“So it’s progress, right?” Niko was saying. We were in the funny-shaped room behind the closet with the never-to-be-completed board game, dust gathering on unresolved plans for world domination. We’d moved all our expedition gear in here; we didn’t want to explain things to anyone else, and the rest of the housemates had forgotten this room even existed. I rubbed the ugly bruise ringing my ankle, sitting on the grimy hardwood floor with my pant leg rolled up.

“Progress?” I winced, prodding an especially tender spot.

“The first concrete sign there’s something down there. Not glints of light. Not sounds. Something physical.”

“Yeah, reassuring.”

He conceded the point, slumping down next to me. “But why now? What brought this on? Is the maze forbidden? Did we violate some kind of rule?”

“Marking our way.”

“What?”

I sniffled. “It’s the first time we’ve tried to leave a permanent trail, something unambiguously marking the way back. Maybe whatever it is... ugh.” It still felt awful to verbalize it, give it that kind of legitimacy. That kind of power. “Maybe it didn’t like that.”

“What about the spilled coffee? That’s a kind of a marker. We didn’t get in trouble for that, and it didn’t disappear or anything. Maybe whatever’s down there doesn’t want us exploring the crawlways. Because they lead to something. Something big.” He punched the wall, suddenly angry. “Who fucking knows? None of it makes any goddamn sense.”

“That’ll go on our tombstones. A week from now, when we’re dead of dimension poisoning.” Cheering him up, making him laugh, was so ingrained in me I barely noticed I was doing it any more. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t exactly a situation to be cheerful about.

Do I do it because I really want him to be happy? Or is it just that I can’t stand it when he’s sad?

“I’m not going down there again,” he said with grim finality.

Neither of us said anything for a long minute.

“Okay fine, I am. You’re right. You win. We find a way back. Somehow.”

“There’s monsters up here, too,” I said softly.

He sniffed. “Or maybe we’re the monsters, man. Crawled out from under the bed.”

***

We decided to explore the vertical shafts, instead of going back into the crawlways. We didn’t know whether what had happened was a message or a provocation. I thought the bruises on my ankle were message enough: Keep Out. Niko argued that was exactly why we should ignore it. Wherever they don’t want you to go is probably the most interesting place to be. On the other hand, maybe the message had been like fences around Chernobyl.

Maybe whatever was farther in was worse.

So we settled on the shafts, which had the virtue of being unusual and promising terrain without even mild signs of demonic infestation. One of Niko’s ex-hobbies was rock climbing, but he’d stopped after the accident jacked up his wrists. Bits of gear still lingered around his overstuffed bedroom, though, so we’d assembled some rope, harnesses, carabiners, and a couple of grappling hooks we found at the sporting goods store. The box called them “Grapple Buddies,” which seemed incongruously cheerful.

Niko took me up into the canyons to teach me some climbing and test the Grapple Buddies. It felt strange to leave the house, breathe hot air and smell external things, outside things, moss and leaves and rain. Climbing didn’t come naturally to me but Niko was patient and a good teacher, and knew his knots and technique. By the time we were loading our packs for the next expedition, I felt reasonably confident I wouldn’t immediately kill us both.

We picked the first pit, since they all seemed about the same, and set about securing the grapples in a doorjamb in a way that would hold our weight. We’d each go down on our own rope, one at a time and using the second as backup. We also had extra Grapple Buddies in our pack, in case something happened to these.

Along with the usual gear, we also brought down a camcorder. We were too broke to afford the newer all-digital cameras, so we borrowed one that shot on Hi-8 tape. This was before the whole found footage craze, so we didn’t think to take the camera down the pit with us and record weepy confessionals into it: we were going to leave it down the hall from the shaft, trained on the pit and our ropes and the Grapple Buddies, hopefully capturing anything that tried to mess with us.

When we were ready, and since we didn’t have a tripod, I left the camera on the floor a dozen paces back, pointed at the pit, and hit record. We shouldered our packs and Niko tied on to the rope. Moving carefully, he stepped over the lip, and started to rappel down the carpeted “floor” of the shaft. I watched his grapple nervously, but it held his weight, tines dug firmly into the solid wood of the door frame.

