“Jesus fucking Christ,” Niko hissed. “What the hell is that?”

I looked.

Way down the hallway, past the reach of the flashlight, were two tiny glints, hovering maybe four feet off the ground, deep in the darkness.

Eyes.

My heart rate was through the roof and I couldn’t breathe, but I raised my flashlight too, shined it down the hall. It revealed nothing but the glints. I felt paralyzed. But I saw how scared Niko was. How close both of us were to panic.

I gave him a mock salute. “Later, skater,” I said, and started down the hall.

“The fuck are you doing?” Niko hissed from behind me. But I kept moving. I kept walking forward, eyes fixed on the glints, willing my light to get stronger, willing those eyes to resolve into something explainable, something benign.

“Shit,” Niko said, and followed me. “Shit shit shit.”

It only took a few more steps before we realized our mistake.

The hall ended in a T-junction. About four feet off the floor was one of those fake candelabra. The glints had been our flashlights, reflecting off its dull metal sheen.

I laughed; it was easy with all the relief flooding through me. “See? There’s enough weird shit going on without jumping at shadows.”

Niko forced a laugh out too, but his face was still pale and tense. “How could you tell? From back there?”

I shrugged. “I couldn’t. This was the quickest way to find out.”

“Great. My hero. Glad you weren’t mauled by a shadowbear.” But he was smiling now for real, and looking at me with respect.

He was right. That was stupid. Bravado is exactly the wrong response to what’s happening.

“Let’s hurry and get this over with.” I turned to walk back to the landing.

But as we walked away, I couldn’t help remembering how those glints had looked in the darkness, before they’d resolved into something explainable. Like eyes. Watching.

Just because it’s not real doesn’t mean it can’t hurt.

I didn’t look back.

We made it the rest of the way to the pool room without incident, and climbed the ladder. Nothing was waiting there for us, which I found mildly deflating, and seemed to validate Niko’s black mood. “Although it makes sense, statistically,” I tried to point out. “Four out of twenty-four. There’s only a one in six chance they’d have gotten an earlier time.”

Feeling dumb, we positioned our note on the floor directly in front of the fridge. The message we’d decided on was simple, three lines on my dad’s old “While You Were Out” memo pad:

Hey, it’s us.
Can we have a key?
We’d like a way back.

It felt ridiculous signing our own names to ourselves, so we’d signed it with a smiley face.

Niko had left the carbon copy in his room as a record of the transaction, which made us feel more secure about the whole thing even if neither of us had any idea what use that could possibly be.

We lingered, but in theory every minute just increased the odds of an overlap. So before long we dropped back down to the concrete pool floor and headed back towards the top.

On the way back up the twisting stairs, Niko paused at the same landing to look down the side hallway. He stopped again, but this time with a frown.

“It’s gone,” he said.

We peered down the hall, flashlights held high. There were no glints now in the darkness at the end of the hall.

“Probably a different angle,” I said, not very convincingly. I cleared my throat, trying to sound like the hero he’d made me out to be earlier. “Um. Should we go look, do you think? See if it’s moved or something?”

He was still staring down the hallway. His expression hadn’t changed, and his voice was strangely calm. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so. I think we should go back upstairs now.”

“Is there, uh. Do you see...?”

My knees felt weak. Some hero.

His eyes flicked to mine, then back down the hall. Our flashlight beams made it only halfway down its length before darkness swallowed them. Somewhere at the gray and ghostly edges of our light, photons stopped bouncing back to us. The vanishing point drank them up. We strained to see through that darkness, but it was impenetrable.

The silence was almost painful.

Abruptly Niko turned and started up the steps, calm and quiet and not looking back, and I was right behind him.

Good call.

Once we got back up to the house (their house, a voice in my head reminded me) we went out onto the porch to decompress. Niko smoked a cigarette, something he’d given up multiple times, but I wasn’t in the mood to play life coach again. We’d had vague thoughts of catching the sunrise, but it was still too early for even a hint of dawn.

“So we learned something,” he finally said, flicking ash. “We know there’s something down there. An intelligence.”

“How do you figure?” I was blindsided by this.

“The glints. Something knows we’re down there. It’s fucking with us.”

“You’re reading way too much into it.” I didn’t want any part of this theory. “We probably weren’t standing at the same angle, or were holding our lights different. Something. Besides, weren’t you the one joking about shadowbears? Where do you get off now with ‘an intelligence?’”

