Before long the texture of the floor started alternating in frequent, abrupt transitions. First it went glossy-smooth, then back to carpet, then to changing patterns of creaking wood and carpet of different textures. I stumbled more and more over bumps and irregularities, as if the floor was crumpling, bunching up as we neared some pressure point.
Niko opened every door we passed now, investigating more thoroughly. When he opened the third one after we slowed down, he sucked in a sharp breath.
“Definitely on the right track. You’re gonna need eyes for this, kiddo.” He pulled my blindfold free.
I blinked in the sudden glare from his light. He stood between me and the open doorway at the end of the hall. It was dark inside, though I could see something glittering in the gloom behind him. Ice?
“Take a look,” he said with a grin. “I’ll shine the light. But don’t lean too far in. I wouldn’t bet your life on my grip on the rope.”
Wondering what he meant, I shuffled to the doorframe. He turned and shined the light past me, and that’s when the vertigo hit.
The door opened onto nothing. Past the frame, the floor dropped away into blackness. The flashlight only went so far, of course, so I shouldn’t have been able to tell how far down the drop-off went.
Except I could.
Far, far below us were tiny clusters of lights. Irregularly spaced, but stretching out in all directions. Maybe miles down. It was like the view out the window of a red-eye, flying over suburbia at night.
That wasn’t what gave me the vertigo.
Stretching down from the base of the doorway in a steep but quickly flattening curve was a filigreed structure I couldn’t at first identify. My impression of ice was wrong: it was laid out more like a spiderweb, a grid of sparkly intersecting lines. As I squinted I realized the sparkles were countless tiny crystals, dangling from some kind of mesh and reflecting back the flashlight in hundreds of shimmering glints. As the web curved down and away it grew denser and denser, strands converging towards a point maybe sixty feet below and another sixty away from the door. The lines of dangling crystal converged there into an dense, scintillating object a couple feet across.
A chandelier. I blinked. It hung with no obvious point of support above a long narrow platform covered in junk. It was as if the chandelier had exploded, but only in one direction, toward us: crystals multiplying and propagating outward and upward in an ever-widening wave of fractal repetition, connecting the chandelier to our hallway with a web of glass.
“It’s a Confusion,” Niko said with a satisfied grin. “Means we’re real close now.”
“A what?” I backed carefully away from the horrifying drop-off.
“What I call them.” He shrugged. “Most of Downstairs tends to follow normal architectural rules. Walls, floor, ceiling, measurements more or less what you’d expect. Bedroom objects in bedrooms.” He played his light along the chandelier-net, watching its cut-glass facets sparkle. “But close to a connection point, things get jumbled up. Like it’s harder to maintain the semblance of order, for some reason.”
I thought of our fridge, in a kitchen with a pool with a door at the bottom.
“This one,” he added, frowning down, “is pretty fucking weird, though.”
Still struggling with vertigo (tipping forward, arms bound, unable to stop myself as I crashed through that flimsy web and tumbled into blackness) I followed his gaze. The lines of chandelier-stuff converged above what I’d at first seen as a narrow strip of ground some way below and in front of us, itself suspended over that awful drop. But as I focused on the strip of ground, I realized it wasn’t a flat surface, but something more complex: a sort of huge tube or pipe, maybe thirty feet thick, stretching away in both directions. It made slow, lazy curves as it went, like an immense statue of a snake slithering through grass. You could walk flat along the top of the snake’s back in either direction, assuming you could get down there in the first place. Its endpoints, if any, were lost in darkness.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
And it got weirder.
