“Nikolaos,” I hissed, trying to be loud and quiet at the same time and stumbling away from the door. “Get the fuck back down here, right now!”

He must have heard something in my voice, because seconds later his head poked over the edge, and he slid down the ladder and dropped the last few feet onto the concrete. I could see him, I could suddenly even smell him, and that tangible realness felt overwhelmingly reassuring. I grabbed his arm and even his awful not-cashmere sweater was comforting.

“What’s up?”

“I thought...” The noise had gone; I felt foolish. “I thought I heard someone out there.”

He walked to the door, pulling away from me. “No don’t!” I hissed, but his hand was already on the knob, he was already turning it, pushing the door open, stepping out into the hallway. Shining his light left, back the way we’d come. He turned, to shine it to the right.

And for an instant I was sure

something

around the corner was going to grab him and in the same instant with nightmarelogic certainty I knew it was my fault for imagining it, for possibling it

for making it real

but nothing happened. He shrugged.

“I don’t hear anything, man.”

Neither did I.

“Let’s get back anyway,” he said. “I’m not even sure how long we’ve been down here. Your boyfriend’s going to kill me.”

As we walked back up the hall through the zone without doors, I glanced behind me. I noticed with a frown we’d left the door to the pool room open.

It felt wrong, somehow. A bad omen.

But no way in hell was I walking back to shut it.

----------------------------------------

We lay on my closed-again bed and stared up at the ceiling, giggling. We couldn’t help ourselves. It felt good to be out of there, to have the whole ridiculous mystery literally at our backs. Even an old mattress felt like shield enough.

I’d felt better with each upward step. The earlier rooms were familiar as we hit them in reverse: the octagon with its stairs down, the bright yellow light of the upstairs halls, Niko’s coffee stain (“so typical,” I told him, “you’ve marked this place with your distinctive musk”) and the big empty room with its couches and piles of everyone’s junk. By the time we’d climbed the final stairs up to my room and swung the bed shut, we were giddy, flushed with excitement, brimming with explanations and theories.

“It must run under the whole neighborhood,” Niko was saying. “Connect to other houses, or maybe it only used to. Maybe no one knows about it any more.” He grinned. “Except us.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I was still protesting, but it felt more ridiculous than sinister. I shook my head, embarrassed at my freak-out earlier. I was spooking myself for no reason. If someone else was down there, wouldn’t they have come to say hi?

Maybe they did.

I shook my head again. It was cool, and nothing was going to get in the way of that.

Niko jumped off the bed up to his feet, then swayed and put out a hand to touch the wall. I frowned, sitting up. “Okay?” Sometimes he blacked out if he stood up too fast. I worried.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving a hand. “Just need some more coffee. Or booze. Maybe both.”

I did some legit research in the next few days. Our landlord stopped by to see how we were settling in and reassure us he’d fix the things he said he’d fix before we moved in, which he clearly wasn’t going to fix. He was a younger guy with kind of a stoner vibe, on the whole not very plausible as a landlord. When I casually asked how he’d come to acquire a hundred-year-old house in a rather nice college town, he said he was trying to make a living off rental properties and we were the first students to move into this one. He mentioned he’d gotten a good deal on the house because of the maintenance it needed (embarrassed cough) and because the city sold it at auction and they “weren’t allowed to play bidding games and shit” with it.

“So the city repossessed it or something? Do you know who owned it before?” I asked, practically exuding casual nonchalance.

“Old dude,” he said, “no heirs. Just the house, though, not the whole estate. No furniture.” I remembered that from when we moved in: it had led to a lot of scrambling at yard sales and favors involving friends with vans. “Real weird guy,” my landlord added when he saw I was interested, warming to the subject. “Had lived here since forever, I guess. Kind of a shut-in.”

“Oh yeah?”

“What the neighbors said,” he confirmed, and waggled his eyebrows while circling a finger near his ear, but apparently didn’t have anything more specific to add.

I didn’t ask if he knew anything about a secret basement the size of a city block, because I was afraid our rent would go up.

