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.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about the wet tunnel as we retracted our steps. Images of it flashed through my mind. The desire to know what was past the reach of our flashlight beams, what was down there, was maddening. I was planning how soon we could come back down, what we’d have to bring with us. What it would take to keep pushing deeper.

For better or worse, we ended up missing the long twisting hallway on our way back. From the grid of rooms we found a different door that let out much closer to the bottom of our pit, and decided without too much discussion to take it. I was glad Niko didn’t press the point. Maybe he’d forgotten.

I couldn’t stand the thought of our perceptions of the world not agreeing.

We passed through the last few hallways to the base of shaft we’d come down. On the carpet directly underneath were our ropes, coiled up neat, Grapple Buddies still tied to the end.

“God damn it,” Niko said with feeling, craning his head to glare accusingly at the shaft and fling curses up its length. We couldn’t see anything unusual up there, not from down here.

Our way back up had been cut off.

We had extra grapples in our packs, but the originals didn’t seem damaged: just detached. The shaft was too narrow to throw one all the way back up without hitting a wall, so we settled for hooking a doorway, halfway up.

Our position now was much more precarious. We couldn’t tell if the grapple was set properly: we just had to trust it. Niko volunteered to go first. From the ground below, I watched him climb, anxious.

And for some reason, that was the moment I finally accepted that I was still in love with him. I’d tried so hard to convince myself I wasn’t, that I’d moved on, wrung him out of my heart, that all we had was an especially deep friendship. But watching him dangle from that rope, knowing he could fall at any second, I couldn’t pretend any more. I’d never stopped loving him. I didn’t know how. Maybe I never would. Our perceptions of the world had never fucking agreed.

He was a good climber. He made it to the sideways door without incident. From there, it was just a matter of taking things in stages to get back up to the top. Each of the vertical rooms we passed served as a miniature base camp, a place to rest before flinging the grapple another few dozen feet to the next doorway. We’d both climb up and do it again. Eventually we made it back to the top. It was like a mountaineering expedition, kind of, except inside a house. So not at all, I suppose.

The camcorder was where we’d left it, sitting on the carpet pointed at the pit.

The door frame where the grapples had been attached wasn’t damaged. We’d seated them pretty firmly, so this suggested that rather than being yanked free from below, someone had carefully unhooked them from up here.

Of course, the ropes had also been carefully coiled at the bottom. Someone had to have done that from down there.

I didn’t want to watch the tape, not while we were still Downstairs. But Niko, face grim, insisted. So I huddled miserably beside him while we watched the footage on the tiny flip-out screen.

The tape had run to the end, so we backed it up a bit and hit play. To our dismay, we immediately saw that the ropes were going over the edge right to the end of the tape; whatever happened, it had been after the tape ran out. Niko held down the rewind button and we settled in for a long haul: but after only a few seconds we saw ourselves spring back up from the pit in fast motion, first me and then him; dicker with the grapples and rope for a few minutes; then zip over to the camera to turn it on.

“I swear the tape was at the beginning,” Niko said. “There should have been two hours of space. This is like five minutes at most. What the hell?”

He let go of the rewind button and let the tape play.

We watched in numb frustration as everything we’d done earlier played back: the same discussions about rope and seating the grapples, the same lame jokes failing to ease tension. There wasn’t much point to watching it all unfold again. We just didn’t know what else to do.

On the tiny screen, I was standing a pace or two back, wondering aloud how much stuff we should take down with us. I hated how my voice sounded on tape, how my face looked. I always had. Even on the tiny screen I could see red blotches. On the screen a miniature Niko sat on the edge of the pit, adjusting his ropes.

Distorted by the shitty camcorder speaker, he said, “How far down do you think this goes?”

My image shrugged, said “We should possibly go much deeper.”

My skin crawled. “Oh my god.”

Niko glanced at me. “What?”

“That’s not what I said.” My head was spinning. What had I said? Something like It can’t possibly go much deeper, maybe. Not that.

Screen-Niko said “You’re right. In fact, we shouldn’t you and I come back up this way at all. No. We should go down and we should let’s stay down there, down and deep.” His voice sounded strained, but he pulled his rope tight smartly. “Don’t come back till we find it, man. What it is we need to find.”

