I can’t tell you this. I don’t want to gut you, reach inside and pull things out, not again. Old wounds and sleeping dogs, you know. Tales better left untold. And you’ve heard this one before, even if your story wasn’t quite the same.

But that’s what sat me down to write. If it’s just a story, maybe we can understand, come to terms. Make peace.

Pretend it’s not ours.

I don’t think I ever told this to you. When I was little, my dad used to come tuck me in at night, and sometimes I’d blink and he’d disappear. He’d be sitting on my bed, singing or smoothing my sheets or telling a story, warm and alive, and between one blink and the next he’d be gone. My heart would thump and I’d clutch the blanket, terrified, eyes thrashing back and forth across the dark spaces of my room like a trapped bird looking for a way out, looking for him, but he’d be gone, and I’d be alone.

Maybe premonition. More likely was that I’d fall asleep, waiting for him to come in, and dream he had. Some noise would jerk me up to a room where he’d long since looked in on me and pulled the door gently shut. But how I rationalize it makes no difference. It doesn’t change how I lived that loss, each night it happened. How I can feel it even today. The person who loved me most, erased from existence in a blink. I’ll never forget how that felt. Even if it never really happened.

So. Maybe a story is a language we can speak, you and I. Find in the telling the truths that matter. Embellish, excise. Revise. Revision.

Although our story really did happen. You know that.

Fine then. Here goes. You ready?

This is what happened when we found some stairs underneath my bed, and decided to go see where they led.

Right from the start things were wrong, but I couldn’t see it. Maybe I didn’t want to. Or maybe I’m being too hard on myself. There wasn’t exactly a roadmap for what happened, a script to follow. But it’s undeniable that even on that very first night—the night of the Russian dance club, remember?—things started happening that shouldn’t have.

I was in the kitchen making ramen, that big kitchen with its vintage appliances and endless counter space, completely wasted on college kids. We’d just moved in a few weeks back, Niko and I and our friends, mostly his, students and lapsed students and a few brave graduates, still settling into the rambling old off-campus house we’d found in the newspaper. (Cast your mind back to a time when kids like us had figured out the internet but people old enough to own property hadn’t, so instead of browsing classifieds our bandwidth went entirely to downloading all the music in the world.)

I was stirring noodles when Niko forced his way in through the side door, perpetually stuck, the soul-juddering screech of metal on wood already a familiar sound, a sound of home. We’d stopped using the front door for reasons I no longer remember, so everyone came and left through that massive kitchen. He gave the doorjamb an affectionate slap and turned his searing grin in my direction, the grin that meant he wanted something. “Ryan, my man. What the deuce is up?”

“Dinner,” I said, with a wary glance that meant I was on to him: but smiling despite myself. The temperature always rose a few degrees when he came into a room, like he radiated in all frequencies, emotional and thermal.

“Cool. Hey. What are you doing tonight?”

Resigned. “Tell me.”

“A bunch of people, like everyone really, are heading out to Orbits. Heard of it?” I shook my head; he rolled his eyes. “Course you haven’t. It’s that new dance club over by the old stadium. Supposedly they play this fucking feral, crotch-pummeling Russian dance music and lots of sexy people will be there tonight, including us.”

“Huh.” I stirred the pot. “Not really my thing.”

“Leaving the house isn’t really your thing, yeah, I get it.” He came over beside me and reached a bronzed hand over to pinch a couple of noodles, wincing at the heat and slurping them up fast, grinning. “But sometimes you have to get outside your comfort zone, you know?” He licked his fingers and fixed me with a look that said he wasn’t taking no for an answer, and maybe it said something else, or I wanted to pretend it did. His eyes were so fucking sharp. When they looked at you and wanted something, it hurt.

“Uh. I’ve got Bio homework.” I blinked. Green. His eyes were green. “And I don’t want to be around a lot of loud drunk people tonight. Or loud drunk music.”

“Oh come on,” he pleaded, running a hand through his black curls. “It won’t be any fun if you aren’t there. Hey, maybe some drunk straight guy will start making out with you cause Russian techno makes him feel all experimental and shit.”

“That’ll definitely happen.”

“Look man, what was the point of coming out if you never actually go out?” He crossed his arms. “Come on. Please?”

It clicked then that he was the one hoping to get some action tonight, probably with some sweet-smelling, dark-skinned exchange student with feathers weaved into her long, black hair. (Yes, her. I know, I know.) She was the one he wanted to take to this club. Maybe it had been her idea. The thought of watching from a corner while he made moves on some intoxicating girl made my stomach knot up.

