now---"and it was so fierce it was... like being burned. It _hurt_, that I couldn't love him back like that. I didn't know how to take it. And then one day at lunch in the cafeteria I was going to break up with him and I think he sensed it coming, wanted to stop it. So he---oh god." I closed my eyes and, yup, there they were: moisture squeezed out between them. "We weren't out, you know. In our town. At our school especially. Nobody was. He stands up on the table, little Bradley Thompson, shouts for attention, shouts in a louder voice than I'd ever heard him use that we're in love, that we didn't care who knew it, that our love would last forever and nobody in the universe could stop it."

"Shit," Niko breathed.

I took a quick breath. "I don't really remember the rest of that day. I know we got sent to the principal's office because that's where my mom picked me up from. There were adults in the cafeteria so I don't think anyone tried anything, but I'm sure the reaction would have been... laughter. Disgust. Thrown banana peels. Maybe some kids would have thought about stopping it, standing up, supporting us, but I doubt anyone actually did, would have dared. But I don't remember. It's all blank. Just... the aftermath."

"Yeah?"

"We broke up," I said, "and I want to talk about that part even less." I pulled the bottle out of his loose fingers and finally poured the shot, downed it.

"That is the worst coming out story I've ever heard."

"Not really." I shrugged. "I didn't get kicked out of my house. Didn't get sent to the emergency room."

"I mean. Still," he said. "So look, just so you know. Dating is generally speaking a lot better than that."

"So I hear." My mood was bottoming out into pitch-black despondency. "Haven't really worked up the enthusiasm to find out, though."

From the corner of my eye I could see him looking at me, the flashing Christmas lights lost in his black curls, more swallowed up than reflected by them. He seemed fragile in the shifting light. Sharp, but delicate. Able to be shattered. I knew he was trying to think of something encouraging to say and all at once I couldn't stand the thought.

I pushed out words. "Can we just, like. Not talk any more."

"No problemo." He slumped back against the wall. But he leaned into me, just a little. I leaned into him, too.

We stayed like that for a few minutes.

Then some friends of his tromped down the stairs and he leapt up, pulling a sparkling smile and manic laugh out from somewhere, pouring drinks and giving high fives, and dragged me with him into the noise, and one of his friends talked me into getting trounced at foosball, and everyone kept drinking. And the moment between us faded into ephemera and lost any possible significance, even to me.

Not long after, Niko disappeared. I figured maybe he'd gone back to his room to be alone: despite appearances, his social energy was limited, had to be rationed. I didn't think anything of it.

Midnight passed, unnoticed.

Some time later the party started winding down. Soon it had winnowed to a couple hardcore foosballers, the girl and the beardy dude making out on the couch, and a few sozzled, earnest conversations in corners. I extracted myself from one of these, but on my way upstairs to take a leak I noticed that the flashlight we'd left by the hall---the one that led to the octagon room, the long stairs, and the pool---was gone.

Had he gone exploring? Tonight?

If he had, he'd been gone a long time.

An hour later the party had just about wrapped. Still no sign of Niko. I'd checked his bedroom---empty---and polled a few housemates. No one had seen him since the start of the night. I worried.

I was standing at the hallway wondering if I should go look for him, when a shadow appeared at its end and my body tried to jump out of my skin.

It was him, of course. But my relief only lasted for a second. As he got closer, a prickling sense crept into my bones that something was wrong.

He grinned when he saw me, but it was forced, and he was walking too fast. His face was beaded with cold sweat, and he was ashen, like he'd been throwing up.

He gave me a jaunty wave as he got close, but didn't slow down.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Peachy," he said. "Going to bed though."

"Did you---" I wanted to say _see something down there_, but couldn't quite work up the nerve. "---have too much to drink or something?"

He clapped my shoulder as he passed, but didn't look at me, and didn't respond: just kept moving, as fast as possible while still making it look like a casual stroll, toward the stairs. The way back up.





Chapter 4




After that everything changed. He'd lost all interest in Downstairs. If I brought it up he'd change the subject; if folks were hanging out down there he wouldn't come. When I finally asked him directly about this, he shook his head.

"I don't think it's a good idea to be down there, that's all." He tried to play it off casual, but his jaw was set.

Something about him had changed. His wardrobe turned straight-laced. He went back to calling himself Nick. He watched a lot of sports on TV. 
And things were strange between us. Our conversations didn't go quite right, didn't fit in their familiar grooves. We'd get derailed, trail off. We started talking less. I couldn't point to something specific that had changed, but the usual pleasurable tension between us, the taut bond of connection we'd had since the accident, was gone. He didn't seem to need me any more. He seemed like just a dude. Just a Nick. Not mine.

I worked up my courage and did a few of my own solo expeditions Downstairs, without telling him, but I couldn't convince myself to go very far. I hallucinated strange noises around corners: floorboards creaking, whispered sighs. I knew I was only scaring myself, but didn't have it in me to stay down there for long.

I lay on my bed a lot and listened to records through my headphones. My dad's old headphones: huge bulky black things with a coiled cord like old telephones. Sometimes I held my breath while I did it. This was an old technique of mine to shut the world out. After a while outside sounds would slip away, and the thrum of blood and music would fill my ears, become my entire universe. As a kid I could hold my breath for three minutes. Enough sometimes to make it through a whole song without breathing.

I fell asleep one night doing this, headphones on, and dreamed about Niko, which happened now and then whether I wanted it to or not. In the dream I was at the hallway junction again, looking down into the shadows at the figure at its end. It was him again, walking toward me. Not hesitant but confident, smiling, happy to see me. I grinned back, thrilling at the reciprocity between us, a bond that felt in that moment tinged with something else, something more primal.

But then I faltered, because I realized I wasn't sure quite what that meant. There are a lot of primal emotions.

There were so many things that smile could mean.

I took a step back, afraid, but there was nothing but empty space behind me. I was standing at the lip of a drop-off.

He came right up to me, Niko, my Niko, looking into my eyes with something I was certain now was love, and the fear faded as he reached up to touch my cheek, and the warmth of it and the smell of him and the look on his face fused inside me into need so intense it parted my lips, as if for oxygen, just as he bent down with hunger to kiss them.

It was a beatific kiss, velvet, brain-melting, the kind you sometimes get in real life if you're lucky but I'd only ever had in dreams, sweet and lingering and seraphic. Everything I'd ever wanted flowed through me into him and I imagined I could feel the same from him to me, echoed and amplified, conjoined. It went on and on and on. He pressed against me, arms wrapped around my back, holding me, and mine were maybe around him too but only limply, subconscious, the kiss and its indescribable tangibility, its dream-forgotten trueness the only thing, the only thing. The only thing.

It wasn't until I'd broken it, pulled back to look up at him, that I realized I was leaning back over the edge behind me, his arms holding me there, my toes the only thing still touching the lip of the drop-off.

I couldn't read his expression. Had no idea what it meant at all.

I didn't even know who he was.

He let me fall.

I plummeted down into darkness, gathering speed, faster and faster. I'd had dreams before that ended like this, a sickening fall and then an ejection back to wakefulness right as I hit ground, covered in cold sweat and shuddering. But this time when I woke, it was more like I'd chosen to do it, pulled away from the dream against its will. Like part of me knew if I'd stayed I'd have kept falling forever, because there was no ground down there to stop me.

The record was turning in its final groove. I stared at it dumbly, dad's big headphones still muffling the outside world, transmitting only hissing, clicks and pops.

_This has got to stop_, I told myself, _you're over him. You got over him a long time ago._ The accident had confused everything but in the months after it I'd sorted myself out, realized it was never going to happen. Put it away and moved on. I had. It was just my fucking dreams didn't seem to have gotten the memo.

I felt Downstairs tingling at my back, beneath me. I switched the player off and took my blanket to sleep on the couch in the living room.


#


One night not long after that, everyone but Niko and I went out to a basketball game. We started drinking, and it seemed to ease the friction between us, which made us both want to keep drinking. I took comfort in this, maybe the first acknowledgment that he felt the gap between us too, wanted as much as I did to find a way to close it.

Deep into a bottle of vodka, we got into one of those hilarious drunken arguments about nothing: the final line to one of our favorite movies. I was sure it was one thing, he was sure it was something a few words off. I knew I was right, and also could see why he might remember it wrong, but he refused to believe me. He tried to pull out his cell phone to call a friend for a second opinion and got it stuck on something in his pocket: laughing, he ended up dumping everything out on the table, but then we got distracted by a text he'd gotten from an ex-girlfriend, which led to more drinking and another argument where I dutifully tried to keep him from responding, not just because he was drunk and she was terrible for him but because back then with those flip phones it would have taken him a fucking hour to peck out a reply.

We ended up slumped in our chairs, the vodka bottle empty, listening to some spacey ambient music on the stereo.

"Niko," I said, or maybe the vodka said it for me. "The other night. At the party."

"What about it?" he muttered, eyes closed.

I couldn't say what I wanted to say. Words come easy until you find the ones that won't come at all, that could shatter unexamined concords in seconds, weaken load-bearing truths. We have universes in our heads that we live in, and the wrong words puncture them, burn them up like airships filled with something unspeakably combustible but embarrassingly common. Dear Diary: Oh, the humanity.

Even the vodka couldn't figure out how to navigate all that. I stayed silent for a long time, until I heard Niko gently snoring. Too late, again, as always. I hadn't yet found the right headspace for this conversation, was perpetually too sober to start it or too drunk to finish.

I started to drift off myself, but then
shook myself awake. Niko was out cold. Before I could wake him and convince him to drag himself to bed I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

In the pile of stuff he'd pulled from his pocket (phone, wallet, keys, crumpled receipts) were two small brass keys.

They weren't on his keyring, just loose in his pocket, and faintly corroded with age.

It was hard to tell for sure, but they looked identical.

Nothing about this was all that unusual but somehow I knew one of those keys would fit the fridge Downstairs. Don't ask how I knew this, because I couldn't tell you, but I did. Irrational.

That ridiculous locked fridge in that ridiculous kitchen atop a ridiculous empty pool.

He'd been keeping something from me.

Had he found something in there? Something that scared him off going back?

What inside a fridge could be that scary? Could make him lie to his best friend?

I'm not sure why I did it. The vodka, maybe. Repressed curiosity. Or maybe the growing frustration that something had happened to Niko, something had changed; but I wasn't allowed to know what it was, or ever put it right.

Quietly, I took the keys. I shouldn't have, but by then I already had.


#


The house was dead quiet, which made the transition to Downstairs feel even more natural. Despite my earlier trepidations, I wasn't afraid as I grabbed the flashlight by the hallway. Vodka is magic.

I passed through the first few hallways, the stairs where the lights went out, the dark lower corridors. It wasn't until I hit the octagon that I got scared again.

I'd been walking on autopilot, lost in musing, but as I stepped into that room with its stairs leading down, I pulled up short, noticing something vital. The flashlight was dimmer. My eyes had adjusted, but through my liquor-addled head I noticed the room was still less bright than the last time I'd been down here.

Niko must have run down the batteries with all his exploring.

This didn't especially worry me: after our first trip I'd brought up this possibility. "Yeah, fuck that," he'd said, and duct-taped four fresh batteries to the long body of the flashlight.

But it did occur to me---now---that to change them down here I'd have to do it in total darkness. Fiddling with sticky tape, fumbling to unscrew the light, pouring out the old batteries and not mixing them up with the new ones, by feel...

So there was that.

I thought for a minute about going back. But I was close to the pool room now. I wanted to find out what was inside that fridge. What Niko had been keeping from me.

And I did have the batteries, after all. If I needed to change them, it would just take a second.

I kept going.

The last set of stairs down, with their weird irrational angles, passed quickly. The hall at the bottom stretched into the gloom, and I sped past the long stretch with no doors till I reached the pool room.

The door was closed. So Niko _had_ been back here.

Inside was the smooth, curved concrete of the pool bottom. I grabbed for the lowest rung of the ladder and pulled myself up, a familiar motion from my swimming days made unfamiliar through lack of buoyancy, being clothed and bone-dry.

The upper level had a lip about three feet wide extending around the edge of the empty pool, and on the ladder side the space opened up, concrete giving way to linoleum. Sure enough, there was a full kitchen up there, just like Niko had described. With all the appliances, it was fairly cozy. I stared bemused at the chrome dials on the oven, the row of pale-green cabinets with round white handles.

I turned to the fridge. It looked dated, a fading yellow with tacky chrome highlights. It only had one big door; no freezer. No magnets or family photos, either. Generically anonymous.

I pulled at the handle, but it didn't budge. Studying it, I saw what Niko had been talking about: there was a small keyhole under the handle. Smaller than a house key: more like one for a padlock, something you'd put on a shed.

The keys I'd lifted from Niko looked about right.

I picked one and slid it into the lock. It went in smooth, with a satisfying click as it bottomed out. But when I turned it, it wouldn't rotate.

Frustrated, I jigged it back and forth, turning harder. The key was too small to get a solid grip on. I squeezed down and gave it a really good twist.

For a second I thought it was turning, but then I realized I'd bent the key. I'd come close to snapping it in half.

I pulled it gingerly from the lock, staring at it in disappointment. Well, shit. There wouldn't be any hiding this from him now. It was bent nearly in half. I slipped it into my back pocket as I tried to think what to do.

In between the little noises I made, the taps and scratches and breaths, I felt the silence like a weight on my shoulders, pressing me down.

_Try the other key._

It slid in easy too, and when I gently twisted this one, it turned. I rotated it through a full three sixty before I heard a second snick.

I pulled at the fridge handle and the door swung open, cold air and yellow light wafting out.

I wasn't sure what I expected to see (_frozen heads_, the part of my brain still traumatized by horror movies suggested) so it took a moment of blinking in confusion to realize the fridge was empty. There weren't even any shelves other than the one above the crisper drawers on the bottom, though the walls had notches where they should go. But no food. A butter dish and condiment nooks in the door, unused.

There was nothing in there.

Except---frowning, I bent down, shining the light inside. The fridge was _deep_. It went back a good six feet. And there was something on the back wall.

The inside of another fridge door. Condiment nooks. Another butter dish.

_What the hell?_

Feeling foolish, I clambered inside, flashlight bumping against the plastic floor above two pairs of crisper drawers, one facing in, one facing out. They held my weight.

I shuffled forward, hunched over (there was less than five feet of vertical space) and pushed the inner door. No give. I pushed harder, remembering stories about kids stuck in fridges, but still nothing. _Is this one locked too?_ I searched for a keyhole, but didn't see one. _Which makes sense, if it's on the outside._ I turned back to confirm, and yes, the door I'd come through had no sign of a lock on its inner surface.

The logo on the plastic butter compartment said Whirlpool.

A thought popped into my head: _What if it's like an airlock?_ This made no kind of logical sense, but seemed compelling. Only one door open at a time, otherwise you'd let all the cold air out. I almost giggled, then stopped myself, afraid.

_What am I doing?_

I decided to try it. Why not? Nothing made sense, so maybe this would, for lack of any better ideas. Turning awkwardly, I reached for the door I'd come through to pull it shut. It wasn't designed to be pulled from the inside, but I managed to get a grip on a condiment shelf and swung it firmly towards me.

As the door slammed shut two things happened, both terrifying in different ways. First, there were two snicks, one from the door in front of me and one behind.

Second, my flashlight went out.

Cold terror flushed through me. I shook the light, pressed the button on and off. Nothing happened. I pushed the door in front of me but it didn't give at all. I slammed into it hard with my whole body, panicking, the rounded edge of a plastic shelf jabbing into my cheekbone, but the door didn't budge.

_Because it's locked_, I told myself, mind whirling. _But the one behind you is open, now._ I twisted around, facing the back of the fridge as near I could tell, the second door.

But the thought of opening that door in pitch blackness, a door leading into complete unknown, opening it blind and crawling out into darkness, was terrifying. I stayed frozen, caught between fears: staying there or moving forward. Finally some combination of claustrophobia and visions of my air running out triumphed over my fear of the unknown. I crab-walked forward till my outstretched hand touched the other door. Before I could stop to think, I kept moving forward, pushing my weight against it.

The door opened easily and my flashlight came back on.

_Like the fridge light_, I thought, dizzy. _Goes out when the door is closed, comes back when you open it. Makes perfect sense._ I actually laughed out loud and then stopped myself.

I couldn't laugh. I had to take this seriously, while I was down here. Or I might never get out.

Stumbling on cramped knees, I spilled out of the fridge and staggered upright, shining my light around warily. But what I saw confused me even more.

It was the same room.

I frowned, mind working, flashing the light over every surface like a brush that might paint sense into what I was seeing.

It was the same kitchen---same ovens, same green cabinets, same improbably-adjacent concrete pool. Not a mirror image, or a slightly different design: it was the same room I'd just left. The only difference was the fridge was on the opposite wall.

Like it had connected through the wall to an identical room on the other side.

Dizzy.

I took a few steps forward, shined the light over the edge of the pool. Same ladder, same door, although it was shut. Had I shut it behind me this time? I'd been in a hurry. I couldn't remember.

I turned back to the fridge, and froze.

The door had swung shut behind me.

I pulled on the handle, but it didn't budge. Locked.

Shit. Where was the key? I'd left it in the lock on the other side. But the other one, the one I'd bent, the one that didn't fit, was still in my pocket.

I pulled it out again to frown at it, knowing somehow what would happen before I tried it. Sure enough, when I slipped the bent key into the lock and turned it, this time it rotated easily and the door swung open.

Different key. Different lock. _Different door._

Different room.

I shut and locked it again, shaking my head.

I had to see. I climbed down the ladder, dropped onto the concrete. I opened the door onto the doorless hallway.

A wave of déjà vu hit me as I looked down it. It was the same hall I'd passed through minutes before---but I knew it couldn't be. I'd crawled out the other side of the fridge. This wasn't the same place, and yet it had that ineffable tang of familiar places, the twinge that tells you _I've been here before_.

As I walked down the hallway, I looked for some distinguishing feature to confirm this intuition: but the decor was, as always, so bland that nothing stood out. It could have been any basement hallway anywhere.

When I hit the stairs back up to the eight-sided room, though, something went wrong.

I'd stopped without meaning to, clutching the banister, foot on the first step. I looked up the stairs, and a faint twinge of vertigo brushed me. It was like what I'd felt that first night we came Downstairs, when I thought I'd seen something at the end of the hall. It wasn't quite premonition, a sensation, a tingling, an insight. It wasn't like knowing or feeling at all.

Something inside me between intuition and emotion just didn't want to go back up there.

When Bradley had outed us both in high school the aftermath had been ugly, in more ways than one. My house started getting egged once or twice a week. Sometimes it was worse than eggs. One day I came home from school and someone had drawn a red chalk outline on our driveway, like at a murder scene. Next to it they'd written _your next queer_. I got the hose and a brush and scrubbed it out fast, wanting it gone before mom got home from work, because she'd already moved me to a new school and I was afraid if she saw the chalk outline, the message, she'd move us to a whole new state, have to quit her job and leave behind her friends and my sister's too, both of them giving up everything because of me, and I couldn't stand the thought of that. I think that was the first time I really understood that some people weren't just grossed out by gay people, or morally offended. They wanted us dead. That was how wrong they thought we were.
To know just existing could make people feel that way about you, to realize that this was the world you'd have to live in, to keep growing up in. If you could.

The creeping feeling I felt now was like that. An existential wrongness. And it was getting stronger. Like a light from around a distant corner, growing brighter.

I listened, motionless, but heard nothing. The quiet pressed against me.

_What am I going to do? Go back?_

No.

Taking a deep breath, I made an impulsive decision. A few paces back was a door, and without stopping to think I pulled it open. The room inside was crammed with furniture under sheets. On a normal day this might have scared the piss out of me, but this feeling of wrongness was getting so strong I would have run straight into a room full of laughing skulls rather than stay in that hallway any longer.

I slipped in and shut the door behind me, quietly---that felt important---and ran to the far end of the room. Spotting something sofa-shaped, I lifted the edge of the sheet that covered it and half-crawled, half-dived inside. Flipping onto my back, I smoothed the sheet, held my hand over the flashlight---I couldn't bear to turn it off---and held my breath.

The feeling had diminished when I ran across the room, but now was growing again. I was trembling. I tried not to breathe, to relax my face as if doing so would open my ears wider, let me hear fainter sounds.

It was deathly quiet. All I could hear was my heartbeat.

The top of my hand glowed a dull red as the flashlight beam lit up bones and the dark veins between them.

The feeling reached an unbearable crescendo, and held there sustained. I was shivering and couldn't stop. It was wrongness, wrongness on every level, filling up my body. I wanted it to go away more than anything.

I thought I heard something move in the hallway outside. Scuffing the carpet, maybe.

Then, mercifully, the feeling started to drain away.

I let out a breath, then took in another. With each one I felt more in balance, an equilibrium I'd never thought to appreciate until now. In another minute, all that was left was me: coated in sweat, crashing off adrenaline, but all right.

And yeah, it took fifteen minutes to muster the courage to lift the sheet and walk back across that room. Now that my regular instincts were back, the thought of what might be under all those other sheets was fucking terrifying.


#


When I'd recovered, I hurried across the room, out into the hall, and back up the stairs. My brain had gone numb: I let myself feel like I was retracing my steps, but another part of me knew I moved through different halls and rooms, on the wrong side of the fridge. But going back would mean following the direction that ugly feeling had drifted---and I couldn't do that. So I climbed the stairs to the octagon room, through the identical hallways back, and up the second stairs to the lighted upper levels, everything exactly as it should have been.

When I saw the coffee stain, though, I stopped.

It was right where Niko had spilled it on our first trip down, where the coffee had sloshed as he'd forced open the sticky door.

It was the same hallway. But I couldn't explain how.

What had happened? My brain whirred, trying to manufacture sense.

What I finally decided was this: I must have gotten turned around in the dark fridge. Banging the inside of the door, trying to force it open, I somehow moved the fridge, pushed it across the kitchen to the opposite wall. When I came out, it was through the other door, but into the same room. And I must have gotten confused about the keys: maybe I hadn't turned the first one the right way when I tried it, that was all.

I couldn't honestly convince myself of this.

_It's the same coffee stain._

I felt superimposed. It had to be the same hallway, and yet it had to be a different one. This was the same stain, and yet I was a ten-minute walk from where Niko had spilled his coffee.

I kept going. I made it back to the big room, looking just as I'd left it, and climbed the final stairs gingerly. But my room was waiting for me at the top, nothing out of place: my records, my textbooks, my dirty laundry. That settled that. Somehow, I'd come back the same way I went in. But I felt deflated, unresolved, like the last fifty pages of the book had been left out. _And then he: The End._

I shut the bed behind me more firmly than necessary. I considered nailing it shut but settled for piling some heavy boxes on top of it.

It had been maybe an hour since I'd left. Niko was still passed out on the couch in our front room.

I curled up on the next couch over and, despite being so keyed up I could barely think, dropped into sleep.


#


I woke some time later to him shaking my shoulder, and sat up, bleary-eyed. It was still dark outside.

"Go to bed," he was saying, "it's late."

I yawned. The trip Downstairs seemed like a dream, coming back in bits and pieces. I snuck a glance at the corner of the table where he'd emptied his pockets, but his stuff was gone. Did he notice I'd taken the keys?

Shit. I'd have to tell him.

"Hey man," I said, dreading this. "You remember earlier when you pulled your shit out to get your phone, and left it on the table?"

He blinked. "Um. No."

He'd been pretty drunk. I pressed on. "We were about halfway through finishing that bottle." The vodka bottle was about a quarter full. I frowned. Hadn't we killed it?

Shaking my head, I pressed on. "Look. What I'm trying to say is, I took the keys. I'm sorry. I just wanted to know if you'd found something down there. Why you hadn't told me. I went but there was nothing there, and I got turned around and... anyway, it doesn't matter. I screwed up and I lost one key, and uh, kind of damaged the other." It sounded so stupid as I said it, and I hated myself, both for stealing from him and for failing to discover anything useful with them. "I'm an idiot, man, and I'm sorry. But look, if you tell me where you found them, maybe we could figure something out, and talk about what's going on, and everything?"

Niko was frowning, but didn't seem angry. Maybe this wasn't going to be a big deal after all.

He sat down on the floor next to me, a serious look on his face.

"Orion," he said, "exactly what fucking keys are you talking about?"





Chapter 5




We sat on the floor of the empty house, still miles from dawn, and each word we spoke brought us closer to panic.

Niko said he'd never found any keys. And as I tried to piece together the evening, to backtrace what had happened, little details kept failing to add up. The vodka bottle. The movie quote: now he agreed with me, was baffled that I thought he could possibly get it wrong. He pulled out his phone and showed me the last text from his ex: four months ago.

Despite these discrepancies, something felt right about the way we discussed them. We were back in sync again. The strained awkwardness and stunted conversations of the past week were gone. It felt like he'd been away on a trip and we were catching up again, despite the fact that we'd been seeing each other all week.

But when I told him where I'd been that night, about the fridge and the keys, it was like I'd punched him in the face.

He bolted up, took a few paces, then collapsed into a chair, stricken. "Oh, shit," he kept saying. "Oh shit oh shit oh shit."

He wouldn't say anything else until I poured him another shot of vodka---the vodka we'd already finished, goddammit---and then the story started breaking out of him in dangerous pieces.

"Remember the night of the party?" He looked drained. "I didn't feel like talking, you know, to other humans. So I went exploring. Had a vague thought like maybe I'd find something interesting to bring back up and show you." He ran a shaky hand through his kinked hair. "But something..." He swallowed. "Something happened, okay? And I got to the pool room and I couldn't go back the same way." He waved a hand at my raised eyebrow. "Let me just finish telling this, okay?"

He wouldn't say what had happened, but it made him change course, and after wandering through unfamiliar halls for a few minutes he found himself approaching the pool room door from the other direction. He climbed the ladder into the kitchen, but when he got there found the fridge not only unlocked, but open---the outer door, at least. He'd done the same thing I had: climbed inside, pulled the door shut, lost his light, pushed the other door open---and climbed out with the same spatial confusion I'd had.

I told him my theory about knocking the fridge around, but he shook his head. "No, I don't think so. When my light went out, I was pretty deliberate with my motions, exactly because I didn't want to get turned around. I barely jostled the thing. And there's something else that makes me think..."

He swallowed, licked his lips. For a long minute, he couldn't meet my eye. Then he grabbed my knee, as if to steady himself, looked over at me. Looked hard. "Ryan. Man. This is going to sound crazy. But listen, okay? This place. This house." He looked around furtively, as if we were someplace dangerous and not the living room of our college crash pad. "We're not where we used to be. _This is a different place._"

"Wait a minute," I said, rejecting this at once. "It's one thing to say there's a couple mirrored hallways down there, but there's not a whole different house up here. There aren't clones of our goddamn roommates, a different street and sky and..."

I trailed off, because he was staring at me, miserable. I realized this was exactly what he thought was happening.

"Look," I said, worried and afraid, "let's go back right now. I'll show you the coffee stain. That proves it."

"I'm not going back down there." He pulled back. "I've been too damn terrified to even think about it, after what I..." He bit his lip, looked away. Took the last swig of vodka.

Tingles crawled down my neck. "What you saw? Well, what was it?"

He didn't answer for a while. I thought he was trying to remember at first, and then maybe that he was trying to forget.

Finally, defeated, he told me. "On my way down. Before I got there. I started feeling... off. Like something was wrong."

"That happened to me, too. I hid in a side room and waited, and after a while it went away."

"Yeah," he said weakly, "probably what I should have done. You know me, man. I ignored it. I kept going. And..."

He stopped, trembling. Phantom insects crawled up my back. What did he see to rattle him this bad?

"That long hallway. Without any doors. I was walking down it, and I saw another light."

I sat rigid. "What the fuck?"

"I kept walking," he went on, not looking at me. "I didn't want to turn my back, get chased down. That sick feeling got stronger. Sharper. But I couldn't stop walking. Couldn't turn around."

He took a deep breath. "The light got closer. It was someone with a flashlight. They were walking toward me the same way I was walking toward them. I couldn't see their face. I just kept walking. I kind of hugged the right wall and they hugged the left. The flashlight was right in my face. I couldn't see anything until we were only a few steps apart."

He met my gaze at last, forehead wet with cold sweat, like he was reliving that queasy sensation. My own stomach twisted. I couldn't breathe.

"Ry," he said, "I passed myself. I walked right past another me with another flashlight, who looked as sick and fucked up as I did. And we both kept walking. We didn't stop. I made it to the pool room, climbed the ladder, and went right through that fucking fridge to get farther away. And there is no fucking way I'm going back down there again."

I swallowed. "Dude. It was dark. You were messed up. Maybe you saw someone else down there, but what you're saying, man. It's impossible."

"Irrational." A hollow laugh. "Things are different here. On this side. I'll show you. What's the smallest bill you've got in your wallet?"

"Uh, I don't know." Taken aback, I pulled it out, riffled through the smaller bills. He smiled grimly at one of them, snatched it, held it up.

"Better hold onto this. Because no one here's ever heard of one."

"What are you talking about?" I said, annoyed.

And over the next hour, he showed me.

We pored through the dusty encyclopedia in our front foyer. We combed the magazines sitting in the house, dragged out Monopoly. We fired up the Internet (all GeoCities and tedium in those days) and found pictures of cash registers, government websites, coin collectors talking about the history of currency.

According to everything we could find, the US Government had never, at any point in its history, issued a three dollar bill as legal tender.

We stared at the one from my wallet with growing unease. Buchanan's familiar portrait stared back, implacable. Niko tapped the portrait's chin. "That right there might be the only one that exists in this place. Wherever we are."


#


We cobbled together a theory out of guesswork and dreams.

If Downstairs had two sides---two versions, or halves, or whatever---then Niko had passed into the other one the night of the party, through the unlocked fridge. The Niko I saw stumbling out of the hall that night, sick and wanting sleep, was the wrong Niko. A different Niko. The one my Niko had passed in the hall.

And that Niko didn't quite fit in. Everything was a little off about him, and from his perspective, I suppose, about me.

But that Niko had found two keys. We had no idea where he'd found them. But if he'd passed through the fridge with one of them---and here I will compress the part where we opened another bottle of vodka rather than accept the ridiculousness of this garbage fairy tale premise where a magical Frigidaire is a gateway between worlds, slept it off, suffered through ugly hangovers the next day, and reconvened late in the afternoon with some Aspirin---if the other Niko came through the fridge just before my Niko had, that could explain why my Niko had found it unlocked and open, was able to pass through.

And earlier---if we followed this chain of logic---I'd been drinking from a different vodka bottle, in a different house, with that other Niko. The one with the keys.

I'd stolen them and passed through to this side of Downstairs---the wrong side---and maybe some other me had been doing the same thing. I only avoided him by my sudden detour, when I sensed something wrong up ahead and ducked into the side room with the sheet-covered furniture, to let him pass by. And now we were both in the wrong house, on the opposite side from where we'd started.

