Turned out Niko hadn’t found the end of the hallway. It had twisted a couple more times, he said, then split again. But that was all academic while I was puking my guts out over a toilet bowl, and for much of the awful day after. Still, it might seem odd that we didn’t go back down there to map the whole thing out right away. I guess 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: more like it 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. One night a few weeks later I jerked awake in the middle of the night, suddenly sure 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 hangover faded so did the lingering terror. Replacing it was a giddy sensation like having too much Halloween 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 baseball buddies and one or two of his closest philosophy 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 kind of failed.

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 much 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 moving a couple couches down (and it was murder getting them around those tight landings, let me tell you) and 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.

“Man, y’all could live rent-free,” one of Niko’s ex-bandmates said one night while we were down there, poking her head into another empty room. “Let these out to those poor engineering frosh. They don’t see no daylight anyway.”

“Yeah,” I said, “except everyone would have to come in and out through my bed.”

“I mean they wouldn’t walk directly over you,” she explained, patting a patronizing hand on my shoulder. “Even though I know that kind of sad sack white boy victim scene is right up your alley. You ask nice, they’ll probably just gently kick you out of the way.”

I didn’t get on well with most of Niko’s friends. I guess they probably all wondered what he saw in me.

No one did end up moving down there.

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 also felt forbidden, somehow, but not in like a sexy rule-breaking kind of way. Being down there had the vague flavor of trespassing, the kind where you’re not going to get away with it and it’ll go bad for you when you get caught. Sneaking into a restricted area at the airport; busting into Area 51. I mean it was our house, right? But Downstairs didn’t feel like ours. Enough laughter or booze or noise and the feeling went away, or at least buried itself somewhere deep, where you’d hardly ever notice it.

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 catalog 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 cheerfully bright wall sconces, and most of the rooms had a single bare bulb in the center of the ceiling. But the damnedest thing was that 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 empty 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 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, some comforting sign of former human occupation. No such luck.

I mean, the place looked like people should have lived there, but 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 bar 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 suddenly seemed a long way away.

No—blinking, I realized it wasn’t that. When I’d turned back towards 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 clearly on the opposite wall, diagonally across from me.

I closed my eyes, suddenly dizzy. I distinctly 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.

Okay, that’s fine, 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.

** 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