I came to another spot where the hallway widened, but this was different. Running along the indentation in one wall was a row of pay phones.

I slowed to a stop and stared, wondering if they were really there.

They rose from knee-deep water, six of them each on its own steel pole. The ceiling had risen so high my glowstick couldn’t find it, but light stabbed down from somewhere, spotlighting each phone like it stood beneath its own personal streetlight, fierce and yellow after hours of only dim red glow.

Water sloshed as I trudged over to the nearest phone, reluctant but intrigued. Payphones don’t normally live inside a house. Did that mean something?

I touched the black plastic of the receiver. It felt grimy and cold. As if in a dream, I lifted it, held it to my ear.

Dial tone.

I blinked as it droned in my ear. This didn’t make sense. If there was no power this far down, surely there weren’t phone lines either. Some telecom grunt hadn’t run a cable all the way down here, snaking it through all these endless halls and vertical shafts, had they? Hope they billed by the hour.

The sound of the dial tone was disturbingly familiar.

Without meaning to, I reached out a finger and dialed a number from an old commercial jingle. Seven sing-song digits.

A voice told me to insert fifty cents.

I almost laughed at this familiar banality. I slapped my pockets, but had no change. I hadn’t expected to need any.

I put down the receiver, lifted it again and dialed zero, still not really expecting anything would happen.

After a ring, a woman’s voice: “Operator.”

My bluff had been called. I didn’t know what to say. “Er... I’d, uh, like to make a collect call.”

“Please hang up, dial star nine seven, and then the number you wish to call. Say your name at the first tone.”

“Thanks,” I managed.

She was gone. The silence hung oppressive in her absence. I needed a voice back on that line. With a couple words she’d made the familiar loneliness unbearable.

But who could I call? Water sloshed around my knees as I considered the utter inexplicability of my situation. Should I call the police, explain I was lost in my own basement, miles from the surface? Ask the fire department to send a rescue team through my bed, down the vertical hallway, and throw a rope ladder down the slimy tube in the giant bathroom?

Or maybe I’d call a friend. You know, one who’d believe me, who wouldn’t hang up thirty seconds into my story. In the movies, whenever someone says “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” there’s always someone to say back: “Try me.” This person invariably turns out to be surprisingly open-minded.

I knew with grim certainty this was not going to work for me. The only friend I had like that was Niko. And he was gone.

I felt desperately alone.

My fingers brushed against the dial pad, hesitating. They punched star nine seven and then they kept going, tracing out a familiar pattern, a groove deep in my muscle memory. My fingers knew it well.

There was a beep and I said my name.

Something clicked and whirred in the receiver. There was a pause, and then, a ring.

Another.

Another.

Then someone picked up and said, “Hello?”

“Mom.” Relief flooded through me like adrenaline. You trust a voice like that on a primitive level, instinctually, in parts of your brain deeper than logic, than thought.

She must have heard something in my tone. “Honey? What’s wrong?”

“What, I only call you when something’s wrong?” I tried to joke, but my eyes were tearing up and my hands were trembling. I held the phone tight against my face. It smelled like old sweat and institutional cleaner.

With my other hand I wiped my forehead. Swallowed. “Nothing’s wrong. Just wanted to hear your voice. How are things? Tell me what you’re up to.” I didn’t care what she said. I only wanted her to talk and keep on talking. To hear sounds from a normal world and pretend that I was part of it. That I’d ever been part of it.

She humored me for a minute, but I could tell she was worried. And I could think of nothing to say that would get me out of here.

“I’m in trouble, mom,” I finally said, voice breaking. “I’m scared. Something’s happened. You remember my... my friend Niko?” I rushed forward, babbling. “I’ve lost him, mom, I don’t know where he is, where either of us are, and this is all too big, I can’t handle it. I fucked things up and we’re lost and I don’t know what to do.” I bit my lip so I’d stop talking, something pressing down hard on my chest, and gripped the phone like it was my last anchor to reality. Maybe it was.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

She took a deep breath. Let it out.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Is it... is it AIDS?”

Of all the things to be terrified about right now, that one was so far down the list that my brain just sort of tripped over itself, downshifted straight back to first and stalled the hell out. “Oh,” I said. “Uh. What? No. No, it’s not AIDS. Mom. I wouldn’t tell you something like that over the phone.” I took a deep breath, and once again said something I probably shouldn’t have. I said it with deadly seriousness. “It’s HIV.”

There was an awful silence.

Then I started giggling. I couldn’t help myself. “That’s not funny, Orion,” she said, but then she was laughing too, and neither of us could stop, even when she kept trying to, kept saying “Orion” again in her serious voice which just set me off more, which set her off again too. And if I could have given anything to stretch that moment out forever, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.

I wiped tears from the corners of my eyes. “I’m sorry. No, it’s not that. I can’t really explain it. I guess I just needed to hear your voice more than anything. I’ll... figure something out.”

“That’s my smartie.” I could picture her expression when she said this; she’d said it a lot. “You know you can always talk to me if you need to, sweetheart. But you won’t always need to. And that’s okay.”

Tears were pushing out of my eyes again, damn it. I leaned against the booth, screwing them shut. “Thanks, mom,” I whispered.

“I love you, sweetie,” she said. “Do you want to talk to your father?”

