“Hey,” I finally said, “this dark is kind of freaking me out. You can shield your eyes or whatever, but I’ve got to have some light. Okay?”

He sighed, as if resigned. “If you have to.”

I reached carefully for a glowstick the same way I used to walk deliberately towards the light switch in my childhood basement, shepherding growing panic with a forced front of calm. I pulled one out, snapped it, shook it, blinked at the surge of blue light from mingling chemicals, and held it up, anxious, as the light crept toward him.

The electric blue was shockingly bright, and he’d winced and held up a hand to block it out. He kept it there for a long moment as I squinted, pupils squirming. Finally, almost reluctantly, he dropped the hand and met my gaze, defiant.

Something was wrong with him.

He was changed. Distorted. Something had leathered him, shrunken and withered his features, hollowed his eye sockets. At first he seemed like some poorly made copy, face a twisted parody of the one I knew so well. But then I started to realize what had done this to him.

Time.

He was older. Much older.

I was at the start of my twenties, remember. I hadn’t been around long enough to see how age inscribes itself on people, crumples parents into grandparents and invalids and corpses. I hadn’t seen friends lose hair and teeth and muscle tone. I hadn’t loved someone long enough to find out what decades do to them.

The Niko against the wall looked twice as old as he should have been, maybe more. He was wearing different clothes, but out of his standard wardrobe: the bowling shirt with “My Name Is BONG” on the lapel. It wasn’t threadbare or faded. Something bulged from the front pocket, maybe a penlight, and his pack leaned against the wall beside him.

He held my gaze, waiting. We stared at each other for a long time.

“What happened?” I finally said.

He took a breath. Let it out. “You can see what happened.” He cleared his throat. I realized now he wasn’t tired, or strained. His voice was just older. “So. Yeah. I’m not your Niko, man. Okay? I’ve been through more. A lot more.”

I stiffened. “You’re the one from the other side?”

He smiled. “Ah. You still think there’s just two sides. Sure, course you do.” He shook his head. “Guess that’s how it seems near the surface. A pair of possibilities. Neat. But deeper down, things get more... tangled.” The word sounded heavy in his throat, dangerous.

“What do you mean?” I couldn’t stop staring at him, at his face, and I swayed with the sick feeling of recognition and strangeness, curdled together.

“There’s a lot of space down here, Orion. A lot of possibilities. Most of them... aren’t good.” His glance had drifted down the corridor, but now it snapped back to my face. “My Ryan and I, we got lost. Long time ago. Real fucking lost. We, uh. Never made it back.”

“Your Ryan?” I looked around, panic spiking. “There’s some older version of me down here too?”

He looked away. “No.”

After a moment, I realized he wasn’t going to say anything else. And then why.

His eyes flicked back to my face again, as if fascinated by it. He stared at me with something like hunger. At seeing my face again? At seeing anyone?

“Been on my own a long time,” he said, as if explaining. “Gotten used to it.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Suddenly I couldn’t accept any of this. “Your clothes.” I shook my head. “Your shoes. No. They haven’t changed. They should be worn down to nothing.”

He looked away again, out into the blackness down the hall. “Like I said. Lot of possibilities.” He cracked a knuckle. “We weren’t the only ones who got lost. Bumped into lots of other Nikos and Ryans down here. Most of them dead. Sorry to say.” He cracked another knuckle, methodical. “But the clothes are fine, man. The clothes fit great.” He forced out a barking laugh, abrupt, cold. I wondered how many years it had taken his laugh to shrivel down to that emaciated sound.

He sniffed. “You get used to it. Stealing clothes, I mean. Stops being strange after a while.”

“But how do you eat?” I felt angry, not the least because my skin was crawling at the thought of him grave-robbing other Nikos. Other Ryans. “If you’ve been down here so long, how the hell are you even alive? It doesn’t make any sense.”

He turned back to me again, no longer wistful but with a dangerous sharpness. You’ve heard the phrase “thousand-yard stare” but you’ve never really seen it. I believed everything he said next, no matter how fantastic. The words were only flavoring on the truth in that stare.

“There’s a room,” he began, voice graveling, “not much farther down from here. Different from anything up here. Bigger. A bit bigger.” That laugh again.

“Can’t walk the length of one of its walls without stopping to sleep. Takes five or six sleeps to walk all the way around, keeping the outer wall to your left the whole time. Passing all the doors.” He shook his head. “Maybe a few thousand halls leading out. Most of them slanting upwards. But only one goes back to the surface. The rest lead nowhere, or in circles, back to one of the other ten thousand halls.

He took a breath. “When you come into this room, though, you can tell something’s different. The carpet ends. It turns to asphalt.”

He stood up suddenly and I cringed back, but he turned to the wall and placed a hand on it. He drew his finger down, then over and around, drawing an invisible square; then drew invisible grid lines in it. “Asphalt,” he said. “City streets. City blocks. A huge grid of them. Suburban streets. Crosswalks, stop signs, you know. What you’d expect. Lawns, but they’re all dead. No sun, right?”

He turned back, leaned against the wall. “And all the houses,” he said, fixing me with that stare again, “are ours.”

“What?” I couldn’t break his gaze.

He shrugged. “Not exactly. None exactly. But all close enough. Sometimes the foyer’s a mirror image, or the front door’s changed, or there’s one more bedroom on the second floor, one less. Or the carpet’s different, or the wallpaper, or the kitchen’s smaller or there’s no bricked up fireplace, or the fireplace is bigger, or there’s a fish tank instead of a fireplace. Sometimes, maybe one in ten houses, I can’t see a difference. But I think it’s always there. Not that I’ve checked them all.” He laughed again. “Did the math once. There’s ten million houses. Give or take. I’ve been down here a long time. But not that long.

“Each one has that upstairs porch room, though,” he went on, relentless. “Your room. And they’re all filled with your stuff. Little variations again. Sometimes your bookshelf has a copy of Dhalgren, sometimes it doesn’t. That one I always look for. But it’s your room, in every house. And your bed.

“And under every one of those beds, there’s another Downstairs, as big as this one. And if you can find your way down, another huge empty city with another ten million houses. Each slightly different. Each slightly different than the ten million up here. And sometimes, other Ryans and Nikos come up out of them, expecting to find the real world, with people and a sun and all. They’re real fucking disappointed. Especially when they wander too far and can’t find the house they came out of again.

“Sometimes I’ll meet them on the streets, crying, panicked. I stay away, of course. Can’t get too close, like you know, or bad things happen.” He pointed to his temples, and I had a sudden shivering flashback to that feeling of wrongness when my double and I had almost bumped into each other.

He looked away. “Course they’re usually dead by the time I find them,” he added lightly. “But. Your question. Each house has a pantry, food. Once in a while a house has power, too, lit up like Christmas in all that dark, and the fridge is running and cold, and there’s lunchmeat and milk and leftovers inside. Unspoiled. So there’s plenty to eat. Just not a lot of, you know. Ambiance.”

He stepped closer. “I heard your gunshots. That’s how I found you. Don’t know what you were shooting at but doesn’t matter. You’re not lost. Are you.” He glanced behind me, back the way I’d come. “This goes back up, doesn’t it? To the surface. The real surface.” He closed his eyes. “With light and birds, and grass, and people who aren’t you or me. I can’t tell you...” He opened them again and I wanted to shrink back, close my eyes and pretend I’d never seen something like that in human eyes, let alone in his, that hollowness and pain and something else, too, something worse. But I couldn’t. I could only stare back, cringing.

“I can’t tell you,” he said more quietly, “what it would mean to me to find my way back up there. Orion. I can’t stay down here any longer. I can’t.”