“Maybe...” I grasped for something to say. Niko was scared now, I could tell, more scared than me. He needed me to calm him down. “Maybe I imagined it. You get that sense down here sometimes, right? Like thinking’s almost enough to make it real?” He eyed me, uncertain. “Maybe I was daydreaming and got confused. We’ve been under a lot of pressure. I mean I don’t know. A mistake.”

He looked at me carefully. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

My face flushed. “I—”

“Don’t just tell me what I want to hear, Ry. Don’t ever do that. You got me? If I can’t trust you...” He swallowed. My face flushed. The accusation stung.

“Let’s go back,” he said. “Let’s go back and look, right now. Sort this out.”

“No,” I said at once, instantly terrified. I didn’t want to know. Because no resolution to this was good. One of us couldn’t trust our senses, or both of us couldn’t. Or something was much more wrong than that.

Or, a voice whispered in my head, maybe he’s lying. Maybe he did see it, and he’s just pretending he didn’t. I shook my head, but the voice persisted. Who knows what else he’s pretending about?

Maybe he was thinking the same thing about me.

“We should go back now,” Niko said, miserable. “And if we don’t both see the same thing in that hall, we need to abort. Get the fuck out of here, rethink this whole thing. This is fucked up, man. We’re out of our depth. We’re losing control.”

“We can’t quit now.” I felt suddenly calm. “If we let ourselves get spooked by every new thing that happens down here, we’ll never figure out what we came down here to figure out. That’s what we’re looking for, right? The strange bits?” I gestured ahead. “We should see where this leads. Explore as far as we can before turning back. That was the plan, right?”

He stared yearningly back at the entrance to the grid of rooms, the path to the hallway that was or wasn’t a helix. Then he turned his eyes to me. Resentful.

Suspicious.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

We kept going.

The halls branched and spread out endlessly. We gave up trying to map, other than our route back. We passed through regions of dark and regions of light. The decor rarely varied from its ubiquitous blandness. Sometimes little things were wrong. A door, off its hinges, lying neat and flat in the center of the hall. A light fixture sticking out of the carpet. We searched around these anomalies, but never found anything useful.

Some of the rooms got larger, too big for rooms in a house. More like a school gymnasium. Still the same carpet, though. And it felt like we were seeing more of the anomalies, the farther in and deeper down we got. An explosion of pipes and plumbing, sticking out of a wall for no particular reason; weird cube-shaped extrusions or cavities in the edges of rooms. It was like the deeper we went, the more flexible the rules became—of architecture, of stability, of god knows what else.

We were getting tired. Just before turning back, though, we found one last curious room. We could hear it before we opened the door.

The room was the size of a squash court, though not quite as tall, the whole thing covered in green bathroom tile, even the inside of the door we came through. A sink rose serenely from its center. Scalding water blasted from the faucet, releasing clouds of billowing steam and filling the air with a moist, sticky warmth. The sink was full, water spilling over its sides and flowing down the porcelain like some artsy fountain, then streaming away across the tile, presumably according to some imperceptible tilt in the floor. It vanished down an open hallway, carpeted once again, slanting down at a steep angle from a corner of the room.

We walked over to the hallway to peer down. It was closer to vertical than horizontal, dropping at a vicious angle. Where the hot stream hit the tilted carpet it became black with mold, and the walls and ceiling of the tunnel were stained with rust and moss. Like water had been coursing through it for a long, long time.

From the slanting darkness rose a hot smell of rot.

“This feels different,” Niko said.

We walked back to the sink and tried to turn off the faucet, but the hot and cold knobs spun loosely. The scalding water rushed full force out of the tap, churning noisily in the basin.

“We’re going to have a hell of a water bill,” I joked, but then remembered something. The newspaper article from the history lady, about the old fort built on the site of our house. It had said something about a natural spring, an underground cavern.

Something felt on the verge of snapping into place, making sense. But I couldn’t quite see it.

A looking-glass held above this stream
Will show your troubles like a dream

I dug through my pack and found a tiny mirror in the survival kit. You were supposed to use it to signal planes. I held it above the stream, angling it around, not sure what I expected to see.

There was nothing. Just the two of us, reflected back.

After a moment the billowing steam fogged the mirror, erasing the reflection.

I put it away, feeling deflated.

Niko was beaming his flashlight down the tunnel, chasing the descending path of the stream. “This would be rough going. Steep and slick. We’d need better climbing gear. And I can’t see how far down it goes.”

I took a deep breath. “It feels like that’s the way, though. Doesn’t it?”

He ran a hand through his hair, eyes still pulled down the shaft. “Jesus, I hope not.”

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