Down at city hall I looked up the property history, which I’d hoped would be more interesting than the chemistry I should have been studying. The house had indeed been built about a hundred years earlier. The records were aggressively boring. Certainly nothing about enormous sub-basements or a fleet of mining vehicles. I even hunted through microfilm of the local paper for anything unusual the week of construction. No dice.

After that, the trail went a bit cold because I had another acne flair-up, a bad one, dropped out of a class instead of showing up to take the midterm and felt generally miserable about myself for a couple of days. I finally pulled myself together enough to get some groceries and refill the expired prescription on my acne cream. I was in the bathroom, rubbing it on my pockmarked face and thinking about how much I’d been lied to as a kid. Oh, that’ll clear up when you get older. Also You’ll figure girls out eventually and There’s someone out there for everyone, you know. Classics, all.

Niko popped his head around the corner. “Dude. Phone’s for you.” He blinked at me. “You realize when you do that, it looks like you’re rubbing jizz all over your face.”

I didn’t really see it. The last thing I thought about when looking in the mirror was anything sexy.

He must have seen something in my face, because he punched my shoulder. “Dude, get over yourself. You’re not Quasimodo.” He sighed. “We need to get you a boyfriend.”

“Store was fresh out,” I said, but grimly resolved to start wearing my pride bracelet out in public again. “Who’s on the phone?”

“Some lady from the local history society? I thought she had the wrong number, but she asked for you by name.”

I had in fact called the history society a few days earlier, and the voice on the phone turned out to be an elderly woman who breathlessly said she’d love to chat about the old houses in our neighborhood, and invited us over to the society office for a cup of tea. The office turned out to be her living room. We sat on a sun-faded couch sipping something tasteless while she fawned over us (“so wonderful to see young people take an interest in local history”). It was awkward. I asked if she knew anything interesting about our address or the old man who used to live there. She wasn’t familiar with the house, although the mayor had once lived on our street, she told us, and she thought most of the houses near there had been built around the same time. Flailing a little, I asked if she knew anything about tunnels or underground rooms around town. She spun a not-very-interesting story about how during Prohibition a local bootlegger had dug a tunnel that led from his basement all the way to a poplar in the neighbor’s backyard—nearly fifty-five feet long. I smiled and nodded demurely until I found a way to excuse us.

Meanwhile Niko had been making excursions on his own. I got kind of upset when he told me—I’d wanted it to be our thing, something we did together—but he said he’d come get me the instant he found anything interesting, and didn’t make too big deal out of it. It really bothered me, though. I thought about going on my own too but it felt wrong without him there. I itched with overwhelming curiosity but also a certain dread that kicked my heartbeat up a notch when I thought about walking too far down those halls, those stairs. I told myself I was being stupid but my pulse didn’t listen.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Niko spitballed the idea of making a map, but figured it would be tricky. “A lot of those angles are non-standard,” he said. “Those funny twists on the stairs down from the octagon, right? They’re more than ninety degrees but less than the next sensible unit—one thirty-five or whatever. I have a feeling if you measured them they’d be fractional. Like one twenty nine point two three eight three eight.” He laughed. “Three eight three eight three eight three eight three—”

“Quit it.”

He smirked. “Irrational.”

Some of the halls sloped up or down, too, enough that you could feel it when you walked them. Keeping track of what level everything was on would add to the confusion. I dragged discussion back up to the bigger picture. “It has to be mostly running east, doesn’t it? Because of the hill. That big stairway doesn’t go down far enough to get under 12th Street.”

“I don’t know.” He visualized with closed eyes for a moment, then shrugged and opened them, shaking his head. “Hard to keep a sense of direction down there. We’ll bring a compass next trip. You think those new GPS things for hiking would work?”

“No, they need line of sight to the sky. We could leave breadcrumbs, like Hansel and Gretel.”

“We might have to, if it’s much bigger.” His eyes widened. “Can you imagine getting lost? Like some estate agent’s nightmare. ’My god, I’ll never be able to replace all this carpet!’”

We had a party down there. By unspoken agreement, the housemates didn’t advertise the extent of the place: I put police caution tape from the dollar store across all the doorways out of the big room, as a joke, though I suspected I wasn’t really joking. It was fine if everyone just saw a chill basement hangout spot. Much levity was made from the fact that you had to climb in and out of my bed to get there, or to go back up and take a piss.