He got up and stubbed out his cigarette. “Something made all that,” he said, and went back inside.

He stayed in his room all the next day.

When I was a kid I got way into swimming one year, another obsession. I started going to the rec center pool every day after school, having mom drop me off there on weekends. They had a swim program and I shot through all the rankings. Minnow, Fish, Flying Fish, Salmon, Shark, Tiger Shark. I swam. I don’t recall especially enjoying it: it was just something I did, like a job. Then at school one day someone asked me why I was so into it and I couldn’t tell them. I could hold my breath for forever, which helped, but hardly seemed like a good reason. The truth was I had no idea why I was doing it, and that terrified me. What had made me start? I couldn’t remember. I felt almost violated, possessed, like some outside force had tricked me into driving all my thoughts and energies into moving back and forth through lanes of water, over and over again, for months on end. I stopped not long after, in part because I was hitting puberty and changing clothes in front of other guys was becoming more and more mortifying, but I think really it was because I couldn’t explain that compulsion and it scared me.

I felt it again, now. I wanted to be back Downstairs. Sure, I could rationalize this away: the only way back home was down there, it was an excuse to spend time with Niko, we had an experiment to follow up on. But the real reason was that I wanted to find out what was down there, more than anything. I was driven to. Something was driving me. At least that’s how it felt.

I didn’t mention any of this to Niko. I knew if I did it might put him off exploring altogether.

We went down to follow up on our experiment when he came out of his funk, at the end of a nervous afternoon of excuses. Eventually he couldn’t put me off any more. I had to see if there’d been a response to our note.

The route was getting familiar. We traced our way through the upper hallways, down the long stair into the dark zone, through to the octagon room, and down the twisting stairs with the weird landings. When we passed the one with the glints, neither of us stopped. We pointedly did not even glance down it. Glints, no glints: neither would have been especially reassuring.

We passed down the stretch with no doors to the pool room, and pulled ourselves up the ladder, but to our vague disappointment, we saw at once that nothing had changed. Our note was still sitting there in front of the fridge, exactly where we’d left it. No key. No sign anyone had been there since us.

Niko tugged half-heartedly on the fridge door. Still locked.

“Maybe our theory’s wrong,” I said. “Lots of guesswork in there.”

“But which part?” He slumped against the fridge in frustration. “Shit. Back to ground zero, I guess.”

“Not necessarily.” I didn’t want him to lose hope. “Maybe something came up on their side and they couldn’t make it down yesterday. Or, you know, they got eaten by the shadowbear.” Niko didn’t smile. I shrugged. “Let’s give them another day or two.”

He was gripping his temples. “I’m getting sick of these headaches, man. I’m tired of this. We’ve been acting like everything’s okay but it’s not, it’s really profoundly not. How much time you think we have to figure this thing out? Something’s slipping away, Ry. Can’t you feel it?”

Sighing, I bent down to pick up the note. I stared again at what we’d written: Niko’s handwriting, the words, our little three-line koan to ourselves. It suddenly seemed very stupid. Of course nothing had happened. We were inventing causalities out of pure fantasy, trying to operate a machine without knowing how it worked or if it even existed. Maybe we didn’t have alter egos in some other dimension. Maybe...

I blinked. I’d been staring at the note this whole time. Something had been bothering me about it, though I hadn’t consciously realized what. But now, like an optical illusion popping into place, I suddenly did.

The note was almost the same as the one we’d left. But not quite.

“Niko,” I gasped, breath failing me, “it changed. It’s a different note. Oh, shit. They wrote back.”

He grabbed it from me, and for a second I could see him struggle to see it, because the change was so small. This note had the same handwriting, was written on the same memo pad sheet. Then it clicked for him too, and his jaw clenched tight.

The message was still exactly in the middle, just as ours had been. Only a couple words had changed. Like they’d been trying to convey a new meaning with the smallest amount of difference.

Hey, it’s us.
Can not have a key.
You’d stay a way back.

It was still signed with a smiley face. But now instead of dots for eyes above the curved mouth, there were circles. Big ones. Like someone wide-eyed with fear, or shock.

Grinning.

I looked at the chrome surface of the locked refrigerator, and my skin started to crawl.

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