The next few minutes unspooled with growing panic, more and more rapidly, like a harpoon line in a speared sea monster diving deeper and deeper.

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 last week were gone entirely. It felt like he’d been away on a trip and we were just now 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 sharp-edged 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 take a sudden diversion, 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 he 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 outer door shut, lost his light, pushed the other door open—and had 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. As if it could hear us. “We’re not where we used to be. This is a different place.”

“Step off,” I said, rejecting this at once. “It’s one thing to say there’s a couple mirrored hallways down there, but there’s not an entirely 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. We can find the other key and—”

“I’m not going back down there.” He pulled back his hand abruptly. “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 just kind of 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, visibly shaking. 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 coming towards me just like I was walking towards 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 finally looked up at me, 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 just 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.” He laughed hollowly. “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 out my wallet, 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.”

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