Turned out Niko hadn't found the end of the hallway. It had twisted a couple more times, he said, then split again. But that was all academic while I was puking my guts out over a toilet bowl, and for much of the awful day after. Still, it might seem odd that we didn't go back down there to map the whole thing out right away. I guess I can't really explain it, unless Niko was already feeling the same irrational foreboding as me.
Another thing my overactive imagination had ruled out for me was horror movies. I'd realized this at some point in high school when they were still a kind of macho rite of passage. One of the last ones I watched was a terrible direct-to-video job about a creature that lived in the woods and hunted down the teenagers who kept blithely wandering in. When you finally saw the monster it was a huge let-down—terrible make-up on an even worse actor. But before you saw it on screen, you heard it, and the movie's whole gimmick, its thing, was that the creature would parrot back anything said to it, in the original voice, flawless. It wasn't clear if it understood the words: more like it just mindlessly mimicked the sound. But while it was slaughtering each hapless cheerleader it would repeat her terrified cries for help back to her, perfectly. Would keep screaming in her voice even after she'd died.
That concept settled into my brain and ate away at me for weeks, though I couldn't explain why it was so terrifying. Why should the worst thing to hear from a dark woods at night be not snarls or growls or witchy laughter, but your own voice, yourself? And yet it was. One night a few weeks later I jerked awake in the middle of the night, suddenly sure something was standing in the shadows of my room, and as I reached out frantic for my lamp I knocked it off the nightstand and it crashed to the floor, the bulb shattering with a tinkle, and I stupidly called out "Is someone there?" and as I did I realized if I heard it repeated back to me from the shadows it would be the end of me, a clean break through my sanity, even if it was a joke or a prank or a hallucination or, dear god, a possible my brain had decided to believe in at that precise moment, and as I clutched my blanket too terrified to go to the light switch on the wall I prayed, pleaded with my brimful imagination not to choose that moment to overflow, to improvise, to believe in things that weren't really there, like it had each time I'd read too much into smiles or gestures, each time I'd watched vivid movies play in my head sprung from single sentences in books or looked at clouds and seen, really seen, fantastic shapes in them, and I'm pretty sure that was the exact moment I decided horror movies weren't for me.
Anyway. I knew there wasn't really anything down there, Downstairs, and as the hangover faded so did the lingering terror. Replacing it was a giddy sensation like having too much Halloween candy. There was a whole huge secret basement under our house that only we knew about. It felt good to have a secret. Another code in our personal dictionary, something only for us.
Niko was terrible at keeping secrets. By next afternoon, all the other housemates had seen Downstairs too, as well as a couple of his baseball buddies and one or two of his closest philosophy buddies. (He'd made a point of changing majors and hobbies once a quarter for the past year, while continuing to swear up and down to his immigrant parents he was still majoring in Economics.) I tried not to take the betrayal personally, but kind of failed.
But the strange thing was that no one seemed much interested. Everyone agreed Downstairs was a cool find, and made for a sick hangout spot, but no one cared to venture much outside the big central room, or spend too much time down there. Everyone other than Niko and I would get bored, start talking about other things, eventually drift back upstairs to whatever they'd been doing before.
Odd, in hindsight.
We did end up moving a couple couches down (and it was murder getting them around those tight landings, let me tell you) and a half-dozen boxes of my records, and made the Big Room available as a kind of secondary hangout space, quieter than the crowded front room with the TV and people always coming and going. Some of the empty rooms off the big one turned into overflow storage for everyone's miscellaneous shit, but remained otherwise unoccupied.
"Man, y'all could live rent-free," one of Niko's ex-bandmates said one night while we were down there, poking her head into another empty room. "Let these out to those poor engineering frosh. They don't see no daylight anyway."
"Yeah," I said, "except everyone would have to come in and out through my bed."
"I mean they wouldn't walk directly over you," she explained, patting a patronizing hand on my shoulder. "Even though I know that kind of sad sack white boy victim scene is right up your alley. You ask nice, they'll probably just gently kick you out of the way."