Where it gripped the camcorder, Niko’s hand was pale. “I didn’t say that either,” he breathed. “Oh my god. I mean I said something about that long, some of those words and phrases maybe. But they’re different they’re fucking different—”

I shushed him, because the voices on the tape were speaking again. But now the words were familiar, mundane. We both watched the screen, afraid to blink, but nothing else seemed changed. Everything played out as we remembered. Except now every word and gesture caused a spike of uncertainty. Had I said that, exactly that? Had I moved my arm that way, stood in precisely that spot?

Screen-Niko started to rappel. The camera focused on my legs as I stood up top, watching him descend. On the screen I waited, then finally clipped onto the rope once he’d made it to the bottom.

Video Ryan checked his harness, took a deep breath, and started down.

He paused just before his head dropped out of frame to call down to Niko: “Coming down.” I remembered saying that.

Then he turned and looked straight at the camera.

Straight into the lens.

He held the gaze for a long moment.

Then he glanced, very deliberately, down the shaft. Then back to the camera.

Wide-eyed.

His head dropped out of sight.

We sat frozen, watching the video of the empty hall for another thirty seconds, until the tape reached its end and clunked to a stop.

Niko breathed slowly out. “Jesus.” He closed the screen and sat the camera down, backing away from it like it was a bomb. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

I kept staring at it. A looking-glass held above this stream...

“Jesus,” he kept muttering. “Jesus.”

We slept in the big room that night because we always had low-level headaches now when we went upstairs. (Also, because I thought I heard someone up there, rummaging in the kitchen. The housemates were all supposed to be at a party. “Hello?” I’d called, but no one answered. The noises stopped, though.) We were becoming trolls, hiding from sounds, afraid to go out under the sky, only venturing from our cave to get more supplies, stock up for further ventures down. I slept under the foosball table, gathering dust. No one but us had been down here for weeks.

You won’t be surprised to hear I had nightmares.

I replayed the tape in my dreams, over and over. Each time I rewound to the very beginning, intent to watch it through, make sure there wasn’t some clue I’d missed. And each time the tape was different. It was always Niko and the pit and I, but never the same. And whenever something changed, fresh dread flooded through me.

Some of the changes were slight, barely there, and I strained to catch the altered words, the different glances. Sometimes our words were lightly rearranged, as if to make cryptic cyphers, hidden meanings on the verge of making sense but never quite resolving.

In some of these variations, Niko and I were together. A couple. I could tell from the words we used, the way we looked at each other. Nothing that would have been obvious to anyone but me. I watched these scenes over and over, rewinding to catch the little glances, secret smiles.

There were other, worse versions.

There were dream-tapes where a gaunt Ryan and Niko fought each other for control of the camera, staring manic into the lens with frantic mouths full of rotting teeth, skin flaking beneath torn and faded rags sticky with dried blood, like they’d been trapped down there for months. They clawed at the lens, as if trying to climb into it. As if it somehow were a way back out.

There were tapes where we screamed at our watcher-selves to go away, to never come down again, that what was down there would kill us. There were others, far worse, where we grinned like wolves, invited ourselves to come down deep, and stay.

There were tapes where the grapple failed and Niko or I fell, the sound of a sickening crunch reverberating up the shaft. There were tapes where we looked right into the lens and stepped willingly off the edge.

There were shots of the pit with nothing else there: no grapples, no ropes, no us. There were shots where the carpet was crawling with beetles. There were shots where the walls were made of meat.

And on one tape—and I rewound and re-watched this over and over, in the dream—water from all the hallways poured into the pit, a four-sided waterfall. The carpets were black and sticky with moss trailing down into the vertical shaft, the air thick with steam. Something jostled the camera and it surged forward with the tide, water sloshing against the lens, until the scalding stream carried it over the edge and it fell, straight down into that boiling pit, surrounded by water on every side, gathering speed, falling into wet and steaming dark, faster and faster and faster...

I would jerk awake at this point, coated in sweat, and try not to fall back asleep. But when I did I’d find myself rewinding the tape yet again and pressing play, hoping this time the footage would return to normal. It was always changed, and I’d have to watch it all over from the beginning, hoping this version would show something useful, a hint, a clue, an answer.