But there was something insistent in the way he demanded my presence. Why did he want me there, too? What role was I supposed to play?

I sighed. “I’m going to hate it.”

“Yeah you are.” He grinned wickedly. “Every second. We’re leaving at eight. I’ll knock on your door.”

I was somehow committed. I was going, like he’d wanted. On the off-chance that something interesting would happen.

Something did. But not till much later, when we got back home, drunk and exhausted.

I’d hated the club, as predicted. The music was so loud it hurt, almost as much as it hurt to call the shit they were blasting “music.” I’d worn my rainbow pride bracelet, the one I’d bought a few months ago and mostly been too chickenshit to wear (it was a college town but a conservative state). I might as well have worn a bag over my head. Everyone ignored me, including hypothetical hot guys with loosened inhibitions. I mostly stood against a wall hating myself and how I probably looked to everyone, an acne-faced geek in too-small clothes lurking on the outskirts, wishing he was back home listening to Dvořák symphonies. I drank too much and as usual it didn’t help. I watched Niko dance his ass off, mostly with girls, and once or twice with guys, whether out of politeness or genuine interest I couldn’t tell. I’d never really been able to tell. He flirted with everyone, flashed the same manic energy in all directions equally. But he, too, seemed to fail at making any solid human connections, and I was relieved when he cornered me and asked if I wanted to duck out early.

Walking home through the chill night air was a relief. It was nice just walking with him, and not only because by that point in the evening it would have been hard to walk a straight line on my own. We’d been friends since freshman year of college and best friends since the year after that, and by now we felt like something more, placidly absorbing jokes about being joined at the hip, going everywhere together. We were; we did. Especially since his accident, we’d had a profound if unspoken level of companionship I’d never felt with anyone. Usually I was content with that.

In some ways we had so little in common it was astonishing we’d become friends. At other moments it seemed like the universe had meant us to find each other. Over the years we had grown together, like two plants in the same small pot. It had been an especially tumultuous gauntlet of an undergrad—although I guess it probably seems that way to everyone—so shared roots twined us together now, half-remembered fragments of stories and selves: skipping a funeral to camp together in the rocky canyons of Brushwillow, sharing long silences amidst the lakes and pines; pulling all-nighters on mad projects with desperate stakes; driving to the next town over through a summer midnight, windows rolled down and air thrumming through, desperate to find fresh vegetables for reasons that seemed incredibly important at the time, buzzed from both caffeine and alcohol as in so many stories involving Niko. In our defense the alcohol was supposed to go in the ragu.

In the fall we’d be starting our fifth year of college, neither of us particularly close to graduating with any particular degree, and for the first time that felt ominous. The future that had been staked out before us our whole lives was running out. A blank canvas ought to have been exciting, but any direction we could imagine to go in seemed blocked off, prematurely closed, inaccessible or unrealistic. Friends were picking already between the few remaining well-flagged routes: getting careers, getting married, getting pregnant, getting gone to new cities, new lives, new starts. It would be our turn soon enough.

On the way back from the club I got ranty about real music, and by the time we reached the house had a half-dozen songs queued up to play for Niko. Mentally, I mean: digital music players weren’t really a thing yet, although it was still tragically too late for my records to be anything but anachronism. Vinyl wouldn’t start making a comeback for years and was deader than dead. Maybe that was why I liked it. When we moved in I’d stacked my crates of LPs precariously in the closet, so now as we tromped up the stairs to my room and dragged them out to hunt for the albums I wanted to play him, we got drunkenly annoyed at the lack of anywhere to put them. So that was how I ended up on my hands and knees, searching fruitlessly for a way to open up my bed.

“Bed” was generous: it was really just a mattress, thrown on a raised wooden platform built into a corner of the room. The platform was mattress-sized and had therefore seemed like the sensible spot to put one, but the bulky thing also really seemed like it ought to be hollow and have some storage space inside. I’d never found any handles or hinges, but in our drink-addled haze it seemed ridiculous that the thing couldn’t be opened somehow, and because I can’t leave well enough alone and because unsolved challenges annoy me, and, okay, because booze, there I was on hands and knees fiddling with the paneled edges of the platform, shoving and kneading and banging on them. When something finally gave with a satisfying chunk, I whooped in satisfaction; but leapt back startled when the whole platform groaned and swung up, pencils and organic chemistry textbooks sliding off the mattress onto the pitted hardwood floor.

Underneath was a set of steep stairs down.