"And both of them are on the wrong side, too," Niko said, still wincing from the hangover.

I licked my lips, head also still spinning, wondering if it would be okay to take two more Aspirin. Or four more. "But these other two, if they exist." I still couldn't quite surrender to this madness. "They could come back any time they wanted, right? And so could we."

"Because the key's still in the lock on their side." Niko frowned. "And you've got the one for this side. Both keys are back where they should be now. One for us and one for them."

"Unless there are two keys for this side too."

"No. You said the first one you tried didn't work, even though it looked the same? I think there's exactly two keys. One for each side. The other me ended up with both, somehow. I guess if he found one and went through, he'd know right where to look for the second."

We stared at each other.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"I have no fucking idea. But shit, man, I'm glad you're here." He ran a hand through his curls, face pale. "I seriously wasn't handling this on my own. This whole last week, things weren't right. _You_ weren't right, and I couldn't stand that, man. I was going crazy without you. Doubting everything, you know how I get. Doubting who I even was. But this, this is..." He waved his hand back and forth between the two of us, then knocked it on the table. "You get me. We're tight. Yeah? In it together, I mean. It's good. I'm glad."

I didn't say anything, but I didn't have to. I felt the same way and he knew it.

I slept in his room that night, in a sleeping bag beside his bed. He didn't want to be alone. I'd kind of wanted some time to process everything but I didn't protest too much. I liked being his anchor. He kept us both up late talking about random bullshit, rambling. It was okay. Everything was upside down. Old comforts couldn't hurt.


#


We slept in the next day. Call me a coward, but buried in my sleeping bag I could pretend I wasn't in the wrong universe.

Things were definitely wrong. Now that I was looking, I couldn't deny it. Familiar people acted strange in a way you couldn't put your finger on. Colors seemed indefinably different shades. A vague sense of off-ness suffused everything, like a movie with the sound a frame out of sync.

After looking more closely, things were off about my room. There was an unfamiliar dress shirt on a hanger. My copy of John Crowley's _Little, Big_ was missing, along with all the other books of his I'd discovered after reading that one. It wasn't quite my room, I realized. It was someone else's.

It was mostly little things, so we grasped at each quantitative difference, each change we could pin down. One night one of our housemates kept saying something I didn't understand. She was going on about getting a parking ticket and kept saying it was the "fourth fucking time" it had happened.

"What's that word you're saying?"

"Fucking," she clarified, unhelpfully.

"No," I said. "Count up in ordinals. You know, first, second..."

She blinked at me. "First, second, third, fourth, fifth."

Fourth. Instead of fourd.

Things were different here.

We didn't find too many obvious changes. People said "potato bugs" now instead of "doodlebugs." Almost everyone wrote the number seven without the stroke through the middle. Usually we weren't quite sure whether something had actually changed, or we were losing our goddamn minds.

We danced around it for a while, but finally the phrase came out: parallel universes. But it didn't really satisfy. Why these two universes in particular, out of a supposedly infinite number? Why were they connected via a series of poorly decorated basement rooms and linked together by a refrigerator, of all things?

At one point, feeling overwhelmed, I called home---not to tell mom what was happening because I didn't want her to freak, just to hear her voice---but the answering machine said they were on vacation till the end of the month. This was annoying both because I hadn't heard about any long vacation, and because "we" presumably meant her and my sister, and for some reason I hadn't been invited, which made me feel even more out of place and abandoned. I was three hours away, not on a different planet.

Feeling rejected, I went record shopping, adding a couple hundred dollars to my already terrifying credit card debt in exchange for a small stack of LPs. Lately I'd gotten obsessed with sci-fi audio book recordings. I found a few treasures at my usual haunts: Leonard Nimoy reading Ray Bradbury, and a six-record set of one of the Dune novels, read by Frank Herbert himself, still shrink-wrapped. More and more I only bought stuff in its original wrapping, unopened, sleeves protected from scuffs and wear marks, the records inside unplayed and undamaged, which is how I'd keep them.

Bradley had been the one who got me into records. I was a cassette tape kid and a Discman high schooler, but he'd hooked me on the sound of LPs, the joys of flipping through those big bold album covers in record stores; of lying on your back blissing out to the singular magic of some rare recording or old favorite spun roaring back to life, twenty-two minutes at a time.

After what happened in the cafeteria I didn't talk to him for a long time. He kept trying to see me. Calling the house, throwing pebbles at my window late at night. I ignored it all. I was so angry at him, for taking something from me I couldn't quite encircle or define: more than my coming out, but all the changes inside me that would have led up to it, too. For putting me in danger, and my friends, my family.

He didn't give up. He left long, rambling messages on our answering machine, slipped love letters under the door. He was waiting outside the house one day when I walked home from my new school and there on the front porch, wearing our backpacks, I told him I didn't want to see him any more and broke his heart.

He begged me. He pleaded. He screamed and then apologized for screaming; he groveled, he cried. He told me he couldn't live without me. He said I'd never find anyone who'd love me like he did. He said if I threw away what we had because of the bigots and bullies I'd be letting them win.

When my little sister got home he started begging and pleading with her to talk some sense into me, and when he grabbed her arm and started shouting at her too, that's when I hit him.

He kept calling and writing and dropping by the house until my mom got the police involved. After that I never saw him again.

Probably it was because of what happened with Bradley that I got so guarded with my friendships later on. I kept a polite distance from most people, and almost everyone I met in college stayed an acquaintance, not a friend. It was as if I'd lost the knack of getting close to people, of letting them in. Connecting. Niko broke through that, somehow, became the first close friend I'd had in years, and even though I tried not to cling too hard, eventually I figured out why it had been so difficult not to. He'd been clinging back.

We stayed close, maybe inevitably now that we were the only matching pair in this entire universe. It felt easy to be closer to him, for us both to need each other. It felt right. A relief from the wrongness all around us.

He thought my airlock idea had legs. Downstairs was made from house-stuff: hallways and empty rooms and appliances. A fridge was one of the few devices in that context that could maintain a seal. It was a cute concept except it didn't actually explain anything.

It took a long time to convince him we needed to go back down.

"Maybe we can just stay here, and they can stay there," he said. "So everything's off a little. So what? It felt way more wrong to get close to..." He waved a hand. "Him. Whoever. My handsome twin. So maybe we should leave well enough alone. Brick the fucker up and never look back."

Then the headaches started.

They were odd headaches. Not severe. A tinge of nausea and dizziness, like stepping off one of those fairground rides that whirls you around, and only a very distant pain. They came and went. But I took them as an ominous sign.

Niko said he'd been getting them all week. Oh. And they'd been getting stronger.

So the headaches more than anything convinced us. We had to go back down, try to get back through. Or maybe there were other points of connection. We'd barely started exploring. There was so much left.

But first we had to solve what Niko called the Mere Paradox. He threw a spoon at me when I said this back to him.

"No, smart-ass. A _Mirror_ Paradox. We're obviously in this creepy weird sync with them." We were in his room with the door shut, and he was pacing the two-and-a-half steps of cleared floor while I lay on his bed, thinking. "Example. Me and the other Niko both went exploring on the same night. The other side, the other house, they were having a party that night too. We both saw that. The decor, uh, such as it was, was the same on both sides, or close enough. He and I were so synced up that we got to the fridge only minutes apart. He beat me, so he came through first, and then we passed in the hall." He stopped pacing, shuddered, and drummed his fingers on a bulky MIDI keyboard propped up against a wall gathering dust. "Two. A week later, both pairs of us end up getting drunk off vodka on the same night. Oh, there's these little differences---one side finishes the bottle, the other doesn't, and this me didn't get a certain text message that night---but both versions of you decide to go exploring. Again, you get to the pool room only minutes apart. For the most part it's like we're staying in a kind of lockstep, despite the superficial differences."

"Your conclusion, professor."

"If we go down to explore, they will too. We meet in the middle, and bam." He shook his head. "Exactly what we don't want to happen." He saw I was still confused, so he scribbled two arrows on his whiteboard, pointed right at each other. "The fridge is the connection point. The only way each pair of us can get back, so far as we know. But if we go back there, so will they. It's like we're trapped on two sides of a mirror. We each want to touch it, but we can't do it at the same time."

"Would it really be so bad?"

He glared down at me. "You don't trust that feeling? I got a lot closer than you, and man, it was the worst. I don't know what was causing it or why, but every part of my body was screaming something was wrong, was sick, was going to harm me." He sighed and flopped down next to me. "So if we can't get close to each other, but trying to cross through will bring us together, then what do we do?"

"Okay, so we explore at random." I sat up. "Every branch, we roll dice. Even if the others are in sync and pick the same time to explore, they'll go down different paths."

He shook his head. "I think the lockstep runs deeper than that. Even randomness could be part of it. The coffee stain. Remember? We both passed the one on this side, coming out. That's what made you assume you were in the same place. Because it was identical, right? If both versions of me spilled coffee and both made exactly the same stain, I bet dice would fall the same way too."

"How do we know it's identical? Did you really stop and look that close?"

That got him. Niko would jump off a bridge to win an argument. A few minutes later we were headed back down the stairs, keeping up a forced light banter. It helped that the coffee stain was close to the surface, and far enough away from the fridge that even if the others went down at the same time, to look at their stain, we'd be nowhere near each other.

No one had cleaned up after the party---in fact, the other housemates had stopped coming down here at all, inexplicably---so there were still Christmas lights and red plastic cups strewn around the big room. Weirdly comforting. We retraced our first trip through the upper hallways to the coffee stain, and got down on hands and knees to study it. I immediately felt foolish.

"This won't prove anything. We never looked at the original this close." I shrugged. "I don't know. It looks the same to me."

"But exactly the same?" Niko bent closer, excited. "No, I don't think so. I don't remember this trail of droplets off to the side here. Do you?"

We argued about it for a few minutes, but it was like grabbing soap in a bathtub. I'd read enough textbooks about memory and perception to know neither of us could accurately recall specifics of the other stain---it was weeks since we'd seen it and the details hadn't seemed important at the time.

I got up, shaking my head. "What is this even meant to prove? Does it matter if they're identical or not?"

"It matters," he said emphatically, "because if it's exactly the same then the two sides are in total lockstep. We can't do anything different from them and they can't do anything different from us. But if the stains are different---even just a little---then there's a chance to break out of the pattern. Do something unique. That could be huge."

"But we know we're not exactly in sync," I said. "For one thing, they somehow found keys down here. We never did that. They know things we don't, which means they're factoring that knowledge into their plans right now."

"Like where they found them in the first place," he said, rubbing his temples. "Right."

We sat in the hall for a minute in glum silence. I stared at the coffee stain, like it was an inkblot that would resolve into something sensible if I could make my mind work the right way.

"There's other differences," I said. "When I went down, I felt like something was wrong, and I went and hid like a baby. The other version of me didn't do that. We did different things."

"Yeah," he said, closing his eyes. "I'm actually worried about that."

"You were just saying you wanted us to be unique."

He rubbed his forehead. Maybe he was getting another headache. "The two sides are nearly identical, as far as we can tell. The two versions of us are nearly identical too. So far, at least. But I don't know. Maybe if we start acting different, if we diverge too far..."

"What?"

He shrugged. "Don't know. Just a thought. Probably garbage, never mind."

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall.


#


Niko was scared. He stayed close to me almost all the time, hanging out in my room, by the TV, wherever I was. This was a familiar pattern, actually: whenever he got overwhelmed he made me his full-time validator, babbling his interior monologue, running every decision big and small by me, ending most sentences with "Right?" or "Yeah?" It was like outsourcing his ego. I let him do it, like I always did. But I felt guilty, too, because it couldn't be healthy.

We kept talking,
and our half-assed theories began to crystallize into a plan.

We rounded up a bunch of dice, some tarot and playing cards, loose change, a dreidel, and a stack of books, and devised a procedure---a ridiculously complicated procedure lasting almost an hour---to end up with two numbers, after several dozen iterations: the first between one and twenty-four, and the second between one and sixty. An hour, and a minute. The theory was that even if both sides were so close even randomness tended to turn out the same, if we stacked that randomness on top of itself, compounding chance on chance, it might be a wedge to split that sameness apart. Niko showed me a tiny video on his computer about strange attractors, said this was chaos theory in action, the butterfly effect. Whatever. We were making wild guesses.

But the hope was that even if the other versions of us were doing the exact same thing---following an identical procedure---their numbers would drift apart and they'd end up generating a completely different time.

Which would allow each pair of us to pass through without crossing paths.

So we had a plan. We just needed a time.


#


"In hindsight," Niko said, throwing back the last of the coffee and smacking his lips, "maybe we should have put a range on the fucking numbers. Dear god. I have a midterm in five hours."

It was just after three in the morning, and we were prepping to go down. The time we'd generated was 3:41. We hoped for their sake the guys on the other side got something more reasonable.

Niko was in a rough mood, and it wasn't just the time of day. His old jock friends had been ragging him about not hanging out. ("I have to pretend sports bloopers are funny, Ry. It's horrible.") Later he'd gotten a call from one or both of his parents about how his degree was progressing, which had not gone well. He spent the rest of the day in his room with the door shut blaring loud music and, apparently, watching a _Friends_ marathon. Every time I listened at his door I kept hearing Joey say "How _you_ doin'?" Laugh track. Maybe he was just watching the same episode on repeat. Late that night I knocked again and reminded him we had a three a.m. date. A long and mournful stream of cuss words came muffled through the door. After an ominous silence he opened it, looking bleak. "Whose stupid idea was this again?" he asked, then grimly set his alarm.

We'd planned a quick trip in and out, to minimize the chance of overlapping times. Once we passed through and got back up to the surface, our surface, we'd leave the house and stay away until the next day. The campus library stayed open all night and if you had a book in your lap they wouldn't usually hassle you for sleeping. The next morning, we'd come back home, the headaches would be gone, and everything would be back to normal. It made sense, except we were making it all up and had no idea if any of this would work or if we were playing make-believe.

Swinging up the bed did feel ominous now, though. I noticed for the first time that it creaked. Stupid. We were girded up with supplies even though it was supposed to be a quick trip---three flashlights each, water bottles, even granola bars. Niko had a pad of yellow sticky notes and flipped the edges of it compulsively, nervous: "in case we need to mark our way," he explained.

We'd never seen anything dangerous down there, exactly. We just knew something wasn't right, now. That it wasn't just a basement down there.

_We knew._ We knew nothing. The truth is that despite our attempts to rationalize, to explain, we were blind. Shooting in the dark. Grasping at straws from sci-fi movies and bad dreams.

We had no idea what was happening to us.

We headed down, quietly so as not to wake our housemates. Once we got Downstairs, we followed the well-beaten path toward the room with the pool and the fridge. Niko was jumpy, especially when we got to the first staircase into the dark zone. Every shadow seemed ominous and he muttered suspicions at everything. "I think this door moved," or, "Someone's been here, I can feel it." I tried my best to keep things light, to reassure him. He started idly doodling flip-book animations of a gruesome hanging on the pad of sticky notes.

On our way down the twisting stairs to the octagon room, he stopped at one landing and glanced down the hall branching off from it. With a choke, he stiffened and leapt back, gripping the flashlight like a sword.

"Jesus fucking Christ," he hissed. "What the hell is that?"

I looked.

Way down the hallway, past the reach of the flashlight, were two tiny glints, hovering maybe four feet off the ground, deep in the darkness.

My heart rate was through the roof and I couldn't breathe, but I raised my flashlight too, shined it down the hall. It revealed nothing but the glints. I felt paralyzed. But I saw how scared Niko was. How close both of us were to panic.

I gave him a mock salute. "Later, skater," I said, and started down the hall.

"The fuck are you doing?" Niko hissed from behind me. But I kept moving. I kept walking forward, eyes fixed on the glints, willing my light to get stronger, willing those eyes to resolve into something explainable, something benign.

"Shit," Niko said, and followed me. "Shit shit shit."

It only took a few more steps before we realized our mistake.

The hall ended in a T-junction. About four feet off the floor was one of those fake candelabra. The glints had been our flashlights, reflecting off its dull metal sheen.

I laughed; it was easy with all the relief flooding through me. "See? There's enough weird shit going on without jumping at shadows."

Niko forced a laugh out too, but his face was still pale and tense. "How could you tell? From back there?"

I shrugged. "I couldn't. This was the quickest way to find out."

"Great. My hero. Glad you weren't mauled by a shadowbear." But he was smiling now for real, and looking at me with respect.

_He was right. That was stupid. Bravado is exactly the wrong response to what's happening._

"Let's hurry and get this over with." We walked back to the landing. Niko wrote "NOT THIS WAY" on a sticky note and slapped it on the wall, drawing an arrow down the hall. I added a smiley face; he grabbed the pen back and drew some demon eyebrows on it.

We made it the rest of the way to the pool room without incident, and climbed the ladder. I was on edge, waiting for any signs of that sick feeling of wrongness, but nothing happened, and there were no creepy doppelgängers waiting for us above the lip of the pool.

"Okay," Niko said, clapping his hands: he was spooked too, I could tell. "Let's do this. You want to do the honors?"

I pulled out the bent key and slipped it into the lock, turned it. It rotated with a smooth snick. I pulled the handle, and as I tugged the fridge door open past the familiar suction, the light inside came on.

Niko let out a strangled gasp and bent down, staring inside the door in horror. I stood frozen, still gripping the handle, unable to process what my eyes were telling me.

Because inside was no longer a vinyl-padded room and the inside of another door. Instead, we were staring down a smooth, white, rectangular tunnel, that went on and on as far as we could see.





Chapter 6




"What the fuck is this?" Niko hissed. I didn't have an answer. We stared into the bright white hallway like it was a road to heaven, or to hell.

The first few feet were the same as when we'd passed through before, the same as the interior of any ordinary fridge. Vinyl walls, plastic crisper drawers below the clear floor, a tiny bright bulb in the ceiling. But it didn't end. It kept going. Every few feet another little white bulb above; vinyl walls extending farther and farther; and an endless highway of clear plastic shelf for a floor, eight inches above the vinyl floor. The lines extended to a perfect vanishing point, and for as far as we could see, nothing changed.

For the next few hours, we did our best to interrogate this new unwanted truth, but gained no new understanding, came no closer to reconciling it with our plans to go back through. First we threw some wadded-up sticky notes and granola bars down the tunnel. When nothing happened to them, we ventured inside. Walking was hard: the ceiling was too low to stand up straight, so you had to move forward in an awkward shuffle. We only made it a hundred feet in before we had to turn back: Niko had been looking over his shoulder every few seconds to make sure the door back out hadn't vanished while we'd turned our backs on it, and eventually bumped his head one too many times on the ceiling and had a full-on claustrophobic panic attack. We retreated, hearts racing and muscles cramping. The next hundred feet had looked just as identical, anyway.

We tried locking the fridge and unlocking it again, turning the key and opening the door a dozen different ways, like it was a car with an unreliable starter you needed the right knack to handle. The door always opened on that same impossible tunnel. We tried shouting down the tunnel, or staying quiet and listening, but our voices were swallowed up and the silence stayed relentless, unbroken except for the quiet hums of the row of tiny lights. Later we got braver, tried more drastic measures: Niko had a pocketknife and we took it to the tunnel walls. Underneath the vinyl was more vinyl. We gouged out a chunk eight inches deep before giving up. The floor felt like flimsy plastic, bending a little with our weight, but no amount of vigorous stomping shattered or even cracked it.

"We could get a bunch of food, mount an expedition," I suggested, half-heartedly. _It can't go on forever,_ I wanted to say, but couldn't bring myself to. He didn't answer.

Finally, we gave up.

We climbed back down the ladder to the empty pool and stepped back into the hall. I was trying to think of next steps, more plans, but my body and mind were exhausted. I turned to pull the pool door shut behind us.

As I did I noticed a small yellow square was stuck to it.

"Niko," I gasped, breath failing me, "oh _shit_. There's a note. Someone left a note."

We stared at it, afraid to touch it. We saw immediately that it was the one we'd left earlier, at the junction with the glints. "NOT THIS WAY," it said in Niko's handwriting. But the smiley face with the demon eyebrows looked sinister now, malevolent.

The arrow pointed toward the pool room, and the fridge.

"It's them," Niko breathed, sagging back against the opposite wall, as far away from the note as possible. "Our doubles. They moved it. My god, Ry. They came here and moved it. They were right outside."

My mind whirled. "Then that means there must be another way through. Some way for them to get here."

"Maybe." He swallowed, face pale. "Or maybe there's something else going on. Something's down here with us, man. Fucking with us."

We stared at the note.

_NOT THIS WAY._

The silence was almost painful.

Abruptly Niko turned and started back down the hall, toward the surface, not talking, not looking back. I was right behind him.


#


When I was a kid I got way into swimming one year, another obsession. I started going to the rec center pool every day after school, having mom drop me off there on weekends. They had a swim program and I shot through all the rankings. Minnow, Fish, Flying Fish, Salmon, Shark, Tiger Shark. I swam. I don't recall especially enjoying it: it was just something I did, like a job. Then at school one day someone asked me why I was so into it and I couldn't tell them. I could hold my breath for forever, which helped, but hardly seemed like a good reason. The truth was I had no idea why I was doing it, and that terrified me. What had made me start? I couldn't remember. I felt almost violated, possessed, like some outside force had tricked me into driving all my thoughts and energies into moving back and forth through lanes of water, over and over again, for months on end. I stopped not long after, in part because I was hitting puberty and changing clothes in front of other guys was becoming more and more mortifying, but I think really it was because I couldn't explain that compulsion and it scared me.

I felt it again, now. I wanted to stay Downstairs. Sure, I could rationalize this away: the only way back home was down here. But the real reason was that I wanted to find out what was down there, more than anything. I was driven to. Something was driving me. At least that's how it felt.

I didn't mention any of this to Niko. I knew if I did it might put him off exploring altogether.

We didn't talk much on the way back, and when we climbed up through my bed and shut it, we split up. Niko went out the front door without a word. I lay on my bed listening to records until I got too creeped out imagining what might be underneath me, and went out to curl up on the porch swing, instead.

The summer air was hot, with only the hint of a breeze, but felt infinitely better than the cold dead air down there.

I tried to think of anything else, but something kept dragging my brain Downstairs, as if it was too heavy to stay on the surface with me. No matter how often I clawed my way onto other topics, Downstairs and all the things we didn't know about it dominated my thoughts.

I had no idea what we should do next.

When Niko came back it was with a brown bag from the liquor store, and he went straight up to his room, not even looking at me. I should have stopped him but I didn't feel like talking to him either.

We didn't know what was going on; we didn't know how to stop it. We didn't know anything.

We might have stayed in our funk for another couple days, except something happened the next morning.

The local history lady had left me a voicemail at around 7:15, a solid fantasy movie and credits before I normally woke up. She'd been useless when I'd stopped by before, and her tone of voice in the message---"something a bit exciting's come to light about your house"---made me assume she'd dredged up some trivia as a pretense to get me to come back and keep her company. Maybe get me to join the local history society myself. A warm-blooded young person like myself could even aspire to become treasurer.

So it was a couple hours before I got around to calling her back and asking when would be a good time to come over.

"Oh, come right away," she said, voice syrupy. "This really can't wait. Just wait till you see what I've found."

Not at all encouraged, I agreed to head over, and biked the mile or so to her fastidiously tidy house. The visit got off to an ugly start when she asked why I hadn't brought my colored friend this time. "Actually, he's Greek," I said through clenched teeth, and then wished I had the guts to say something else. She served me tea again, weak to the point of tastelessness, and spent so much time making small talk I'd convinced myself she hadn't found anything and this whole exercise was a waste of time. Worse, she kept glancing at my pride bracelet and pursing her lips, and then pretending not to have done either. I wanted to get out of there but was too mentally exhausted to remember how social interactions were supposed to work, what niceties would bring a conversation to an end.

The third or fourd time I pressed her about what she'd found, she got up with a smug smile and bustled out, returning a minute later with a file folder holding a few photocopies.

"I did some digging on your address," she said, "and found something rather interesting." She turned the last two words into an annoying sing-song. _Raaaaather intressting._ Trying to tune her out, I opened the file and pulled out the first page.

Clutching the page, I scanned the smudged text. It was a blurry copy of an old newspaper ad, maybe from around the turn of the century. It advertised, in a hand-drawn, swirling font, some attraction called "THE VORTEX."

I noticed the address and almost choked on my tea.

The ad looked for all the world like one of those terrible roadside attractions desperate for tourist dollars. MADAME ZOLA WILL READ YOUR FORTUNE, MEET BOBO THE CHUCKLING CLOWN, that kind of thing. IF YOU ONLY KNEW WHAT AWAITS YOU.

Towards the bottom, though, an image caught my eye. It was a drawing of two identical women with wavy, crimped hair and a distant expression, sad and remote. Actually, it looked like the same drawing printed twice, side by side. Both women stared vaguely down and to the left. THE SISTERS, said a caption above them, and then, below and smaller, the word DESCEND.

Running through the ad was something like a ribbon that, on peering closer, seemed meant to be a stylized stream of water. This was confirmed by a rhyme running alongside one part of it, in tiny, florid print:



	A looking-glass held above this stream 
	Will show your troubles like a dream



There was no further explanation. Admission to the Vortex was ten cents and it was closed Sundays.

DESCEND.

I flipped to the other few pages in the folder as the woman twittered on about her sleuthing skills in the county archives. The second page was a short newspaper clipping about the Vortex being shut down---not over a grisly murder or string of disappearances but, of all things, a zoning controversy. A new mayor had instigated a crackdown on businesses operating improperly out of residential districts. There was no date but "1934" had been scrawled in pencil on the photocopy.

The final page was at first a mystery, an article---maybe even older than the Vortex ad---about an old Army post being torn down to make way for new housing. I pieced together from a few contextual clues ("the new university", "on top of the hill") that this was my neighborhood, and felt a sinking hunch our house was on the site of the old post.

The article recounted in brief the fort's unstoried history, built on the site of a spring which "bubbled up from a natural cavern" bricked up when the place was constructed.
Nothing much of note had ever happened there. Built to keep white settlers safe from the natives they were busy exterminating, the post had never been attacked or even threatened.

"Once the fort was built and the spring bricked up, the Indians never again came near the place," the old article said by way of explanation.

She must have caught me staring at this sentence, because she leaned over and tapped it with a pencil. "Haunted." Her grin was smug.

"Excuse me?"

"Been seeing spirits, have you?" she asked. "Must be an old burial ground. Read a book about it once. When they're disturbed, young man, the ghosts of redskins get _very_ angry."

I looked up at her with a flash of anger. "I think we say Native Americans now. And there's no ghosts. That's not it." I didn't know how, but I'd never been more sure of anything.

She puckered her mouth, glanced again at my pride bracelet. "Well. Should have realized you'd be the _sensitive_ type."

I couldn't take this any more. Her racist bullshit aside, the notion that what was happening to me was a cute mystery for her to solve was so disconnected from the growing existential dread of the past few days I wanted to slap her. She was everyone who thought my problems had simple explanations, everyone who thought casting victims as villains made for good stories. For a moment, brief and burning, I hated her.

And that's when her face came unstuck.

This was back when movies were still celluloid, and at the drive-in theater by our house the film would sometimes jump the gate, get misaligned. When that happened the image would smear, frames no longer projected neat one after the other but running liquid through the machine, all movement turned into vertical bands of distorted color; and the audio would go juddery, vague, and distant, recognizable but distorted. Clipped and monstrous.

This was like that but in three dimensions.

The woman exploded. Her face twisted and smeared, exposing blood and bone. The back of her tongue flapped against her pulsing epiglottis, her eyes round spheres peeling back, turning inside out, her lips deformed and pulled like taffy into a twisting shape that reached from the ceiling to her knees. Her fingers had gone long as tree branches and skinny like pencils, twisting and jerking backward at frantic angles; the pattern of her dress had multiplied and filled the empty spaces in the air and was so thick now I choked on it. Everything moved, everything in her sounded, and the sound was a scream, like her lungs were jet engines, her voice box a bleating thing the size of a cow being flayed alive.

I dropped the teacup and the files: I vaguely remember them tumbling toward the floor in slow motion, spilling and twisting around each other. I was screaming too. All I wanted was to get away. I stumbled back and my head cracked against a cabinet of china plates; I held up my hands to shield myself, as if such a pathetic act could matter against a thing so huge and horrible. It came toward me, moving fast. I couldn't stop it. My sanity frayed.

And then she snapped back into herself, and her voice returned to normal. Almost. It still juddered, like the floor beneath her vibrated a hundred times a second. And her skin was boiling and rippling, like something inside it was desperate to get out. Thousands of tiny somethings pushing and pounding with disproportionate strength against her wrinkled flesh.

She reached toward me---and maybe this was all in my head, maybe she was trying to help, reacting in shock to my reaction, what must have seemed like some kind of seizure---but as she opened her mouth to speak, the rippling distortions made it into a grin. A huge, horrible, ravenous grin, malevolent. Gleeful.

Her reaching fingers writhed, and her eyes were wide and round as saucers.

I jerked to my feet and ran.

For a while I didn't even know what direction I was running. I bolted straight through intersections and past oblivious pedestrians, not seeing them. I wasn't thinking about anything at all. I didn't stop until a knife in my side brought me up short, bent me double, and I realized I'd been running a long time.

I collapsed on a patch of hot grass and threw up, retching and gasping. Gnats scribbled the air around me. Somewhere a dog barked.

I stayed there five or ten minutes, breathing jagged, looking down, studying my hands on the grass and my puke, dealing with those three things, the hands and the grass and the puke, not wanting or able to look up or deal with anything else. Nothing happened. After a while that started to help.

Eventually I climbed to my feet, got my bearings. I realized I knew where I was. I walked slowly back to our house.

I never went back for my bike.


#


When I got home, Niko was gone. I let myself into his bedroom and curled up on his bed, because I needed to be surrounded by something familiar. The smell of him was an anchor to reality. Maybe the only one.

I must have drifted off, because moments later the afternoon light was dying and his hand was on my shoulder, shaking it. I jerked awake, guilty excuses on my lips before I realized he didn't seem concerned about me breaking in. His hair was matted and he had a distant expression, staring past me.

"I took a piss," he said quietly, as if to someone standing behind my left shoulder, "and the bubbles were like eyes. There were thousands of them, floating. Staring. Iridescent, like oil. Something grinning underneath them, though, behind them. Something babbling and grinning and hungry and even when I closed the lid and flushed them away I could still hear them, down there, all of them..."

I sat up,
grabbed his shoulders and shook him, then did it again, hard. His head flopped back and he grabbed my wrist, a faint annoyance reaching his face. I was glad to see anything there at all.

I let him focus on me before saying, "There's no eyes."

He stared at me.

I shook my head, more sure of it now. "That's not it. It's not ghosts, or a thing out there, stalking us. It _is_ us. We're what's wrong here. We're the ones who don't belong." I swallowed, bile still souring the back of my throat. "We're slipping. Losing our grip on... something. This whole world, maybe. Or it's losing its grip on us."

