After that things were different. He’d lost all interest in Downstairs. If I brought it up he’d change the subject; if folks were hanging out down there he wouldn’t come. When I finally asked him directly about this, he shook his head.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to be down there, that’s all.” He tried to play it off casually, but his jaw was set.

Something about him had changed. His wardrobe turned straight-laced. He went back to calling himself Nick. He watched a lot of sports on TV. And things were strange between us. Our conversations didn’t go quite right, didn’t fit in their familiar grooves. We’d get derailed, trail off. We started talking less. I couldn’t point to something specific that had changed, but the usual pleasurable tension between us, the taut bond of connection we’d had since the accident, was gone. He didn’t seem to need me any more. He seemed like just a dude. Just a Nick. Not mine.

I worked up my courage and did a few of my own solo expeditions Downstairs, without telling him, but I couldn’t convince myself to go very far. I hallucinated strange noises around corners: floorboards creaking, whispered sighs. I knew I was only scaring myself, but didn’t have it in me to stay down there for long.

I lay on my bed a lot and listened to records through my headphones. My dad’s old headphones: huge bulky black things with a coiled cord like old telephones. Sometimes I held my breath while I did it. This was an old technique of mine to shut the world out. After a while outside sounds would slowly slip away, and the thrum of blood and music would fill my ears, become my entire universe. As a kid I could hold my breath for three minutes. Enough sometimes to make it through a whole song without breathing.

I fell asleep one night doing this, headphones on, and dreamed about Niko, which happened now and then whether I wanted it to or not. In the dream I was at the hallway junction again, looking down into the shadows at the figure at its end. Only this time it wasn’t me down there, it was him, walking toward me. Not hesitant but confident, smiling, happy to see me. I grinned back, thrilling at the reciprocity between us, a bond that felt in that moment tinged with something else, something more primal.

But then I faltered, because I realized I wasn’t sure quite what that meant. There are a lot of primal emotions.

There were so many things that smile could mean.

I took a step back, afraid, but there was nothing but empty space behind me. I was standing at the lip of a drop-off.

He came right up to me, Niko, my Niko, looking into my eyes with something I was certain now was love, and the fear faded as he reached up to touch my cheek, and the warmth of it and the smell of him and the look on his face fused inside me into need so intense it parted my lips, as if for oxygen, just as he bent down with hunger to kiss them.

It was a beatific kiss, velvet, brain-melting, the kind you sometimes get in real life if you’re lucky but I’d only ever had in dreams, sweet and lingering and seraphic. Everything I’d ever wanted flowed through me into him and I imagined I could feel the same from him to me, echoed and amplified, conjoined. It went on and on and on. He pressed against me, arms wrapped around my back, holding me, and mine were maybe around him too but only limply, subconsciously, the kiss and its indescribable tangibility, its dream-forgotten trueness the only thing, the only thing. The only thing.

It wasn’t until I’d broken it, pulled back to look up at him, that I realized I was leaning back over the edge behind me, his arms holding me there, my toes the only thing still touching the lip of the drop-off.

I couldn’t read his expression. Had no idea what it meant at all.

I didn’t even know who he was.

He let me fall.

I plummeted down into darkness, gathering speed, faster and faster. I’d had dreams before that ended like this, a sickening fall and then an ejection back to wakefulness just as I hit ground, covered in cold sweat and shuddering. But this time when I woke, it was more like I’d chosen to do it, pulled away from the dream against its will. Like part of me knew if I’d stayed I’d have kept falling forever, because there was no ground down there to stop me.

The record was turning in its final groove. I stared at it dumbly, dad’s big headphones still muffling the outside world, transmitting only hissing, clicks and pops.

This has got to stop, I told myself, you’re over him. You got over him a long time ago. The accident had confused everything but in the months after it I’d sorted myself out, realized it was never going to happen. Put it away and moved on. I had. It was just my fucking dreams didn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

I felt Downstairs tingling at my back, beneath me. I switched the player off and took my blanket to sleep on the couch in the living room.

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

One night not long after that, everyone but Niko and I went out to a concert. The two of us were drinking, and it seemed to ease the friction between us, which made us both want to keep drinking. I found comfort in this, maybe the first acknowledgment that he felt the gap between us too, wanted as much as me to find a way to close it.