I didn't get on well with most of Niko's friends. I guess they probably all wondered what he saw in me.
No one did end up moving down there.
Zero natural light is kind of a downer, even for well-adjusted people. Niko made some noise about bringing a girl down sometime. ("Dude, it's a secret make-out lair. You're doing college wrong if you don't get some action down there.") But we both knew he wouldn't actually do it.
It was too quiet, for one thing.
It also felt forbidden, somehow, but not in like a sexy rule-breaking kind of way. Being down there had the vague flavor of trespassing, the kind where you're not going to get away with it and it'll go bad for you when you get caught. Sneaking into a restricted area at the airport; busting into Area 51. I mean it was our house, right? But Downstairs didn't feel like ours. Enough laughter or booze or noise and the feeling went away, or at least buried itself somewhere deep, where you'd hardly ever notice it.
Maybe because of that, definitely because of day-to-day distractions, maybe also because we enjoyed prolonging the sense of mystery, and, okay, because I was sulking, more than a week passed before we got around to scoping out the place in depth. Niko spent a day in an extraordinary funk of fierce depression followed by an equally intense reversal, like he'd do from time to time, and I took advantage of his high to prod him into going to catalog Downstairs. He took to this plan eagerly, and seemed pleased when I told him I'd been waiting so we could do it together. "Ryan," he said fondly, "in an emergency, you know, you can do things without me. I'll allow it."
"Well, I kind of thought this was like, our thing, you know."
He fell onto one knee. "Oh, my noble Orion," he intoned, "canst thou e'er forgive such rank betrayal, breaking this our vow of secrecy? Will thy gentle heart recover—"
"Okay, okay," I said, waving my hand. "Get over yourself."
He leapt up with a wicked grin, made himself a pot of coffee, put on a truly awful and unseasonable Christmas sweater, and headed Downstairs with me to map out what was down there.
Except we couldn't.
We'd grabbed flashlights in case of dark corners or burnt-out bulbs, but didn't need them. Every hall was lit by those cheerfully bright wall sconces, and most of the rooms had a single bare bulb in the center of the ceiling. But the damnedest thing was that we couldn't find an end to the place. We picked one hallway and wandered around for maybe fifteen minutes, through T-junctions and ninety-degree corners, past dozens of doors and empty rooms. The same wood-paneled walls, seventies carpet, and wall sconces were everywhere. Downstairs was aggressively bland but disturbingly unbounded. It went from weird to surreal to sort of frightening, how much of it there was.
I'd poked my head into a room with a nook at the far end, a wooden dowel running along the top—like a doorless closet, maybe. I wandered over to investigate, hoping for a few dusty hangers, some comforting sign of former human occupation. No such luck.
I mean, the place looked like people should have lived there, but there was almost nothing around to prove it. Anonymous marks scuffed the walls, the odd piece of lint dotted the floor, but there were no height marks penciled on door frames, no piles of old magazines, no bright squares on dirty walls where pictures once hung. Not a single old candy bar wrapper or forgotten sock. I ran my hand across the wooden dowel and wondered who had put it there, if anyone had ever hung clothes from it.
I turned around and saw Niko hadn't followed me in. I felt a moment of disorientation. The door suddenly seemed a long way away.
No—blinking, I realized it wasn't that. When I'd turned back towards the doorway, it wasn't there.
I frowned. The doorway was on the other side of the room from the one I'd instinctively turned to. I thought I'd walked along the wall to get to the nook, that it and the door had been on the same side. But the door was clearly on the opposite wall, diagonally across from me.
I closed my eyes, suddenly dizzy. I distinctly remembered keeping the faded white wall to my right as I crossed the carpet to the closet nook. But when I looked again, the door was still where it was, in the opposite corner.
Obviously it hadn't moved.
You're doing it again. Don't see things that aren't there. You fucking idiot.