I had his full attention now.

"And I don't know what happens when we let go, or it does," I finished. "But I don't think it's good."

He stared at me, hopeless. "There's no way back."

"No. Not yet." I took a breath. "Not until we find one."





Chapter 7




We turned the wall of his bedroom into a map, taping up big sheets of artist's paper, shoving piles of books and unwashed dishes and dirty socks and two scuffed snowboards out of the way to make room. He transferred our notebook sketches to the wall and we tried to fill in the rest from memory. It was imperfect, because stairs down there ran up and down and the wall was flat, and also because the hallways twisted at weird angles and we didn't have surveying equipment to sort them out. But it was a start.

It was also painfully incomplete. There were dozens of doors we'd never tried, branches and halls we'd only glanced into. Almost everything we had seen was from that single hall off the big room, the one we'd tried on a whim our first time down. Other than peering around the first couple corners, we hadn't explored the other four halls at all.

Niko swept a hand across all the empty space. "We're fucked."

"Look," I countered, "we know the other versions of us found a key, somewhere. And we also know the two sides are staying almost exactly in sync. Close enough to spill coffee the same way."

"Not close enough to leave each others' fucking sticky notes alone."

"Still," I pressed on, "that means the keys can't have been too well-hidden. We could have almost found one, walked right past it. Maybe the only difference was a momentary decision about which door to go through, what wall to glance at."

"Doesn't matter." He stirred his coffee, morose, and sat it down to cool on his dresser, next to a half-empty older mug growing a skim of mold. "The keys are useless now, anyway."

"If there's one set of keys, there might be more. Other keys, other doors. And besides, we have no idea what else might be down there. We need to keep looking."

He ran a hand through his hair, a familiar gesture, but he looked changed. His eyes were getting sunken, from lack of sleep or some more worrisome deficiency. His face, so often laughing, hadn't smiled in days.

"Synchronicity," he said. "That's the problem."

"How do you mean?"

"I think we're getting out of sync with them. Day by day, decision by decision, we're losing our lockstep. And the farther out of sync we get, the harder it is to go back."

"Speculation," I said, tired.

"And the deeper," he pressed on, "the deeper we'll have to go to find another way through."

"Bullshit." But I didn't have energy to argue with him. Clearly we couldn't solve anything from up here. We needed to go back down. We had to fill in the blank spaces on that map.

Our first expedition departed the next morning. We had backpacks, trail mix and energy bars, lots of flashlights and batteries, twine, spray paint, a compass, graph paper, whistles, and rope. Despite everything, I think the prep got us fired up a bit. If answers were down there, we'd find them. We skipped class and I called in sick to work, and we both agreed if necessary we'd do the same tomorrow, and the next day. Finding a way back was top priority.

"They're not _our_ grades anyway," Niko said with a smirk. I sensed a slippery slope here vis-à-vis morality and nihilism, but I wasn't in the mood to debate philosophy with him. I wanted to move. To delve. Find some answers.

We chose one of the unexplored halls off the big room, and decided to explore as much of it as we could, until we'd mapped it all or got too tired to keep going. We picked the one at the far end, opposite the stairs back up. Right away we found something different.

The first few twists and turns were the familiar terrain we'd come to expect: carpet, wall sconces, scuffed doors. But after a short and confusing snarl of hallways and tiny rooms, the floorplan opened up into an area with a slightly different style of sconces, and longer, straighter hallways.

Some of them went straight down.

We stood at the lip of one of these pits and peered over the edge. It was like someone had taken a regular hallway and stood it on end. The brown carpet went right over the lip and continued straight down, passing sideways doors, sideways wall sconces. Maybe seventy or eighty feet down, it hit a carpeted bottom and leveled out again, branching in opposite horizontal directions. The pit filled the exact center of a junction; we could step around the corners into hallways leading off in the three other directions from the one we'd arrived. It was a five-way intersection, all at right-angles.

A couple dozen paces down one of those halls was another pit.

"What is this," Niko sighed, "challenge mode?"

When you think of treacherous terrain a basement hallway isn't the first thing that comes to mind, but clutching the corner and peering vertiginously down, the pit looked as unscalable as the Matterhorn. There was nothing to get a grip on, except the doorways every twenty feet or so. Clearly we couldn't get down without climbing gear, nor come back up without it either.

If you fell... if you got stuck down there...

We stepped carefully around the pit (which was awkward and terrifying because it came right up to the ninety-degree edge of the wall) and kept exploring on the same level. But the pits were everywhere. Each horizontal hall would dead end sooner or later, and the side rooms were all small and empty. Some of them had hallway pits, too, leading down from their exact center. After an hour we'd mapped out everything we could get to without a climbing harness. Other than going back to the big room, there was no way forward except fourteen pits, each at least fifty feet deep.

"Maybe difficult is good." He perked up. "This is the first thing we've had to work for. Maybe means there's something interesting down there."

"Or maybe one of the other halls leads to a room filled floor to ceiling with keys. No point guessing."

We went back to explore one of the other halls---we didn't have much choice---and found something different there, too. All the doors on one side opened onto a vast dark room piled floor to ceiling with tables.

Niko leaned casually against the door and poked his head inside with a suave expression. "Hey," he called into the shadows, "How _you_ doin'?"

The room began like all the others, although unlit: a regular door and the same style carpet. But we couldn't see a far wall, nor a wall to either side, maybe in part because the tables started a few feet in. There were a lot of them. Flimsy plastic folding tables, huge oak dining tables, card tables, end tables, TV trays, workbenches, school desks. They were mostly upright but some were wedged in at crazy angles, like movers had started systematically and then given up halfway through, throwing the rest on top in careless chaos.

Bending down, we shone our flashlights through an endless sea of legs. There was enough space to crawl between them, but nothing like a straight path: upended walls of wood or marble or metal made intermittent obstacles, and poles and supports of all materials and angles made a forest of the open space. Our flashlights cast scattering shadows through the maze, but couldn't penetrate far.

"Promising," Niko said. "They're making us work for it."

"There's no 'they,'" I said automatically, mostly because I didn't want to think about it. "And it's the same problem again. We can't risk getting lost."

"But this is easier, man. We don't need specialized equipment. Just some way to leave a path. Hansel and Gretel, like you said."

Or maybe Ariadne. I had a ball of twine in my pack, so we settled for a simple solution: tying one end to my ankle, and the other around the doorknob. After some deliberation, we decided to keep our packs on, despite the awkwardness of crawling the maze with them. Having girded ourselves with stuff, we felt naked without it now.

We set off to map.

Crawling through the maze was surreal. The furniture painted by the bright of our headlamps made us feel foolish, like kids crawling around grandma's kitchen with the lights out. But the scale glimpsed in the shifting shadows, the distance traversed by our bodies and soon felt in our knees and ankles, spoke to confusing and frightening immensities, the deepness of caves, an underworld. The space went on and on. There was too much of it for reason, for safety, for sense.

Of the four cardinal directions you could move in from the big room, the maze of furniture seemed to fill one of them up entirely. The few hallways stretching that direction were like jagged tendrils reaching into the world's emptiest jumble sale.

We moved carefully at first, stopping to map each twist and turn, trying not to be unnerved by the way our lights carved a thousand sweeping shadow-shapes out of that desert of furniture, moving and twisting like something alive. But as we started to realize the extent of the space, Niko developed a new strategy: push towards the center, or at least away from the long wall we'd entered from. Find the middle, if there was one. If it didn't go on forever.

What happened next caught us completely unprepared.

We'd started moving in a steady direction, as near as we could manage. I'd begun to feel almost cheerful: we were solving the mystery, peeling back this place's secrets. Surely it was just a matter of time before we found a way back home.

And then something _yanked_ my ankle from behind.

I gasped and twisted around, dozens of metal legs reflecting my headlamp back at me; I could only see a few dozen feet. But the twine tied to my ankle was taut, and pulling me with terrible force, starting to drag me backwards. I cried out, digging my fingers into the carpet.

I collided with the metal leg of a folding table and heard a clattering groan as furniture shifted all around me, pushed out of place. Weight shifted alarmingly above.

"What the fuck, _help me!_" I shouted. The loop around my ankle was viciously tight, cutting off circulation. My fingers scrabbled for purchase but the carpet wasn't shaggy enough to grip.

Niko scrambled back towards me, shrugging out of his pack and grabbing my arm. But as he pulled me back the twine dug into my ankle like a vise, like the pressure would saw the line straight through my foot. It _hurt_. "Cut it, fucking cut it!" I gasped.

He cursed and let me go, whipping back around to zipper open his pack, letting the line start to drag me away. I reached out to grab another table leg but only succeeded in dragging the whole thing along with me, screeches of metal-on-wood and the ominous clutter of shifting weights and balances sounding above and all around; and I let go before the whole nightmare could crash down around me, dividing me, burying me alive.

I panicked. My mind flashed through visions of monsters waiting at the edge of the maze, reeling me in, each sway of my headlamp birthing a new imagined terror out of the confusion of shapes around me. A horned demon. Some evil-eyed little girl from a shitty horror movie. And then the history lady flashed into my head, inside-out and distorted past the breaking point, eyes white and wide; and I started babbling

	DESCEND

mind slipping towards the only place it might be safe 

	IF YOU ONLY KNEW WHAT AWAITS YOU

and Niko cut the twine.

I missed the lead-up in my nightmare, but he'd dug through his pack for the Swiss army knife, lost at the bottom with the camping gear, then struggled to squeeze ahead of me without kicking me in the face or knocking anything down on top of us. He told me later he'd barely touched the blade to the twine when the taut line snapped, whipping away in a fraction of a second.

He had to spend a minute calming me down. My mind had skidded toward some rarely glimpsed drop-off, pulled edgeward by a dark and primal gravity, and it took time to climb handhold by handhold back up to the light.

What brought me back, prosaically enough, was the growing unpleasant tingling in my foot. Pins and needles: painful, but familiar. The knot on the twine had slipped down and pulled a tight loop around my leg just above the ankle, digging half an inch into my jeans. Niko helped me cut it off and I sat rubbing my foot for a long time, calming down, waiting.

Listening.

After maybe fifteen minutes we started back, Niko up front with the knife. I was equally terrified bringing up the rear, though, constantly looking over my shoulder, miserable and afraid. The furniture right around us had been dragged out of shape, but the rest of the way back was unchanged. We swung the lights back and forth ahead but could see nothing but a forest of shadows.

Maybe they really were alive.

After a few dozen feet we found the cut end of the twine, slack and unmoving. We followed it all the way back to where we'd come in.

It was no longer tied to the doorknob, like we'd left it. The twine lay coiled up in a neat loop. Right outside the threshold.





Chapter 8




"This changes everything," Niko was saying. We were in the funny-shaped room behind the closet with the doomed board game, dust gathering on unresolved plans for world domination. We'd moved all our expedition gear in here; we didn't want to explain things to anyone else, and the rest of the housemates had forgotten this room even existed. I rubbed the ugly bruise ringing my ankle, sitting on the grimy hardwood floor with my pant leg rolled up.

"Does it? How?" I winced, prodding a tender spot.

"It's the first concrete sign there's something down there. Not glints of light. Not sounds. Something physical."

"Yeah, reassuring."

He conceded the point, slumping down next to me. "But why now? What brought this on? Is the maze forbidden? Did we violate some kind of policy?"

"Marking our way."

"What?"

"It's the first time we've tried to leave a permanent trail, something unambiguously marking the way back. Maybe whatever it is... ugh." It still felt awful to verbalize it, give it that kind of legitimacy. "Maybe it didn't care for that."

"Or maybe whatever's down there doesn't want us exploring the furniture maze. Because it leads to something. Something big." He punched the wall, suddenly angry. "Who fucking knows? None of it makes any goddamn sense."

"That'll go on our tombstones. A week from now, when we're dead of dimension poisoning." He raised an eyebrow at me: _Really?_ I shrugged. "Either that or lung cancer from the smokes, bro. You pick."

He laughed despite himself, and I chalked up a mental win. Cheering him up, making him smile, was so ingrained in me I barely noticed I was doing it any more. Maybe that day, I shouldn't have been. It wasn't exactly a situation to be cheerful about.

_Do I do it because I really want him to be happy? Or is it that I can't stand it when he's sad?_

"I'm not going down there again," he said with grim finality.

We both contemplated that for a long minute.

"Okay fine, I am. You're right. You win. We find a way back. Somehow."

"There's monsters up here, too," I said softly.

He sniffed. "Or maybe we're the monsters, man. Crawled out from underneath the bed."


#


We decided to explore the vertical shafts, instead of going back into the maze. We didn't know whether what had happened was a message or a provocation. I thought the bruises on my ankle were message enough: Keep Out. Niko argued that was exactly why we should ignore it. Wherever they don't want you to go is probably the most interesting place to be. On the other hand, maybe the message had been like fences around Chernobyl.

Maybe whatever was farther in was worse.

So we settled on the shafts, which had the virtue of being unusual and promising terrain without even mild signs of demonic infestation. One of Niko's ex-hobbies was rock climbing, but he'd stopped after the accident jacked up his wrists. Bits of gear still lingered around his overstuffed bedroom, though, so we'd assembled some rope, harnesses, carabiners, and a couple of grappling hooks from the sporting goods store. The box called them "Grip Monkeys," which seemed incongruously cheerful.

We picked the first pit, since they all seemed about the same, and set about securing the grapples in a doorjamb in a way that would hold our weight. We'd each go down on our own rope, one at a time and using the second as backup. We also had extra Grip Monkeys in our pack, in case something happened to these.

Along with the usual gear, we also brought down a camcorder. We were too broke to afford the newer all-digital cameras, so we borrowed one that shot on Hi-8 tape. This was before the whole found footage craze, so we didn't think to take the camera down the pit with us and record weepy confessionals into it: we were going to leave it down the hall from the shaft, trained on the pit and our ropes and the Grip Monkeys, hopefully capturing anything that tried to mess with us.

When we were ready, and since we didn't have a tripod, I left the camera on the floor a dozen paces back, pointed at the pit, and hit record. We shouldered our packs and Niko tied on to the rope. Moving carefully, he stepped over the lip, and started to rappel down the carpeted "floor" of the shaft. I watched his grapple nervously, but it held his weight, tines set deep into the solid wood of the door frame.

The bottom of the shaft seemed a mile down with Niko dangling above it, but probably only dropped about seventy feet. He moved fast and soon was stepping onto the once-again-horizontal carpet at the bottom. He shined his light back up at me and gave the all-clear.

I followed him down, trying to think only in particulars about what was happening and not the terrifying big picture. I focused on old climbing lessons, what my hands were doing. One thing at a time. Presently I'd made it down too.

The hall at the bottom of the pit stretched off to either side, like we were at the junction of an upside-down T. Detaching from our dangling ropes, we picked a direction and began to explore.

Things got weird down there.

The hallways continued on as they had above, and there were more pits. But now they didn't go straight down. Not quite. They descended at angles ranging from subtle to severe, never quite true to vertical. Some were almost ramps. Others changed their angle or gradually twisted as they dropped. And while the pit we'd rappelled down was lit, none of these were. Each plunged down into darkness.

And there were more of them. A lot more. Maybe hundreds. Most opened from the middle of a hallway, filling its width: easy to jump across, but wearing a pack you felt clumsy, were acutely aware you were one stumble away from a very bad time.

We decided to avoid unnecessary leaps, but the pits were so thick they hedged us in, pushed us inexorably in certain directions. If we tried to veer too far off course, they'd get denser, and we'd have to backtrack or turn aside, angling back to our former heading. And the farther we went that way, the more the hallway angles edged off true.

It was subtle at first. But the horizontal halls were becoming less and less level. We'd stumble on a floor that canted slightly left, or tilted a half-degree up or down. The walls, too, were growing angled, some leaning outward a degree or two instead of staying neatly parallel, or bent a little bit inward at mismatched angles. It made us feel drunk. You've seen so many well-constructed hallways in your life, your brain doesn't know how to process ones that don't behave.

Once at the peak of my swimming days I'd had a chance to swim in the ocean. It was a school trip and there was a beach day and some of the other guys were going to do it but the thought alone terrified me. Not because of waves or rip tides or sharks. In a pool, you know, through goggles, the universe becomes a smooth abstraction: white and well-lit concrete on all sides, contained, chemicals and filters flushing out anything but you. Sounds are muffled. Gravity's on break. There's no place for anything to hide, and even when you can't touch bottom, you know it's there, a few feet below.

The ocean is different in every conceivable way. Standing in the surf would be one thing, but swimming out past where my feet could touch the sand? The thought crushed me with primal terror, compressed me. An unknowable void stretching down beyond my flailing bare feet. What it might contain. Years later I tried reading Lovecraft and thought of that sensation again when he talked about cosmic horror, something so vast and inhuman it could shatter you, so close it could reach out and brush your toes. I couldn't make it through more than a couple stories. I couldn't shake that image.

I couldn't shake it now.

We kept going.

The halls branched and spread out endlessly. We gave up trying to map, other than the route back. We passed through regions of dark and regions of light. The decor rarely varied from its ubiquitous blandness. Sometimes little things were wrong. A door, off its hinges, lying neat and flat in the center of the hall. A knob embedded in the ceiling, unable to be turned. We searched around these anomalies, but never found anything useful.

Some of the rooms got larger, too big for rooms in a house. More like a school gymnasium. Still the same carpet, though. And it felt like we were seeing more of the anomalies, the farther in and deeper down we got. Doors or sections of hallway paved in bathroom tile; weird cube-shaped extrusions or cavities in the edges of rooms. It was like the deeper we went, the more flexible the rules became---of architecture, of stability, of god knows what else.

At one point we came to a low-ceilinged room maybe twenty feet across, unlit, too big for our flashlights to see the far end. But at the edge of their reach, in the dimness, the floor began to curve up.

We started forward. The ceiling stayed at the same low height, maybe seven feet up, but its angle began to steepen, in lockstep with the angle of the floor. After a few minutes, the slope was too severe for our shoes to get purchase on the carpet. For as far as our flashlight beams could show the slope kept on steepening, although we couldn't see too far around the curve ahead. It was like walking up the inside of a giant carpeted hamster wheel.

"This proves it," Niko said.

"Proves what?"

He threw his hands up. "Downstairs can't possibly exist."

"No shit, Sherlock."

"I mean not in real, physical space." He swayed, shifting his balance on the awkward carpeted slope. "This is too big. We haven't gone down nearly far enough for this whole curve to fit underground."

"I don't know about that. It doesn't feel like we've climbed enough to hit ground level yet. And maybe this isn't a full wheel. Maybe it stops just up ahead."

He scowled. "Man, why are you always _defending_ this place? Making excuses for it? Okay, Einstein. Why wouldn't it go all the way around?"

"Well, why _would_ it?"

We stared at each other, but there was nothing else to say.

"Maybe it's more like a message," he muttered as we started back down the slope. "Rats in a cage, you know. Spinning our wheels. Getting nowhere." He shot a vicious glance at the curving ceiling. "Funny."

There were no doors out of the hamster wheel other than the one we'd come in from, where the slope had flattened out again. We left it behind, another baffling mystery.

We were getting tired. Just before turning back, though, we found one last curious room. We could hear it before we opened the door.

The room was the size of a squash court, though not quite as tall, the whole thing covered in green bathroom tile, even the inside of the door we came through. A sink rose serenely from its center. Scalding water blasted from the faucet, releasing clouds of billowing steam and filling the air with a moist, sticky warmth. The sink was full, water spilling over its sides and flowing down the porcelain like some artsy fountain, then streaming away across the tile, presumably according to some imperceptible tilt in the floor. It vanished down an open hallway, carpeted once again, slanting down at a steep angle from a corner of the room.

We walked over to the hallway to peer down. It was closer to vertical than horizontal, dropping at a vicious angle. Where the hot stream hit the tilted carpet it became black with mold, and the walls and ceiling of the tunnel were stained with rust and moss. Like water had been coursing through it for a long, long time.

From the slanting darkness rose a hot smell of rot.

"This feels different," Niko said.

We walked back to the sink and tried to turn off the faucet, but the hot and cold knobs spun loose. The scalding water rushed full force out of the tap, churning noisily in the basin.

"We're going to have a hell of a water bill," I joked, but then remembered something. The newspaper article from the history lady, about the old fort built on the site of our house. It had said something about a natural spring, an underground cavern.

Something felt on the verge of snapping into place, making sense. But I couldn't quite see it.



	A looking-glass held above this stream 
	Will show your troubles like a dream



I dug through my pack and found a tiny mirror in the survival kit. You were supposed to use it to signal planes. I held it above the running water, angling it around, not sure what I expected to see.

There was nothing. Just the two of us, reflected back.

After a moment the billowing steam fogged the mirror, erasing the reflection.

I put it away, feeling deflated.

Niko was beaming his flashlight down the tunnel, chasing the descending path of the stream. "This would be rough going. Steep and slick. We'd need better climbing gear. And I can't see how far down it goes."

I took a deep breath. "It feels like that's the way, though. Doesn't it?"

He ran a hand through his hair, eyes still pulled down the shaft. "Jesus, I hope not."


#


I couldn't stop thinking about the wet tunnel as we retraced our steps. Images of it flashed through my mind. The desire to know what was past the reach of our flashlight beams, what was down there, was maddening. I was planning how soon we could come back down, what we'd have to bring with us. What it would take to keep pushing deeper.

We passed through the last few hallways to the base of shaft we'd come down. On the carpet directly underneath were our ropes, coiled up neat, Grip Monkeys still tied to the end.

"God damn it," Niko said with feeling, craning his head to glare accusingly at the shaft and fling curses up its length. We couldn't see anything unusual up there, not from down here.

Our way back up had been cut off.

We had extra grapples in our packs, but the originals didn't seem damaged: just detached. The shaft was too narrow to throw one all the way back up without hitting a wall, so we settled for hooking a doorway, halfway up.

Our position now was much more precarious. We couldn't tell if the grapple was set properly: we just had to trust it. Niko volunteered to go first. From the ground below, I watched him climb, anxious.

And for some reason, that was the moment I finally accepted that I was still in love with him. I'd tried so hard to convince myself I wasn't, that I'd moved on, wrung him out of my heart, that all we had was an especially deep friendship. But watching him dangle from that rope, knowing he could fall at any second, I couldn't pretend any more. I'd never stopped loving him. I didn't know how. Maybe I never would.

And that was also the moment
the grappling hook ripped through the molding of the wooden doorframe far above, and Niko fell.





Chapter 9




Time seemed to snap and twist back on itself in opposing directions, both too fast and too slow. Terror struck me like lightning, searing me with unbearable matching thoughts: _he's going to die_ and _there's nothing I can do to help him_.

Then he grabbed the edge of the next doorframe down and his body slammed against the horizontal door beneath. I watched the bottoms of his sneakers as they kicked and flailed at the smooth beige wall, scrabbling for purchase.

He was still too far up. _Too far._ If he fell...

"Are you okay?" I shouted up at him, or something equally useless. My lungs were clenched so tight that for a minute I couldn't breathe back in.

He'd managed to press the toes of his sneakers up against the wall, but there was nothing to stand on. His position was desperate, hands gripping the inch of molding like claws. I could see muscles trembling even from here. He clung to the wall quivering like a caught-out insect, paralyzed with indecision.

"You're okay." I tried to keep my voice light, in control, willing confidence into it and up to him. My mind thrummed as it raced to find him a way out. He was still clipped on to the climbing rope but the grapple now swayed useless beneath him. The hallway pit ran featureless above and below the doorframe he clung to: there was nothing else to get a grip on, not for a dozen feet in either direction.

"The door." I projected calm authority. "You need to get the door open. If there's a room inside, it'll only be a little drop. Niko. Are you listening to me?"

He shook his head, as if snapping out of shock, found the doorknob beneath him and focused on it. It was on the bottom side of the door from our perspective, at waist-height for Niko, but too far off to the side to easily reach.

He lifted an ineffectual foot to try kicking at it, but it was too high. I watched his fingers slip towards the edge of the molding.

"Nice idea." I tried to keep my voice steady. "Just try again, okay? I'm right here. If you fall, I've got you." But did I, really? My arms were stretched out stupidly, but if he fell into them from that height it would break us both.

He kicked again, more desperate this time, foot still far from the knob. His shoe scudded across the smooth paint of the door. His fingers gripped the molding so tight they'd gone white. He couldn't hold a grip like that much longer.

"You almost had it," I lied. "Come on, buddy, you got this."

"Just shut up for a second," he shouted, flashing a glare down at me. "Stop fucking telling me what you think I want to hear and shut up."

I fell silent, face flushed, paralyzed. Singed.

He stared at the knob, and the silence sharpened until I couldn't help but break it, to say out loud what I knew he was thinking.

"You'll have to let go with one hand." I said it as even as I could. "Just for a second. To turn the knob." I breathed. "There's no other way."

He nodded. I stood helpless below him, arms still stretched up, aching.

Then he did it.

In one quick move he pressed his body in toward the door, letting his toes take as much weight as they could, let go of the frame with his left hand and thrust it out hard toward the knob. He brushed it and for a horrible moment it looked like he wouldn't be able to grip it and turn it, the angle all wrong, and so was his balance, now; but then his fingers wrapped around the knob, his wrist twisted and it turned.

The door clunked and swung inwards from the bottom as his weight pushed against it, and he half-collapsed, half-scrambled through as his balance was lost, fingers slipping off the frame. He tumbled inside, banging knees and shins, and fell through, the door swinging shut behind him like a cat flap, muffled thumps and curses making their way through the walls.

But before I could even breathe out, a shock of awful, sawtoothed sound smacked into me from above, and I was so startled I bit my tongue. It was utterly alien, a juddering metallic _twang_ that lingered in the air, throbbing, jittery, reluctant to die away.

And then I realized what it was.

The sound turned in an instant from monstrous to mundane. Niko must have thwacked it as he tumbled past, flailing: one of those springy metal doorstoppers, no doubt surprised to meet a falling body instead of a hastily opened door.


#


We made it to the top, in the end. It took a series of shorter climbs to each sideways room, treating them like miniature base camps, places to rest before flinging the grapple up another dozen feet to the next door, the next cube of safety; testing each set of the grapple more thoroughly, belaying each other as best we could in the patently unsafe circumstances. But at length, we'd made it back out.

"Sorry about earlier. What I said." I'd just grabbed his hand pulling me up the last few feet, and now we were sprawled on the carpet, mercifully horizontal again, like two mountaineers on the world's blandest summit.

"Don't worry about it. You just... do that sometimes, and it bugs me." _Tell him what I think he wants to hear._ I shut my eyes. "I wish you'd..." He lifted a hand, gestured vaguely in the air, dropped it in defeat. "Whatever, forget it. There's a million more important things to worry about."

The camcorder was where we'd left it, sitting on the carpet pointed at the pit.

The door frame where our original grapples had been attached wasn't damaged. We'd seated them pretty firmly, so this suggested that rather than being yanked free from below, someone had carefully unhooked them from up here.

Of course, the ropes had also been neatly coiled at the bottom. Someone had to have done that from down there.

I didn't want to watch the tape, not while we were still Downstairs. But Niko, face grim, insisted. So I huddled miserably beside him while we watched the footage on the tiny flip-out screen.

The tape had run to the end, so we backed it up a bit and hit play. To our dismay, the ropes were going over the edge right to the end; whatever happened, it had been after the tape ran out. Niko held down the rewind button and we settled in for a long haul. We spooled back through the whole tape, but nothing changed: it was two hours of motionless footage of the hallway and our ropes. Finally we saw ourselves spring back up from the pit at high speed, first me and then him; dicker with the grapples and rope, then zip over to the camera to turn it on. The tape clunked to a stop.

Cursing up a blue streak, Niko hit play.
We watched in numb frustration as everything we'd done earlier played back: the same discussions about rope and seating the grapples, the same lame jokes failing to ease tension. There wasn't much point to watching it all unfold again. We just didn't know what else to do.

On the tiny screen, I was standing a pace or two back, wondering aloud how much stuff we should take down with us. I hated how my voice sounded on tape, how my face looked. I always had. Even on the tiny screen I could see red blotches. On the screen a miniature Niko sat on the edge of the pit, adjusting his ropes.

Distorted by the shitty camcorder speaker, he said, "How far down do you think this goes?"

My image shrugged, said "We should possibly go far deeper."

My skin crawled. "Oh my god."

Niko glanced at me. "What?"

"That's not what I said." My head was spinning. What _had_ I said? Something like _It can't possibly go much deeper_, maybe. Not that.

Screen-Niko said "Yes, right. In fact, we shouldn't the two of us come back this route at all. We should descend and we should let's stay down, down and deep." His voice sounded strained, but he pulled his rope tight smartly. "And don't come back up until we find it, man. What it is we need to find."

Where it gripped the camcorder, Niko's hand was pale. "I didn't say that either," he breathed. "I mean I said something about that long, some of those words and phrases maybe. But they're _different they're fucking different---_"

I shushed him, because the voices on the tape were speaking again. But now the words were familiar, mundane. We both watched the screen, afraid to blink, but nothing else seemed changed. Everything played out as we remembered. Except now every word and gesture caused a spike of uncertainty. _Had_ I said that, exactly that? Had I moved my arm that way, stood in precisely that spot?

Screen-Niko started to rappel. The camera focused on my legs as I stood up top, watching him descend. On the screen I waited, then clipped onto the rope once he'd made it to the bottom.

Screen-Ryan checked his harness, took a deep breath, and started down.

He paused before his head dropped out of frame to call down to Niko: "Coming down." I remembered saying that.

Then he turned and looked straight at the camera.

Straight into the lens.

He held the gaze for a long moment.

Then glanced, deliberate, down the shaft. Then back to the camera.

Wide-eyed.

His head dropped out of sight.

We sat frozen, watching the video of the empty hall for a minute, two, the grainy image showing nothing but the empty hall and our ropes.

Niko breathed out. "Jesus." He closed the screen and sat the camera down, backing away from it like it was a bomb. "Jesus fucking Christ."

I kept staring at it. _A looking-glass held above this stream..._

"Jesus," he kept muttering. "Jesus."


#


We slept in the big room that night because we always had low-level headaches now when we went upstairs. We were becoming trolls, hiding from sounds, afraid to go out under the sky, only venturing from our cave to get more supplies, stock up for further ventures down. I slept under the foosball table, gathering dust. No one but us had been down here for weeks.

It won't surprise you to hear I had nightmares.

I replayed the tape in my dreams, over and over. Each time I rewound all the way to the start, intent to watch it through, make sure there wasn't some clue I'd missed. And each time the tape was different. It was always Niko and the pit and I, but never the same. And whenever something changed, fresh dread flooded through me.

Sometimes the changes were slight, hardly there, and I strained to catch the altered words, the different glances. Sometimes our words were rearranged, as if to make cryptic cyphers, hidden meanings on the verge of making sense but never quite resolving.