The tube appeared to be made of the same scuffed, dusty hardwood floor tiles as my bedroom. A profusion of tatty throw rugs clung flat to its surface even on the curving sides, like stickers on a tipped-over water bottle. And arranged haphazardly across the surface was a motley collection of bedroom furniture, also attached in some gravity-defying way to the curved surface. No matter the angle, furniture rose from the hardwood tube as if down was towards its center. A dresser canted at a forty-five degree angle; the top of a bookshelf poked up around the edge of the curve, like peering over the horizon of a tiny planet. So yeah, picture looking down at a giant snake that had somehow coated itself in superglue and slithered through a secondhand furniture store, encrusting itself with beds, nightstands, dressers, floor lamps (some lit), bookshelves, bureaus, trashcans, and laundry hampers. Escher’s own frat house. And all suspended over a miles-high drop down to god knows where, connected to us via exploded rays of chandelier.
“Holy shit,” I said.
He laughed. “Damn straight. Okay then. Who wants to go first?”
----------------------------------------
It was me. Surprise. Niko realized he’d have to untie my hands for me to climb down, and if he went first, there’d be nothing to stop me running off back the way we’d come. I’d be running in the wrong direction, away from the supposed portal back to my own side, but I felt like that might be preferable to being the prisoner of a hungry psychopath who looked like a strung-out version of my dead best friend.
Of course, if I went first there’d be nothing to stop me running off along the impossible bedroom-tube, either. Except I’d have exactly two directions to choose from and Niko would have a birds-eye view on which one I picked. Academic, anyway: he retied the rope around my ankle, let out enough slack for me to get down, and wound the other end around the doorknob of the last room back, a few paces up the hall.
“This probably won’t hold your weight,” he said, tugging the rope experimentally. “Not for long anyway. But if I brace myself and take some of the load, it should be enough.”
He explained the plan while sliding fresh batteries into a headlamp and tightening it onto my head: I would climb down the chandelier net while he and the doorknob stood ready to catch me if I fell. When I got to the top of the tube-path—the back of the snake—he’d retie the rope to himself, and follow me down while I braced from below. He reminded me that since we’d be tied together, catching him if he fell would be in our mutual interest.
He also mentioned, quite casually, that he had no plans to kill me. Our deal held. Once I got him to the surface, he’d vanish and I’d never see him again. If I messed with him, though—tried to untie my rope while down there and run off, or got funny ideas about yanking it—he would hunt me down. He told me of his expertise at hunting me down—me, personally. He’d done it dozens of times. He’d know which way I’d choose at intersections. Where I’d try to hide.
And once he found me, he’d hurt me. He’d spend a long time hurting me.
He was an expert at that too, he said.
As if to illustrate this point he pulled out a camping knife with a long, serrated blade and flipped it open: the kind you’d use to saw through small deadwood to make tinder. We’d looked at one just like it at the sporting goods store, my Niko and I, but decided not to get it. After admiring it for a moment, he closed it and attached it to his belt. I wondered if this was less a threat than insurance against being tied together above a gut-clenching drop. Maybe some of each.
He watched me watching the knife, with cut-glass intensity.
“Time to go,” he said.
I clutched the doorjamb, trying not to stare down at the twinkling lights far below. Trying to think of some way to get out of this.
“What do you think’s down there?” I asked, buying time.
He didn’t look up, focused on a knot. “I think we’re above the City. With all the houses, like I told you. From down there you sometimes see clusters of lights, way up above. This must be one of them.”
He pulled the cinch tight. “Found a couple smashed-up Ryans and Nikos down there, too. Never understood what happened to them, before. Try to be careful, buddy.”
He got to his feet. “Okay, quit stalling. Get moving.”
“Hang on.” Fear sweated out of me. “We don’t even know if this mesh or net or whatever will hold my weight. Or if this portal you’re looking for is even down there.”
“It’s down there.” He set his grip on the rope. “I’m sure of that. But as for your first concern...”
He shrugged, then shoved me, hard.
I flailed, but my body was already past the edge of the door, my hands too slow to grab the frame, world tilting at a sickening angle. My sneaker tried desperately to glue itself to the carpet of the hall but my center of mass was too far out, way too far. My head dropped below my feet and I opened my mouth to scream as I began to fall into nothingness.