Pushing away the uneasiness, I crossed diagonally across the carpet to the door, unable as I did to shake the sensation that I was tracing a different path than the one I'd walked coming in.
That this door led somewhere else.
I pushed my head out into the hallway. It looked just the same. Of course, they all did.
"Niko?"
No answer.
Okay, that's fine, I thought, keeping a firm grip on myself. I walked down the hall in the direction we'd been headed, peeked around the corner.
More hall, more carpet, more doors. No Niko.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
I shouted his name again, louder.
Nothing.
It was so quiet.
I started down the hall, then halfway down thought maybe I should go back, not forward; then stopped in confusion. If you're lost you're supposed to stay put, not wander around.
I've never been lost in a basement before.
The knob on the nearest door started to turn.
My heart tried to jump out my throat. The door thumped. The knob turned the other way, more violently.
With a shuddery squeal the door burst open, Niko's shoulder leading the rest of him out.
"Stuck," he said, jiggling the knob. "Just like the one upstairs. Oh, goddammit. I spilled my coffee."
We looked down at the new dark stain on the carpet. He licked droplets from his fingers, examined a candy-caned sweater cuff critically. "Thank Christ it didn't stain the cashmere."
"That is not cashmere," I said, rolling my eyes. "Hey. Don't wander off on me like that."
I didn't want to admit how spooked I'd been, and thought I'd done a good job hiding it, but of course he knew me better than that. He stared into me and seeing those emerald eyes full of concern was enough to melt my fear, transmute it into something infinitely better.
"Okay," I laughed. "You're not in trouble. Just stay close, yeah?"
"Sure, and sorry, but hey." His eyes had a mischievous glint. "Come check it out. I found some stairs."
----------------------------------------
The new stairs led down into darkness. From the top we could see about twenty or thirty steps down before things got shadowy, and enough of the shadows to tell the stairs kept descending for a while after that.
Niko had been excited to show me, but now he perched uneasily on the top step. I got out my flashlight and switched it on, pointing down. "Come on. Maybe there's some answers down there." He still looked hesitant. I put on my straightest face and my best P.I. voice. "Don't you want to get... to the bottom of this?"
"Mmm." He frowned in concern. "I just wouldn't want your boyfriend to get jealous, me spending all this time down here with you."
This was a little joke of his. I didn't have a boyfriend.
But he flicked on his own light, waved it down. "After you, amigo."
There were maybe a hundred steps. Other than that, and the fact that we were lighting our way with flashlights, they seemed like any other stairs in a house built during the Carter administration and slowly lapsing into senility. That same damn carpet. They must have bought up the whole factory.
The wall sconces were still there, but no longer lit. Still no light switches anywhere.
When the stairs finally gave out, it was into another hallway, nearly identical to the ones above. This one felt a bit bigger, and the carpet a darker shade, looking more brown now, though maybe both impressions were a trick of the flashlights. Funny how much light influences your perception of spaces, of shapes. Colors. Everything, really.
More rooms opened off this hall, though these had more variety. A few doors were locked, which we hadn't encountered on the upper level. Some of the rooms seemed like bedrooms: a few even had old bed frames and mattresses in them. I looked in vain for colored tacks stuck to the wall with ripped corners of posters still attached, or even a crumpled gas station receipt. I mean it wasn't like the place was sterile. Another room had a drain in the floor with stains running up to two big utility hookups on the wall, and the faint smells of dust and moths and yellowing wallpaper glue were everywhere. What was missing was anything personal.
The weirdest room, though, was the kitchen. It was too big for a kitchen, for starters, and had too much stuff in it: too many ovens hookups, too much haphazard ceiling ventilation, red-handled water valves everywhere, and a dozen jumbled stove tops with holes where the burners should be. There were parts of appliances but no whole ones: bundles of wiring, even a kitchen sink. Niko tried the faucet and we both were startled when water came out. It was like a half-assembled restaurant kitchen with all the equipment jumbled together, rather than a row of stoves here, a row of dishwashers there.
