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

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 identical to the 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 checked my pockets. It wasn’t on me. What had I done with it?

A sinking feeling crept over me. It was still in the lock on the other side.

And I’d set the other one, the bent one, on the counter before coming through.

Maybe that was the one that fit this side?

I stood there for a long moment, not sure of what to do.

I grabbed the handle again and pulled it harder, as hard as I could; tried to pull the whole fridge forward. But its back end was flush with the wall, and it didn’t budge even a little, like it was cemented in place.

There was nowhere else to go. The fridge was locked, and the only door out was at the bottom of the pool.

Resigned, 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 nothing stood out. It could have been any basement hallway anywhere.

When I hit the stairs back up to that 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. Or not vertigo, exactly. It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t quite a feeling, or a premonition, a sensation, a tingling, an insight. It wasn’t really like knowing or feeling at all.

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

Like that sense you get before eating spoiled food, even if you haven’t consciously smelled anything sour. Like this is going to be bad for you.

Like you’re going to regret it.

I had a sudden vivid flashback to a photo I’d seen as a kid, still confused about my burgeoning sexuality. It was from an article in a news magazine about gay bashing: there’d been an upswing of murders everywhere, big cities and small towns. The photo showed a chalk outline on a dirty sidewalk and next to it a spray-painted message, red and messy: “A Queer Died Here.” I remember a wave of despair and horror washing over me as I stared at that picture, curdling the pulse-pounding fear of getting caught I always had when encountering something relating to my secret suspicions about myself. That was the first time I understood it wouldn’t just be embarrassing or awkward to be gay, or found out as gay. There were people who would hate me for it, maybe even kill me. That was how wrong they thought I was.

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 grinning clowns 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 it 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 continuously. 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, slowly, then took in another. With every breath I felt more normal, a level of normal 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 for me 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.

It worked if I didn’t think about it too hard.

But then where was the key?

Simple. Still in the lock, but on the side now up against the wall. As for the key on the counter, maybe I’d knocked it off with all my banging in the fridge. It fell on the floor, got kicked away or maybe swept underneath.

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.

Maybe going Downstairs drunk had been a bad idea.

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 strangely 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 Niko 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 glanced nervously 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 them both. Both keys.” It sounded so stupid as I said it, and I hated myself, both for stealing from him and for squandering whatever opportunity they’d represented. “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, slowly, “exactly what fucking keys are you talking about?”

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