In some of these variations, Niko and I were together. A couple. I could tell from the words we used, the way we looked at each other. Nothing that would have been obvious to anyone but me. I watched these scenes over and over, rewinding to catch the little glances, secret smiles.

There were other, worse versions.

There were dream-tapes where a gaunt Ryan and Niko with aged and wrinkled faces hobbled up to the camera in wonder, picked it up, passed it back and forth between them in awe. Like they'd been trapped down there for a lifetime. They pawed at the lens in a stupid glee, as if they'd forgotten what a camera even was. As if it might somehow be a portal back through time.

There were tapes where we screamed at our watcher-selves to go away, to never come back again, that what was down there would destroy us. There were others, far worse, where we laughed like sharks, invited ourselves to come down there, and stay.

There were shots with two Nikos or two Ryans, pretending to be two different people. There were shots where we _were_ different people, people I'd never seen. There were shots where we spoke other languages, or babbled idiot sounds and pretended they were speech.

There were tapes of the pit with nothing else there: no grapples, no ropes, no us. There were tapes where the carpet was crawling with beetles. There were tapes where the walls were made of meat.

And on one tape---and I rewound and re-watched this over and over, in the dream---water from all the hallways poured into the pit, a four-sided waterfall. The carpets were black and sticky with moss trailing down into the vertical shaft, the air thick with steam. Something jostled the camera and it surged forward with the tide, water sloshing against the lens, until the scalding stream carried it over the edge and it fell, straight down into that boiling pit, surrounded by water on every side, gathering speed, falling into wet and steaming dark, faster and faster and faster...

I would jerk awake at this point, coated in sweat, and try not to fall back asleep. But when I did I'd find myself rewinding the tape yet again and pressing play, hoping this time the footage would return to normal. It was always changed, and I'd have to watch it all over from the beginning, hoping this version would show something useful, a hint, a clue, an answer.


#


I woke to stale nicotine. Niko leaned against the stairs back up to my room, staring into the dark, a lit cigarette between his fingers.

"Our lease says no smoking in here," I grunted, still shaking off nightmares.

He took another drag. "Blow me."

I laughed and he flashed me a wicked grin. It felt good to laugh. Even if it was a little bit forced, to make sure he knew that I knew he was kidding.

Rubbing my eyes, I sat up in my sleeping bag. After a moment I scrunched over beside him, back against the stairs.

We steeped in smoke and silence for a long minute.

"Did I ever tell you," he finally said, "about that time I went camping by myself, up in Brushwillow?" I shook my head. "Used to do that a lot, after the, uh. Accident."

I took that in. He hadn't brought it up in a long time. Neither had I.

"I went by myself, cause I didn't want a lot of people around just then, and it's easier than twisting people's arms to get them to come with you. Planning around schedules, all that bullshit." He shifted into citation voice. "'The man who goes with another must wait until they're ready. The man who goes alone can leave today.'"

"Yeah, Thoreau. You quote that one a lot."

He shrugged. "I like it up there. Anyway."

I waited, staring into the whorled beige universe of the carpet.

"So this one night I'm up there, alone. I'm in my tent, and it's dark. Cloudy, no moon. I'm sleeping fine, on my back, you know, head up against the edge of the tent. And then I wake up, cause I hear something, just outside."

He sucked on the cigarette. "Something breathing. Low, hissing, gurgling breathing. Sounded huge, like a bear or something, a big-ass wolf. And it was right on the other side of the tent flap. Inches from my face. Like something had pressed its muzzle against the nylon, that thin nothing sheet of ultralight fabric, and was waiting.

"I still remember what that felt like. Fucking terrifying.

"I was too scared to move, so I lay there a long time, hoping it would go away. But it didn't. The thing stayed where it was. Kept making those horrible breathing sounds. Inhale. Exhale. Raspy, choking."

He flicked the cigarette onto the carpet, rubbed it out with his foot.

"And then I realized where the sound was coming from. The breathing was coming from me. I was sleeping on a root or something, my head had gotten into some funny angle. I was snoring, basically, and woke myself up. But I didn't realize what woke me was a sound I was making myself."

I was too tired to process this. "Cool story."

"Do you get what I mean, though?"

I rubbed a hand over my face, tried to think.

"You're saying maybe there's not... a _thing_ down there. That somehow, all of it is us."

"Echoes," he said. "Reflections. The rooms are reflections of our shitty old house, and the things we're seeing, experiencing down there, maybe they're not alive. We're causing them, somehow. And now we're ascribing intentionality to side effects. Jumping at our own shadows." He lay back down on his sleeping bag, staring up at the ceiling.

I remembered something from a neurobiology class. "Did you know there are more neurons going from your brain to your eyes than in the other direction?"

"So?"

"From your brain to your eyes," I repeated, "not the other way around."

He blinked. "That doesn't make sense."

"It does if you realize that vision is mostly the brain telling the eyes what it expects them to see." I rubbed my face again, trying to wipe off the exhaustion. "We think we have two little cameras in our head. We don't. They're little yes-men, reassuring us nothing unexpected is happening. That's why that trick works, with the guy in the gorilla suit. You ever see that video in school?"

He nodded. "You're watching a bunch of people toss a ball around, and the guy in the gorilla suit walks right through them, and it's like he's invisible. He even waves. But you don't see him the first time, because you're watching the ball. Then you watch it again looking for him and your mind's blown." He smiled faintly. "Dude in my high school science class swore the teacher changed the tape."

"You don't see the gorilla because you don't expect to. There's no reason he'd be there, so your eyes don't notice him. Even though he's in plain sight. Standing right in front of you."

We were both quiet for a while.

"So maybe we're somehow looking at this wrong," I finally said. "We're not seeing something. We keep saying it doesn't make any sense. Maybe we're just not seeing it the right way."

"Maybe." He closed his eyes. "Or maybe there's nothing there to see."

"Niko. About the accident." I swallowed. "That night."

He rolled over. "Don't want to talk about it."

"I know. But if you ever did want to, I mean, if you ever needed that again---"

"I don't. Go the fuck to sleep, man."

We both closed our eyes and tried.
I could feel the camcorder dream lingering, eager to take over again. I tried to fight it off, but I was so tired.

"Even if we are the wolf," Niko muttered, just as I was about to drift off, "that doesn't mean it's not trying to kill us."


#


I got fired from my job, which was fair enough; I'd missed two shifts in the past week. I got a nosebleed during the meeting with my supervisor. He told me to go home and take care of myself. I was halfway home before I remembered that phrase has a positive meaning, too.

I'd thought he was telling me to commit suicide.

Something was in my room when I got back. I stood outside the closed door, dried blood on my face, listening. It sounded like an elephant. Heavy, clopping footfalls made the floorboards groan. Wet, agitated breathing rasped. Dust motes danced at my feet in a strange breeze, sucked under and pushed back out through the space below the closed door, rhythmic. Air moved with faint fleshy sounds, like a hundred quiet people flapping their arms, flailing.

I crept away, miserable, and by the time I came back with Niko and he threw open the door in some play at courage, there was nothing there.

I collapsed into his arms, sobbing, and he let me stay there for a while until I'd calmed down. I clung to him, afraid if I loosened my grip he'd disappear.

He had a perpetual headache now. He kept describing it with the word "stabbing" and only that word, as if clinging to the sound of it. Like using a different one would acknowledge the pain too had changed, grown worse, was no longer caged by the word he'd picked to trap it. I could see how much it hurt him to think, to make words, to move around. He ground his teeth. He was being worn down.

My headaches weren't getting worse, not yet anyway. It was the strain of always having them that wore on me. Of wondering if we'd have them for the rest of our lives.


#


We left to explore down the slippery tunnel late that night. It might have made more sense to go down after a good night's rest, but neither of us could sleep, and spending so much time down there meant night and day were becoming academic concepts anyway. Niko caffeined up (I was jittery enough already), and we loaded our packs with canned food and power bars, thick gloves, and crampons from the sporting goods store. "12 points of contact ensures solid grip on ice," the box had said. We didn't expect the manufacturer had tested them on moldy carpet, but it was the best we could do.

In my pack was also a gun. I bought it from a place I'd driven past every day on my way to work but never gone into until that morning. The friendly clerk agreed to waive the mandatory waiting period in exchange for the last of my ATM cash. I didn't tell Niko about the gun. I thought it would make me feel safer but it just felt heavy.

It had been a hot day and the old house clung to that heat through the night with grim brick desperation. Descending into chillier air was a relief. With every step down the headaches diminished, our mood improved. It was almost addictive, being down there.

We retraced our route through the upper halls to the top of the shaft and reset the grapples. This time Niko hammered them into the doorjamb, face set, until he'd driven the steel spikes three inches into the wood. Even so, neither of us really expected they'd still be there when we got back.

When, or if.

Getting down was a familiar exercise now, danger mitigated by procedure and repetition. We retraced our route to the tiled room with the sink. The water was still running, hot and steaming, rushing across the floor to the corner with its angled hallway lined with slimy black carpet. We shined our lights down the hot throat and the steam grabbed their brightness, bounced it back to us innocently. We couldn't see more than a few body lengths down.

Niko ran a hand through his curls, deflating again in the hot moist air; scratched the hair behind his ear furiously, like a dog with an itch. He was shaking. "Are we sure about this? Really really? Because it sort of seems like a colossally stupid thing to do."

"You have a better idea?"

He sighed, looking down the steaming shaft unhappily.

"No, I don't have a better idea," he said at last.

We pulled on the crampons and the heavy gloves. Harness, rope, knots. Check. Niko pounded two new Grip Monkeys into either side of the angled tunnel entrance. We tied on. Double-check.

Then, each holding our rope, kicking hard to sink the sharp toes of the crampons deep into the slimy carpet, we started down.

It was slow, hot work. Once we got inside the slanted hall, the steam was oppressive, everywhere: we were instantly drenched with it, like rot-smelling sweat. Even with the crampons our feet slipped. The sludge was deep and slick, a stew of algae and mold and fungal slimes, green-black and stinking of putrefying jungle, of horrible things happening under your carpet, inside your walls. We held tight to the ropes with steam-wet gloves. The walls and floor twisted and bent as we descended, as if the constant moisture had warped them, but the downward angle stayed relentless.

It was a gullet. We were letting ourselves be swallowed. No---worse. We were forcing ourselves in. Eager. Like we couldn't wait to be digested.

We were nearing the end of our sixty meter ropes when everything went to shit.

All at once we were sliding. Our ropes had gone slack in our hands, no longer connected to anything. There was no time to dig in the crampons; we were already moving too fast, careening down like a grotesque slalom. Neither of us screamed, focused I guess on trying to grab hold of something, anything, but there were no doorways, no light fixtures, nothing but the thick hot slime and the scalding water. I tried to dig my feet into the oozing carpet but my loose rope had entangled me, my pack was in my way, my face was smeared with scalding gunk and I couldn't open my eyes.

My hand closed on Niko's leg and I grabbed it. A moment later the floor angle shifted and he cried out, threw his body sideways, brought us both to a shuddering, squelchy stop.

We were soaked through, overheating. Scalding water ran past us down the slope. I blinked my eyes open and saw he'd wedged himself into a kink in the tunnel. One of his knees was scraped open and a dull red mark on his forehead was beginning to swell. But he'd done it. He'd stopped us.

Ropes slithered down the tunnel past us, followed moments later by two grapples still tied to their ends. Niko reached out to grab one with his free hand, but his weight shifted, and he had to throw the hand back against a wall to re-brace, cursing. I tried to snag them with my foot, but didn't even come close. They vanished down the tunnel, trailing rope.

Niko's face was tight. He tilted his head down toward me. "This was a mistake. God, we're so fucking stupid. Ryan, man. We have to go back."

"Calm down," I gasped, head filled with the roaring of the water, blinking gunk from my eyes. "Don't panic. We can do this."

"Man, I'm barely holding on. I don't know how much longer I can keep from slipping. We have to try to climb back up."

"Back?" I said, confused. "You want to go back?"

He stared down at me. "Of course back. Are you fucking crazy? Where the fuck else?"

"There's nothing good up there. Nothing right." I kicked my foot for purchase, managed to rest at least some weight on a hidden protuberance. "Besides, nothing's changed. The plan's still the same. This is the best lead for finding a way back to our side."

"Are you not paying attention?" he hissed, furious. "Something is trying to kill us."

"So let's find out how to stop it." I tried to keep my tone reasonable. "We're halfway down already. Climbing back up will be hard, regardless. Why not get all the way to the bottom first?"

"Because we don't even know if there is a bottom." His face was blotched red with fury, with sweat, with the scorching heat of the air. "Halfway? We have no fucking idea how deep this goes. I should have said this a long time ago. You're obsessed. You get obsessed a lot, man, let it drag you down. Your stupid records." He took a deep breath. "Well now you're obsessed with this place, and it's blinding you. It's _feeding_ on you, your obsessions. Multiplying them. You can't see it, or maybe you don't want to, but I do. I'm looking right at it. Like the gorilla in the crowd."

I was angry. "If I'm obsessed with anything, it's with finding a way back. We're running out of time. We either figure this out, or we're stuck here forever, in the wrong world. We need each other to get through this."

"You're obsessed with me, too," he muttered. "When was the last time you hung out with someone else?"

"When was the last time you did?"

He shook his head angrily, dismissing this.

"Our housemates," I pushed, "when was the last time you hung out with any of them? Anyone other than me?" He stared back, seething. "Their names. I bet you can't even remember their names." I was bluffing. But could I remember them, either? Names, faces. No. There was nothing. None of those people mattered, not to me, not to us. We were the only thing that mattered. Getting back to where we'd been, what we'd had. What I'd wanted.

He shook his head again, violent, like there was something inside it he wanted to dislodge. "You're living in a fantasy," he spat, "you always have been. _I can't be what you want me to be, okay?_ I can't be what anyone fucking wants me to be. You all have these versions of me in your head, these ideal perfect Nikos, but they're not real. They're not real. I can't live up to them." He opened his eyes, stared yearningly back up the shaft. "Help me. If you really care about me, help me back up. Don't be like everyone else. Don't just fucking _use_ me to get what you want."

"Going back's not going to help. There's no answers up there." He wasn't understanding. I reached for something else. "Those headaches aren't going away. You think you can live with that pain? Forever?"

"Better than being fucking dead!" He seemed to realize I wasn't changing my mind, turned away to reach for a handhold, but there was nothing there, nothing to grip, and he scrabbled pathetically at the slime.

"Is it?" I shouted, angry, desperate. I had to say something, something that would make him stay, keep him here, and my mouth raced ahead of me. "You won't make it, up there, not with pain like that. We both know you won't."

He tensed, glared down at me. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You know exactly what it means," I said, shaking. "Never really helped you. I've done nothing but help you. I've always been there for you. Every fucking time you fall I pick you back up. _You'd be dead if it weren't for me._"

He shot me with a gaze of such cold fury I cringed. "You're fucking poison," he hissed, "you know that? A fucking snake. I wish you'd let me die that night. I wish we'd never met. _Let go of me!_"

And his hand did close on something, and he pulled himself up, triumphant. His leg was slipping out of my hands, and I couldn't bear for him to crawl away from me, couldn't handle the thought of going back up to that world, to any world where everything was wrong and nothing I wanted was possible, so I pulled. I pulled, too hard, and both his hands slipped, and he crashed back into me, only I wasn't holding onto anything but him any more so both of us tumbled down, faster and faster, slipping and twisting and scraping together down the steepening blood-hot slope, down and down and down into darkness.






PART TWO

MULTIPLICIOUS





You and I 
Again and again 
Always almost 
Never enough.

Ayushee Ghoshal











Chapter 10




The first time someone kissed me it didn't really count.

I'm in the closet at the back of the band room, sophomore year of high school, and this annoying girl, Krissy or Kristy or something, has followed me in to grab the music stands, and she's especially giggly and flighty and nervous for some reason, brushing up against me, and then the lights switch off and she grabs me and I realize it's a setup, she got someone to stay out there and flip the switch: and in the sudden gloom she grabs me and crushes her lips against mine. And all I can think of in this moment is all the guys this could have been, friends I'd been too shy to get close to, guys from the showers or the seat across from me in homeroom, even guys who brushed past me in the hall with a glance and made me crazy for the rest of the day. Three months later I'd meet Bradley and have a real first kiss and all would be forgotten, brushed aside in favor of a thousand better kisses, remembered still despite the awful way they ended. But now in the closet as this dumb girl's lips push against mine all I can think of is what's been taken from me, the legend of my first kiss, how I've fucked it up, lost it, failed some future boy and myself and even this girl, whose eyes I can't meet as I pull away and brush past her out of the closet and past snickering faces to the door outside, changed, maybe, or maybe not. Her hair was in the way, after all, long straight blonde strands of it tasting like strawberry conditioner, so our lips didn't really even touch, let alone tongues. Was that a kiss? Did it count? Who knows. I don't feel like it should, and anyway I don't feel any different except maybe worse, somewhere deep down, even less experienced and less ready and less sure of who I'm supposed to be. I drop out of band not long after that. I've always liked listening to music more than playing it, anyway, and I like to listen alone.


#


I plunged into a pool of steaming hot water, instantly immersed, choking. My scrabbling hands could find nothing to push against but churning water, and for a few awful seconds I panicked, thrashing; and then my face broke the surface and I gasped, slipping and struggling to my feet. Water came up to my waist. I wiped rank muck off my face, blinked burning eyes open, tried to catch my breath.

It was utterly dark. All I could hear was splashing water.

"Niko?" I shouted.

Nothing.

I shrugged off my pack, zipped it open with blind, shaking fingers while struggling to keep it above the waterline, and fumbled around inside. My hand closed on a plastic tube. Glowstick. I pulled it out and snapped it, shook it, frantic.

A dim red glow began to bring the world back, a breath at a time. Churning water was everywhere, white and frothy. Steam swayed. A few steps away a sheer angled shaft climbed back up, lined in oozing black gunk and coursing fluid. The one we'd slid down, presumably. Turning all the way around, the edges of my dim circle of light suggested level hallways, flooded, leading off into darkness in three equidistant directions.

No sign of Niko.

Something dark and coiling swirled in the water: my rope. I grabbed for it and reeled it in. One end was still attached to my waist. At the end of the other, my shiny grappling hook trailed tangled green streamers.

I searched the frothing surface, but saw no sign of a second grapple, or a second rope.

Shutting my eyes, I tried to sort through the confusion of the sliding fall. We had tumbled, together at first, my hands grabbing for his slime-drenched shirt, the sodden edges of his pack. But there was nothing to get a grip on. After those first few moments all I could feel was my own tangled rope, the pasty mulch sliding past me. I assumed I'd gotten ahead of him, or behind.

But what if I hadn't? What if he'd managed to stop himself again behind me, wedged himself into another kink in the tunnel?

Or what if the tunnel had split, somewhere up there?

I didn't want to think about the third possibility, but I spent a few grim minutes duck-walking through the water, old rescue swim lessons running through my head, feeling my hands through the muck beneath the churning surface. I found nothing solid. No backpack, no rope. No body.

He wasn't here. I was alone.


#


Everything in my pack was soaked. I threw out a waterlogged sandwich and watched it drift in the churning current before vanishing beneath the foam, as if someone hungry underneath had grabbed it. I'd lost a crampon in the fall and couldn't find it, so I took off the other one and maneuvered it into my pack. The red light from the glowstick turned everything the same shades. Black and blood.

I had no idea if the dripping gun would still work, and was seized by a thick fear now of firing it down here---of how far that sound would carry and what it might attract---but I slipped it into my belt anyway. It still didn't make me feel safe but I tried to pretend it did.

My flashlight wouldn't turn on, even with fresh batteries. "Water resistant," according to the package, but I imagined it had been subjected to an environment outside factory test conditions. I strapped it to the top of my pack anyway, hoping it might dry out and be useful again. I had a dozen waterproof glowsticks, so I wasn't really worried about light.

Not yet, anyway.

I stared up the shaft we'd tumbled down for a long time, considering. Climbing back up---without a rope, with only one crampon, without someone helping me---seemed impossible. I tried to picture Niko up there somewhere, struggling to pull himself back up, handhold by slippery handhold. If he made it to the top, he'd throw another rope down to me.

Wouldn't he?

I waited a long time, as long as I could stand it. It might have only been a few hours, maybe even less. But it grew more and more maddening to simply stand there, soaked through, bathed in steam and sweat, doing nothing. Wondering if he was trying to find me. Wondering if he'd left me behind. Wondering if he was drowning or dead or lost, somewhere in this irrational maze.

I thought about what he'd said to me, what I'd said to him. But I couldn't get a grip on it. The words kept slipping away. I couldn't process them. Not then.

At last I decided to move. If he'd made it back up, he could take care of himself. And if he was down here somewhere, maybe I could find him. Offer help, if he needed it. If he'd take it. Anyway hadn't I said it would be silly to make it all the way here and not explore?

It was the deepest we'd been yet. Maybe there were answers down here. Or at least another way out.

I picked a flooded hallway, took out my keys and gouged a crude arrow into the shitty paint of the wall, drywall dust spilling out. Breadcrumbs, to find my way back. Or show Niko where I'd gone, if he was lost down here too, or came looking for me.

_And if something else comes looking, you're pointing it right at you._

But there was nothing to be done about that. I gave the shaft back up one last doleful look, then turned to the hallway and began to push my way forward through the hot, sluggish water.


#


I wandered. I'm not sure for how long. The black water's surface smoothed once I moved away from the turbulence at the bottom of the shaft, swallowed up the glowstick's dim red light. There were no longer any curious features or unusual architecture: only an irregular grid of junctions. The infrequent side rooms were either empty or filled with rotting furniture floating on the surface, waterlogged, ruined. Sometimes the floor or ceiling sloped up or down, not always in sync; so the water level would drift from ankle-deep to above my waist, and the ceiling from claustrophically low to beyond the reach of my light. The halls trended wider and narrower, too, in unpredictable rhythms. I worried for a while about stepping into a pit I couldn't see and dunking myself again, but there weren't any. Nor were there stairs, up or down, or even light fixtures. Only hallways, branching, recombining, endless.

The air stayed steamy, and while the water cooled as I moved farther from the hot inlet stream it was still uncomfortably warm. I felt hot and clammy, thick-headed. Mist swirled in the air, sculpting the dim red light into strange shapes and shadows.

I kept gouging arrows into the wall with a key, kept moving. If I kept moving I wouldn't have to stop, wouldn't have to think.

Walking takes almost no thinking at all.


#


I came to another spot where the hallway widened, but this was different. Running along the indentation in one wall was a row of pay phones.

I slowed to a stop and stared, wondering if they were really there.

They rose from knee-deep water, six of them each on its own steel pole. The ceiling had risen so high my glowstick couldn't find it, but light stabbed down from somewhere, spotlighting each phone fierce and bright after hours of flat red glow.

Water sloshed as I trudged over to the nearest phone, reluctant but intrigued. Pay phones don't normally live inside a house. Did that mean something?

I touched the black plastic of the receiver. It felt grimy and cold. As if in a dream, I lifted it, held it to my ear.

Dial tone.

I blinked as it droned in my ear. This didn't make sense. If there was no power this far down, surely there weren't phone lines either. Some telecom grunt hadn't run a cable all the way down here, snaking it through all these endless halls and vertical shafts, had they? Hope they billed by the hour.

The sound of the dial tone was disturbingly familiar.

Without meaning to, I reached out a finger and dialed a number from an old commercial jingle. Seven sing-song digits.

A voice told me to insert fifty cents.

I almost laughed at this familiar banality. I slapped my pockets, but had no change. I hadn't expected to need any.

I put down the receiver, lifted it again and dialed zero, still not really expecting anything would happen.

A ring, and then a woman's voice: "Operator."

My bluff had been called. I didn't know what to say. "Er... I'd, uh, like to make a collect call."

"Please hang up, dial star nine seven, then the number you wish to call. Say your name at the first tone."

"Thanks," I managed.

She was gone. The silence hung oppressive in her absence. I needed a voice back on that line. With a couple words she'd made the familiar loneliness unbearable.

But who could I call? Water sloshed around my knees as I considered the utter inexplicability of my situation. Should I call the police, explain I was lost in my own basement, miles from the surface? Ask the fire department to send a rescue team through my bed, down the vertical hallway, and throw a rope ladder into the slimy tube in the giant bathroom?

Or maybe I'd call a friend. You know, one who'd believe me, who wouldn't hang up thirty seconds into my story. In the movies, whenever someone says "You wouldn't believe me if I told you," there's always someone to say back: "Try me." This person invariably turns out to be surprisingly open-minded.

I knew with grim certainty this was not going to work for me. The only friend I had like that was Niko. And he was gone.

I felt desperately alone.

My fingers brushed against the dial pad, hesitating. They punched star nine seven and then kept going, tracing out a familiar pattern, a groove deep in muscle memory. My fingers knew it well.

At the first tone, I said my name.

Something clicked and whirred in the receiver. A pause, and then, a ring.

Another.

Another.

Someone picked up and said, "Hello?"

"Mom." Relief flooded through me like adrenaline. You trust a voice like that on a primitive level, instinctual, in parts of your brain deeper than logic, than thought.

She must have heard something in my tone. "Honey? What's wrong?"

"What, I only call you when something's wrong?" But my eyes were tearing up and my hands were trembling. I held the phone tight against my face. It smelled like old sweat and institutional cleaner.

With my other hand I wiped my forehead. Swallowed. "Nothing's wrong. Just wanted to hear your voice. How are things? Tell me what you're up to." I didn't care what she said. I only wanted her to talk and keep on talking. To hear sounds from a normal world and pretend I was part of it. That I'd ever been part of it.

She humored me for a minute, but I could tell she was worried. And I could think of nothing to say that would get me out of here.

"Alright, star man," she finally said, and my brain flashed to my sixth birthday when she dressed up like an astronaut to bring in my cake. Crêpe paper planets and glow-in-the-dark comets. "Fess up. What's going on?"

"I'm... I'm in trouble, mom." My voice was breaking. "Something's happened. You remember my... my friend Niko?" I rushed forward, babbling. "I've lost him, mom, I don't know where he is, where either of us are. I fucked things up and I don't know what to do. This is too big, all of this is too big, and I... I made a mistake, and..." I bit my lip so I'd stop talking, something pressing down hard on my chest, and gripped the phone like it was my last anchor to reality. Maybe it was.

She took a deep breath. Let it out.

"Oh, honey," she said. "Is it... is it AIDS?"

Of all the things to be terrified about right then, that one was so far down the list that my brain sort of tripped over itself, downshifted straight back to first and stalled the hell out. "Oh," I said. "Uh. What? No. No, it's not AIDS. Mom. I wouldn't tell you something like that over the phone." I took a deep breath, and once again said something I probably shouldn't have. I said it with deadly seriousness. "It's HIV."

There was an awful silence.

Then I started giggling. I couldn't help myself. "That's not funny, Orion," she said, but then she was laughing too, and neither of us could stop, even when she kept trying to, kept saying "Orion" again in her serious voice which just set me off more, which set her off again too. And if I could have given anything to stretch that moment out forever, I'd have done it in a heartbeat.

I wiped tears from the corners of my eyes. "I'm sorry. No, it's not that. I can't really explain it. I guess I just needed to hear your voice more than anything. I'll... figure something out."

"That's my smartie." I could picture her expression when she said this; she'd said it a lot. "You're sure it's nothing I can help with?"

"I'm sure." The red monochrome of the glowstick made the pay phone into an artsy abstraction; the blackness around me sucked away all the rest of its light.

"Well, you'll figure it out." She sounded less worried than I expected, and for some reason I took comfort in that. "You know you can always ask for help when you need to. But you won't always need to. And that's okay."

Tears were pushing out of my eyes again, damn it. I leaned against the booth, screwing them shut. "Thanks, mom," I whispered.

"I love you, sweetie," she said. "Do you want to talk to Bradley?"

And out of everything that had happened, all the unexplained and terrifying and gut-wrenching things, nothing hit me like those words did. Sometimes words hit harder than a slap. You feel them, like ten thousand volts. They sour everything that came before, ruin everything coming after. That's how those words hit me.

"What?" I managed, my voice small.

"He was helping us shop for your sister's prom, remember? The three of us had a blast. Hang on, I'll put him on."

I stood clutching the phone, unable to move, to breathe.

Faint rustling sounds came over the line.

"Hey, gorgeous."

There are some voices you hope you'll never hear again. When a person bends you so far you snap, you can usually forget about the piece of you that broke off, until something reminds you of the splintered edge where more of you used to be. When people die or move away or betray you and you tuck your thoughts of them out of sight like a forgotten photo album, it's a shock when the book is dragged back out, the pages wrenched open, frozen moments shoved unwanted toward your face.

The stylus of a record player is a needle, dragged along a ragged surface to conjure ghosts of long-ago sounds: instruments, rhythms. Voices. If you don't consent to be played, the needle hurts.

"Brad." I didn't know what else to say.

"You will not believe this dress we found for Sarah." I could hear his mischievous smile, the sound of the glints in his eyes. His tone was light and playful and casual. Like we'd last spoken yesterday. Like nothing had ever been wrong.

"Brad," I said again, "what the fuck are you doing at my mom's house?"

"Oh, you know, casing the joint," he said breezily. "Your mom has a lot of good stuff. Is it okay if I just say 'mom?' _She's_ been saying My Second Son all day, so it's kind of awkward if I don't. Oh my god, Orion, does she know something I don't?"

"What?" I felt weak.

"This mysterious camping trip," he teased. "Wanting everything to be perfect. Don't worry, babe, I'm good at pretending to be surprised."

"What are you talking about?" I sounded like an idiot but I couldn't help myself. Nothing made sense. This conversation was out of its groove, the needle scratching across the surface, leaving an ugly mark that could never be buffed out.

How could he act like everything was fine, after all that had happened? Like any of this was normal?

_Maybe in this universe, it was._

This had never once occurred to me since I'd passed through to this side. It was too huge a change. All the differences were so tiny, so inconsequential. Not like this.

I couldn't conceive of what my life would have been like, if we'd never inscribed those wounds on each other. If we'd stayed whole. Who would I even have become? Who would he?

_Or._

_Maybe it's not him at all._

Something inside me withdrew, to wherever small animals go in their heads while staring down looming headlights. Some residual part of me thought I ought to move, speak, react. Get out of the way. But I didn't know how.

"So is this super-secret message part of the whole thing?" He still sounded playful, flirty. "All this stuff about _going deeper_?"

My blood was frozen and my mouth had gone dry. "What?"

"When you called last night," he explained, voice still achingly familiar, "so secretive. You said next time we talked I was supposed to remind you that you need to go deeper." I could hear him raising his eyebrows, somehow, seductive. "I'm not opposed, dear, although maybe we shouldn't talk about this"---he dropped into a stage whisper---"when your mother's in the other room."

"I didn't talk to you yesterday."

The ground felt like it was dropping away.