I found what was clearly the plumbing for a toilet hookup in the middle of one wall, and had to put my foot down about this making any sense at all.
"Maybe a wall was supposed to go up here?" Niko shined his light between the bathroom plumbing and the nearest stovetop, but the kitchen stuff extended to either side.
"Who puts a toilet in the middle of a kitchen?" I didn't get it.
He shrugged.
Just the one door, too, and nothing nearby that might have been a dining room or pantry, though we did find a large, empty, low-ceilinged room a few doors down. "Not that you could get a dining table down here," Niko mused. Same brown carpet, but no signs of anything to explain the room's purpose: no ceiling bulb or place to attach one, not even a single electrical outlet.
"You get the feeling whoever built this place didn't exactly know a lot about architecture?" Niko's voice was hushed in a kind of reverence. "Everything down here's a little off, you know? Like, who was that old lady in California who built that house with all the doors that went nowhere and fake hallways and everything?"
Sarah Winchester. I told him. Except her house is now an internationally famous tourist attraction. And this place was bigger.
Someone should have known about this.
Niko was thinking along the same lines. "Seriously, though," he said. "Who the fuck built all this? And why? For what?"
"No clue. But if there's any explanation, it's probably down here somewhere." I even half-believed that, which felt nice.
"I feel weird walking around a crazy person's house." His eyes darted around the empty room. "Not that I expect, like, pit traps and rotating blades. But it feels sort of... unsafe." He had finished his coffee and was fiddling nervously with the mug, twirling it by the handle back and forth in his fingers.
He kept glancing at me like he wanted me to say something that would make him feel better, to save him, so I tried my best like always. "You ever notice old horror movies have lots of really improbable architecture?" I babbled. "I want to meet some of those architects. Probably all dead now but I still want to just grab them by their ghostly lapels and ask why the fuck they built all those crawlspaces and secret torture rooms and basements without proper lighting."
"Can we not talk about horror movies right now? Also, ghosts. Maybe just shut up, actually." But he was grinning.
We moved on.
The next door we tried was another locked one. For some reason, I knocked.
"Why did you do that?" Niko hissed. I shrugged, smiling despite myself. But then a weird sensation came over me, like walking on someone's grave. Because as silly as it was, we both couldn't help waiting for a breath or two.
Listening.
Isn't that how that expression goes, walking on someone's grave? Or is it someone walking on yours? No, that wouldn't make sense. Never mind.
There was no answer, of course.
"You're freaking me out, man," Niko said. He held the light under his face, washing it out to a ghostly tan as his eyes rolled up into his head. "Vreeaking meee owwwwt."
"Attractive."
"You would totally date undead me. Rotting flesh and all. Don't pretend you wouldn't."
"You're half-skeleton already. There's barely any flesh to rot off you."
"Come on." He grabbed my shoulder and propelled me down the hall. "Let's keep going." The rough of his hand shocked some courage back into me. My shoulder felt cool when he took the hand away.
A few more paces down the hallway, it opened into an octagonal room, a closed door in each wall other than the one we'd entered through. We tried a few. Each door opened onto another staircase leading down.
"But seriously," Niko said, visibly alarmed. "This cannot possibly be here. It doesn't make sense." He looked towards me, desperate. "Ryan, help."
"Okay," I said, grasping at straws. "Maybe it's like a whole underground network. All the houses in the neighborhood connected together. People used to smuggle drugs or something. Underground railroad."
"Decor's too new," he countered. "And we haven't found any other stairs back up."
"Bomb shelter. Last owner decided to modernize. Dreamt of turning it into the ultimate student housing complex. Collapsed from construction debt before he could get rich off desperate kids willing to live in windowless asbestos-lined death traps."
He shook his head. "Let's go back, man. I don't like this. Something's not right."
I peered down one of the dark stairwells, frustrated. It bothered me that we might be so close to figuring this out. The next door might open onto something that explained it all.
And an undercurrent of excitement cut through the tinge of fear. This was fun. We were exploring. On a quest together.