Deep into a bottle of vodka, we got into one of those hilarious drunken arguments about nothing: the final line to one of our favorite movies. I was sure it was one thing, he was sure it was something a few words off. I knew I was right, and also could see why he might remember it wrong, but he refused to believe me. He tried to pull out his cellphone to call a friend for a second opinion and got it stuck on something in his pocket: laughing, he ended up dumping everything out on the table, but then we got distracted by a text he’d gotten from an ex-girlfriend, which led to more drinking and another argument where I dutifully tried to keep him from replying, not just because he was drunk and she was terrible for him but because back then with those flip phones it would have taken him a fucking hour to peck out a reply.

Eventually, we ended up slumped in our chairs, the vodka bottle empty, listening to some spacey ambient music on the stereo.

I had about drifted off when I shook myself awake. Niko was out cold. Before I could wake him and convince him to drag himself to bed I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

In the pile of stuff he’d pulled from his pocket (phone, wallet, keys, crumpled receipts) were two small brass keys.

They weren’t on his keyring, just loose in his pocket, and faintly corroded with age.

It was hard to tell for sure, but they looked identical.

Nothing about this was all that unusual but somehow I knew one of those keys would fit the fridge Downstairs. Don’t ask how I knew this, because I couldn’t tell you, but I did. Irrational.

That ridiculous locked fridge in that ridiculous kitchen atop a ridiculous empty pool.

He’d been keeping something from me too.

Had he found something in there?

Something that scared him off going back?

What inside a fridge could be that scary? Could make him lie to his best friend?

I’m not sure why I did it. The vodka, maybe. Repressed curiosity. Or maybe the growing frustration that something had happened to Niko, something had changed; but I wasn’t allowed to know what it was, or ever put it right.

Quietly, I took the keys. I shouldn’t have, but by then I already had.

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

The house was dead quiet, which made the transition to Downstairs feel even more natural. Despite my earlier trepidations, I wasn’t afraid as I grabbed the flashlight by the hallway. Vodka is magic.

I passed through the first few hallways, the stairs where the lights went out, the dark lower corridors. It wasn’t until I hit the octagon that I got scared again.

I’d been walking on autopilot, lost in musing, but as I stepped into that room with its stairs leading down, I pulled up short, noticing something vital. The flashlight was dimmer. My eyes had adjusted, but through my liquor-addled head I could see the room was noticeably less bright than the last time I’d been down here.

Niko must have run the batteries down with all his exploring.

This didn’t especially worry me. After our first trip I’d brought up the possibility of batteries going dead. “Yeah, fuck that,” he’d said, and duct-taped four fresh batteries to the long body of the flashlight.

But it did occur to me—now—that to change them down here I’d have to do it in total darkness. Fiddling with sticky tape, fumbling to unscrew the light, pouring out the old batteries and not mixing them up with the new ones, by feel...

So there was that.

I thought for a minute about going back. But I was close to the pool room now. I wanted to find out what was inside that fridge. What Niko had been keeping from me.

And I did have the batteries, after all. If I needed to change them, it would just take a second.

I kept going.

The last set of stairs down, with their weird irrational angles, passed quickly. The hall at the bottom stretched into the gloom, and I sped past the long stretch with no doors till I reached the pool room.

The door was closed. So Niko had been back here.

Inside was the smooth, curved concrete of the pool bottom. I grabbed for the lowest rung of the ladder and pulled myself up, a familiar motion from my swimming days but weird to be doing it bone-dry, without buoyancy.

The upper level had a lip about three feet wide extending around the edge of the pool, and on the ladder side the space opened up, concrete giving way to linoleum. Sure enough, there was a full kitchen up there, just like Niko had described. With all the appliances, it was fairly cozy. I stared bemused at the chrome dials on the oven, the row of pale-green cabinets with round white handles.

I turned to the fridge. It looked dated, a fading yellow with tacky chrome highlights. It only had one big door; no freezer. No magnets or family photos, either. Generically anonymous.

I pulled at the handle, but it didn’t budge. Studying it, I saw what Niko had been talking about: there was a small keyhole under the handle. Smaller than a house key: more like one for a padlock, something you’d put on a shed.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The keys I’d lifted from Niko looked about right.

