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As Above, So Below

As Lore and Hamish took the lead ripping apart the floor, Nick sat there, shivering, sweating, as though he was retreating from himself further and further—like watching someone drift all the way out to sea. And Owen sat next to him, trying to ignore the pain throbbing through his fingers and his arms. The very pain that ensured he wouldn’t be of much value here, digging through the floor.

At one point, Nick seemed to jostle awake—even though his eyes had been open the whole time, unblinking, suddenly it was like, boom, he was there again. He looked to Owen and said, “Sorry I left you alone. And dragged you here in the first place. You’re all right, Zuikas.”

“Sorry we didn’t listen to you all those years.”

A weak shrug as Nick stared out through nothingness. “Not sure I’d’ve listened to me either. Fuck. What a mess.” His voice cracked, then, like a tree in a hard wind. “I’m scared, Owen. I don’t like this thing being in my head and—and I don’t think I’m going to make it—” At that, he gulped a hard sob. Owen pulled Nick close and let him put his head on Owen’s shoulder.

“We’re gonna get you out of here,” Owen promised him.

“Gotta get this thing outta my head first,” Nick said.

“We’re working on it. We got you.”

But Owen wasn’t so sure. Whispers of doubt crept in through the floorboards of his mind like creeping vines. You can’t do this. You’re too late. You can’t do this. You’re too late. Over and over again. He gritted his teeth and winced, shutting them out as best as he could. But he could still hear them. Neverborn. Nailbiter.

—

An hour later, Lore and Hamish used all the tools they had at their disposal—a hammer, a brass lamp base, a loose cinder block, even the heels of their feet—to bash open a raggedy hole in the floor of the crawlspace.

Click .

Lore shone a flashlight down in the dark.

“It’s a fucking pit,” she said.

“A bottomless pit,” Owen added.

They could see the bending pipes and the drape of wires descending into the darkness. Eventually, they were swallowed by shadow.

“Welp,” Hamish said, taking the hammer and dropping it into the hole. He held a finger to his lips. Mouthed the word: “Listen.”

The hammer clanged against a couple pipes.

Then: thump, thump, thump, a sound receding, its volume shrinking, until it was gone somewhere down in the dark.

Lore felt a shiver skitter over her, like dancing spider legs. The pit felt less like a pit now and more like a mouth. She eased back from the edge, in case the boards bent and dropped her in. “I—I don’t like it.” She was an early player of Minecraft when it was in alpha, and then beta, and this reminded her of the earliest days of that, when you’d come upon a hole in the crust of that blocky world. You’d hear things down there: the hiss and moans of Minecraft ’s monstrous inhabitants. Creepers, zombies, spiders. You could easily fall to your death down in those places. Just like you could here.

To its credit, she heard no such monstrousness down below.

Instead, the pit seemed to breathe on her, a stale wind of strange smells: wet wood, rancid potpourri, bleach, lawn clippings. And a hint of coppery blood.

“It could be the way out,” Owen said.

“It could be a way to die,” she answered.

Nick stiffened. “It doesn’t want us to go down there. Can you feel that? I can feel it. It resists . Wants us to be afraid of it.”

“It’s doing its job,” Hamish said, “because I am afraid of that hole. It’s a hole. Like, a fucking nowhere hole. There’s no argument here, it just goes into nothing. If we go down there, we are nothing.”

Owen looked around. “Maybe we can use a rope. Make a…a ladder.”

“Nobody here knows how to make a ladder,” Lore said.

“This isn’t actually Minecraft, Owen. Besides, whatever rope you find? It’s going to have to be a lot longer than any of us can even imagine. And then what? What if it’s still not enough? We just go down into the dark? Hanging there? Dangling?” Waiting for something to rush up out of nothing and close its jaws upon us? An insane thought. A monster gobbling them up. Maybe the house really doesn’t want us to go there.

