“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 a few decades later, unaware style had moved on. Eleven 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 just 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 both 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 sick of living in shitty campus housing or the shittier apartments nearby preying on starving students, so we pooled our resources to go in on something big and spacious in the pleasant tree-lined neighborhood a few blocks farther out. It was an old house, maybe as much as a hundred years old, but big, in good repair, and, most important, cheap: we were all paying less in rent than we had been 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 little 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 bowed formally, the room only spinning a little. “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 already. “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, would inevitably become 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 actually bothering to keep the 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 the carpet as he tromped down the stairs, which was the detail I noticed. 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, eleven more dropped to a second landing. We stomped down, Niko’s drunken excitement leading us on like a dog straining at a leash. Past that corner was one more landing, then eleven final steps that opened into a large, windowless room.

It was bigger than any other room in the house, maybe thirty feet across by sixty or seventy 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. Firewood was stacked up by two fireplaces on opposite walls, in the same style as the non-functional one upstairs hidden by our TV. No windows, not even those awful basement ones that fill up with dead leaves and spider webs. No furniture, either. Just 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, tentative, like into a tide. He flexed his bare toes on the ugly carpet. “It’s like a whole secret underground lair!”

I felt the same thrill, mingled 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, where to put 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. (Okay: also the beer.) But someone else’s bedroom was under mine. I felt an indignant vertigo, and made Niko come back with me to 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. They were pretty cramped, but no worse than the many 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. They were all empty.

The hallways branched at the end: we picked one and saw both ways passed more doors before making an L-turn, 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, uh, paying for all this electricity?” Niko asked with jittery alarm.

“We haven’t gotten our first bill yet.” I felt proud for only slurring my speech a little; witty. “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 abruptly, a wave of nausea washing over me, and put a hand against the cold wall.

He stopped instantly. “You okay?”

I smiled, embarrassed. “I think, uh. Don’t want to get too far from a bathroom.”

He eyed me appraisingly. “You shouldn’t have done that last shot. I keep telling you. Beer before liquor, never sicker.” He tousled my hair again, but very 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.

This is just one way the story can go. In the final version of Subcutanean, the text will change for each new reader: no two copies will ever be quite the same. Find out more at https://igg.me/at/subcutanean