"I wrote it down because it was so weird." I could hear the rustle of a paper: I could see him, squinting through his glasses. "I'm supposed to say that you're not deep enough yet, and you need to keep going down. Deeper and deeper. As deep as you can get." He cleared his throat meaningfully. "I mean you know I'm all for going down in general, babe, but seriously, what's the deal?"

"I don't... I can't..." There were so many things I wanted to say to him. Fear and anger and a homesick longing for places that can't be returned to were churning around inside me. I couldn't accept this. I didn't know if I could even survive it.

"Babe," he said, "what's wrong? You're being weird."

"I loved you," I whispered.

"I love you, too," he said, mishearing, and then something spasmed inside me, my lungs locking up like in a cramp, refusing to breathe. My vision closed down to a tunnel. My fingers went numb.

I dropped the phone. It swung on the end of its metal coil, spinning slowly. I could still hear his voice, faint and distorted---

"Ryan?"

---Bradley's voice, drifting faint from those tiny holes in the receiver, as I backed away, staring---

"Orion? You there?"

---and my shoulders hit the wall, and I couldn't back away any more but I could still hear his voice coming out of the receiver, so I pulled out my gun and shot it.

Somehow I hit the dangling receiver on my first shot, and it exploded. Tiny bits of plastic shrapnel cut the air. One whizzed past my cheek and sliced it open. I didn't notice. I raised the gun to the boxy metal body of the phone and shot that, too. I shot it again and again until the gun wouldn't fire any more.

My ears hurt. The reverberations were deafening, echoing endlessly. I pictured compressed sound waves expanding through miles of hallways, like a dangerous thought lighting up more and more neurons, bouncing off skullbone to keep reflecting, multiplying, feeding on itself. A sound crashing up staircases and down shafts in rippling patterns of interference and reinforcement. I stared down at the gun in my hand, thoughts dull, shots ringing and echoing in my head and through the halls. I unclenched my hand and the gun fell into the water, vanishing under the surface without a splash.

The phone made a distinct, metallic _clunk_.

I looked up at its bullet-riddled surface.

Inside, something was tumbling down through the pay phone's innards, dinging and plinking past metal obstructions. My gaze moved down, following its invisible path through the body of the phone.

Finally, the clattering stopped. The gate of the coin return jiggled as something clunked into the slot behind it.

Not wanting to, I edged forward. Part of me reached out while another part tried in horror to call my hand back, but it kept moving. It pushed the gate open.

In the coin return was a small brass key.

I stared at it for a long moment. Then I snatched the key and pulled back, turning away from the bank of phones in the same movement. I slogged fiercely on through the water and down the hall, moving fast, not looking back.

My ears still rang with gunshots. In the silence, that ring kept sounding almost like a distant telephone, bell clanging somewhere far behind me. I tried to ignore them, but the ghost sounds didn't fade for hours.





Chapter 11




In a flooded side room half the floor had rotted away. Water coursed down into consuming blackness, no lower level visible. I stepped carefully past the open door and the strong current rushing in, tide sucking my shins like it was hungry for them, and sloshed away fast up the hall, shuddering at the thought of that black pit. You fell into that thing, God knows where you'd land.

Soon after, the hall began sloping up. The carpet went from wet to damp, and then, between one step and the next, dry.

Up ahead glimmered a tiny spark of silver. I stumbled closer: a night-light, plugged into an outlet at the base of the wall. Something about it whispered of lightning bugs and sleepy summer nights, and all at once I felt immensely weary. I fell to my knees when I reached the weak light and sloughed off my waterlogged pack, then curled up around the tiny pale glow as if it was a campfire. My face snuggled into the brown whorls of the carpet like the fur of some huge friendly beast. I slept.

My body did, anyway. My mind kept marching.

I dreamed endless waterlogged halls. I trudged, not making any attempt to mark my way or track my position. I searched for nothing, found nothing: just wandered. When I realized I was dreaming I tried to break free of the nightmare, but lucidity was slippery, fumbled away between heartbeats, and I kept losing it. I walked halls lit only by flickering blood-red light and thought of nothing that wasn't them.

Once, in a long, straight hall of waist-deep water that never seemed to end, the surface ahead of me shifted, swirled.

Something moved underneath.

I stopped short, squinting, and held my glowstick high. The ripples flung its dim light back to me, bunched up and distorted. But it was enough to see something person-shaped under the surface, swimming toward me.

The gun was in my hand: in this dream, I'd forgotten I lost it. Gripped by fear, I aimed it at the thing under the surface and pulled the trigger. But the shots went wide, from the angle of the water or some grim nightmare-logic. Whatever it was kept coming.

I cringed back against the wall. The thing beneath the water was doing the breaststroke with smooth, efficient moves. It didn't break the surface and it never came up for air. Through the rippled distortions I could see no face.

But as it swam past, I could see it was wearing my clothes.

It didn't slow down. I pressed my back against the wall, cold sweat prickling my face, helpless to stop my head turning to watch it pass.

It swam to the end of the hall and around a corner, never stopping for breath, leaving a wake of dark whorls and eddies behind.


#


I woke with a parched, sticky mouth. My face was glued to the carpet with dried blood from where the piece of phone had cut my cheek. I tugged myself free, which reopened the wound. Wincing, I sat up and rummaged in my waterlogged pack for something to staunch the bleeding, still half-asleep. I'd left my soaked shoes on and my feet felt like they'd swelled to twice their normal size inside them.

My glowstick had long since burnt out. The nightlight's weak silver glow reduced the world to a dim circle of carpet, a few feet across. And I was groggy, still shaking dream-remnants from my head. So I didn't realize until I started digging for a fresh glowstick that someone was sitting a few feet away.

I gasped and leapt up, scrabbling back against the wall behind me. I could see only tennis shoes, catching the pale gray edge of the nightlight, and the faintest hint of a body in the shadows behind them, knees pulled up with clasping hands. Someone sitting with their back against the wall, faint silver glints in two eyes. Watching.

I stayed there trembling for a moment, too afraid to either come closer or flee into the blackness back the way I'd come. I'd left my pack in the circle of light, between me and whoever was sitting beyond it.

I realized I recognized the shoes.

Hesitant, I cleared my throat. "Niko?"

The face was so shadowed I could barely make it out, but I thought it smiled. "Hey, man."

The voice was cracked, weak. But familiar. Unmistakable.

I stepped back toward the light. "Shit, dude, you scared me." He made no move to get up. "What happened to you? We got separated and I didn't know what to do. Did you find the arrows I left? Jesus, I'm glad you found me."

I knelt and pulled a new glowstick from my pack, but he held up a hand.

"Okay if we talk for a minute first, like this?" he said. "Been in the dark for fucking ever and that thing will murder my eyes." He lowered the hand. "Cool?"

It was such a relief to hear his voice again I shoved the glowstick back down, along with a vague sense of unease. "Fine. So what happened?"

"Rather hear what happened to you. Tell me everything."

So I did. How I'd waited at the bottom of the shaft, explored the water-soaked hallways. I told him about the call at the bank of payphones. But I left out the part with the gun, because in hindsight it felt stupid, and because I remembered he didn't know about the gun, and I didn't want to mar our reunion by revealing I'd kept something from him. Something else, anyway.

He didn't say much. The silver glints bobbed at times like he was nodding or cocking his head. But the darkness was fierce. All I could really make out were his shoes, and the hands clasped around his knees. In the pale silver of the night-light they looked skeletal, emaciated.

Disquiet crept into me, rising through the floor into my feet and up my bones. I couldn't see his face. I wanted to see his face.

"Hey," I finally said, "this dark is kind of freaking me out. You can shield your eyes or whatever, but I've got to have some light. Okay?"

He sighed, as if resigned. "If you have to."

I reached carefully for a glowstick the same way I used to walk deliberately towards the light switch in my childhood basement, shepherding growing panic with a forced front of calm. I pulled one out, snapped it, shook it, blinked at the surge of yellow light from mingling chemicals, and held it up, anxious, as the light crept toward him.

The electric yellow was shockingly bright, and he'd winced and held up a hand to block it out. He kept it there for a long moment as I squinted, pupils squirming. Finally, almost reluctant, he dropped the hand and met my gaze, defiant.

Something was wrong with him.

He was changed. Distorted. Something had leathered him, shrunken and withered his features, hollowed his eye sockets. At first he seemed like some poorly made caricature, face a twisted copy of the one I knew so well. But then I started to realize what had happened to him.

Time.

He was older. Much older.

I was still in the shallows of my twenties, remember. I hadn't been around long enough to see how age inscribes itself on people, crumples parents into grandparents and invalids and corpses. I hadn't seen friends lose hair and teeth and muscle tone. I hadn't loved someone long enough to find out what decades do.

The Niko against the wall looked twice as old as he should have been, maybe more. He was wearing different clothes, but out of his standard wardrobe: the bowling shirt with "My Name Is BONG" on the lapel. It wasn't threadbare or faded. Something bulged from the front pocket, maybe a penlight, and his pack leaned against the wall beside him.

He held my gaze, waiting. We stared at each other for a long time.

"What happened?" I finally said.

He took a breath. Let it out. "You can see what happened." He cleared his throat. I realized he wasn't tired, or strained. His voice was just older. He spoke in short, clipped sentences, like breathing in too deep was painful. "So. Yeah. I'm not your Niko, man. Okay? I've been through more. A lot more."

I tensed. "You're the one from the other side?"

He smiled. "Ah. You still think there's just two sides. Sure, course you do." He shook his head. "Guess that's how it seems near the surface. A pair of possibilities. Neat. But deeper down, things get more... _tangled_." The word sounded heavy in his throat, dangerous.

"What do you mean?" I couldn't stop staring at his face, and I swayed with the sick feeling of recognition and strangeness, curdled together by that fierce yellow light.

"There's a lot of space down here, Orion. A lot of possibilities. Most of them... aren't good." His glance had drifted down the corridor, but now it snapped back to my face. "_My_ Ryan and I, we got lost. Long time ago. Real fucking lost. Never made it back."

"Your Ryan?" I looked around, panic spiking. "There's some older version of me down here too?"

He looked away. "No."

After a moment, I realized he wasn't going to say anything else. And then why.

His eyes flicked back to mine again, as if fascinated by them. He stared with something like hunger. At seeing my face again? At seeing anyone?

"Been on my own a long time," he said, as if explaining. "Gotten used to it."

Suddenly I couldn't accept any of this. "Your clothes." I shook my head. "Your shoes. No. They haven't changed. They should be worn down to nothing."

He looked away again, out into the blackness down the hall. "Like I said. Lot of possibilities." He cracked a knuckle. "We weren't the only ones who got lost. Bumped into lots of other Nikos and Ryans down here over the years. Most of them dead. Sorry to say." He cracked another knuckle, methodical. "But the clothes are fine, man. The clothes fit great." He forced out a barking laugh, abrupt and cold. I wondered how many years it had taken his laugh to shrivel down to that emaciated sound.

He sniffed. "You get used to it. Stealing clothes. I mean there's no Penney's down here, so..."

"But how do you eat?" I felt angry, not the least because my skin was crawling at the thought of him grave-robbing other Nikos. Other Ryans. "If you've been down here so long, how the hell are you even alive?"

He turned back to me again, no longer wistful but with a dangerous sharpness. Maybe you've heard the phrase "thousand-yard stare" and maybe you've even seen one before, but I hadn't. It _struck_ me. I believed everything he said next, no matter how fantastic. The words were only flavoring on the truth in that stare.

"There's a room," he began, voice graveling, "not much farther down from here. Different from anything up here. Bigger. A bit bigger." That laugh again.
"Can't walk the length of one of its walls without stopping to sleep. Takes five or six sleeps to walk all the way around, keeping the outer wall to your left the whole time. Passing all the doors." He shook his head. "Maybe a few thousand halls leading out. Most of them slanting upward. But only one goes back to the surface. The rest lead nowhere, or in circles, back to one of the other ten thousand halls.

He took a breath. "When you come into this room, though, you can tell something's different. The carpet ends. It turns to asphalt."

He stood up so quick I cringed back, but turned to the wall and placed a hand on it. He drew his finger down, then over and around, drawing an invisible square; then drew invisible grid lines in it. "Asphalt," he said. "City streets. City blocks. A huge grid of them. Suburban streets. Crosswalks, stop signs, you know. What you'd expect. Lawns, but they're all dead. No sun, right?"

He turned back, leaned against the wall. "And all the houses," he said, fixing me with that stare again, "are ours."

"What?" I couldn't break his gaze.

He shrugged. "Not exactly. None exactly. But all close enough. Sometimes the foyer's a mirror image, or the front door's changed, or there's one more bedroom on the second floor, one less. Or the carpet's different, or the wallpaper, or the kitchen's smaller or there's no bricked up fireplace, or the fireplace is bigger, or there's a fish tank instead of a fireplace. Sometimes, maybe one in ten houses, I can't see a difference. But I think it's always there. Not that I've checked them all." He laughed again. "Did the math once. There's ten million houses. Give or take. I've been down here a long time. But not that long.

"Each one has that upstairs porch room, though," he went on, relentless. "Your room. And they're all filled with your stuff. Little variations again. Sometimes your bookshelf has a copy of _Little, Big_, sometimes it doesn't. That one I always look for. But it's your room, in every house. And your bed.

"And under every one of those beds, there's another Downstairs, as big as this one. And if you can find your way down, another huge empty city with another ten million houses. Each slightly different. Each slightly different than the ten million up here. And sometimes, other Ryans and Nikos come up out of them, expecting to find the real world, with people and a sun and all. They're real fucking disappointed. Especially when they wander too far and can't find the house they came out of again.

"Sometimes I'll meet them on the streets, crying, panicked. I stay away, of course. Can't get too close, like you know, or. Bad things happen." He pointed to his temples, and I flashed back to that feeling of wrongness when my double and I had almost bumped into each other.

He looked away. "Course they're usually dead by the time I find them," he added lightly. "But. Your question. Each house has a pantry, food. Once in a while one has power, too, lit up like Christmas in all that dark, and the fridge is running and cold, and there's lunchmeat and milk and leftovers inside. Unspoiled. So there's plenty to eat. Just not a lot of, you know. Ambiance."

He stepped closer. "I heard your gunshots. That's how I found you. Don't know what you were shooting at but doesn't matter. _You're not lost._ Are you." He glanced behind me, back the way I'd come. "This goes back up, doesn't it? To the surface. The real surface." He closed his eyes. "With light and birds, and grass, and people who aren't you or me. I can't tell you..." He opened them again and I wanted to shrink back, close my eyes and pretend I'd never seen something like that in human eyes, let alone in his, that hollowness and pain and something else, too, something worse. But I couldn't. I could only stare back, cringing.

"I can't tell you," he said more quietly, "what it would mean to me to find my way back up there. Orion. I can't stay down here any longer. I can't."





Chapter 12




I wanted to find my Niko, but this strange alternate kept arguing against it. Impossible, he said. Like finding a needle in a haystack. Except this haystack went down forever. In the best-case scenario, he explained patiently, we'd wander until our food ran out, and then with our last dregs of energy and luck find our way back up and out, empty-handed.

He didn't mention the worst-case scenario.

Decamped in a small empty side room with low ceilings and walls bulging with water damage, we argued. A single weak light bulb stuck in the center of one wall made stark shadow-men play across the other. He insisted the smartest strategy was for us to retrace my steps to the base of the slide and climb back up. "The closer to the top, the fewer possibilities," he said, "the fewer choices. And fewer chances of making the wrong one." When he found out I hadn't seen my Niko since we got separated in the shaft, he grew even more convinced. "Maybe he's not down here at all. Maybe he caught himself on the way down, like you said, and he's up there now waiting for you. Worrying." He gave up convincing me. "Or if he's not, he'll realize heading back is the smart option. I _know_ he would, buddy." He tapped his head. "Trust me."

I couldn't deny this plan made sense, but I felt sick. Too much was wrong. "Look. Even if I take you back up there, it won't be your world. You can't stay. If you're on the wrong side too long, you start to feel---detached." I shuddered without meaning to. "Like it's rejecting you. Like antibodies swarming. It'll kill you."

He shrugged. "You don't know that. I'll risk it. Anything's better than staying down here."

"It's not just that." I felt like a coward, but desperately wanted an excuse, a reason he couldn't come back with us. "You know about that sick feeling when you're too close to a twin. That's even worse than the headaches. So say we find my Niko and get you both back to the surface. Then what? The two of you get a double on campus, move in together?"

He sighed, impatient. "You think I haven't thought this through, all the time I've had? You help me get back up, I'm gone. It's a big planet. I've learned how to survive. I'll never get within a hundred miles of either of you again."

"Wait a minute." I'd had an idea. "That sick sensation, when you're too close. We can use that to find him." He raised an eyebrow. "Okay, maybe you're right, and there's too much space here to find him by dumb luck. But you've got a sixth sense for where he is. You're like a magnet we can move through that haystack, feeling for tugs. Any twinges and we steer closer, till we're close enough to do the rest by shouting."

"You're not listening to me, Orion." He was getting angry. He realized it, took a moment to collect himself. "There's a lot of space down here. You have no idea how much space. You're never going to find him. You need to accept that. You'll get us both lost. And I'm _sick_ of being lost, buddy. Fucking sick of it."

He had an intensity my Niko never had---though maybe there'd been something like it latent in him, waiting for the right trauma to pull it out like a loose thread. It scared me.

He was right. I didn't want to get lost down here, either. I didn't want to end up like him.

But I also wasn't willing to give up on my Niko.

I dug out my keys, held them up. "Look. I've been using these to mark my way. There's no chance of getting lost. And I've got plenty of food, still. For both of us. So we keep searching. Keep marking the way. Be methodical, map it out. And if the food runs low..." My throat felt tight. "If that happens, we'll turn back. But I can't give up on him yet. I can't."

His eyes narrowed, and I could see him weighing something behind them.
"Fine," he said at last. "Until the food runs low. But look. Buddy." He put a hand on my shoulder, squeezed it, tighter than I would have liked. "I've been down here a lot longer than you. These halls are deceptive." He kept his eyes locked with mine, not looking around, like the walls would notice him if he did. "We'll look as long as we can. But if we do this, you've got to trust me. When I say it's time to turn back. We turn back." He wasn't asking. It was an order. His eyes drilled into mine and there was something cold and grim in them, like a general leading his troops to slaughter.

But then a corner of his mouth lifted and he clapped my shoulder, dropped the hand. "That okay with you, man?" he asked, and he sounded so much like his old self it ached.

"Fair enough," I said, even though I didn't want to. It made sense, I supposed, for him to play guide. But my stomach twisted when I realized what I was agreeing to, realized the power I was ceding. Realized I'd agreed to trust someone who, in every way that mattered, I barely knew at all.


#


Elder Niko was obsessive about marking our way---I could hardly blame him---so we made slow progress. But despite his initial misgivings he seemed committed now to finding his younger double. Even downright cheerful about it.

We slipped into something like a rhythm, despite the surreal circumstances. He declined my offer of a glowstick, and didn't pull out the penlight or whatever from his shirt pocket, instead keeping close to me as I swung my light around, peering down all the hallways we passed. Sometimes, for a moment, I'd forget it wasn't him. Then the light would catch the hard-edged crow's feet around his eyes, or he'd ask in nostalgia-tinged tones if I remembered something that happened a week or a month ago, and reality crashed back into me. I supposed from his perspective I was like a long-lost friend at a high school reunion, so as woozy as it made me feel I could understand this behavior.

I thought I could, anyway.

He didn't seem to need much light. I asked about this and he shrugged, saying he spent most of his time in total darkness. Sometimes, he said, there were long stretches between lit-up rooms, between scavenged batteries or glowsticks. My skin crawled when I imagined trying to navigate this endless labyrinth by feel, never knowing when you might step into a puddle of water, a bottomless shaft. A body. I thought of him wandering these halls in utter darkness, face placid, eyes unfocused, fingers skimming the paneled wall, the only sound the scuff of sneakers on carpet. Sniffing for rot at hallway junctions. Feeling on hands and knees for corpses and their backpacks of supplies, like a blind crab scavenging for leavings at the bottom of the sea. I thought of getting so used to this that it no longer seemed awful. That it seemed perfectly normal.

The sense that he was keeping something from me, that something was wrong, only grew. He kept asking about the way back up: casually, like making conversation. But he wanted to know what was above the slide, the layout of the rooms before that, whether I'd found the hamster wheel, which branch I'd taken off the Big Room to get down here. He was trying to reconstruct the route back out. Maybe this made sense---maybe he was just curious, or hedging his bets in case we got split up, like I had with my Niko---but behind the jokes and easy laughter I sensed calculation. A front. Performance.

Now and then I'd ask if he'd gotten any twinges of feeling, hints we were getting close to another Niko. He'd answer right away: Sorry. Nope. Nothing. At one point, annoyed, I demanded he stop for a minute and really try. He put on a show of being abashed, of closing his eyes and concentrating---but I could tell it was only an act. He wasn't expecting to find anyone.

Like he already knew there was no one to find.


#


We'd come to a maze of endless narrow rooms and hallways lined with empty shelves of all shapes and sizes, like a fractal pantry. Stairs twisted up and down through shelf-lined landings, doors opening onto endless dead-ends lined with more shelves, stained and bent from past weight but supporting nothing. We poked around a space the size of a mansion, cluttered with oddly-sized corners and crannies, finally realizing the whole area was a dead end. There was no other way out.

"Maybe it's time to turn back," Elder Niko said when we realized this, solemn. We were near the back of the big cluttered space, in a long narrow dead-end with twenty-foot ceilings, flimsy shelves stretching all the way to the top. The air was dry and smelled of dust. "Man, it's going to be hilarious when we find out my younger self's been topside this whole time. Lounging on a blanket in the backyard, you know, under the sky. Catching some rays. Listening to tunes. Waiting for you to get out." He laughed, and his voice sounded hollow, swallowed up by endless rows of empty shelves.

His face grew more serious. "Or maybe he's so lost we'll never find him. Orion. I tried to tell you. This place is too big." He gestured around us, took a deep breath, looked chagrined. "It's a lost cause, buddy. I think it's time to give it up."

He took a step toward the door, but I was in his way, bristling. Holding my ground.

He stopped, looking confused. "What's up?"

I couldn't explain my trembling, except for a deep-seated certainty that this was wrong. Everything about it was wrong, just generally, but a specific wrong thing was the way this place had taken Niko from me and done this to him, made him into something I couldn't understand and didn't trust, and I couldn't stand it any more. Some yawning possibility loomed before me, like I was blindfolded on a precipice, about to step forward. But I had to know. Better to fall than stay lingering on the edge.

I met his eyes. "Tell me."

"Hmm?"

"Tell me whatever you're not telling me. What's really going on. I want to know."

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Damn it, stop _pretending_. Everything is not okay. You're stringing me along and you need to stop it. Be honest with me."

"Oh?" His expression stayed pleasantly neutral. I could project on it anything I wanted.

"Stop playing games." I clenched my fists. "Stop _using_ me. Look, we can do this together. You need me to get out of here. Both of you do. I know the way back, and I'll help you, but I need to trust you. And you need to trust me. Okay?"

Looking annoyed, he scratched furiously behind one ear, not meeting my eye. He sighed, heavy.

Then, looking up at me with a resigned expression and shaking his head, he stepped forward, and punched me in the throat.

I staggered back, pain exploding from my neck, but he stepped forward at the same time, looking bored. He punched me in the face so hard I spun sideways and slammed into the wall of shelves, something crunching in my nose, and he kept stepping forward, grabbing my wrists and kicking my feet out from under me. He twisted my arms as I fell so I landed face first, and still he kept moving with me, descending with his knee in my back so when I hit the ground his full weight slammed down on top of me. He punched me hard in the kidney, twice, grinding my face into the carpet with his other hand now somehow on my head.

My mouth was open but I couldn't breathe, or scream or speak or think for lack of breathing. My throat felt crushed, my lungs paralyzed. Pain like a stab wound tore open my side. I couldn't think enough to move muscles.

Never taking his weight off the knee digging into my spine, he pulled something from his bag. I heard a rip, and was so sure it was some part of myself it confused me when I felt no pain. Something sticky wrapped around my wrists, tugging at the hairs on my forearm. Duct tape. And now I did struggle, feebly trying to dislodge him, kicking my legs. Pathetic as a half-squashed bug, twitching, not realizing it's already dead. In moments he'd bound my ankles, too, and then my knees.

I tried to make a sound, to beg him to stop, or ask why he was doing this, but all that came out was a coarse rasp, not even a gasp. So I begged with my eyes instead.

He met them and laughed. He knew what I was trying to say. It amused him.

He frisked me: hands patting my ass, my pockets, my crotch. "Gun," he said, impatient, "where's the gun?"

I had just enough breath back to grunt a word. "Gone."

"Stupid." He cuffed the back of my head. "There's worse things than me down here. And worse _me_s." He smirked, but his hands had found my back pocket, felt what was inside. They reached in, urgent, and dragged out the key. His breath caught.

He bent down and shoved it in my face, angrier now than he'd looked while beating the shit out of me. "What's this? How long ago did you find this?"

My head spun, trying to think of some way to regain control. "Couple," I gasped. "Hours."

"Have you used it yet? Gone through?"

I didn't want to answer his questions, but I couldn't see how lying would help me, either. I shook my head.

He stood up and slammed his fist down on a shelf, cracking the flimsy wood. Then he started to pace, furious. Thinking. I groaned and rolled partway onto my side. The pain in my kidney was evolving from a stabbing into a roiling burning sickness, like something inside me boiled, threatened to burst. Breathing felt like forcing air through pipes sealed with rust.

"My Niko," I rasped. "Looking for me. Won't let you. Do this."

"Your Niko's dead," he said, and he said it so simply, so matter-of-fact, it sunk into me like another punch. "Found him and got rid of him before I found you. I always kill the Nikos first. Makes the headaches go away faster."

It felt like the room was dropping. I didn't want to believe him. I fought not to. "No," I gasped. "Bull. Shit."

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out what I'd thought was a penlight. It wasn't. It was a finger.

He tossed it onto the carpet by my face and it rolled once, coming stiffly to rest a few inches from my eye. It was cut through at the knuckle and pale and dead. But more or less the right color.

"I've killed him hundreds of times," he said, sounding bored again. He was watching me, though, and as he noticed my tears he gave them a small, sad smile, as if touched by my naiveté. "And you, too, you little bitch. You're even easier. Always freeze up at first. Or if you don't, you try to grab my arm. But the same way every time, right? So that makes it simple to break your wrist. When you double over whining, it's easy to grab your skull and smash it into the ground until you stop moving."

He knelt down, turning his head sideways to study my face, as if curious about the effect his words were having on me. "This time's different, though. _You're_ not lost yet. _You_ know the way back." He reached out and tousled my hair, playful-rough. "And you're going to take me there, Orion. Take me back up. Or you're going to die."

He stood up again. "But this fucking key. Complicates things. You said you're on the wrong side, from your perspective. Yeah?" I didn't answer; he went on as if I had. "That means there's another you who's also found a key. The twin key to this one, on the twin side. And if that other you didn't get ambushed by his old bestie"---a wicked grin---"he'll pop through to this side soon enough. Because. You find a key, you're just a few hours away from finding its door."

I couldn't see how this changed things. "Why does that m-matter?"

He turned the key over and over in his hand, staring at it. "Staying in sync. Wasn't that always our theory? I think we have to. Buddy. I told a lie earlier. I don't always kill you both right away. Sometimes I... ask questions." He scraped a thumbnail along the key. "Find out where you've been. What happened before. The ones who have it worst are always the ones who got too out of sync. With their doubles. There's lots of connection points but the higher-up they are, the easier to get---misaligned. Two lasers pointing at each other, yeah? Nudge them just a bit, and instead of meeting, the beams go on forever." I thought of the tunnel with the infinite fridge, and shuddered. "And if two sides lose sync entirely... if things warp too out of true..." He made a sucking sound through his teeth, bringing it to a crescendo and then cutting it off, like a tire popping in reverse.

He glanced at me, then back to the key. "That's what happened to me. My double and I, we... diverged. And something tore. Or popped, maybe. Forget lasers. Think pairs of soap bubbles, floating in infinite void. They need each other to stay stable. Our universes got too far apart and it wasn't good for them. They're gone now, or too far to ever reach. Dark.

"But yours..." He grinned even more broadly. "A ripe pair. Undamaged. Still connected. To each other, and to you. You. I can follow you back into them like a thread. Like a fucking thread, Orion. Up and out and back and into the light."

This is the part where if I was a spy or an action hero, I'd be secretly digging a knife out of my pocket, working my way free of the bonds, taking advantage of the villain's distracted ranting to try for my freedom. But I wasn't a spy. I was a Bio major. I'd never been in a fight. I was trussed up, I couldn't move, the pain was still excruciating, and I had no idea what to do.

As if to reinforce my stupid squandered opportunity, Niko seemed to notice me again. Abruptly he put the key in his pocket (his front right pocket, I noticed, desperate not to be completely helpless) and dug through my pack. With a satisfied grunt, he pulled out rope, and proceeded to tie my hands and lower arms behind my back, so tight my elbows almost touched.

My freedom was slipping away. I tried to keep him talking. "But..." I had to clear my throat, heavy. "If you... if Niko's dead---my Niko---isn't it too late? How can anything be in sync now?"

He paid no attention to this, continuing his rope work. When he'd finished he wrapped the end a few times around my neck and fear spiked through me, but then he lifted me gently to a sitting position, leaning against the wall.

He went to the pack and pulled out my flashlight, shaking it. "This thing work?" I didn't answer: he was already toggling the switch on and off with no effect. He grunted, dug some batteries from his own pack and slipped them in, nodding in satisfaction as the light came on. Pocketing it, he rummaged through my pack, eyes lighting up when he found my cache of food. He ripped open the wrapper on a power bar and took a huge bite, grunting in satisfaction.

"Niko," I said, trying not to cry. "Please let me go."

He grimaced, like what I'd said had hurt him, and scooted closer to me, still chewing. He touched his fingers to my chin and lifted my head, gentle. Stared into my eyes with a frown. Like he'd lost something in them.

"I told another lie earlier, bud," he said, swallowing. "Sometimes those houses down there do have power, like I said. Who knows why or where it comes from, but sometimes they do."

I kept my eyes on his, hoping to find some empathy or humanity there.

He took another bite. Chewed more slowly this time.

There was nothing in his eyes.

"Power," he said, mouth half-full, "cold fridges. Sometimes. But nothing inside. They're empty. All of them. There's no food down there, Orion. None at all."

I couldn't stop trembling. I couldn't look away from his eyes.

He swallowed again, shoved the last of the bar into his mouth. "But you and me," he said, mouth full, "other versions. Man, there's _so many_ of us. Popping up out of those houses, those millions of houses. Lost. Always lost. Pathetic. Eaten all their food. Starving, out of their minds. They're already dead, really. Or a nudge away."