“Whoah,” Niko said, “Jackpot.”

They were carpeted in the same dark beige as the rest of the house, which looked like someone had redecorated in the seventies and died a few decades later, unaware style had moved on. Eleven steps led down to a landing where they twisted right and reversed. Cramped, but bland and familiar: the walls paneled in that same fake wood as the rest of the house, lit by those same tacky wall sconces. All just as you’d expect from the stairs down to a basement, except we were on the second story and the house already had a basement, which emphatically did not connect through my bed.

Niko laughed in astonishment. “What the fuck is this, man? What’s down there?”

“Hell if I know. More secrets.” We were both grinning, because this sort of thing had already happened a few times since we’d moved in. The house had been my find. The group of us were getting older (or so we thought then) and were sick of living in shitty campus housing or the shittier apartments nearby preying on starving students, so we pooled our resources to go in on something big and spacious in the pleasant tree-lined neighborhood a few blocks farther out. It was an old house, maybe as much as a hundred years old, but big, in good repair, and, most important, cheap: we were all paying less in rent than we had been living in pairs or alone. I’d claimed the funky second-floor patio room in a lumpy wing extending into the backyard, clearly a later addition, and Niko snagged a creaking and stuffy room next to mine which he dubbed “lovingly misshapen.” A lot of the place was like that: a half-landing here, an awkward angle there, bits taken out and bricked over on some whim or other. The house had expanded and contracted over the generations, it seemed, in decades-long breaths.

The listing hadn’t mentioned a secret passage. But it also hadn’t mentioned the closet with a door in the back leading to a dusty, forgotten room (which now housed a dusty, forgotten game of Axis and Allies); nor had it mentioned the extra bedroom in the basement tucked away around a corner and behind an unlikely-looking door. These little discoveries gave the place a quirky, rambling feel, and I loved it. My whole life I’d had dreams about finding new rooms in houses I’d lived in, each time with a thrill of discovery, of learning your cozy domain still had surprises, things left to find. Maybe it came from moving around all the time as a kid. Or maybe it said something about me.

I still had them, the dreams. I didn’t know they were about to get much worse.

Niko touched the angled bottom of the bed platform and looked at me, as if for permission. He gestured grandly downwards. “Well, Orion, should we check it out?”

I bowed formally, the room only spinning a little. “Indeed, Nikolaos, let’s fucking do it.”

He grinned and tousled my hair, bounding over the lip. He stooped as he took the first few steps, black curls brushing the underside of the tilted platform.

“You going to fit down there?” I smirked. “This looks made for normal-sized people, not basketball players.”

“High school power-forward Nick appreciates your validation of his identity, thanks,” he called back, almost to the landing already. “College dilettante Niko, though, wants to know if you’re fucking coming.”

I hesitated on the threshold, strangely reluctant.

He turned from the landing to look back up, arms folded. “I’m not that tall, am I? I’ve only got like three inches on you and your—” He flailed a hand up and down at me. “Your demographically average carcass. Stop giving me complexes.”

Actually you’re exactly four and a half inches taller than me. But who’s counting.

He shrugged, continued down the next set of stairs and out of sight. “Later, skater.”

I flipped his skinny ass off and followed him down.

Despite his complaints, Niko was in fact wearing a basketball jersey, but an ironic one from the thrift store, for some hopefully-fictional team called the Reagans. He wore a purple blazer over it, which I trust is all I need say about his fashion sense. Somehow, it worked. His horrifying ensembles always worked, whereas the clothes I’d buy, new or used, would inevitably become ugly, permanently wrinkled, and the wrong size by the time I got them home. “Dear Diary,” I’d imagined writing in my nonexistent diary, “I get now that I’m destined to die alone. You can stop sending me signs.” You used to put self-deprecating shit like that in diaries, back before social media was invented. Not actually bothering to keep the diary was about as unsatisfying as typing and erasing status messages without ever posting them; so if you do that a lot, I can relate.

Anyway. Niko had shrugged his shoes off when we’d gotten to my room, and now his bare feet sunk half an inch into the carpet as he tromped down the stairs, which was the detail I noticed. His feet were hard not to notice: maybe it was all the basketball, or the Greek ancestry, but they were like statuary. Perfect.

The stairs were steep but otherwise unextraordinary. Around the corner, eleven more dropped to a second landing. We stomped down, Niko’s drunken excitement leading us on like a dog straining at a leash. Past that corner was one more landing, then eleven final steps that opened into a large, windowless room.