We brought down a foosball table, some Christmas lights, lots of booze, and the stereo. I protested that my record collection was for archival purposes, not playing at parties, but I was overruled. It was an okay turnout and everyone, for all the usual reasons, focused on getting good and drunk. My usual social ineptness kept me from truly enjoying myself. Some girl tried to hit on me; I was so startled by this I blurted “Actually, I’m gay,” which was even more awkward out loud than it sounds written down, and she laughed noisily and commiserated about the tragic ironies of dating for a few embarrassing seconds before vanishing, and only too late did I think to ask what the hell had compelled her to talk to me in the first place, because certainly whatever it was had never worked on any guys.

Not that I’d figured out how to go to parties where guys who’d be interested would hang out, anyway. I hated dance clubs and the couple gay bars I’d stepped into had made my skin crawl; I still felt a rush of anxiety when I thought about stepping into the tiny campus LGBT center even after years of passing it on the way to classes. I’d always thought things would get easier in college. At my massive high school there hadn’t been a single out queer person, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the first. Not only because of crippling shyness, self-image issues, and fear for my actual life, but because I literally did not know how to come out. Ellen hadn’t done it on national TV yet when I was in high school; Kevin Kline hadn’t done it at the movies, let alone sultry-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal; not enough gay teens had been famously killed or killed themselves to inspire anyone to tell us It Gets Better. Gay people basically did not exist in my universe, and yet there was I, somehow, gay regardless. College would surely be an improvement. But once I got there, I failed to blossom into a beautiful flower. Maybe I should have moved farther away, to an actual big city, rather than somewhere close by and familiar and still red-state as fuck: but the problem wasn’t really my environment, I came to realize, it was me. It wasn’t that I had issues with being gay: the internet had given me plenty of opportunities to come to terms and feel okay about it. I just didn’t know how to be it in public, with other people, on any level but especially a romantic one. I’d never dated anyone or even asked anyone out, and it increasingly felt like it was getting too late to start.

Meanwhile the straight people were having a nice party. Niko, wearing a blue bowling shirt with “My Name is BONG” stitched into the lapel and a pair of tight-fitting lime-green jeans, whose only virtue was the tight-fitting part, was shadowing some girl he’d been trying to hit it off with. It wasn’t going well. They got into an argument early in the evening (Dear Diary: I tune out when I hear the phrase “That’s not what Marx said”) and she ended up storming off up the stairs. Niko fumed, then stormed off too, reappearing minutes later in a Linkin Park t-shirt and torn jeans and carrying a bottle of tequila, which he used like a police baton to corral me into a corner to do shots with him.

“Said I dress too fucking weird for her,” he said with a hollow Ashes to Ashes sort of intonation. “Is this fucking normal enough? Whatever. The hell with everyone.” I could drink to that. We threw back a shot, sitting on the carpet with our backs to the paneled wall. Niko was always swinging between extremes: at high ebbs he wanted to be friends with everyone, at low ebbs I was the only person in the universe. He was busy furiously ignoring the rest of the party, which I didn’t feel especially connected to, either.

He sniffed. “You know when we first moved over here I didn’t speak any English?” I nodded; I’d heard this story before. “My parents thought it’d be cute to dump me into third grade like that. You know, full immersion.” His face twisted.

I poured him another shot, thinking I probably shouldn’t, but by then I already had.

He leaned back against the wall, looking worn down. “I tried so fucking hard to fit in. To get to where just opening my mouth didn’t mark me out as a freak. By the time junior high started none of the new kids even knew. Master fucking performance.” He tugged at the t-shirt, a corner of his mouth twitching. “Meanwhile the fam all expects things to be exactly like we’d never left. Like America’s just a little rest stop, like of course I’ll want to go back to Greece and have a million kids as soon as I graduate. My aunt asked me at Thanksgiving why I wasn’t married yet. I reminded her I only turned twenty-one this year and am still in the middle of fucking college. I didn’t say fucking.” He sipped at the shot, winced. “Urgh. Never sip tequila.” He held it up to the light, squinted at it suspiciously. “Anyway. She said neither of those things stopped my uncle.”