He swallowed the last of the power bar, licked his lips and the crumbs off his fingers. Then he leaned forward, slow, like he was going in for a kiss.

He stopped, face inches from mine.

"Wouldn't it be such a waste?" His breath smelled of processed figs. "Such a shame for all those deaths to have been for nothing. To have served no purpose. Don't you think?"

"Niko," I begged, wanting it to mean so many things.

He touched a finger to my lips. "I think you get it. So. We have to find the door this key connects to. We have to wait for your doubles to come through---yours, and your dead friend's. Swap places with them. Pass back to your side. Keep things _synchronous_. And then head up, up, up into the shallows, back to the surface, away from this place forever, and synchronicity can go fuck itself." He stood up, reaching down, and grabbed my shirt to jerk me to my feet. He wrapped the end of the rope around his arm.

"But we'd better get moving. Cause your door's going to be farther down from here. And best for both of us if we find it before I get too fucking hungry." He gestured back toward the way out of the jumbled maze of shelves, mockingly polite. "After you, amigo."





Chapter 13




We kept moving, but nothing else was the same. I led, Niko following behind holding the rope wound around my neck. He'd cut the duct tape from my ankles so I could walk, but tied a blindfold made from a damp shirt tight around my face. "Little handicap," he said, "case you decide to run off." I cringed when he clapped me playfully on the back. "Don't worry, bud. If you're good, I'll tell you when you're about to walk into a pit."

Like a bitter parody of the exploring I'd done with my Niko, a million years ago, we searched. At intersections he'd describe each hallway, and casually discuss which way to go, as if we were equals. As if he hadn't threatened to kill me and worse. Other than a preference for moving toward anything weird or different, he seemed content to let me choose the direction. He marked the wall, tracing our path with fastidious care---"If we're doing it on this side, they're doing it on theirs, too"---and on the whole seemed downright cheerful. For a while he whistled something I finally placed as the theme to one of our favorite shows. Just the second bar, over and over again.

Like he'd forgotten the rest.

I made little plans for how to get away.

None of them seemed very plausible.

From his descriptions, I gathered we were passing through a maze of identical drab halls. The carpet underfoot was sometimes dry, sometimes thick with something that felt like dead mulch and made me stumble, and often slick with slime and mold. We must have been only just above the water table, if such a concept made sense down here. Probably it didn't. Sometimes we'd go up dry stairs to a soaked hall at the top, or along a downward slant that went from squelchy to dusty. We were near water, anyway, moving through histories of past inundation. Niko described walls streaked with damage from it, paint browned and peeling. Once he found some mushrooms growing from a split baseboard, and stopped to eat them. I could hear him chewing, a slimy sound. The smell as they mixed with his saliva was of pond scum and rotting dirt. He offered me one, but I declined, and he seemed unsurprised. He said they'd keep you alive but weren't especially satisfying. I tried not to hear menace in that.

There were few side rooms here, but he'd open the door to each we passed and check it. Bedroom-sized, he told me, sometimes empty, sometimes filled with chaotic mounds of furniture in broken, ruined pieces. A small drain in the center of each floor, sometimes clogged with sawdust, splinters, and grime, leaving stagnant puddles of mold-choked sludge.

It was hard to keep my balance, blindfolded and with arms bound behind me, and I stumbled a lot. The adrenaline from earlier had worn off, leaving behind a dozen throbbing aches and a deep exhaustion. How long had I been down here? I couldn't come up with a number, but my body knew the answer. Too long.

Worse, I felt abysmally alone. To feel like the last person in the universe that cares for you is not only gone, but twisted into a thing that loathes you with active and pulsing hate, is utterly miserable. Maybe this place had twisted him, or maybe that hate had been there all along, buried under the surface, and I'd just never noticed it.

At the next intersection I tripped on a rough patch of carpet and collapsed, smacking my chin against the ground. It hurt, and I started crying. Sobbing, actually. I'd never felt more useless, pathetic. Niko told me to shut up, and I tried to pull myself together. He sighed, and suggested we take a rest. Sniffling, I agreed.

He sat me up against a wall. I clenched and unclenched my tingling hands; from the elbows down everything was numb. After a while the tears stopped.

I wanted to sleep but couldn't bear waking back up to this. I wanted him to untie me, unwind the rope from my neck, let me go. I wanted to get away from him, or better yet for none of this to ever have happened at all. I wanted to be dreaming of something other than hallways, and him.

I could have none of these things. But he hadn't gagged me. I could still talk. And maybe talking together, like we'd done so much, I could find a way to reach him.

So I asked him about the things he'd seen, and he told me.

He spoke of a room whose floor was a chaos of school desks, plastic bucket seats and flip-down wooden tops. How he'd excavated them out at least ten feet deep without seeing signs of a floor. He spoke of caged metal ladders climbing up through vast, dark, empty spaces, rung after rung through nothing but void.

He spoke of more connection points between paired dimensions, useless to him since he couldn't find his way to the surface of any---and all _tangled_ down there, he said again. The connections always had some kind of airtight seal. Steam-filled wood saunas with a door at each end; empty gun safes with doors on either end, just large enough to wriggle through; a shower, but vertically stretched, thirty feet of bathroom tile with frosted glass doors at the top and bottom, and climbing its steel fixtures, faucets and knobs sticking out at random from the walls, climbing it all the way to the top in absolute darkness. Because that was another universal feature of the connections, apparently. Your light, whatever its origin, would go out in the space between, like my flashlight in the fridge. He'd taken a burning two-by-four into one and as soon as the door shut behind him the flames simply stopped, not even glowing embers left behind.

Sometimes you found rooms so well-furnished, he said, you could almost imagine they were part of a regular house. Out the door you could pretend there was a kitchen, maybe, with bacon frying and morning light slanting through the window, or a porch with a cool breeze. As long as you stayed put it was almost like being home. He said these rooms, by far, were the most dangerous of all.

He spoke of catwalks over voids, of flooded libraries swimming with illegible books, of treacherous mountains of abandoned silverware, poised to bury you alive at the slightest touch. He spoke of vast caves made entirely of stairs: walls, floor and ceiling expanding and contracting in carpeted, ninety-degree edges. More than a decade later, the first time I saw a blocky cavern descending into shadow in _Minecraft_, I had to shut the game down, right then, turn on the lights, walk away. It looked exactly how I'd imagined Niko's stair-edged pits.

Finally, he trailed off, and we steeped together for a while in the thick, unbroken quiet. I was trying to think what I could say to keep him talking, but he broke the silence first.

"You would have gone wild for some of that shit, man. Wish you could have been there." His voice was wistful. "All our crazy, stupid theories. We were wrong about everything. But it was more fun being wrong together."

I licked my lips. Maybe this was my chance.

"Yeah. Hell yeah," I started. "Jesus, man, I can't imagine what it's been like for you." _Isn't the phrase "I can only imagine?"_ some part of my brain whispered. I shook it off. "I mean, I don't know what I'd have done, if it were me. Alone down here." I took a breath, extemporizing. "You've... done things to survive, and I mean who could blame you? Who's to say when push comes to shove what's right or wrong when survival's at stake?"

He didn't make a sound, and I couldn't see his face through the blindfold. But I sensed a tide shifting. I'd said something wrong. My chance was slipping away.

"_You don't have to do this to me._" I hadn't meant to say it and not with such pitiful desperation, but now I couldn't help myself, couldn't stop babbling. "We're friends. You're my friend. We're only going to survive by working together. You don't have to keep me tied up like this. I want the same thing you want. To get out, get the fuck out of here---"

"Friends." he interrupted, voice dangerously quiet. "Is that what we were? Back in the day?"

My chest was tight. "Yeah. I thought so. Weren't we?"

I heard a scratching sound. A dog itching itself. I couldn't see but had a clear image: he was scratching the hair behind his ear, head tilted, half-turned down. Something he always did right before explaining something he didn't think he should have to explain.

"I've had a lot of time to think, Ry." His voice was still calm. "About our _friendship_. About _us_." I jerked: he'd rested his fist on the top of my shoe. "Why we ended up down here."

I was losing him, or had already lost him, but I didn't know how or why or what I could say to reverse it. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, lifting the fist and letting it fall back on my sneaker. "I think maybe there was more going on than I really appreciated at the time. For. Example." He punctuated each word with a harder bap on my foot. "We only found this place because of you. Remember? Because you found it, underneath your bed."

"Okay," I said, "but---"

"And _that_ only happened," he said, hitting my foot harder, "because we were both living in that house. And why was I in that house, friend? Why did I end up moving in?"

"You just said it. We were friends." But something ugly was burrowing up. I shoved it down. "I mean maybe it's my fault you were there, sure, but I didn't mean to... I mean I couldn't have known... you needed a room, and so---"

"I needed a room, and you wanted to help me out. Is that it?" This time he punched my foot, hard: it ached through the shoe. "Why me, Ryan? _Why. Specifically. Me._"

"We were friends," I said again, like a mantra that could save us. I was cringing back, eyes clenched shut behind the blindfold.

"That's not it," he said, but then I sensed him stiffen, twist his head away. He switched on the flashlight and dim light filtered through the blindfold. He seemed to be pointing it down the hallway, back the way we had come.

"What is it?"

"Shut up. Did you hear anything?"

I shook my head, vague distant relief mingling with fresher fear. "No."

Silence. It seemed to expand in my head, like those disposable earplugs, eating up all the empty space.

Finally he turned back toward me. "I think something's following us."

Some_thing_. Not someone. Oh. "Like what?"

"You know about the other versions of us down here." He snickered. "More than you'd like to. The doubles, and their doubles from the other houses, and so on. They're us, more or less exactly. Which is why we get that sick feeling when they're close. And because they're us exactly, it makes them easy to take out. Don't have to learn their weaknesses, because fuck, you already know them." He paused for a moment. "But there's... other ones."

I wasn't sure I wanted to prod, but found myself doing it anyway. "Other ones?"

He shook his head. "Ever see someone watching you down here? Like at the edge of your light?"

"No," I said, hair rising. "I mean... I don't think so."

"If you get closer, you can see they look like us, too. Always a Niko or an Orion. On the outside, anyway." The pattern of light shifted as he swung it down each of the other hallways, then back to the first again. "When you get close to a double of yourself, you can feel it. Right? Feels wrong, somehow. Bad. Something to do with the synchronicity, I think, the risk. If the two of you see each other get out of sync, if you understand you've broken it... bad news, and your body senses it. That danger.

"But. These other things. You get close to one of them, even if it looks like you, you don't feel anything at all. And that somehow makes it so much worse." He spat. "Because it means the Ditto-Men aren't human. They look like us, but they're not, not really. They're something else."

"You named them the fucking Ditto-Men?" I was horrified. "Thanks. Not creepy at all."

He laughed a genuine laugh, then cut it short, like he was upset with himself. Like I was pulling something over on him. "They _are_ creepy, dumbshit. They just stand there. They don't usually come too close, but if you walk up to them, they don't move away. They don't move at all. They watch you." He sniffed. "I mean they move their eyes, you know. To track you. Their heads. They breathe." He unscrewed the water bottle and took a swig. "But they don't respond to anything you do. _Anything._"

He paused, as if to let that sink in. Or as if remembering something.

"And if you walk off," he continued, "they'll follow you. At a distance. But if you stay in one place for too long, sometimes. Sometimes. They kind of creep up on you. Slow. Edge a tiny bit forward every now and then. Like they're eager, but also real, real patient. I woke up one time and two of them, two Nikos, were bent over me. Standing there for fuck knows how long while I slept. Staring. Mona Lisa smiles."

He shrugged. "If you sprint for a while, take some twists and turns, you can shake them. Creepy, yeah, but not a problem."

_Oh well that's fine then._ "What are they?"

"No idea." He laughed that hollow bark-laugh again. "Maybe echoes, or waves, or something. Waves and particles. Superimpositions. This whole place, Downstairs, it's like some kind of huge multiplier. You've figured that out, right? At least that much? It multiplies. Dimensions, people. Rooms. Ideas. Emotions. Some kind of chain reaction that got started somehow, sometime. There's a spring down here," and he was almost chanting now, murmuring, his voice gone strange, "clear waters at the source. Deep. All the water comes from there. Very, very deep. It splits, and splits, and splits again, and keeps splitting. Thousands of times. Millions. And each stream is as big as the one it's splitting from, and they shouldn't all fit but they do, and it's wrong, it can't fit in your head, it's too big _it's too big..._"

He seemed to catch himself, stiffened.

"But the Ditto-Men," he said, in control again. "They do it too, sometimes. There'll be two of them, moving almost in sync. Or four. I think if two bump into each other, they sort of stick together, cluster up. And if those two meet others, they all join up, like a fucking molecule. Snarled in bigger and bigger tangles." He was watching me now, I guessed; I got the sense he was smirking, enjoying the effect the story was having on me. "One time I had to walk through a whole room full of them. All just standing there, packed shoulder to shoulder as I shoved my way through. They weren't doing anything. Just looking. Looking at me."

I turned my head nervously in the direction of the hallway I couldn't see. "And you think there's one back there now?"

"Oh, I know there is," he said. "It's standing right there, watching you."

I jolted back, lost my balance, and topped over, kicking back with my feet and scrambling to right myself. My skin was crawling and all I wanted was to get farther away, except I couldn't see it, couldn't see anything, and _what if a second one is coming up behind me---_

But Niko was laughing now, and it slowly dawned on me through my terror what that probably meant.

"You fucking pussy." He climbed to his feet, grunting. "Dumb of me. If you'd wet your pants I'd have to smell it the rest of the way."

I awkwardly struggled upright, stood, furious. He made no move to help.

But I knew him too well. He might have been bluffing at the end, but only to cover for being legitimately scared. He _had_ heard something down the hall, or thought he had. And he hadn't been teasing when he'd started talking.

At least some of that had been true.

He tugged on the rope around my neck. "Storytime's over, bitch. Get moving."


#


Walking blind into the unknown isn't fun, and gets worse when you're freshly terrified of it. I kept expecting now to walk into a body, someone standing in my way, fleshy and warm and inhuman. Staring. But I didn't. To my captor's credit, he never let me walk into a wall (or a pit), although he was sometimes rough with jerks to the rope around my neck to correct me.

But I was reaching the limits of my endurance. My collapse by the nightlight felt like eons ago, and maybe I'd only slept for an hour or two there, anyway. Waves of emotion had washed through me since then, each one leaving its own high-water mark. I stumbled even over level ground. I was barely awake.

Niko finally noticed, and agreed we could stop for "a sleep." He let me lie down, but kept my head covered and hands tied. It was better than nothing.

It's a testament to the depth of my exhaustion that I fell asleep within moments. This time, I didn't dream.

I blinked awake some time later, not quite sure what had woken me. Niko breathed quietly, a few feet away. I got the sense he was sitting up against the wall, legs folded up, and I was lying at his feet in the center of the hall. It was dark. He must have turned the flashlight off, not that I'd be able to see much anyway with a t-shirt tied around my face.

I wondered if I could, very slowly and quietly, wriggle away. Like a worm out of a tackle box.

He reached out and nudged me with his foot. "Don't even think about it, bitch." But the nudge was gentle, and his voice tired.

We stayed there for a long moment, listening to each other breathe.

Finally, he exhaled, loud, frustrated. "You think I want this?" He sounded desperate. Near tears. "I don't. Any of it. Scaring you like this. I'm not a monster, man, I don't get off on it. I'm doing what I have to. You don't get that, I know, but you haven't been down here long enough. Nowhere near long enough."

I stayed quiet, afraid to say something that might make him angry again.

He sighed. "I don't always kill you, either. Or at least not right away. Sometimes, first. For old times' sake, you know. I fuck you."

The word _fuck_ stung me.

He leaned forward, holding his head a foot above mine. His breath tickled the fabric at my ear. "You do remember, don't you? The time we did it?" He sounded concerned. "That night, after I tried to kill myself?"

Sometimes when a person is stung their body overreacts. They swell up, maybe so much their eyes are forced shut. It's called anaphylaxis. Unprotected, in the Greek. But the point is it's not the sting that's doing it to you, not really. It's your own body, blinding you and destroying itself in a misguided attempt to keep you safe.

"Yes," I whispered.

"That was maybe the closest I ever felt to anyone." His voice was calm, bland, like recounting a decent lunch he'd had. "I loved you so much. Not in that way, you know. Not the way you wanted me to. But I figured what the fuck. You saved me. No, not just that." His finger brushed my cheek through the fabric and I flinched. "You _needed_ me. I was _everything_ to you. That felt so fucking good."

I was trying to stay motionless. I remembered a safety video they'd made us watch at Yellowstone. _If you're on the ground and a bear attacks you, curl into a ball and play dead. Don't fight back. The bear will win._

I couldn't open my eyes, couldn't breathe. Maybe it was the anaphylaxis. Something somewhere was terrifying. Doppelgangers lurking in basement hallways. A camper in a tent, terrified by his own snores.

_The bear will win._

His hand moved over the shirt wrapped around my head, not quite touching it, not quite pulling away. "I want to get that feeling back sometimes, you know? It's so fucking lonely here. You can't blame me." He laughed, so loud and close to my face I cringed. "I mean. Don't get me wrong. I'd prefer a girl but there aren't any down here. Just us. Only us."

His fingers outlined my face. "Anyway. Doesn't work. Never works. Never the same with you." He breathed out through his nostrils and it tickled the fabric by my cheek. "I can't trust you. Any of these versions of you. Ry, Ryan, Orion. You seem different but you're all the same. Everything you ever said or did after that. Was bullshit. None of you gave a shit about me, did you? What I needed. Who I was. You just wanted it to happen again.

"And the next time I tried to off myself, that's the only reason you stopped me, isn't it?" He rapped his knuckles on my forehead, through the shirt. "Isn't it, bitch."

"No." It was so soft, I'm not even sure he heard me.

I could feel him shrug. "Anyway, that's why I kill you, after. Case you were wondering."

He sat back up, wincing. "But sorry, man, not tonight. Got a headache." He stood, kicked me in the side. "Come on. Better keep moving. We're close. I can feel it."





Chapter 14




Before long the floor began to change. First it went glossy-smooth, then to shag, then to changing patterns and textures of creaking wood, tile, and carpet. I stumbled more and more over bumps and irregularities, as if the floor was crumpling, bunching up as we neared some pressure point.

Niko opened every door we passed now. At the third one after we slowed down, he sucked in a sharp breath.

"Definitely on the right track. You're gonna need eyes for this, kiddo." He pulled my blindfold free.

I blinked in the sudden glare from his light. He stood between me and the open doorway at the end of the hall. It was dark inside, though I could see something piled up jumbled in the gloom behind him. Bricks?

"Take a look," he said with a grin. "I'll shine the light. But don't lean too far in. I wouldn't bet your life on my grip on the rope."

Wondering what he meant, I shuffled to the doorframe. He turned and shined the light past me, and that's when the vertigo hit.

The door opened onto nothing. Past the frame, the floor dropped away into blackness. The flashlight only went so far, of course, so I shouldn't have been able to tell how far down the drop-off went.

Except I could.

Far, far below us were tiny clusters of lights. Irregularly spaced, but stretching out in all directions. Maybe miles down. It was like the view out the window of a red-eye, flying over suburbia at night.

That wasn't what gave me the vertigo.

Curving down from the base of the doorway was a complex, multi-colored structure I couldn't at first identify. My impression of bricks was wrong, I realized. They were books. A mounded pathway of them: a ribbon of books and long flat pieces of wood, jumbled up like after an earthquake, curving down and away towards a point maybe sixty feet below and another sixty from the door. The chaos converged there into a tall rectangular object, where the sheets of wood became flat and level, interspersed with neat rows of books.

A bookcase. I blinked. It sat on a square platform suspended beneath us in mid-air. It was as if the bookcase had exploded, but only in one direction, toward us: books and shelves multiplying and propagating outward and upward in an ever-widening wave of fractal repetition, connecting the bookcase to our hallway with a web of itselfness.

"It's a Confusion," Niko said with a satisfied grin. "Means we're real close now."

"A what?" I backed away from the horrifying drop-off.

"What I call them." He shrugged. "Most of Downstairs tends to follow normal architectural rules. Walls, floor, ceiling, measurements more or less what you'd expect. Bedroom objects in bedrooms." He played his light along the path of books, embossed titles and snatches of cover art bouncing it back. "But close to a connection point, things get jumbled up. Like it's harder to maintain the semblance of order, for some reason."

I thought of our fridge, in a kitchen with a pool that had a door at the bottom.

"This one," he added, frowning down, "is pretty fucking weird, though."

Still struggling with vertigo (tipping forward, arms bound, unable to stop myself as I plummeted past that cloud of books and tumbled into blackness) I followed his gaze. The stream of book-stuff converged at what I'd at first seen as a square platform some way below and in front of us. But as I focused on it, I realized it wasn't a platform, but a set.

Only its base was solid, a room-sized square suspended in midair over that awful drop. Thin metal poles sketched out the cube whose floor was defined by the platform, and wires arced up from the cube's top corners and down from its bottom ones into the distance, anchoring it in place. A set, like I said: my first impression was that I was looking down on some ambitious experimental theater production.

And it got weirder.

The floor of the set appeared to be the same scuffed, dusty hardwood floor tiles as my bedroom. Tatty throw rugs, dollar-store trash cans, secondhand furniture, and a battered desk filled up the floor space, haphazard: none exactly like the things in my room, but close, as if out of the same catalog, the same tile set. Pictures and mirrors hung suspended on wires where the nonexistent walls should have been; in the latticework above, artfully positioned spotlights shone down, making the stage gleam bright in the gloom. So yeah, picture looking down at an experimental theater production set in a cramped and overstuffed bachelor pad, furnishings cluttered together with no sensible order. And all suspended over a miles-high drop down to god knows where, connected to us via an exploded pathway of library.

"Holy shit," I said.

He laughed. "Damn straight. Okay then. Who wants to go first?"


#


It was me. Surprise. Niko realized he'd have to untie my hands for me to climb down, and if he went first, there'd be nothing to stop me running off back the way we'd come. I'd be running in the wrong direction, away from the supposed portal back to my own side, but I felt like that might be preferable to being the prisoner of a hungry psychopath who looked like a strung-out version of my dead best friend.

Not that it was apparent the floating platform was anything but a dead end. I protested weakly, but he was firm: "The path goes through there. Looks like a dead end from up here but there'll be something when we get down. Some way forward. You'll see." He retied the rope around my ankle, let out enough slack for me to get down, and wound the other end around the doorknob of the last room back, a few paces up the hall.

"This probably won't hold your weight," he added, tugging the rope experimentally. "Not for long anyway. But if I brace myself and take some of the load, it should be enough."

He explained the plan while sliding fresh batteries into a headlamp and tightening it onto my head: I would climb down the ribbon of books and shelving while he and the doorknob stood ready to catch me if I fell. When I got to the floating set, he'd retie the rope to himself, and follow me down while I braced from below. He reminded me that since we'd be tied together, catching him if he fell would be in our mutual interest.

He also mentioned, quite casually, that he had no plans to kill me. Our deal held. Once I got him to the surface, he'd vanish and I'd never see him again. If I messed with him, though---tried to untie my rope while down there and run off, or got funny ideas about yanking it---he would hunt me down. He told me of his expertise at hunting me down---me, personally. He'd done it dozens of times. He'd know which way I'd choose at intersections. Where I'd try to hide.

And once he found me, he'd hurt me. He'd spend a long time hurting me.

He was an expert at that too, he said.

As if to illustrate this point he pulled out a camping knife with a long, serrated blade and flipped it open: the kind you'd use to saw through small deadwood to make tinder. We'd looked at one just like it at the sporting goods store, my Niko and I, but decided not to get it. After admiring it for a moment, he closed it and attached it to his belt. I wondered if this was less a threat than insurance against being tied together above a gut-clenching drop. Maybe some of each.

He watched me watching the knife, with cut-glass intensity.

"Time to go," he said.

I clutched the doorjamb, trying not to stare down at the twinkling lights far below. Trying to think of some way to get out of this.

"What do you think's down there?" I asked, buying time.

He didn't look up, focused on a knot. "I think we're above the City. With all the houses, like I told you. From down there you sometimes see clusters of lights, way up above. This must be one of them."

He pulled the cinch tight. "Rules of geometry don't really make sense this deep, though. Maybe we're already below the City. Maybe this goes down forever. Maybe those lights are stars."

He got to his feet, wincing and putting a hand momentarily to his temples. "Okay, quit stalling. Get moving."

"Hang on." Fear sweated out of me. "We don't even know if this book path thing will hold my weight. Or if this portal you're looking for is even down there."

"It's down there." He set his grip on the rope. "I'm sure of that. But as for your first concern..."

He shrugged, then shoved me, hard.

I flailed, but my body was already past the edge of the door, my hands too slow to grab the frame, world tilting at a sickening angle. My sneaker tried to glue itself to the carpet of the hall but my center of mass was too far out, way too far. My head dropped below my feet and I opened my mouth to scream as I began to fall into nothingness.


#


With a muffled _whump_, I crashed into the mountain of books. It would have been like falling onto a lumpy, moss-covered slope, except for the edges of shelves biting into my back. For a second I slowed, a faint cloud of dust and wood pulp rising around me, and then I started to slide.

With a whimper I grabbed for a handhold and ripped off the cover of a Stephen King paperback. I was picking up speed, scraping and slipping down a slope that was murderously steep, dislodging books that slid away and tumbled down into nothingness. Frantic, I jammed my hands into gaps between them, dug in my left foot. My right was dangling out into the void, but my other three limbs, thank god, were enough to stop me. I gasped, inhaling book dust, heart pounding, and wondered idly if Borges had ever had this particular nightmare.

From somewhere above, Niko laughed. "See!" he called down. "Speculate, theorize all you want. Only way to get answers is to dive in head first. Or butt first, in your case." He let out some slack in the rope. "Now untwist your panties and get climbing."

I wriggled away from the unthinkable drop-off, back toward the flatter middle of the book-path. I was close enough to get a good look now, and recognized a lot of titles. Sci-fi paperbacks, biology textbooks, graphic novels, biographies of composers. Some of them were books from my own bookshelf, and the rest would have been plausible to find there. Tens of thousands of them. They seemed to be stuck together with something like glue: strong enough for the slope to keep its basic shape, but not strong enough to feel safe trusting your grip to.

I looked back up. There was no wall around the hall we'd come through to get here. It stretched back into empty space beyond the limits of my light, wreathed in billowing pink insulation. Huge lumps swelled from the sides, also swaddled in pink: presumably the last few rooms we'd passed. It looked like a long pink tongue, thick with diseased bumps, that we'd wriggled to the end of and crawled out the tip.

Shuddering, I looked down along the path of books, scouting my route to the relative safety of the floating set. The steep slope flattened as the path dropped and converged to bookcase. I decided facing the books and right-side up was the safest position to start, like descending an especially literate climbing wall. When the thing became more horizontal, I'd have to twist around and crawl, then drop the last few feet to the platform.

It was awkward and slow going, in part because I took significantly more care than I strictly needed. I did not want to trust my life to that murderous asshole and a fucking doorknob, or to the integrity of a yellowing Douglas Adams paperback.

One handhold and foothold at a time (and ignoring Niko's frequent insults and urgings to hurry the fuck up) I finally made it to the bookcase proper, which stood innocently on the hardwood platform. The books and shelves converged into order as if by magic, like every few inches down were another frame of an explosion played in reverse.

I clambered down the last few shelves and stepped onto the dusty wooden floor, unclenching hands rubbed raw and scraped with paper cuts. While nice to be off the ribbon of books, this felt only slightly less precarious. The platform swayed with my momentum: slight, but enough to suggest how thin the wires were that held it suspended, how unknown the strength of their theoretical anchor points, lost in shadow. I kept away from the edges, which confined me to a small square in the platform's center.

I eyed the bed with suspicious curiosity, but on closer inspection it looked nothing like my own. It was a bulky thing with a built-in headboard shelf, and showed no signs of having the ability to swing open.

I finally remembered Niko, who'd stopped berating me some time ago, and glanced up to see what he was doing. He wasn't there. I frowned. The rope tied to my ankle curved up to the lip of the hall, tracing the path of the books, and vanished inside. I was so far below the hallway now I could only see a few feet of walls and ceiling through its open door. The corridor still seemed lit by the refracted glow of a flashlight, moving around somewhere back there, so I figured he hadn't gone far. Maybe he was untying the rope from the doorknob and tying it to himself, so he could follow me down. But he'd been at it a while.

_Shit._ This was an opportunity, and I was squandering it. I glanced down at the rope tied to my ankle, but there were multiple knots, some kind of Navy-ass shit, pulled so tight my foot was losing circulation. Sharp. I needed something sharp. I cast around desperately. A few paces from me was a nightstand with drawers, and I yanked one open, hoping for---I don't know. Something. Anything. But there was only junk inside: a few dusty paperclips, a mechanical pencil with a missing eraser. A single red prize ticket from a skeeball alley.

I stared at it, despair creeping over me.

Light played across my face. I started and looked up, guilty. Niko was back, peering down distractedly from the hanging doorway, the rope now tied around his waist. The shadows from the wires and cables that held the set suspended played across my face like strands of spiderweb. He didn't seem to notice what I was doing. He seemed on edge.

"I think there's one of those fucking Ditto-Men up here," he said. "Way, way back in the hall. At the edge of my light. Doesn't matter. Not going back that way, are we? I'm coming down. Find something to brace yourself on. Brace good and tight," he added, "because if I fall and you're not secure, you're coming with me, baby."

Maybe that would be preferable, the best fate for all concerned.

But maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he really wasn't planning to kill me. Maybe there was a door up ahead for my key. A way back.

_Without Niko?_

My survival instinct shoved the thought away, like a drowner pushing their rescuer down into the choking depths, desperate to keep their own head above water.

I cast around for something heavy, but the set's furnishings were as accurately cheap as its upstairs inspiration: more particle-board than heavy oak, plastic trash cans but no sturdy hope chests. I kicked one scraped-up dresser with my foot, and it obligingly slid a few inches across the floor.

"Bracing myself might be a problem,"
I shouted up, but there was no response. I figured he hadn't heard---the empty space around us swallowed up sound, creating a surreal distance to everything, like someone had turned down the volume on reality---but when I looked up to shout, Niko was staring back down the hallway behind him again.

"I think it got closer." He glanced down at me for a moment, face unreadable, then looked back down the hall. "While I wasn't looking. Fucking creepy. In fact..." He trailed off, staring at something I couldn't see. My vantage point only showed a couple feet of ceiling.

"What?" My stomach churned, as if in warning.

He didn't look away from whatever he was staring at.

"It's got something in its hand," he said, quite calmly.

Nausea swept through me, chemical fear. Hairs prickled all over my body.

"It's coming toward me, Ry." He was still calm, still staring down the hall. "I'm starting down in twenty seconds. Figure out a way to brace yourself. Fast."

