“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 the concrete. I could see him, I could suddenly even smell him, and that tangible realness 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 thought 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 glanced 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 upstairs 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 up 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 ridiculous than sinister. I shook my head, embarrassed at 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.

Niko jumped off the bed up to his feet, then swayed and put out a hand to touch the wall. I frowned, sitting up. “Okay?” Sometimes he blacked out if he stood up too fast. I worried.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving a hand. “Just need some more coffee. Or booze. Maybe both.”

I did some legit research in the next few days. 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 a bit cold because I had another acne flair-up, a bad one, dropped out of a class instead of showing up to take the midterm 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, you know. 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 seen something in my face, 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 turned out to be 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 the old man 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 a little, 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-five 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!’”

Then one night, we had a party down there. 

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