I picked one and slid it into the lock. It fit smoothly, with a satisfying click at the end. But when I turned it, it wouldn’t rotate.

Frustrated, I jigged it back and forth, turning harder. The key was too small to get a solid grip on. I squeezed down and gave it a really good twist.

For a second I thought it was turning, but then I realized I’d just bent the key. I’d come close to snapping it in half.

I pulled it gingerly from the lock, staring at it in disappointment. Well, shit. There wouldn’t be any hiding this from him, now. It was bent nearly in half. I tossed it on the counter for a minute as I tried to think what to do.

In between the little noises I made, the taps and scratches and breaths, the silence almost smothered me.

Try the other key.

It slid in just as easily, but when I gently twisted this one it turned. I rotated it through a full circle before I heard a second snick.

I pulled at the fridge handle and the door swung open, cold air and yellow light wafting out.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to see (frozen heads, the part of my brain still traumatized by horror movies suggested) so it took a moment of blinking in confusion to realize the fridge was empty. Those plastic wire shelves, immaculately clean. A butter dish and condiment nooks in the door, unused.

There was nothing in there.

Except—frowning, I bent down, shining the light inside. The fridge was deep. It went back a good six feet, and so did the shelves. And there was something on the back wall.

The inside of another fridge door. Condiment nooks. Another butter dish.

What the hell?

I pulled the chilly wire shelves out and stacked them next to the fridge. Feeling foolish, I clambered awkwardly inside, flashlight bumping against the plastic floor above two pairs of vegetable drawers, one facing in, one facing out. They held my weight.

I shuffled awkwardly forward (there was less than five feet of vertical space) and pushed the inner door. No give. I pushed harder, remembering stories about kids stuck in fridges, but still nothing. Is this one locked too? I searched for a keyhole, but didn’t see one. Which makes sense, if it’s on the outside. I turned back to confirm: yep, the door I’d come through had no sign of a lock on its inner surface.

The logo on the plastic butter compartment said Whirlpool.

A thought popped into my head: What if it’s like an airlock? This made no kind of logical sense, but seemed compelling. Only one door open at a time, otherwise you’d let all the cold air out. I almost giggled, then stopped myself, suddenly afraid.

What am I doing?

I decided to try it. Why not? Nothing made sense, so maybe this would. Turning awkwardly, I reached for the door I’d come through to pull it shut. It wasn’t designed to be pulled from the inside, but I managed to get a grip on a condiment shelf, and swung it firmly towards me.

As the door slammed shut two things happened, both terrifying in different ways. First, there were two snicks, one from the door in front of me and one behind.

Second, my flashlight went out.

Cold terror flushed through me. I shook the light, pressed the button on and off. Nothing happened. I pushed the door in front of me but it didn’t give at all. I slammed into it hard with my whole body, panicking, the rounded edge of a plastic shelf jabbing painfully into my cheekbone, but the door didn’t budge.

Because it’s locked, I told myself, mind whirling. But the one behind you is open, now. I twisted around, facing the back of the fridge as near I could tell, the second door.

But the thought of opening that door in pitch blackness, a door leading into complete unknown, opening it blind and crawling out into darkness, was terrifying. I stayed frozen, caught between fears: staying there or moving forward. Finally some combination of claustrophobia and visions of my air running out triumphed over my fear of the unknown, and I crab-walked forward till my outstretched hand touched the other door. Before I could stop to think, I kept moving forward, pushing my weight against it.

The door opened easily and my flashlight came back on.

Like the fridge light, I thought, dizzy. Goes out when the door is closed, comes back when you open it. Makes perfect sense. I actually laughed out loud and then stopped myself.

I couldn’t laugh. I had to take this seriously, while I was down here. Or I might never get out.

Stumbling on cramped knees, I spilled out of the fridge and staggered upright, shining my light around warily. What I saw confused me even more.

It was the same room.

I frowned, mind working, flashing the light over every surface like it was a brush that might paint sense into what I saw.

It was the same kitchen—same ovens, same green cabinets, same improbably-adjacent concrete pool. Not a mirror image, or a slightly different design: it was identical to the room I’d just left. The only difference was the fridge was on the opposite wall.