It was bigger than any other room in the house, maybe thirty feet across by sixty or seventy long. (Logically it ought to have been the same size as the house’s footprint, but both the dimensions and orientation were wrong for that.) It had the same beige carpet and brown wall-paneling, tacky faux-bronze wall-sconces, and a plaster ceiling eight feet up. Firewood was stacked up by two fireplaces on opposite walls, in the same style as the non-functional one upstairs hidden by our TV. No windows, not even those awful basement ones that fill up with dead leaves and spider webs. No furniture, either. Just the expected bits of floor lint, carpet stains, wall gouges, and other subtle remnants of long occupation. A cool, musty smell suggested said occupation had been a long time ago.

Five open doorways led out: two along each long edge, and one on the far wall opposite the stairs.

“Holy shit, Ry, this is fucking amazing!” Niko’s eyes lit up as he walked a few paces in, tentative, like into a tide. He flexed his bare toes on the ugly carpet. “It’s like a whole secret underground lair!”

I felt the same thrill, mingled with hesitation. Did our landlord somehow not know about all this extra space? Was it some kind of forgotten bomb shelter? Niko was already talking about throwing parties down here, where to put couches. A secret basement hangout spot.

We called it Downstairs, big D, without really thinking about it.

The architecture was making my head spin, though. (Okay: also the beer.) But someone else’s bedroom was under mine. I felt an indignant vertigo, and made Niko come back with me to resolve this mystery before exploring any farther. We went back up to my room, then downstairs—regular lower-case downstairs—to reconnoiter. There was, in fact, an odd protrusion into the kitchen underneath and to one side of my room, and when we peeked into our absent housemate’s bedroom around the corner, a mirroring blocky bulge in there. So together those two bulges explained the stairs, though not why you’d build a staircase in the middle of a wall like that. But the house was full of those weird angles and edges, so it seemed in character.

We went back Downstairs and poked around a few of the side hallways. They were pretty cramped, but no worse than the many god-awful basement apartments I’d seen students living in. Like some of those, there were no windows anywhere, which made sense: it felt too far down. Rooms opened off the sides of the halls (those cheap particle-board doors, those rattling brass-plated tin doorknobs). Some were carpeted and looked like they could be bedrooms; others had bare concrete flooring like a laundry or utility room. They were all empty.

The hallways branched at the end: we picked one and saw both ways passed more doors before making an L-turn, each in opposite directions. Those crappy wall sconces were everywhere, so despite the lack of windows, it was almost too bright. They were all lit, and weirdly enough we couldn’t find a light switch anywhere.

“Are we, uh, paying for all this electricity?” Niko asked with jittery alarm.

“We haven’t gotten our first bill yet.” I felt proud for only slurring my speech a little; witty. “Good thing we’re splitting eight ways.”

We didn’t exhaustively explore, beyond checking another hallway and seeing that it, too, branched and snaked off, shedding rooms left and right. Niko had started down that one, but I stopped abruptly, a wave of nausea washing over me, and put a hand against the cold wall.

He stopped instantly. “You okay?”

I smiled, embarrassed. “I think, uh. Don’t want to get too far from a bathroom.”

He eyed me appraisingly. “You shouldn’t have done that last shot. I keep telling you. Beer before liquor, never sicker.” He tousled my hair again, but very gently. “Okay, man. Hang on just one sec. I need to see the end of this fucking hallway and then we’ll get you back upstairs.”

I didn’t want him to leave but couldn’t think of any sane reason to stop him that didn’t sound needy, so I nodded and let him go. Too many vaguely ill feelings were churning around inside me to sort them out from each other.

“I’ll wait here,” was all I could say, the thought of walking back up twisting stairs feeling for a queasy moment like a bad idea.

He was already halfway down the hall, but lifted a hand in acknowledgment. Moments later he’d turned the corner and was gone.

It was suddenly very quiet.

I sunk to a sitting position, knees at my chin, back against the fake wood-paneling. Why do you always, always drink too much? Idiot. I tried to focus on the feel of the carpet under my butt, the smoothness of the wall at my back. I tried not to think about my stomach.

Please, please hurry back.

Something changed around me, subtle but significant. Head swimming, I couldn’t lock on to what, at first, was different. I blinked, squinted.

The light. The play of light around me had changed, gone darker, even though none of the wall sconces in my field of vision had gone out or gotten any dimmer.

We were at a T-junction, where the hall we’d come from, back to the big room with the fireplaces, had branched in two directions. I was slumped against the wall facing the way we’d come, head turned towards the right-hand fork, the way Niko had gone.