The bottom of the shaft seemed a mile down, especially with Niko dangling above it, but probably only dropped about seventy feet. He moved quickly and soon was stepping onto the once-again-horizontal carpet at the bottom. He shined his light back up at me and gave the all-clear.

I followed him down, trying to think only in particulars about what was happening and not the terrifying big picture. I focused on what Niko had taught me, what my hands were doing. One thing at a time. Presently I’d made it down too.

The hall at the bottom of the pit stretched off to either side, like we were at the junction of an upside-down T. Detaching from our dangling ropes, we picked a direction and began to explore.

Things got weird down there.

The hallways continued on as they had above, and there were more pits. But now they didn’t go straight down. Not quite. They descended at angles ranging from severe to subtle, never quite true to vertical. Some were almost ramps. Others changed their angle or gradually twisted as they dropped. And while the pit we’d just rappelled down was lit, none of these were. All of them plunged down into darkness.

There were more of them, too. A lot more. Maybe hundreds. Most opened from the middle of a hallway, filling its width: easy to jump across, but wearing a pack you felt clumsy, were acutely aware you were one stumble away from a very bad time.

We decided to avoid unnecessary leaps, but the pits were so thick they hedged us in, pushed us inexorably in certain directions. If we tried to veer too far off course, they’d get denser, and we’d have to backtrack or turn aside, angling back towards our former heading. And the farther we went that way, the more the hallway angles edged off true.

It was subtle at first. But the horizontal hallways were getting less and less level. We’d stumble on a floor that canted slightly left, or tilted a half-degree up or down. The walls, too, were growing angled, some leaning outward a degree or two instead of staying neatly parallel, or bent slightly inward at mismatched angles. It made us feel drunk. You’ve seen so many well-constructed hallways in your life, your brain doesn’t know how to process ones that don’t behave.

We passed through one long hall that started leaning left and kept going as we moved down its length, twisting through a full three hundred and sixty degrees. I don’t mean it was actually moving: imagine holding a long strip of paper, a hand gripping each end, and rotating one wrist to twist an end around. That was the shape the hallway made. The “floor” tilted and then became the wall as we walked, and we tromped across closed doors, the rooms beneath them echoing. Then we were walking on the ceiling, stepping over light fixtures. By the time the hall ended it had rotated all the way around, and we were back on carpet again.

That wasn’t the weird part.

The helix hall had opened into a grid of rooms with open doorways and no connecting corridors. After moving through these into an exit hallway, I called for a break. We hadn’t been talking much, lost in our own thoughts. I said something about the weird hallway and Niko seemed confused.

“Weird how?”

“Twisting all the way around like that. You think it’s significant?”

He didn’t know what I was talking about.

I asked him to describe the path we’d taken to get here. Raising a skeptical eyebrow, he did. Everything was right except he called the part before the grid “a long, straight hallway.”

“Nothing unusual about it?”

He blinked. “No, not that I saw. What are you getting at?”

“You don’t remember, like, walking on the ceiling.”

He frowned. “Are you fucking with me?”

I closed my eyes. I could remember quite distinctly the awkwardness of walking against that steepening angle, shifting a foot to shuffle awkward through the trough of an edge turned into two sloping floors. The way the sound had changed as the surface beneath our shoes went from carpet to drywall. The changing angle of the light as it hit us from below, from the side, from above.

I told him. When I’d finished, he looked sick, and angry.

“If you’re messing with me, man...”

“I’m not. I swear. I’m not.”

He hunched back into himself, looking despite his height like a tiny, cornered animal. Hunted.

“This changes things.” His voice was small.

“How do you mean?”

He sniffed. “Alters the equation, you know. If you and I can’t even see the same things any more... we’re lost. In every sense that matters.”

We vividly described our current surroundings to each other. Past things we’d seen: the octagon room, the pool.

Everything matched up.

It didn’t make us feel any better.

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