I didn't want it to end.
"It can't go on forever," I said. "And whatever's deepest down will be most interesting, right?"
I talked him into it. It didn't take that much doing. He felt the same pull as me. And there was nothing dangerous down here: it wasn't like exploring an abandoned mine shaft. Everything was in perfect repair even if no one seemed to have been here for years.
Big as it was, it was only architecture.
The staircase we picked dropped down for a few dozen steps, then turned at a weird angle and dropped some more. It wasn't necessarily smaller but felt more claustrophobic. Maybe that was my brain reminding me how deep underground we must be getting. At most of the landings a new hall branched off, each at a different angle. We kept going down.
After four or five weird angled twists the stairs ended, opening up into another corridor. This one felt different, though I couldn't put my finger on why. The texture of the carpet, maybe, or something changed in the wall paneling. Like a new decorator working to the same plans.
There were more doors.
We shuffled past them, flashlights glinting off doorknobs and—there was a difference—instead of the wall sconces, fake candelabra now. You know the ones, with those awful faux-candles that flicker orange and don't fool anyone? They weren't lit now, anyway.
It's hard to explain the quiet. It felt complete in a deeper way than absence of sound. Like we were far away from anything that made noise, other than us. I guess we were.
We stopped less to try side doors now, eager to get to the end of the hall, or the end of something, at least. Find some answers.
For a long stretch there were no doors at all, just wood paneling, so that when we did come to another door it was a relief, like exhaling held breath. Niko tried it, and it swung open onto a room unlike anything we'd seen so far.
It was concrete and tall, with rounded corners at the bottom. The ceiling was higher than the walls, like we were in a pit dug into a bigger room. In the center of the concrete floor was a drain.
Niko, intrigued, grabbed the bottom of a short ladder that ended around shoulder-height and pulled himself up to the top of the pit, flashlight swinging crazily. I clung to mine, keeping it steady like a candle I was afraid would blow out.
I felt afraid, without quite knowing why.
He shined his light back down at me. "Yep," he said, "it's a swimming pool."
That made sense, by some incredibly loose definition. "What's up there?"
He turned away from the lip, moved out of sight. Patterns of light swam across the ceiling as he swung the flashlight around. Something rattled. "Another kitchen." His voice bounced oddly off the rounded concrete. "This one's all furnished, though."
I was getting more and more unsettled, unaccountably so. "Any more doors?"
The reflections of light moved to and fro, like something alive. "Nope. And there's no place to sit and eat, either." He paused. More scuffling. "Funny. The fridge is locked. Like, there's a keyhole on the fridge and you can't open it. Who does that?"
The door we'd come through, I noticed, was the same as all the others: cheap particle board, regular brass-plated knob. Not especially waterproof. I bent down, pushed it shut. Sure enough, there was a gap between it and the top of the carpet. Like you'd expect for any regular door not, you know, at the bottom of a swimming pool.
"Hey, Niko?" I straightened up, keeping my voice steady. "Let's go back." I wanted to add I don't like this or maybe I want to get the hell out of here right now, but some irrational fear gripped me that if I showed any weakness, he'd be the one who wanted to keep going down.
Going deeper.
Something rattled up there, wood scraping wood. "There's silverware in these drawers," he called, as if he hadn't heard me. "Cups in the cabinets too. Super seventies. Like the cups your grandma probably has, you know? I think Barbarella had these cups."
His voice was starting to seem unreal. I felt how tenuous a connection I had to him: a voice, the glints of his flashlight on the ceiling above the empty pool. Echoes and shadows. The distance between us seemed terrifyingly far, and growing wider, maybe already unbridgeable.
I remembered lying in bed as a kid, waiting to be tucked in, and the person I loved most in the world vanishing, between one blink and the next.
And then. Maybe I imagined this, between the weird echoes of that concrete pool bottom, and the nerves I'd worked up. But I thought I heard muffled voices. Faint. Coming through the wall.
Coming from the other side of the closed door back.