Like it had connected through the wall to an identical room on the other side.

Dizzy.

I took a few steps forward, shined the light over the edge of the pool. Same ladder, same door, although it was shut. Had I shut it behind me this time? I’d been in a hurry. I couldn’t remember.

I turned back to the fridge, and froze.

The door had swung shut behind me.

I pulled on the handle, but it didn’t budge. Locked.

Shit. Where was the key? I checked my pockets. It wasn’t on me. What had I done with it?

A sinking feeling crept over me. It was still in the lock on the other side.

And I’d set the other one, the bent one, on the counter before coming through.

Maybe that was the one that fit this side?

I stood there for a long moment, not sure of what to do.

I grabbed the handle again and pulled it harder, as hard as I could; tried to pull the whole fridge forward. But its back end was flush with the wall, and it didn’t budge even a little, like it was cemented in place.

There was nowhere else to go. The fridge was locked, and the only door out was at the bottom of the pool.

Resigned, I climbed down the ladder, dropped onto the concrete. I opened the door onto the doorless hallway.

A wave of déjà vu hit me as I looked down it. It was the same hall I’d passed through minutes before—but I knew it couldn’t be. I’d crawled out the other side of the fridge. This wasn’t the same place, and yet it had that ineffable tang of familiar places, the twinge that tells you I’ve been here before.

As I walked down the hallway, I looked for some distinguishing feature to confirm this intuition: but the decor was, as always, so bland nothing stood out. It could have been any basement hallway anywhere.

When I hit the stairs back up to that eight-sided room, though, something went wrong.

I’d stopped without meaning to, clutching the banister, foot on the first step. I looked up the stairs, and a faint twinge of vertigo brushed me. Or not vertigo, exactly. It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t quite a feeling, or a premonition, a sensation, a tingling, an insight. It wasn’t really like knowing or feeling at all.

Something inside me between reason and emotion and intuition just didn’t want to go back up there.

Like that sense you get before eating spoiled food, even if you haven’t consciously smelled anything sour. Like this is going to be bad for you.

Like you’re going to regret it.

I had a sudden vivid flashback to a photo I’d seen as a kid, still confused about my burgeoning sexuality. It was from an article in a news magazine about gay bashing: there’d been an upswing of murders everywhere, big cities and small towns. The photo showed a chalk outline on a dirty sidewalk and next to it a spray-painted message, red and messy: “A Queer Died Here.” I remember a wave of despair and horror washing over me as I stared at that picture, curdling the pulse-pounding fear of getting caught I always had when encountering something relating to my secret suspicions about myself. That was the first time I understood it wouldn’t just be embarrassing or awkward to be gay, or found out as gay. There were people who would hate me for it, maybe even kill me. That was how wrong they thought I was.

To know just existing could make people feel that way about you, to realize that this was the world you’d have to live in, to keep growing up in. If you could.

The creeping feeling I felt now was like that. An existential wrongness. And it was getting stronger. Like a light from around a distant corner, growing brighter.

I listened, motionless, but heard nothing. The quiet pressed against me.

What am I going to do? Go back?

No.

Taking a deep breath, I made an impulsive decision. A few paces back was a door, and without stopping to think I pulled it open. The room inside was crammed with furniture under sheets. On a normal day this might have scared the piss out of me, but this feeling of wrongness was getting so strong I would have run straight into a room full of grinning clowns rather than stay in that hallway any longer.

I slipped in and shut the door behind me, quietly—that felt important—and ran to the far end of the room. Spotting something sofa-shaped, I lifted the edge of the sheet that covered it and half-crawled, half-dived inside. Flipping onto my back, I smoothed the sheet, held my hand over the flashlight—I couldn’t bear to turn it off—and held my breath.

The feeling had diminished when I ran across the room, but now it was growing again. I was trembling. I tried not to breathe, to relax my face as if doing so would open my ears wider, let me hear fainter sounds.

It was deathly quiet. All I could hear was my heartbeat.

The top of my hand glowed a dull red as the flashlight beam lit up bones and the dark veins between them.

The feeling reached an unbearable crescendo, and held there sustained. I was shivering continuously. It was wrongness, wrongness on every level, filling up my body. I wanted it to go away more than anything.