Maybe he was messing with me again. Trying to put the fear of god in me so I'd hurry it up.

Or maybe he wasn't. I knew what his calm tone meant. What he hid behind it. He was fucking terrified.

"I've never seen one move like this," he said, voice still calm. "It's running down the hall towards me, now. Ryan. Hurry."

Something inside me screamed. _He's not lying and something is coming and there's nowhere to run and maybe I should let it get him but I'm tied to him I'm fucking tied---_

I ripped my gaze from the floating hall and cast frantically around the narrow square of safety for something sturdy. The big bed with its headboard filled with knick-knacks looked the heaviest. I pushed another armoire, one of the few solid-looking pieces, over on top of it, then scrambled underneath the bed and back over the top of both pieces of furniture, pulling the rope tied to my ankle behind, trying to ignore the way the platform rocked and swayed beneath me as I did. Quickly I did it again, wrapping the rope twice around the furniture's bulk. If Niko fell now, all that weight plus my own should be enough to hold him.

"Hurry up," he shouted from above, still staring down the hall, and then _I could hear it_. Footsteps, beating against the carpet. Something running down the hallway, running flat out. A manic run. Fast. As fast as it could.

"Ready," I shouted up, not sure which side to root for, not sure of anything but the pulse hammering in my ears.

He nodded once, then pulled his gaze away and swung out over the edge, flipping around to face the book-slope, feet feeling for purchase while he clutched the end of the carpet. Focusing on his hands, not glancing down the hall again, he started down. His descent was much quicker than mine, efficient and smooth. But still not fast enough.

It was coming for him. The footsteps thudded the hall above, creaked loose floorboards. They were close.

"Shit," he said. "Shit shit shit." He was still close to the doorway. Too close.

_What is it what does it want why is it running what does it have in its..._

With shocking suddenness a hand wrapped itself around the doorframe. It gripped it tight as a body appeared behind it, skidding on the carpet, coming to a halt on the edge of the drop-off. I shivered as I saw it, every part of me shocked into motion like I'd leapt into an ice-cold stream. I wanted to scream but couldn't. My gaze was fixed on the thing in the doorway.

And then I recognized its face.

It was Niko. Young again.

_My Niko._

He raised his hand and shot his older clone with my gun.

But even as he did, Elder Niko was throwing himself to the side, scrabbling for handholds of musty paper (_and it can't be my gun_, I thought distantly, _no more bullets_) and younger Niko changed his aim, steadied himself; but Elder snarled, leapt back up four feet of books in a frantic bound, and wrapped his arms around his double's lower legs, hanging his whole weight on them; and younger Niko's knees buckled and he tumbled forward onto the slope with a cry.

Or maybe it was me who cried out, I wasn't sure, and I couldn't breathe, because both Nikos were snarling, scrambling for purchase on each other, on the gun, on the precarious slope beneath them as they tumbled down it, ripped-off pages fluttering in their wake. They were seconds away from slipping off the side, from plunging into the void of empty space beneath us.

"Look out!" I shrieked, but young Niko had jammed his gun hand into a gap between two hardbacks, jerking both Nikos to a halt. The pillar of books shuddered with crumbling pulpy sounds, a hundred rips and tears; a dozen volumes shook free and fell. I felt the same crawling horror of watching a spider fight a scrabbling insect, vicious, instinctual. Elder Niko leapt a body length up the slope and grappled for his double's gun hand. The gun went off again with a muffled thump, swallowed up by the books and the void around us.

Elder Niko lifted his other arm high and elbowed his double hard in the gut, but was met with a savage kick; he grunted and started sliding again, grasping at slippery covers for purchase. Young Niko struggled to pull his gun arm free but all his weight hung from it now and the collapsing books had closed on it like a vise. Elder had grabbed his leg and was yanking on it; he kicked at the grasping hands, and as he did I remembered something vitally important.

"He's tied to me!" I screamed.

Elder laughed as Niko's eyes widened. "That's right, asshole," he shouted. "If I go, your boyfriend goes."

Niko bit his lip, recalculating, and pushed himself higher with a grunt, yanking his arm free. But as he did the gun caught on a dust jacket, and before he could grab it the weapon was sliding and scraping down the slope. Toward the other Niko, who lunged for it, laughing.

In a clear mental flash I saw what would happen: he'd grab it, he'd shoot young Niko between the eyes; his face would go slack and he'd fall off the edge into the void and vanish, and it wasn't that I loved him or couldn't survive without him but something else, a pure flash of righteous indignant anger rising up in me. After coming back for me, after _rescuing_ me, when he could and maybe should have left me behind, he didn't deserve to die like this.

Elder was stretched out precariously, hand only inches from the gun, and without thinking or planning I grabbed the rope trailing up to him and yanked it, with all the strength I had.

He let out a _whoof_ as his torso lurched back, all the air forced out of him, and balanced for a heartbeat at a crazy angle, only one foot touching the confusion of books. Then momentum pulled him backward, over the side, and he fell.

Everything happened very fast.

The gun tumbled off the uneven edge and dropped away into darkness.

Elder screamed in fury and grabbed for the edge. He caught the corner of a thick hardback but it pulled free from the others, and he fell, still holding it, arms and legs flailing, trailing rope behind him.

But dislodging the book had kicked off an avalanche. More and more books were slipping free now, tumbling into nothing like a sand castle balanced on the edge of a crumbling cliff. My Niko scrambled up the slope like an ant in a sandtrap. Losing ground.

All this happened faster than movement. Maybe my brain had sent signals to my muscles, but they hadn't arrived yet, or my body was too confused to interpret them.

Elder tumbled down, rope twisting behind him. He reached toward the platform, but it was too far away; he was going to fall past it. He stretched instead for one of the taut cables holding it up but he was moving too fast; it shrugged him off, slicing the skin off his fingers and twanging with a low, sharp-edged thrum, and he kept falling.

Above me, my Niko cursed and dove off the collapsing tube of books as it gave way beneath him, and then he was falling too. Only he wasn't tied to anything.

I finally moved, lurched forward to do something, anything. But Elder had fallen out of my sight line, and his end of the rope tied to the bed I stood on snapped taut with a creak.

Young Niko plunged by on the edge of my vision in a rain of paperbacks, but then the bed juddered and groaned underneath me. It started to slide, to pull me toward the edge.

I realized I'd made a mistake.

I'd thought if someone fell, the stress on the rope would be basically downward. The weight of the bed, especially with me on top, would act like an anchor. Surely enough to arrest a fall.

But the rope came up over the edge of the platform and angled across the floor. The force on the bed was entirely from the side.

Elder's weight on the rope was pulling the bed not down but sideways, like a bodybuilder tugging it across a floor; and me with it. Toward the drop-off and the lights of the city of houses, miles below. Toward a drop there'd be no possible way to survive.

I moved faster than thought. I'd never considered myself a person with quick reflexes, someone you could count on in a crisis. But before I consciously knew why I was doing it I'd flung myself off the bed and was racing across the platform towards the opposite side. Behind me I could hear the bed's juddering accelerate as Elder's weight tugged it even faster across the floor. _Someone's not getting their deposit back_, a surprisingly deep-seated part of my brain observed. I had only seconds before it reached the edge.

Before I could change my mind, I leapt off the platform, arcing down into nothingness.





Chapter 15




I fell for only a second before I jerked to a stop, the rope around my leg yanking me back with a stab of pain and flipping me upside down. I swung in sickening arcs, head twisting from side to side trying to understand what was happening, but for a moment nothing made sense, my headlamp strobing through images I couldn't assemble into a coherent whole: a length of blue and white rope, a swinging body, a line of dusty floorboards. Frantic, I reached up and grabbed the rope, pulling myself more or less upright, swaying dizzyingly, face battered by the landslide of books only now starting to peter out.

I took a breath but it didn't help.

I dangled thirty or forty feet below the underside of the bedroom platform, swinging on my rope. A ways below and twenty feet away, Elder Niko swung from his end of the rope, off the other side of the platform. Above us on its top, out of sight now, our ropes met at the anchor of furniture I'd wrapped them around; the awful juddering had stopped, so our roughly equal weights were balancing the pulls on it from opposite directions. We swung in sickening arcs over the void. But we'd stopped. We weren't falling.

I looked up for younger Niko, and immediately regretted it.

A network of dark guy-wires splayed out from the bottom corners of the bedroom set, like the ones from its wirework top, angling in straight lines down and away into darkness, and through luck young Niko's downward path had intersected a cluster of them. He was just clinging to one, struggling to snag his foot on another, but the wires bounced angrily with absorbed momentum, and were caked with grease and dust. His fingers were slipping free. In seconds, he'd fall.

He looked down at me, frantic, dangling from my rope.

Gaging the distance.

I opened my mouth to scream _No!_ and he leapt for it.

Because the only reason Elder and I had stopped was that we balanced either other out. But with two bodies on one side of the rope, there was no way our anchor up top would stay put. No way in hell.

He collided with my rope maybe fifteen feet above me, wrapping grease-smeared hands around it tight. Above us, the platform groaned and vibrated as the bed started skidding across its surface, pulled back towards our side again. We began to drop, like eggs in a basket being lowered from a window. Beneath and across from us, Elder Niko started to rise.

Niko moved.

Like lightning he shot up the rope, climbing hand over hand like a demon. With everything in motion it was hard to tell at first if he was gaining on the platform above us, the bottom of the set, but then I could see he was, was almost to it. A muffled crunching smash came from the top of the platform as our anchor smashed into some other piece of furniture, and our descent slowed: but only for seconds. Niko used every one of them. Just as the anchor had begun to pick up speed again and my stomach had started to drop, Niko pushed off the taut rope and grabbed desperately for a dark mass of pipes and ductwork extending from the bottom of the set.

His hand closed around a metal pipe and he gripped it tight, swaying, then pulled himself up to a perch in the exposed network of house guts. My descent had stopped as once again the force on the two ropes became equal.

But the anchor of furniture groaned above us, shifting uneasily, and as I looked back to Elder Niko I realized I was in trouble. Though he'd started well below me, we now swayed an almost equal distance beneath the set, and he was swinging on the end of his rope, deliberate, getting closer each time. Eyes locked on me.

Reaching out his hand for my rope.

I leapt up mine, for a second sure I'd be faster. I had a head start. I was twenty years younger.

But my life hadn't been given over to surviving down here, to stalking, to killing. And my slack coiled beneath me: a leash, tied to my ankle.

In another swing Elder reached the loop and grabbed it. Then he hung his full weight on it.

I slipped four feet before my grip on the rope was firm enough to stop me, friction-burned hands screaming.

Below me, he laughed, and sprang up my side of the rope like it was a ladder. My arm muscles were already aching. Before I could pull myself up more than a foot or two, his hand closed around my ankle.

I strained to pull away, kicking, and again felt the bed shift unsteadily above. I looked up. Younger Niko's gaze met mine; he clung to a rook's nest of plumbing, casting around for a way to help, but there was nothing in reach. He couldn't help me.

I looked down and saw the same face, shriveled in a blink by decades of rage into something monstrous.

"We don't have to do this," I panted, still trying to shake my leg free from his cold grasp. "We can all go through, get to the surface. Then go our separate ways. Like you said."

"You fucking idiot." With the hand not gripping me he fumbled at his belt. "You thought after all this time down here I'd _forgive_ you? That we could be friends again like old times? No. You're going to die. And then I'll hunt that bitch down"---his eyes flashed up to his younger clone---"and kill him, again. First things first, though." And he reached up with the knife he'd unclipped from his belt, flipped it open, and sawed into my calf.

I screamed, trying to pull away, but his other hand gripped my leg tight, and I looked up through the pain and starred vision at my Niko's shocked, helpless, too-distant face, and below me his double laughed and kept sawing with terrible strength. In one fierce thrust he sawed through my jeans and into my skin, and drew the serrated blade back, cutting deeper, into flesh, into muscle.

"It's your fault," he grunted, and the strength drained from my hands as hot pain sliced through me.
"All of this. Why it happened. You led me here. You led us both." My blood dribbled onto his face and he spat it away. "This place. Only exists because of you." He pulled the blade back and I screamed, trying to twist away, but he only gripped me more firmly. "You can't see that, I know, but it's clear. To me." His breath was ragged. He shifted his grip on the knife. "Clear as the waters. The dream. This stream."
He sawed the blade deeper and I screamed and realized, then, that I couldn't escape this, couldn't escape him, that if I didn't die from falling or bleeding out or being left for dead the best I could hope for would be a life down here in the dark, like him, left to wander forever, trapped, helpless, lost. Fighting it was impossible. It was already done and settled, and had been from the moment we'd first set foot Downstairs, from the moment we saw the house, from the moment we'd first met.

"He won't forgive you, either." He grimaced up at his younger self through teeth stained red by my blood. "He just hasn't realized it yet."

"He's not you," I gasped, "he'll never be you." And because I couldn't make myself believe it I stomped down on his face as hard as I could.

He let out a _whoof_ of air and something crunched as a splatter of blood arced out into darkness. His eyes rolled up into his head and he went limp, and then he fell. In thirty feet he reached the end of the rope around his waist and it jerked him away in a huge arc, flailing his limbs like a scarecrow. He swung in sickening curves beneath me, spread-eagled, face up, over the void. Eyes closed.

Somewhere above me Niko was whooping in victory, but I barely heard him through the blood thumping in my ears, the high-pitched scream of pain in my leg. Refocusing my eyes, I dragged them down. The knife was still embedded in my calf. As if from a great distance, I reached with one hand, gripping the rope tight with the other, and pulled it free in a queasy sucking motion. Blood dribbled down my pant leg, dripping off my foot. Numbness and pain rippled through me, and muscles spasmed in my arm, but there was something I had to do before any other concerns. Woozy, I slid the knife under my belt, and started to climb back up. From the top of the platform I could cut myself free, let Elder's weight pull him and his anchor down. All the way down to hell.

"No, wait!" Niko shouted down at me. "The key! Do you have the key?"

I looked up, not really registering the words he'd said. "What?"

"To get back to your side." His voice seemed distant, swallowed up by empty space. Maybe I was losing more blood than I realized. "Our side, I mean. The right side. The doorway's close. It has to be. But you need to get the key."

_Front pocket, right side._

Below me, Elder Niko still swung at the end of his rope, eyes closed. I didn't think I could have killed him, but I must have knocked him out.

_Or he wants you to think you did, anyway._

Niko was clambering one handhold and foothold at a time to the edge of the floating set. He reached it and clambered up onto its surface with a sigh of relief. Peering over the edge on hands and knees, he shouted down to me. "Look, I'll pile some more furniture on the bed, weigh the anchor down. Enough weight for you to climb down his rope."

I hung indecisive for a long moment. Then, with a sigh like a death rattle, I began to swing. Building up momentum.

Reaching for the other rope.

"Hurry," Niko hissed above me.

"Thanks," I muttered. "Helpful."

Muffled sounds of shifting furniture floated down as I swung. Otherwise the silence was oppressive, now that no one was talking or scrambling or trying to kill anyone. It felt like the surrounding darkness was a blanket, muffling, infinitely thick. A dangerous unreality was taking hold, like this was a video game. A dream. I shook my head, fighting mental fog. Tried to feel the pain in my leg, to let it be an anchor to keep me from floating away.

Eventually I'd swung far enough to grab Niko's rope. At first I could simply climb down it, my own rope tracing a rising angle back up to the opposite side of the platform. But as it grew taut I realized I had a problem. When I'd looped it around the bed I hadn't bothered to even out the two sides. And now, at the end of mine, I was still a few body lengths above Niko. I couldn't reach him. His side had happened to be the longer one, and the only way down to him now would be climbing the last few feet on the other end of the rope. His end.

Which meant detaching myself from mine.

With one hand I scrabbled pitifully at the knot, but untying it was hopeless for half-a-dozen reasons, my weight on it not the least. There was only one way to get off my rope onto his.

Below me, Elder Niko let out a gormless groan, head lolling to one side. But his eyes stayed closed.

A strange clarity had descended on me, the disconnected panic that comes from piling bad decisions on bad decisions, realizing you've gone too far but no longer able to stop. I flipped open the knife again, and before indecision could paralyze me, I cut through my own rope, just above the knot at my ankle.

It was done. My rope swung away out of the range of my headlamp, swallowed up by darkness. His creaked as it took my weight. I tried not to hear it. Tucking the knife into my belt, I lowered myself the last few feet to Elder Niko's body.

He was still splayed out, spread-eagled, face up, eyes closed. Blood and spittle drooled from the corner of his mouth.

His fingers twitched in gentle spasms, the last motions of a dying insect.

We were surrounded by darkness. The faint streetlights miles below, the pools of desk lights and floor lamps above, bookended but did not penetrate the dark we swam together in.

Gripping the rope with one numbing fist, I reached out with my other hand, fingers brushing the edge of his pocket. He groaned again, flopped his head sideways.

I pushed my fingers inside, feeling for the key.

There.

I pulled it free, carefully, gripping tight as the tines tugged the lining of his pocket, caught on its edge. I focused all my attention on not dropping it, not letting it tumble down into oblivion; on pulling my hand slowly, deliberately, out of his pocket.

Which is why I didn't notice his eyes had opened. Not until his hand closed around my wrist.

"The fuck," he muttered, lids heavy, speech slurred, "you doing down there?"

His grip on me was weak, but I felt the gathering awareness in him, like a coiling viper. His face was smeared with blood, and more had rushed to his head as he dangled, making his face look misshapen, swollen. One of his pupils had dilated all the way open, and a blood vessel in the eye had burst, a spidery red blotch reaching tendrils through the white. He looked monstrous.

"It's all because of you," he muttered, eyelids fluttering closed. "You're where all the possibilities spring from. You started something, somehow." He blinked, coughed. "The flow. The troubles. This dream. This. Stream. Irrational." He swallowed, made the ghost of a laugh. "Three eight, three, eight three, eight three eight..."

I let him rant. Maybe he didn't know what he was saying.

But I saw him then with a sudden chill clarity. I understood he was only monstrous because of what I'd done to him. And I'd only done it because of what he'd done to me.

We were our own vortex, circling, wanting to converge but never meeting in the middle. Dragging each other down, deeper and deeper and deeper.

"I'm sorry," I said, gently pulling free of his grip and slipping the key into my pocket. He scrabbled at my waist with his other hand, pathetic, as if trying to get a grip on my belt to pull himself up. "Sorry for dragging you down here. You deserved... someone better than me to be your friend. And you can hurt me, hunt me, kill me as many times as you want but it'll never change that. Never take it back." I took a deep breath. "But I can't let you do it any more. You don't deserve to die, but..." My eyes flicked up, then back to his. "Neither does he."

He smiled, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth, and as it dribbled away something changed. Like the light had shifted, popped a shadow into a shape. Like noticing the gorilla in the crowd.

The confusion in his eyes had been a lie. They were perfectly clear.

"Too bad," he said, "no one gets what they deserve."

He had the knife in his hand. My belt. He'd slipped it off my belt while I was babbling.

I swung sideways as he lunged it at my face, and it nicked my ear. There was no grogginess in him, no disorientation. I'd just seen what I'd wanted to see, one last time. I'd never really seen him at all.

My muscles tensed to fling myself back up the rope, but without the knife I'd never make it. Never be free of him. Certainty flushed through me. This had to end. This had to be the last time.

He lunged again and I grabbed his wrist, wrenching it backwards, trying to pull the knife free. He snarled and reached for me with his other hand but I twisted away. We swayed and twirled at the end of the rope, the rope I was no longer tied to, clinging instead with one desperate, trembling hand. I felt fibers snapping somewhere above us; this rope wasn't rated to hold two people. One way or another this was about to end.

He stabbed at my face again and I swung to the side, just enough for his hand to brush past me, so I bit down on it as hard as I could. He swore as I ground down harder, feeling flesh give, tasting blood. Sensing his grip loosen, I snatched the knife, his expression of shock burned into my vision even as I turned away, already climbing. Maybe I'd never done that before, in all the times he'd attacked me. Maybe I'd never fought back.

I climbed, the knife clenched between my teeth. For a fleeting moment, and maybe for the first time in my life, I felt like a badass.

But I'd bought myself only seconds and not enough. I'd pushed well past the limit of my endurance. I barely had the strength to pull myself up. I'd put a few body lengths between us, but he could swallow that lead in seconds. I was a wounded rabbit limping from a wolf.

Below me something screamed and I realized it was him; a terrible scream, rage and pain and loneliness and betrayal etched onto air. He started up the rope after me.

"Get. Back. Here." He growled. "Get the fuck. Back down here. I'm not finished. With you."

Bloodstained rage twisted his face. He was gaining. He was going to kill me.

And then a dictionary clobbered him in the face.

I looked up, shocked, at a triumphant Niko peering over the edge of the platform, shaking a fist down at us. "Leave him the fuck alone, dickweed!"

He'd piled books scavenged from the bedroom set next to him on the edge. He had another heavy hardback already in his hand. He hefted it, gaged the distance, and flung.

The angle was awkward for throwing, and this time the missile went wide, plummeting down into darkness with its pages aflutter, like they wanted to take wing. But he'd already grabbed another book.

Below me, his elder was shaking off the blow.

I climbed.

Niko kept throwing books, and some collided with my pursuer, enough to throw him off balance, to buy me more seconds. I needed every one. I was fading fast, and so was the rope. Muscles tore and fibers snapped. My vision shrunk to a wavering tunnel, only my hands and the rope visible in the deepening blackness. 
I climbed.
I climbed with some reserve of strength I'd never guessed I had.

After a particularly vicious clobbering I gained a body length and stopped climbing, spit the knife into my hand, and started to saw.

"Faster," someone was muttering, maybe me, "faster."

The Niko below flung himself up the rope. I hadn't gained enough distance, after all. He'd almost reached me.

A crushing inevitability pressed into me, from tingling arms to kicking feet. Someone had already won. Someone would live. The clock would run out and we'd find out who.

_Faster._

Fibers twisted, stretched, broke free.

A copy of _Little, Big_ arced smoothly by my head.

Guttural noises just beneath me. It was too late. He was here.

And then the rope split.

He was at my feet. He flung himself at them when he heard the tear of the rope giving way, but had nothing to push off, no momentum to save him. He scrambled frantic as the rope went weightless in his hands, a finger brushing my shoe.

Then he fell.

Within a second he'd plunged past the range of our lights, swallowed by blackness. Only then, after losing sight of him, did he scream, and there was no fear in it at all. Just rage.

But it was a tiny sound, lost in vanishing darkness, fading fast and not repeated.

He was gone.






PART THREE

MANIFOLDWISE





As long as the sky whirls 
You will be my redemption and my doom

Reinaldo Arenas











Chapter 16




Hunger woke me, finally rising to the top of my list of needs.

With Niko's help I'd made it back to the top of the suspended bedroom set, as exhausted as I'd ever been.
I thought nothing in the world had ever felt so good as lying on my back on a floor, every muscle gloriously unclenched.
Wedged in between two dressers, so as not to roll off the edge, we slept. His idea.

When we woke we ate power bars from Niko's pack: my own had gotten lost somewhere in the fight, probably kicked off and down into the darkness below. I had no idea where to go from here, but Niko had noticed something while scrambling around up top. One of the guy-wires sloping down into darkness had loops of rope tied to it every couple of feet, sized just right to be handholds. You could swing from one to the other, like monkey bars, working your way along and underneath. Unlike the guy-wires themselves which were coated in ages of grime, the loops of rope were clean. They looked like recent additions.

A night's rest had knitted our muscles back together enough to make the traversal merely painful rather than fatal. Grunting and moaning like old men, we swung away from the set into darkness, hand over hand.

Before long our headlamps picked out a looming shape ahead: a huge concrete tube snaking horizontal through the blackness and cutting across our path on a diagonal. The wire ran just above it, so when we reached it we could simply step down onto its curving top side to shake out our weary arms.

Exactly underneath where the cable's path crossed the tube was a trapdoor. It opened downward with a creak when you pushed on it, releasing fold-up stairs like the ones that sometimes climb into attics. The stairs descended some fifteen feet to a cement floor bisecting the cylinder. Its upper half was a domed tunnel, vanishing into the distance in either direction. Bare bulbs hung from the roof every fifty feet or so, leaking dim puddles of yellow-orange glow. Water ran down the center in a foot-deep trench, fast enough to gurgle.

Niko thought we should head upstream, follow the water toward its source. Too worn down to argue, I agreed.

We kept to the level ground on either side of the trench, and started trudging.

We moved slowly. Niko had cleaned up the cut in my lower leg as best he could, surprisingly tender, bandaging it with some socks from a dresser drawer and a tight-wrapped bungee cord from his pack. But it hurt, a lot. I hobbled more than walked, had to stop for frequent breaks, or lean on him for support. He helped me without comment, when I needed it.

I couldn't help notice, up close to him like that, that he seemed to have all his fingers.

Unsaid things festered between us.

The tunnel had no perceptible slope, but the water in the trench ran fast, rushing eagerly past us. The path curved gently left, then gently right. We walked for what felt like a long time.

Gradually, the perfect curve of the ceiling began to straighten. The roof above flattened, the curves at its edge sharpening, until they squared off entirely. At the same time the tunnel gradually shrunk back to house-sized dimensions. Presently we were walking down a rectangular hall of concrete, like some forgotten subbasement in a shuttered factory. It felt like we were back "inside" again. The sensation of walking through a pipe suspended over empty space receded, and we felt once again embedded in earth.

There were no side doors, no junctions, no rooms. There were no decisions to make. We just walked. Other than an occasional grunt or word of coordination, we didn't speak. I sometimes saw him looking at me, out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn't look back. A small part of me wanted to ask a million questions. Another part didn't want the answers. There was a tautness between us, a strain, like a handshake stripped down to bone and gristle, rubbing, raw. It had been there a long time, underneath everything we'd each wrapped around it.

Mostly we were just too tired for talking.

Up ahead, the hallway opened into a larger room. After a few more minutes of trudging we reached it.

It was a vaulted brick antechamber, maybe thirty feet across and hexagonal, with tunnels coming in from all six sides. Each seemed identical to the one we'd entered from. Water flooded the sunken floor of the chamber and ran out the trenches in the middle of each tunnel.

In the center of the room, under the water, was a stubby concrete pillar topped by a metal hatchway with a wheel, like something you'd see on a submarine.

I knew before checking that the hatch would have a keyhole.

Once we confirmed it did, we became strangely hesitant, our momentum lost. We perched on the lip of a tunnel, dangling our feet in the water, using the excuse that we needed a rest.

There was so much I should be asking him, so much I should be saying, but I couldn't find a way to start.

Well. I had pretended nothing was wrong for such a long time. Maybe another few minutes wouldn't hurt.


#


The rippling sounds of the water were peaceful, and I didn't want to break the silence. But someone had to.

"So." The sound echoed off vaulted brick. I coughed. "We've come all this way. We going through, or what?"

The words seemed to shake him out of a daze, and he perked up, flashing a huge grin. "Hell yeah! Let's do it. Let's go home."

We waded over to the hatchway. The wheel was inches under the surface of the water. I pulled the key from my pocket and slipped it into the lock, and it went in smoothly. I spun it through a full turn till it made a tiny _chunk_, then turned the wheel. After a few revolutions, something gave, and we found we could swing the circular hatch open along one hinged side.

We held our glowsticks underwater near the opening. The hatch opened into an ordinary-looking but flooded room beneath us with a yellow-tiled floor. Chrome and porcelain rippled up at us. We realized after a moment it was a flooded bathroom.

"If this portal thing leads through a toilet," Niko said, "I'm out."

We could only assume the way through was somewhere out of sight, around a corner or down an unseen hall. But how far?

"The other guys are probably doing the same thing on their side," Niko said hopefully. "Maybe we'll swim through at exactly the same time, go past each other."

"You really think we're still in sync? After everything that's happened? Our doubles defeated their own evil Niko with exactly the same strategy and ended up here at precisely the same time as us?"

He shrugged. "Might as well believe that. Because if we don't, and, uh, there's no way back... that would kind of suck."

"We don't even know if this goes anywhere," I said. "For all we know, there's a mile of flooded tunnel down there before it mirrors back to our world, if it ever does. You know what would suck more? Drowning."

"No, look," he said with a grin, thrusting his light deeper into the circular opening. "There's a guide rope."

I squinted, trying to make the wavering underwater shapes resolve. Tied to something just under the hatchway was a climbing rope, the same kind we'd used with our Grip Monkeys. It stretched down in a taut line out of sight, towards the hidden wall of the room beneath us.

Niko reached into the hatch to give it a tug; it seemed taut. "Thirty-five meter rope," he said. "And the end's cut off, so it's got to be shorter than that. Looks like someone marked the way through." He pulled off his shirt and started emptying his pockets.

"What are you doing?" I asked, unsettled.

"No time like the present," he said. "Might as well get it over with. Come on in, the water's fine."

Something was wrong again. The dark circle of the submerged porthole was ominous. Unknown. This was happening way too fast. "I don't know. Shit. What if something happens down there? What if one of us gets stuck, or needs help? We could fucking _drown_." My mind was racing. It felt like riding a bike that kept slipping gears, nothing quite fitting together, accelerating down a hill with less and less control, no way to stop.

"Let's just do it," Niko said brightly. "I mean, the sooner we go through, the sooner we'll be home."

"How did you even know this was here?" My throat tightened. His eyes widened. "No. I can't do this again. Why won't any of you be honest with me? Stop it. I know. _I know._ You're not... you're not really..."

Somewhere far below us, something _groaned_, low, immense. The ground quivered, like a mountain turning over in its sleep, and the surface of the water pinched and jittered in sympathy. And just as this happened Niko reached up, eyes wide, and touched two fingers to my lips. Made a zipping motion across them. I was shocked into silence by it all: the sound, the absurdity of the gesture, his fingers on my lips. The fear on his face.

"Don't," he said, quiet. "Please."

We both took a breath.

"You have to trust me, Orion. Everything will work out for us. Everything. But you have to _trust me_, now, here, about this if nothing else."

The rumbling receded. The water smoothed out.

He took another breath, seemed to notice his fingers were still touching my lips, pulled them back. Stared at them.

And as his eyes flicked back to mine I saw something there I'd never seen, no matter how much I'd wanted to. Something hot and desperate, yearning, vulnerable. Something that rippled in the space between us, flickered and grew, a mass, almost a shape.

And I understood.

The finger, lying cold on the carpet inches from my eye, the whorled texture of his fingerprints.

_I'll hunt that bitch down, and kill him. Again._

How easily he'd found the right route, led us straight here to the way back through. How sure he was about what I'd find on the other side.

And the way he'd fought for me. The way he'd been looking at me.

He wasn't my Niko.

The ground groaned again beneath us, more dangerous this time. A brick fell from somewhere above, made a splash loud enough to make us both flinch. But we didn't break eye contact.

"Don't say it," he breathed.

Synchronicity.

