Something was wrong with Uncle Nick’s house. (Was it bigger on the inside?)

The darkness made it seem cavernous. Squinting through his lenses, Booker still couldn’t see anything beyond the flashlight beam. That narrow lance of visibility gave the surrounding dark a weight, a density. A malevolence.

(Or maybe the house was somehow bigger on the inside?)

Booker tried not to shine the torchbeam too far ahead—who knew what eyes might notice him before he noticed them?—and moved slow-and-silently forward, knees bent, breath steady. He heard nothing. No floorboards creaked. No wind moaned through the framing. Even the evening insect-song had quieted. Only his pulse remained.

Until the skitter.

The noise reminded Booker of fingers drumming against a tabletop, but sharper. (Did they drum or did they drill?) It came from—upstairs? Ahead? He couldn’t tell. But the growing echo told him it grew closer…

He thumbed the hammer back on his pistol. Took a breath.

Something blurred across the corridor ahead, something big and fast on the periphery of the flashlight glow.

Booker raised the barrel. Took a breath.

taktaktaktaktaktak

Above? Ahead?

From his side, hands flew out from an unnoticed threshold. They grabbed him as he spun toward them. He shouted half a syllable before a cool palm found his lips.

“Quiet,” Castellanos whispered.

Booker disengaged the hammer, thumbed the safety back on.

Castellanos let go of him.

The finger-drum-drill sound stopped.

They stood in a bathroom. Castellanos stepped out into the hallway to check their surroundings.

“What the hell is going on?” Booker whispered.

As Castellanos ducked back into the room, she shrugged. “We’re solving the case.”

“Are you real?”

Castellanos blinked. “John…”

“Are you?”

“We worked together for five years, John. Was I real, then?”

“Is ‘now’ different?”

The soft chuckle that escaped her lips echoed briefly in the silence. “Do you remember in the condo—”

“What about the car?” he almost lost control of his voice, breaking the whisper. He caught himself.

She glowered. “If you’d let me finish?”

“Just answer me. Please.”

“The whole truth?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Leaned in close. “The truth is…it’s about time you expanded your notion of what ‘real’ really means.”

“What?”

“Now come on,” she whispered. “While It’s not paying attention.”

“What?” he repeated more urgently; but they were already moving. 

And something was wrong with Uncle Nick’s house.

They ascended the stairwell. Hadn’t Castellanos pulled him into the bathroom from a hallway? She had. Nonetheless, leaving the bathroom, they ascended the—(the descent)—the stairwell. Castellanos’ boots made no sound against the worn cement steps. Booker’s shoes clapped each stride.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked, his voice clonazepam-calm despite his racing heart.

Castellanos kept climbing noiselessly. Fluorescent lights flickered. A dank industrial drip echoed.

He’d been here before.

Had he been here, before?

“Shh,” Castellanos finally replied. “Be careful.”

He wanted to ask ‘why?’ but the question hadn’t exactly proved helpful thus far. He didn’t press the issue. Sidearm held low, he followed Castellanos from a couple steps behind, listening for some other sign of life. A drip echoed. His shoe-soles smacked the stairs.

At the top of their climb, a broad, door-less threshold yawned open from a wide staircase landing. Castellanos withdrew a Rubik’s cube from her holster. It didn’t look right. Something glowed inside of it.

Had Booker lost his mind?

clack-clack

Castellanos stood on the opposite side of the garage-sized gap. “Ready?”

“Wait.”

The drip had changed.

“John…”

“Wait.”

Or it had never been a drip at all.

(slap-whimper)

slap-whimper, slap-whimper

He couldn’t move. “I—I…”

“John,” Castellanos urged.

He’d lost track of his pulse. His heart rampaged. His blood burned through him. “I can’t,” he barely breathed.

“John, look at me.”

Sludgy shadows danced in his periphery. Nausea rumbled through his guts. He couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t—

“John!”

He shook.

slap-whimper

Blinked. Looked.

Castellanos stood in the center of the threshold, framed in perfect symmetry. The Rubik’s cube floated inches above an outstretched palm. Something inside of it glowed. Crackles of strange lightning crawled across it, black and purple, white and blue. “I chose you, right? That means something. And it is your duty to—”

Whatever took her did it too quickly to really understand. It blew through the landing like a roiling cloud, a blur of limbs and body only half-material, and as it funneled itself through the wide gap, it left with Castellanos tangled and wrapped up in its mass.

Booker gave chase. He didn’t have time to think.

slap—

He passed the threshold and found an unlit hallway on the other side, hardwood floored, maybe a kitchen to his right. A dozen paces ahead, at the end of the narrow suburban corridor, a lamp hung over an open doorway. It buzzed and flickered, buzzed and flickered.

Struggling to steady his breath, Booker approached.

Wooden railings followed concrete steps down to a dead man’s basement. Vague light glowed up from below.

Booker descended.