And out of everything that had happened, all the unexplained and terrifying and gut-wrenching things, nothing hit me like those words did. Sometimes words hit harder than a slap. You feel them, like ten thousand volts. They sour everything that came before, ruin everything coming after. That’s how those words hit me.

Because my father was dead.

“No,” I managed in a quiet, trembling voice.

“Oh, he’s right here, honey, it’s no trouble. Hang on.”

I stood clutching the phone, unable to move, to breathe.

Faint rustling sounds came over the line.

“Well hey there, son.”

This is something you probably won’t understand unless you’ve lost a parent. You have to put things away when that happens. Something is gone and parts of you went with it, in ways that aren’t always obvious. You have to accept that this person is not coming back. You may not want that to be true but it is and you can’t change it, and you need to believe you can’t change it, which isn’t exactly like acceptance, but still. You do it. You put the pain from those missing pieces in a box and nail it shut and you don’t forget it or accept it, not exactly, but you learn to stop thinking about it. After a while it’s almost like you’ve buried the box, or lost it. It’s gone.

And then you hear that voice again, and you realize nothing was ever buried or lost or even nailed shut. The box has been there all along, wide open, and everything in it still has exactly the same power to hurt you. It’s just been waiting for the right moment to try.

“Hey, dad.”

The words came out against my will. There’s been a mistake, I thought dreamily. He’s still alive. Just a dream that a freight truck doing ninety smashed into him on a country highway with a busted stoplight, killing him instantly, taking him away from me between one blink and the next. It made sense: it had never felt real, anyway. Some strange multi-year delusion, not easily explained but easy, so easy, to accept.

Or maybe in this universe it had never happened.

Maybe here, he’s still alive.

This had never once occurred to me since I’d passed through to this side. It was too huge a change. All the differences were so tiny, so inconsequential. Not like this.

Or. Maybe it’s not him at all.

Something inside me withdrew, to wherever small animals go in their heads while staring down looming headlights. Some residual part of me thought I ought to move, speak, react. Get out of the way. But I didn’t know how.

“Good to hear your voice.” My dad. He sounded like he meant it. “How you holding up?”

“Dad.” I wasn’t in control: I sounded distant to myself, like someone else was speaking. “Dad. What’s going on?”

He chuckled. “We were going to ask you the same question. Your mother and I were a little worried after that call the other day.”

I couldn’t think. “Call?” I said stupidly.

“From you and Niko.” My father hesitated. “We couldn’t figure it out, son. You want to let us in on the gag?”

“Uh. Gag?”

“Sure. All that business about going deeper.”

My blood was frozen and my mouth had gone dry. “What?”

“You said,” he explained, voice still achingly familiar, “you both said the next time you called, I was supposed to remind you that you have to go deeper.” He cleared his throat. “That, um.” I could hear the rustle of a paper, like he was reading off a notepad. I could see him, squinting through his glasses. “That you’re not deep enough yet, and you need to keep going. Deeper and deeper. As deep as you can get.” He cleared his throat. “Pretty mysterious. What’s it all about?”

The ground felt like it was dropping away.

“So what’s the news, son?” my father said, a hint of a smile in his voice. “You in deep enough yet?”

I dropped the phone. It swung on the end of its metal coil, spinning slowly. I could still hear his voice, faint and distorted—

“Ryan?”

—dad’s voice, drifting faint from those tiny holes in the receiver, as I backed away, staring—

“Orion? You there?”

—and my shoulders hit the wall, and I couldn’t back away any more but I could still hear his voice coming out of the receiver, so I pulled out my gun and shot it.

Somehow I hit the dangling receiver on my first shot, and it exploded. Tiny bits of plastic shrapnel cut the air. One whizzed past my cheek and sliced it open. I didn’t notice. I raised the gun to the boxy metal body of the phone and shot that, too. I shot it again and again until the gun wouldn’t fire any more.

My ears hurt. The reverberations were deafening, echoing endlessly. I pictured compressed sound waves expanding through miles of hallways, like a dangerous thought lighting up more and more neurons, bouncing off skullbone to keep reflecting, multiplying, feeding on itself. A sound crashing up staircases and down shafts in rippling patterns of interference and reinforcement. I stared down at the gun in my hand, thoughts dull, shots ringing and echoing in my head and through the halls. I unclenched my hand and the gun fell into the water, vanishing instantly under the surface without a splash.

The phone made a distinct, metallic clunk.

I looked up at its bullet-riddled surface.

Inside, something was tumbling down through the payphone’s innards, dinging and plinking past metal obstructions. My gaze moved down, following its invisible path through the body of the phone.

Finally, the clattering stopped. The gate of the coin return jiggled as something clunked into the slot behind it.

Not wanting to, I edged forward. Part of me reached out while another part tried in horror to call my hand back, but it kept moving. It pushed the gate open.

In the coin return was a small brass key.

I stared at it for a long moment. Then I snatched the key and pulled back, turning away from the bank of phones in the same movement. I slogged fiercely on through the water and down the hall, moving fast, not looking back.

My ears sill rang with gunshots. In the silence, that ring kept sounding almost like a distant telephone, bell clanging somewhere far behind me. I tried to ignore them, but the ghost sounds didn’t fade for hours.