I decided the sudden dimness must be from the lights in the hall behind me, the one we hadn’t explored yet. They must have gone out.

Carefully, still fighting nausea, I turned my head.

I’ve always had an unhealthy imagination. This has manifested itself in various ways over the course of my life. Staying under the covers reading comics instead of doing homework, or sleeping. Satisfying myself with vivid fantasies about guys I crushed on rather than risk asking them out in real life. Obsessions, where each new hobby would become all I could think about. Things get lodged in my head and they stay there, sometimes for too long.

The other hall was dark. The lights were off, and the dark brown walls sucked up the refracted light from the other two hallways, so that the end of this one, where it turned another corner, was right at the edge of shadow.

But there was enough light to see that someone was standing there.

In sixth grade I had a brief friendship with a weird, indrawn kid with the same unhealthy imagination as me. He liked to possible. When you catch something from the corner of your eye, he’d explained, and it looks for an instant like something fantastic—a witch’s face in a hedge, a huge monstrous far-off thing instead of a tiny nearby insect—instead of correcting your perceptions, you let yourself keep believing in that first impression for as long as you can. You possible it. Hold it in your head, your mental model of what’s real. Keep your mind from asserting the boring truth it thinks it knows and trust the one your senses first perceived. And I’d tried this, with him and on my own, off and on for a few weeks until I scared myself because I was getting too good at it. So was he: I realized it before long when he started scaring me with stories about the things he’d seen, and I think his parents or the school figured it out not long after, because they took him away and I got sent to a counselor for a few weeks just for being friends with him.

But you don’t unlearn something like that. Not completely.

I stared at the person lost in shadows at the end of the hall and tried to unsee them, to resolve them into a trick of angles and darkness: turn off my brain’s over-eager pattern matchers, finding predators in a coincidence of edges. And at the same time, I could feel that old part of me fighting this, trying to keep seeing what it thought it saw the first time.

A person, standing there in the dark. Watching me.

It didn’t help that the hallway was spinning and I felt closer and closer to throwing up each second.

It moved.

The shadow took a step forward, slow and deliberate. Like a deer not sure if it’s seeing a bobcat or a bush. I couldn’t see its eyes or expression but it was facing me, looking at me.

And then I realized who it was.

Whether my eyes had started adjusting to the dim light, or the possible in my brain was shifting into high gear, I couldn’t say, but like the solution to a puzzle plunking full-formed into my head I recognized, now, who was standing there at the end of the hall.

It was me.

I clutched the carpet under my hand, feeling for the solidness of it, an anchor back to reality. Everything was spinning. My stomach churned and my mouth filled with saliva, like the glands for adrenalin and poison protection were crossing wires. Fight, flight, or puke.

The face was still dark but I recognized the way the body held itself, the silhouette it made, the shoes. Unmistakable. The person in the mirror, except I’d never seen him from this far away before.

I squinted into the darkness, seeing something else now. Something barely visible, even further back in the shadows.

There was more than one of them.

The second stood just behind the first, so I couldn’t see its face either: but it was the same silhouette, the same height, the same shape. It was another one, identical. Another me. It had been there all along, perfectly hidden behind the first, and I could only see it now because they were moving again, lifting up the other foot, just as slowly, hesitant, following the double in almost perfect synchronicity. Like they were glued together.

They put the feet down, gentle, soundless on the thick carpet.

Another pace closer.

Seeing double. You’re drunk. Except I’d never had it happen in three dimensions before, along the z-plane. And the edges of the hall weren’t doubled at all.

I wondered how many more were stacked up behind them. How many more I couldn’t see, each pressed up against the last, a line vanishing into the darkness, stretching back god knows how far, waiting patiently for something I could never understand.

I wondered what they wanted.

I wondered how fast they could reach me if they started to run.

“What you looking at?” Niko asked from behind me, and I leapt, fucking leapt to my feet like the floor was electric, whirling around to face him, body in full panic like all the building adrenalin had been released in an instant and I guess it probably had; panting and overwhelmed with terror and nausea and a terrible, stabbing relief at seeing him, seeing a him I could believe in instead of a me I couldn’t.

“The lights back there went out,” I said, gasping, not looking behind me. Also, more certain: “I need to throw up.”

He clapped my shoulder, grim. “Let’s get you back upstairs.”

I let him shepherd me away. I didn’t look back down the hall.

But as we left, his arm protective on my shoulders, he frowned. “Pretty sure those lights were out when we first came down here, man.”