I felt like we were balanced on an impossibly heavy pivot, a mountain peak turned upside down. If we leaned too far in any direction...

Two soap bubbles, pressed together, floating in a vast empty void. Trembling.

Somehow we were closer than we'd been a moment before. The curves of his jaw, his cheek, were aches inside me, blood-memorized, bone-familiar.

The air around us held its breath. Where the water touched my knees, it thrummed.

His lips were too close to mine. It would be so easy. It would last forever, like dying winter sunlight slanting into a room through melting icicles, lighting it up, setting fire to the neurons that had always struggled to keep truths and fictions apart and burning them away forever, every universe fading away like stage lights until the spotlight of that kiss would be the only thing left. The possible I'd always wanted made real, at last.

"I want to," I breathed.

"Then do it." The need in his eyes was almost too bright to bear.

I shook my head. "Not that. I want to trust you."

He blinked. "Then do that." But I pulled back, biting my lip, and his brow creased with worry. "Can't you?"

I wanted to laugh. _Trust?_ Could we _trust_ each other? The question unraveled into a million strands, tendrils stretching back through everything that had happened down here, and everything that had happened before that. Trust. What a beautiful, fucked-up, irrational concept.

He kept his gaze locked on mine.

I tried to see him. Really see him. I willed the layers of muck and confusion between us to pull back, to clear away and reveal someone, at last, who I could understand. The Niko who forgave me. The Niko I'd hurt. The Nikos I'd saved, damned, slept with; the ones who needed me, who hated me, who wanted me dead. The one I'd tried so hard to find, looked everywhere for, down here, up there, inside us both and beyond possibility. Each of them were tales disguised as truths; worlds that I yearned to slip into like tailored gloves, sized just right; stories reassuring me that I finally understood what I deserved, good or bad, where I belonged and who I belonged to, and who belonged to me, where I didn't have to be afraid that I'd love the wrong person or the wrong person would love me.

But people don't wrap up like that into nice little cages, contained. We weren't each others' stories. He wasn't the Niko I wanted. None of them had been, even if this one thought maybe he could be, was as deluded as I'd been. We'd mistaken shadows for substance, all of us: chased them and failed, of course, to grab them, become shadows ourselves in failing.

But we weren't shadows. We were more than that. We deserved more.

Something swayed inside me, as if I'd let go of one handhold and gripped another, shifting my weight even though I wasn't sure the new grip would hold. But by then I'd already done it, already committed. And it held. It didn't let me fall.

"I'm going through." I took a deep breath. "But it's not because I trust you." He looked alarmed but I raised a hand. "It's okay. Let me finish. I don't deserve your trust, and maybe I don't know how to give it to anyone else. But if I have to start somewhere I should start with myself. And I think I can do this. I _trust_ I can. Okay? I made Tiger Shark in swim club and I can hold my breath for three minutes and I can make it. I can make it through. I can. But Niko, you can't come with me." Tears sprung like pinpricks to my eyes, but I blinked them back, fierce. "You _can't come with me_."

"Bullshit," he said, stepping forward, even though I could see he knew I was right, see it in how his faced creased with pain. "I belong with you. Your double, on the other side..." An ominous crack sounded from somewhere above us, but he pressed on. "He doesn't feel the same way about me. I don't _belong_ with him."

The ground dropped out from under us, like a plane hitting turbulence. Rumbles quivered in stone far below.

"Niko, stop," I said, afraid to look away, to even glance at the walls around us, as if they could read the truth in our eyes. "You can't come through. You know why you can't."

"I can live with pain," he said, reaching out for me; but I must have looked shocked, because his expression changed to placating alarm. "No, it's okay. The pain doesn't matter. It'd be worth it. You're worth it."

"I'm not." I shook my head, angry, never more certain of anything. "You think I could live with myself, putting you through pain like that each day?"

"Everything will be all right," he pleaded, ignoring me. "It'll be fine, it'll all be fine, just let me come through. Let me try. _Let me try._"

And I couldn't bear to see that need in his face, reflected back at last after all this time, and wondered if he'd seen it too, how sad and jagged and pathetic and painful it was, and how the way I'd hidden it for so long had only made it more of all those things, and I couldn't stand hurting him anymore, and then the words came that we should have said to each other long before, not that any words could fill the gaps inside us but these were the ones I had and they were better than nothing, so I said them: "I'm not the only one who can love you."

He stopped dead, face draining of color.

The surface of the water twitched, rippled. Waiting.

I took a long, ragged breath and realized what I'd said was true. And not just for him.

He broke our gaze. His eyes fell to the water beneath us like he'd dropped something, watched resigned as it sunk away for good, no longer trying to save it.

"Guess, from your perspective," he said carefully, "that should have been my line."

"Yeah, well." I waved my hand at the architecture around us. "Life's got a funny way of fucking everything up."

He laughed, sudden and loud, and even if things weren't right, even if the edge between us was jagged and always would be, it was good to hear that laugh again.

We breathed. It was settled.

"So," he said. "You'll swim through. Pass your other." He swallowed; I nodded. _Just my other. Not his._ "And then we'll each be where we should be." His face hardened into a mask as he said this, grim and colorless. Then he looked at me, the corner of his mouth twisting in pain but also a challenge, flinging some of the pain back: "You'll be fine without me, I guess. Yeah?"

It did hurt, like he knew it would. Well. At least we were saying truths to each other. Not quite the same as trust, but a good start.

I stripped down to my jeans, self-conscious, but Niko was spinning a theory about the identical set of clothes I'd find on the other side. If alter-me was swimming through too, he should have had this same thought, and we'd both have dry shirts and shoes waiting, and wasn't that cool?

I wasn't really processing this, still overwhelmed. Trust. Pairs of universes, pulling apart. Drowning, death. Dry clothes seemed like insubstantial details. I tied the glow stick to my belt loop, emptied my pockets of everything non-essential.

"Oh hey," he said as I did this, affecting it as a casual afterthought, "I want you to take something through for me." He pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, folded-up pages with something written on them inside. "Hold onto it for a while, okay? Just till you get back through."

"Sure." I took the bag. "I suppose I shouldn't read it until---?" A faint judder rippled through the ground; for an instant the water danced in interference patterns.

He looked pained. "Please, please don't." Glancing around, he took a deep breath. "Okay. You ready?"

I wasn't, so I stepped forward and hugged him, fierce as the roiling lump in my throat.

His bare skin, still damp, felt hot against my own. He held me tight, wet curls rubbing against my face. Heat passed between us, but it was the least of what had.

We'd loved each other, at times. Even if the people we'd loved were mostly in our heads.

It was nice, but his curls were tickling my nose, and I pulled back before I meant to, reflecting his surprise at this with embarrassment. For a second it looked like he thought I was going to kiss him, and then I thought maybe he was thinking of kissing me, and we both stood uncertain for a second or two before dropping arms and stepping back.

Awkward. But sort of perfect for the mismatched shape of us, which was, if nothing else, our own.

"Are you going to be okay?" he asked, without spite this time.

I didn't know how to answer, because despite these tidy revelations, the thought of never seeing him again still stabbed at something deep inside me, and maybe always would; and the idea that anyone in this or any world would ever know me as well as he did seemed impossible. But I nodded. Eventually, maybe, it would be true.

"How about you?"

He grinned. "I don't plan to spend a couple decades sulking down here like that asshole, if that's what you mean." He looked up at the arched roof above us, scanning the bricks like there might be constellations in them. "I've never known what I wanted, man. Just what everybody else wants me to want. I'm sorry I mixed you up in all that." He shrugged. "Guess I should figure that out, yeah? Spend some time with myself. Maybe more solo camping, you know? Wandering in the wilderness. Worked for Jesus."

"Sure," I said. "You see that wolf again up there, man... you fucking wreck it."

We grinned at each other, one last time, or maybe for the first time, depending on how you looked at it: and then I turned away, toward the submerged portal, the way out, the way home. I stared down at it.

The thought of swimming into that hole without knowing the way to the other side stabbed a different part of me, the one concerned with oxygen and continued existence. I pushed the fear down but it kept manufacturing images for me: jeans snagging on hidden nails that held me back while I flailed uselessly; huge dead fish swimming the flooded halls with flaking gray skin, bulging eyes growing larger and larger as they closed on me. I imagined drowning. Breathing water instead of air. Spasms of lungs. Knowing you were about to die, only not soon enough. Not nearly soon enough.

I took a deep breath, then another. I tried to slow my heartbeat. I didn't look at Niko.

Another breath. _Breathe._ Deeper and deeper.

I stared at the circular opening, visualized the motions I'd make. I tried to believe I could do this. I tried to push down the sliver of doubt lodged somewhere in my throat.

Gripping the sides of the hatch, I paused. I wasn't ready. But if I waited any longer, I'd never be.

"Later, skater," I said, not looking back, then took one last huge breath and dove headfirst into the hatch.





Chapter 17




The room below was, in fact, a bathroom, lined with tile that might have been a pale yellow but glowed green in the light of my glowstick. Chromium sink fixtures and a frosted-glass shower threw back emerald light. In contrast to the other flooded chambers there was no mold, no algae, no water damage. It might have been flooded seconds before.

I didn't pause to wonder about this, but kicked off through the open door into a murky hall, following the guide rope which led onwards like Niko had said.

I focused on my strokes, old swimming lessons coming back. This was a different sort of lane, of course: the floor brown carpet, plaster-of-paris above instead of a shimmering boundary of air. And the wounded leg slowed me down: it hurt, every time I kicked. But I wasn't worried, not yet. I had good lungs. I could swim for a while.

The rope turned a corner into a large unfurnished room with a half-dozen washers and dryers piled in a corner. I swam past them, mechanical, calm, following the rope through an open doorway opposite.

Through the door was what looked like a small porch or mud room. Boots and shoes tumbled weightless in the water. The rope stopped here, tied to a capped metal pipe. The opposite wall was a sliding glass patio door.

The airlock.

Through the glass it was dark. All I could see was my own green reflection holding the glowstick. Seeing myself floating there, a hit of adrenaline coursed through me. How much air was left in my lungs? More than half what I'd started with? Doubt flooded into me. _This is crazy. I can't do this._ I forced the thought from my mind, replaced it with: _Just hurry. Hurry and get it over with._

I slid the glass door open and forced myself into the black water beyond. The ground dropped off on the other side, and there was no ceiling, either. Everything was dark.

And as I swam past the threshold something _changed_.

The water cooled; the pressure and ambient sound in my ears shifted. I could see the vague outlines of another sliding door just ahead of me, but it seemed too as if I floated in a cavernous space, a space beyond measuring, the other door impossibly distant. Disoriented, I turned around to shut the one I'd come through---remembering they couldn't both be open at once---and as I did another shock of _change_ swept through me, crystallizing into something immense, yawning, terrorful. I remembered the spring Elder Niko had spoken of

	this stream

deep at the roots of this place: a spring that split and split and split again, endless. I felt possibilities branching in the water around me, but even more in the waters inside me, in the part of me inside the waters. Branching, expanding, growing like mold in a petri dish but spilling out of the dish now, spreading through the lab into the walls, the world

	A looking-glass held

and it was as if I was the mold, the spring, an effervescent source spilling out into infinite variation, branches branching and branched again into an unfillable space, filling it. Boundless, multiplied. Multiplicious.

Slowed by dream-syrup, fighting awed stupor from these whispers of immensity, I turned my back on that powerful water at the center, pulled the glass door shut, staring numb as it slid implacable down its track.

In the last second before the door clicked shut and my glowstick guttered out, I saw something reflected in the glass. There were people floating behind me.

They drifted in that immense and empty space, lit a gangrenous green by the light of my glowstick. Three of them. All with my body, my clothes. My face. Their wide-open eyes (_my_ eyes) were fixed on me as they floated gently forward, converging.

Their grasping hands reached out for me, and then the door clicked shut, and everything went black.

I screamed, bubbles of precious oxygen exploding from my mouth. I yanked the handle of the door, but it wouldn't budge. I clawed at it, slammed my fist against the glass. The darkness was absolute, thickened by the potent water into a solid, crushing thing. The door wouldn't open and they were right behind me they were coming they were going to get me and I _twisted_ wildly, pressed hands to the glass behind me, trying to guess their position, but it was hopeless. I couldn't see. I'd squandered my air. Hands would close around my neck, my face, and I'd scream again one last time and drown, thrashing in pain and terror and darkness. Alone.

_No._

Anger pierced through fear. Maybe I had issues and maybe I'd made mistakes, and maybe I even deserved this, to be strangled by my own soulless doppelgangers in a shitty basement apartment with delusions of grandeur. But I didn't want to die, and being alone had nothing to do with it. I wasn't going to let this happen to me just because my first love had betrayed me and I couldn't forgive him, just because my second was trapped in another universe and I could never, ever see him again. None of that mattered. I was still here. I was still alive.

For now.

_Think._

They'd been coming from three angles, two above and one below.

In the middle there'd been a gap.

Gripping my panic by the neck before it ran wild, snarling like a cornered animal, I put my feet against the glass door behind me and pushed off hard, as hard as I could.

The pain in my wounded calf went white-hot but I barely noticed it. I shot straight forward, intent, threading the gap like a needle, right through the center of the things closing in.

I hoped.

Something brushed my leg. I kicked forward, pulled water with cupped hands and all the strength I had. Two fingertips bounced off my forehead, trailed through my hair, but I was moving too fast for them, I was through, I was past them. I'd fucking done it.

I surged forward, swimming hard, a savage rictus of victory splitting my face, and then with a crunch and flash of pain I slammed face-first into something hard and smooth. Glass. The door on the opposite side.

Seeing stars, tasting blood, I scrabbled for the handle, but I couldn't find it. My hands slid off smooth glass in every direction. I smeared them across it frantically, up, down, side to side, kicking out with my feet, conscious every second of those things behind me, turning, drifting back towards me, closing in; of the air in my lungs, running low. Running out.

There: the handle. I pulled it sideways, and as the door slid open in its groove my glowstick came back on, the most glorious shade of green you could possibly imagine.

I kicked forward into the other anteroom and pulled the door shut behind me, not looking back. There was no sign of the things, the Ditto-Men, the echoes, whatever they were. I'd escaped them. My face throbbed with a sharp, spreading pain. But I had a bigger problem. In fact with lightheaded desperation I realized I was in deep, deep shit.

My air was almost gone. I'd lost some panicking, and my muscles burned through the rest as I shot myself through the airlock. An urge to breathe was taking hold of me, a tingling thrum running through my body as cells clamored for air. My lungs were empty. I couldn't swim again the distance I'd come, either forward or back.

Ahead of me, down the mirror-tunnel toward the other hatch and the other junction room, a deep green light burned, brightening. The reflected light from another glowstick.

I watched myself swim into the room, holding it.

Amidst all the panicked horror and desperation, I hadn't noticed the wrongness creep up on me, but now I realized that sick feeling had been there all along, getting stronger, flavoring my more pressing concerns. This wasn't one of the things, I realized. It was me. My double, from the other side.

We were passing each other, as planned. But the plan had failed.

We stared at each other and both realized I wasn't going to make it.

Blood diffused from my nose in billowing red clouds; the cut on my leg burned a deep, dangerous ache. My torn fingernails stung where I'd clawed at the door. I was damaged, flawed. The worse-off copy. Looking at him, unharmed, whole, I accepted that I was about to die. It was surprisingly easy.

He tilted his head, studying me. As if considering something. Or trying to see me, really see me, like I'd tried so many times to see Niko.

_Do it_, I thought, _I'm too broken to make it. Go back. Or go forward. Just go. Live. Be the one who lives._

His expression changed. Just a little.

And then he launched himself at me. At once the sense of wrongness spiked, as if approaching some exponential maxima. His face winced at this in exact sympathy with mine, but he didn't pull up, slow down. Instead he crashed right into me, hard. Tumbling, he wrapped his arms around me, held me, did the last thing I'd have ever expected.

He pushed his mouth to mine, and flooded my lungs with his air.

The wrongness had reached an unbearable threshold. But as his lips touched mine the sensation exploded outward, like magnets pushed against repelling poles till they slip from your fingers, flip around, snap into place. The water quivered around us; the room groaned, launching wet clouds of mud from splintering lintels, sending subsonic shockwaves shuddering through us. His breath flowed into me. I couldn't think, let alone protest or react. Boots tumbled around us, long laces waving like antennae. I remember that.

And then he was empty, and I was full.

He pulled back, blinked, smiled a smile I knew from the mirror. It meant _Oh, well, what you gonna do_.

He'd picked me.

A huge rumbling crack broke over the growing crescendo of rumbles and groans, and we both looked up. The ceiling had split in a long ugly scar. But the room wasn't collapsing on us. The split filled in almost immediately with new plaster, just as a different split bisected it, which also instantly filled.

The room was getting bigger.

My double grabbed my elbow, pushed me toward the hall he'd come in through, the way to the hatch to the other world, my world. And I started to swim. I shouldn't have. I should have thanked him. I should have given back half his air, or dragged him after me, found some way to save him. I should have died. But I didn't. I swam. I swam with everything I had left.

He'd made a mistake. Bet on the wrong horse. But I wouldn't forget it. I wouldn't forget him.

All around me the architecture was groaning, flexing, like something waking up. Plaster dust pillowed into the flooded hall in thick weightless clouds as the walls split and reformed, split and reformed, like bones breaking and healing and rebreaking, growing fractionally longer each time. I swam past a crack that didn't fill in but puckered into a new doorway, a flap of wallpaper lengthening and hardening into door. New doorways were spawning all around me; new pits gaped open in the floor. I ignored it all. I swam. I swam for my fucking life.

The guide rope, taut as a bowstring, snapped, whipping past my face as its two endpoints pulled away from each other. It didn't matter. I knew the way.

I swam into the mirror bathroom, shiny new sinks sprouting on the floor, on the ceiling; the toilet multiplying and splitting in porcelain osmosis, someone's pretentious art project. I swam up to the ceiling---already much higher than a bathroom ceiling should be---put my hands on the wheel of the hatch, and turned.

It didn't budge.

The groaning rumbles of hell surrounded me, my body was once again starting to tingle as my second lungful of air reached its end, my face throbbed and my leg was on fire, and the wheel wouldn't turn.

I pounded on the hatch, screaming in fury, the sound utterly lost in the cacophonous eruption of architecture beneath me.

I braced myself, gripped the wheel so hard I thought my knuckles would pop, pulled on it with everything I had.

Then I tried turning it the other direction, and the wheel spun.

I yanked it around, then forced myself up against the hatch, lungs burning, kicking hard, and pushed and swung it up and open, and then I was through, breaking the surface. I breathed, huge and deep.

Then I coughed. Clutching the sides of the hatch, I coughed, blinked, tried to take stock of this new hexagonal room. A huge crack had opened in the floor, and all the water had drained out. The groaning and clanging was sharper up here, out of the water, but mostly coming from beneath.

I pulled myself out of the raised pillar and tumbled to the bucking ground, wiped blood from my face. I was gasping, coughing, bleeding, hurting, panicking, and also, somehow, living. Deservedly or not.

Piled on the lip of one of the tunnels out were a pair of shoes and a dry, folded t-shirt.

An ear-splitting crack rang off the walls. Bricks fell from the ceiling in a deadly shower, landing a dozen feet away. I grabbed the shirt and pulled it on over my wet torso, slipped the shoes over numb and wrinkled feet. The ground heaved beneath me like the back of a whale taking a colossal breath before diving deep, and as it did it swallowed up the bricks, incorporated them neatly into itself like a child's plastic puzzle pieces falling into matching slots.

The floor of the bathroom, through the open hatch, was gone. Tile walls descended, vanishing into darkness. They were splitting and rejoining, like some fractal screensaver, an optical illusion in constant motion from the corner of your eye but damnably still if you looked right at it.

Something was broken. Something had diverged too far. There were too many possibilities and they couldn't all fit. They needed more room.

Time, I decided, to get the hell out.

With a great belching snap, the floor punctured upwards and a spout of cloudy water billowed up. Another spout exploded from the other side of the room. I picked one of the circular tunnels and started running down it, as fast as I could on my hobbled leg, while behind me the depths of Downstairs sloughed and squirmed into new permutations, unseen. I was too busy living to look back.





EPILOGUE






To have known him, to have loved him, 
After loneness long; 
And then to be estranged in life, 
And neither in the wrong; 
And now for death to set his seal--- 
Ease me, a little ease, my song!

Herman Melville



I hope this finds you well, if it finds you at all.

I walked by our old house this morning. The whole yard was flooded, caution tape everywhere. Empty driveway. Whoever lives there now must have abandoned ship while they waited for the plumbers to sort it all out. But it gave me an idea.

I always wondered what you must have felt, waiting on the other side for your Ryan to come through, imperfect though you knew he'd be: waiting while the whole place started to shiver and crumble and expand around you. Maybe you thought we both died down there. Maybe you did too but I don't think so. I bet you were smart enough to run.

I hope you found another way back up to the surface, like I did. Took some doing. There were no more power bars by the time I made it out and hadn't been for a while. But I did make it out, in the end.

Maybe it would be better to let you keep thinking I'm dead. Maybe I shouldn't be writing this. But I think you'd rather know. There's a difference between dead and gone, despite the expression. I think you'd prefer knowing one Ryan, at least, survived. I never really did understand how you think, but I'm reasonably sure about that.

Water gushing up from the basement windows. A mess. But I found a little whirlpool in the swamp of the front yard, a big exposed pipe sucking liquid back in. Back down. That's where I'll drop this, I suppose. Maybe that pipe just leads to the city sewer system, but maybe, if I'm lucky, it goes a lot deeper.

I'll triple-bag the shit out of this first, though, because, and I hate to say this, the letter you gave me didn't survive my swim through.

The seal on that baggie must not have been tight. When I finally pulled it out, back on the surface, the letter was soaked through and mostly illegible. Something seemed to have expanded it, too. All that was left was a nightmare of bloated wood pulp and smeared squiggles. Too much of both. But after a lot of tweezer work, I pieced together a little. Not the whole story, but enough to maybe get the gist.

We were wrong, weren't we? About you guys being trapped on the wrong side, like us. Sure, you were trapped just like we were when the fridge connection was broken. But we were wrong when we thought you'd been looking for a way to get back through. Because you were back already, where you belonged, on your own side. The problem was that two doppelgangers had followed you through.

Us.

You figured it out a lot quicker than we did, I think. How that loss of synchronicity had pulled our twin houses partially apart, like a gardener starting to separate two potted flowers. How the easy way back had been sheared off.

So you had to figure out a different way to get rid of us. We were sleeping in your beds. Eating your food. Stealing your lives while you lurked below, afraid to come near us and push things even more out of sync. Sneaking up to steal food in the middle of the night, thieves in your own house. And the only way to send us back was to find another connection point, a deeper one, down where roots still twined together. And prod us into finding it, too. You had a lot more time to explore than we did. Downstairs became your home.

You couldn't explain things to us, not directly. Because if we'd also realized how much things had diverged, it would have tugged our universes even further apart. So you tried to find the subtlest ways to send a message. Saying things without changing hardly anything. Tweaking the note, the video. Pulling us back from the dead-end of the furniture maze. Nudging us away from the red herrings closer to the surface, to deeper explorations. Toward the new way through you'd discovered. A flooded tunnel, buried deep. A way to get us back home.

I think about that a lot. We were your monsters. But you helped us anyway. Maybe you didn't see any other choice, but still. That was pretty great of you.

A lot of your note was illegible, and like I said, there seemed to be way too many pages, and a lot of duplicates. But toward the end I could piece together a few phrases, and I think I figured out some of how your story ended.

Once you'd found the flooded connection, you could pass through to our home universe, and help clear the way back for us. Leave guide ropes. Make it easy. One of you stayed to keep an eye on us, to make sure we "discovered" the flooded tunnel. Once we did, the plan was probably that you'd swim back through in advance, so that, when the time came, all four of us could pass each other, and the two of us could keep holding onto the thread of belief that synchronicity wasn't broken. At least until we were all in the right place again and what we believed no longer mattered.

But then that other Niko crept up from the depths of possibility and fucked everything up. You didn't see that coming, I don't think. How could you have?

Did you find your own body, murdered, mutilated, in one of those bland hallways?

I'm so sorry. I can't imagine what that must have been like.

I don't know quite how to tell you this next part.

Your Ryan never came back because he saved me. He _chose_ to save me. I don't know why. I didn't deserve saving. But he did it anyway.

You saved me too, of course. On the bedroom set above that awful void, and other times besides. And I deserved even less to be saved by you, maybe. Maybe you should have let me die. But you didn't. Neither of you did. And I can never pay you back for that.

I am enclosing ten bucks, though, for the drink you bought me that night at the Russian dance club. I assume your Ryan was as much of a mooch as me. I did say I'd get you back, didn't I?

I should wrap this up. If I spend all day writing mysterious letters to another man, my boyfriend might get jealous.

Leon. That's his name. Leon.

Maybe it's ridiculous to think something as tiny as a triple-bagged USB key wrapped in a ten-spot could possibly find its way to you. If our two universes connect at all any more, it's far down in knotted skeins, hopelessly tangled. I imagine this baggie winding its way through miles of piping, tumbling down moss-covered tunnels, floating through submerged, warped bedrooms. Somehow making its way back up to another surface, another flood. Seems silly. But I see it in my head, vivid. I try to believe it, to possible it, even though the odds seem astronomical.

On the other hand, with so many possibilities down there, maybe it's inevitable. Maybe this message will multiply, splitting off into thousands of fractal copies, a million USB keys floating to a million surfaces, ending up in the hands of a lot of confused people but also, too, in yours.

Maybe one of those versions will even seem right to you. Irrational, but true.

I haven't dreamt about you in years, but I did last night. Not in particulars. Your name floated through me, troubling in some way but not defined. A word repeated until it loses its meaning, becomes obsessed with itself. A reflection's reflection. It's why I came by the old house, but all that was here was a flooded yard. All it reflected was me.

I never knew what we were to each other back then. Something less than all those things we never were, but more than a friendship. An else-ship, maybe. An other-ship. Traces of mingled shrapnel under shared skin. Broken pieces of each other we tried to make our own.

I guess we're left with what we had. _Have._ Definitely have, yeah? Because we're gone to each other, but not dead. We survived.

So hey. I hope you're doing all right in your weird world where people say "fourth" instead of "fourd." I hope you found better people to hang out with and a new set of hobbies and someone to appreciate your fashion sense. I hope you realized you were someone worth saving, too.

I miss you sometimes, but that's okay.

We made it. And I think we'll be alright.

Nah. Scratch that.

I trust we will.






ALTERNATE SCENE



_Here's a scene from Subcutanean in a different rendering from the one in the main text of this version of the book._


#


_(From Chapter 4...)_ I worked up my courage and did a few of my own solo expeditions Downstairs, without telling him, but I couldn't convince myself to go very far. I hallucinated strange noises around corners: floorboards creaking, whispered sighs. I knew I was only scaring myself, but didn't have it in me to stay down there for long.

I retreated instead into a game I'd bought a few months back but never made much progress with, a CD-ROM adventure set on a space station orbiting a massive, distant star. Apparently cribbing from _Solaris_, you played a new arrival sent to investigate why all the scientists had gone crazy and stopped sending back data. You did this by wandering the station's endless metal halls---the transition animations got reused _a lot_---knocking on the scientists' doors, and watching tiny video clips of them ranting through narrow metal slots they'd slide open to talk to you. Most would play the same few clips over and over, but some had a surprisingly broad selection. There were a huge number of doors and scientists, and you had access to all of them right from the start: the game's puzzles didn't seem to prevent you from getting to any part of the station.

The game was hypnotic but frustrating. Each level of the station was on its own CD, and sometimes when you swapped them it would crash, resetting progress since your last save. It would also sometimes crash when you knocked on a scientist's door, instead of playing the right video clip---something about a QuickTime corruption error. Worse, it often wasn't clear whether the puzzles were broken or just mysterious. They consisted of weird alien artifacts that seemed to litter the halls at random: you could always walk right by them, but if you clicked them you'd get a zoomed-in view of their incomprehensible surfaces. Clicking various components or protrusions would produce odd sound effects, morphing animations, or, most of the time, nothing. Sometimes clicking part of a puzzle would take you back to the hall view, as if you'd clicked away. As far as I could tell none of my fiddling had ever done anything. I kept waiting for some clue or Rosetta stone that would help begin to make sense of the alien artifacts. It never came. Either it wasn't there or I was missing it. Nothing the scientists said in their video clips related to the puzzles, either: they each seemed trapped in their own hallucinatory world of inner demons, and their delusional ramblings didn't seem connected to each other or the plot, if there even was one. The whole thing was so gloriously baffling that the game became a mild obsession for a while, a surreal distraction to fill the hours I was no longer spending with Niko.

Eventually I went looking for hints on the internet. I found a Yahoo directory page for the game which listed half a dozen fan sites, some of them as obtuse and labyrinthine as the game itself, all riddled with under-construction gifs, hand-drawn maps, questionably relevant web rings, and elaborate self-insert fanfics, or long rants about _what it all meant_ peppered with links to freud.com. The game's fans certainly had a type. Curiously, while many of the fan sites promised that full guides or walkthroughs were coming soon, none of them seemed to actually have any, and I started to wonder if it wasn't just me having trouble with the puzzles. Maybe no one had solved them. Maybe the game was so broken it was impossible to beat. I finally uninstalled it and used the hard disk space for _Warcraft II_, which was less existentially terrifying. 








ABOUT THIS COPY



_There are several hundred places in the master copy of_ Subcutanean _where text can vary. Here is a sampling of some of the decisions made by the rendering code when this copy was generated._






‣ Your narrator was a bit more pessimistic than the norm.

‣ Your narrator preferred to avoid slang.

‣ Some proper nouns in this copy that might be different in others include Ditto-Men, Grip Monkeys, and _Little, Big_.

‣ Your version of Downstairs was on the site of an old roadside attraction called The Vortex.

‣ Your Ryan and Niko found the endless fridge tunnel.

‣ Your versions of Ryan and Niko found the Hamster Wheel.

‣ Your copy of _Subcutanean_ contains this stats page.

‣ In this version, the final fight took place on a floating set suspended over an endless dropoff.






BACKER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



Countless permutations of thanks to my crowdfunding backers who helped make this project happen!


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Aaron A. Reed is a writer and game designer focused on exploring new ways for authors and readers to tell stories together. His award-winning games have been featured at IndieCade, South by Southwest, Slamdance, GaymerX, and the Independent Games Festival, and he has spoken about digital storytelling at Google, PAX and PAX East, WorldCon, NarraScope, and the Game Developer Conference. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a MFA in Digital Arts and New Media, and aims to continue abusing them both in interesting ways.

This is, by some definitions, his first novel. Or maybe that was _Blue Lacuna_. Or _Hollywood Visionary_. Or _The Ice-Bound Concordance_. It's hard to say.

Aaron lives with his totally real boyfriend in Alameda, California, in a house without a basement.






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