I thought I heard something move in the hallway outside. Scuffing the carpet, maybe.

Then, mercifully, the feeling started to drain away.

I let out a breath, slowly, then took in another. With every breath I felt more normal, a level of normal I’d never thought to appreciate until now. In another minute, all that was left was me: coated in sweat, crashing off adrenaline, but all right.

And yeah, it took fifteen minutes for me to muster the courage to lift the sheet and walk back across that room. Now that my regular instincts were back, the thought of what might be under all those other sheets was fucking terrifying.

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

When I’d recovered, I hurried across the room, out into the hall, and back up the stairs. My brain had gone numb: I let myself feel like I was retracing my steps, but another part of me knew I moved through different halls and rooms, on the wrong side of the fridge. But going back would mean following the direction that ugly feeling had drifted—and I couldn’t do that. So I climbed the stairs to the octagon room, through the identical hallways back, and up the second stairs to the lighted upper levels, everything exactly as it should have been.

When I saw the coffee stain, though, I stopped.

It was right where Niko had spilled it on our first trip down, where the coffee had sloshed as he’d forced open the sticky door.

It was the same hallway. But I couldn’t explain how.

What had happened? My brain whirred, trying to manufacture sense.

What I finally decided was this: I must have gotten turned around in the dark fridge. Banging the inside of the door, trying to force it open, I somehow moved the fridge, pushed it across the kitchen to the opposite wall. When I came out, it was through the other door, but into the same room.

It worked if I didn’t think about it too hard.

But then where was the key?

Simple. Still in the lock, but on the side now up against the wall. As for the key on the counter, maybe I’d knocked it off with all my banging in the fridge. It fell on the floor, got kicked away or maybe swept underneath.

I couldn’t honestly convince myself of this.

It’s the same coffee stain.

I felt superimposed. It had to be the same hallway, and yet it had to be a different one. This was the same stain, and yet I was a ten-minute walk from where Niko had spilled his coffee.

Maybe going Downstairs drunk had been a bad idea.

I kept going. I made it back to the big room, looking just as I’d left it, and climbed the final stairs gingerly. But my room was waiting for me at the top, nothing out of place: my records, my textbooks, my dirty laundry. That settled that. Somehow, I’d come back the same way I went in. But I felt strangely deflated, unresolved, like the last fifty pages of the book had been left out. And then he: The End.

I shut the bed behind me more firmly than necessary. I considered nailing it shut but settled for piling some heavy boxes on top of it.

It had been maybe an hour since I’d left. Niko was still passed out on the couch in our front room.

I curled up on the next couch over and, despite being so keyed up I could barely think, dropped into sleep.

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

I woke some time later to Niko shaking my shoulder, and sat up, bleary-eyed. It was still dark outside.

“Go to bed,” he was saying, “it’s late.”

I yawned. The trip Downstairs seemed like a dream, coming back in bits and pieces. I glanced nervously at the corner of the table where he’d emptied his pockets, but his stuff was gone. Did he notice I’d taken the keys?

Shit. I’d have to tell him.

“Hey man,” I said, dreading this. “You remember earlier when you pulled your shit out to get your phone, and left it on the table?”

He blinked. “Um. No.”

He’d been pretty drunk. I pressed on. “We were about halfway through finishing that bottle.” The vodka bottle was about a quarter full. I frowned. Hadn’t we killed it?

Shaking my head, I pressed on. “Look. What I’m trying to say is, I took the keys. I’m sorry. I just wanted to know if you’d found something down there. Why you hadn’t told me. I went but there was nothing there, and I got turned around and... anyway, it doesn’t matter. I screwed up and I lost them both. Both keys.” It sounded so stupid as I said it, and I hated myself, both for stealing from him and for squandering whatever opportunity they’d represented. “I’m an idiot, man, and I’m sorry. But look, if you tell me where you found them, maybe we could figure something out, and talk about what’s going on, and everything?”

Niko was frowning, but didn’t seem angry. Maybe this wasn’t going to be a big deal after all.

He sat down on the floor next to me, a serious look on his face.

“Orion,” he said, slowly, “exactly what fucking keys are you talking about?”