I was staring idly at a dark-haired girl and a bearded jock flirting on the couch across the room, words swallowed up by the thumping of the stereo. Thinking about the music echoing down all those empty halls. “I can’t even imagine getting married.”

“Yeah, neither can the government.”

“Not just that, asshole.” I side-kicked him, then frowned, trying to figure out what I wanted to say, how deep I wanted to go. Fuck it. I let the tequila talk. “I don’t know. I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend the rest of their life with me. Or that I could believe someone would say yes, if I wanted to with them.”

I closed my mouth, feeling stupid, but he was nodding. “Yeah, I dig you. Thinking you could be that for someone. Believing in yourself that much.” He was frowning. “I can’t believe in anything they fucking want me to be.”

He tilted his head back, eyes closed. “Well, you ever make it there, you got a best man lined up at least.” He opened one eye, peered at me skeptically. “Or are there two best men? How would all that even work?”

“I don’t know.” I closed my eyes, too. Dear Diary. Figure out how all that even works.

We listened to the music for a minute, surrounded by people who naturally knew how to Saturday night, without training. It was kind of nice being near them, at least.

Niko said, very quiet: “You think there’s something wrong with me?”

I opened my eyes, looked at him. His were still closed. The flashing Christmas lights were lost in his black curls, more swallowed up than reflected by them.

A corner of his mouth lifted. “Stupid question.”

“You’ll make it,” I said, more because I wanted him to believe it than because I’d given it any real thought.

I’d rarely seen his face at rest like this, without its usual mask of social engagement—he liked to play gracious host, loudmouthed philosopher—and the strong curves of his prominent jaw, his sharp nose, seemed fragile in the shifting light. Sharp, but delicate. Able to be shattered.

“Not fucking likely.” His brow furrowed, but then his face relaxed. He downed the rest of the shot, clinked his empty glass against mine, and leaned into me, just a little. “Nice to have someone around to humor me, though. Keep doing that, yeah?”

“No problemo,” I said, leaning into him, too.

We stayed like that for a few minutes.

Then some friends of his tromped down the stairs and he leapt up, pulling out a sparkling smile and manic laugh from somewhere, pouring drinks and giving high fives, and dragged me with him into the noise, and one of his friends talked me into getting trounced at foosball, and everyone kept drinking, especially me. And the moment between us faded into ephemera and lost any possible significance, even to me.

Not long after, Niko disappeared. I figured maybe he’d gone back to his room to be alone: despite appearances, his social energy was limited, had to be rationed. I didn’t think anything of it, focused on getting drunk with everyone else because it seemed like the thing to do.

Midnight passed, unnoticed.

Some time later the party started winding down. Soon it had winnowed to a couple hardcore foosballers, the girl and the beardy dude making out on the couch, and a few sozzled, earnest conversations in corners. I extracted myself from one of these, but on my way upstairs to take a leak I noticed that the flashlight we’d left by the hall—the one that led to the octagon room, the long stairs, and the pool—was gone.

Had he gone exploring? Tonight?

If he had, he’d been gone a long time.

An hour later the party had just about wrapped. Still no sign of Niko. I’d checked his bedroom—empty—and polled a few housemates. No one had seen him since the start of the night. I felt a stab of guilt for getting so wasted, for not looking out for him; pushed down vague resentments at feeling like I had to.

I was standing at the hallway wondering if I should go look for him, when a shadow appeared at its end and my body tried to jump out of my skin.

It was him, of course. But my relief only lasted for a second. As he got closer, a prickling sense crept into my bones that something was wrong.

He was stepping carefully, like over ice, deliberate, head turned down to the carpet. For a moment I wasn’t sure it was him at all.

He noticed me, gave me the thinnest of smiles. Sweat beaded on his face, which was ashen, like he’d been throwing up. He grabbed my arm as if to keep from falling over. His hand was cold.

“You okay?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. Just need to go to bed.”

“Did you—” I wanted to say see something down there, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. “—have too much to drink or something?”

He chuckled, weak. “Bed.” He brushed passed me, and headed, wobbly, up the stairs.