“We don’t need a rope or a ladder,” Nick said, grunting as he stood up. He wobbled, but managed with Owen’s help to remain on his feet. “God, for a bunch of smart people you’re pretty fucking stupid.” Lore felt a weird spike of hope. He can still sound like Nick. That was a good sign, right? Nick went on to say: “The pipes? The wires? Ladder and rope, right there. Look—the pipes bend. Up and down, back and forth. And the wires go straight down. It’ll be like climbing the rope in gym class.”

“You know they don’t do that anymore?” Hamish asked.

“I always fell,” Owen said.

“I’m going,” Nick said.

Lore objected. “The fuck you are. We just got you back. We do this together or we don’t do it at all. The Covenant, buddy. The Covenant.”

To her, that was it. Game, set, match.

Nick did not seem to agree.

He leaned in, his face serious. His voice was hoarse when he said, “You want to talk the Covenant? The Covenant is about no bullshit. And the no-bullshit thing here is, we’re going to die or succumb to the house if we don’t go down there. It doesn’t want us to go down there. So that means we have to go down there. And if we die? Then we die together instead of up here, poisoned by this place so badly we bash one another’s heads in with—” He gestured all around him. “Cinder blocks, table lamps, or the same pipes we should’ve used to climb down into the dark.” He sniffed. “ I’m going .”

“Nick—can we just talk about this—”

“Step aside.”

“I think he’s right,” Owen said.

Lore shot him a look. “What the fuck, Owen? You, of all people, want to do the stupidest, scariest thing?”

“Respect, Zuikas,” Nick said, offering him a fist to bump.

Owen bumped that fist, looking a little chuffed.

“I do,” he answered. “Nick gets it. This place will wear us down. I don’t want to wait for that. Maybe there’s a reason we didn’t think about digging, about the pipes and the wires. And even now you can feel the house outside these walls, whispering its hatred at us. What if—what if we go down there and it’s the way out? The exit? This way to the great egress and instead of taking it we just stand here, too afraid to go that direction?”

“Owen, we could die —”

“That’s true doing anything. I’d rather die trying to get out than die stuck.”

“Yeah, hell yeah,” Hamish said.

Fuck, you too, Hamish?

“Ham, you died once already—”

“So I’m already living on borrowed time. I’m going, too.”

Every part of Lore resisted this.

Every molecule of her screamed, This is a bad idea .

Then again, that was how she’d lived her life this whole time. All the while she knew there was the safe way to do things, the quote-unquote “smart” path to take, and she always did the opposite. Took every risk she could. Any time there was a door, she didn’t go through it knowing that’s where everyone else was going—instead, she’d break a window, or punch her way through a wall, or—

Or bust a hole in the floor and jump down into darkness.

Parachuting into Hell itself .

“Fine,” she said. “I’m in.”

—

Down, down, down we go.

Nick was right. They could use the pipes almost as ladders, affording them footholds and handholds. The pipes were bent, inexplicably, in ways that betrayed sane design. (Once more, Lore’s mind went not to a game, but to the old screen saver on her ancient Windows machine: the one that had colorful neon pipes ever growing and expanding, like a bundle of breeding snakes.) Sometimes, they heard water rushing through the metal—a wet susurrus as it traveled past. She could even feel it on her hands—it cooled her palms and she welcomed the sensation. Bundles of wires dangled next to them, with individual wires joining from random points in the darkness above, like threads pulled from faraway skeins. Sometimes they could use those to brace themselves when the pipe bends got tricky to navigate.

One of the things that tripped Lore out the most was…looking down? Darkness. Looking up? She saw meager light shining through the jagged, bitten shape of the hole they had busted in the floor. But everywhere else?

More darkness.

All around them: nothing but the black-teethed void.

It chilled her.

It was Nick who demanded to go first, so Lore went second. Owen after her, then Hamish last.

They did periodic check-ins up and down. Everyone okay? Anyone struggling? Owen was having a hard time with it. Nick wanted to push on but Lore asked him to wait—and to her shock, he did. She told Owen to hug the pipe close, rest against it. Everyone could take a rest then.

“I’m okay,” he said, after a bit. “I’m good. Let’s keep going.”

And so they did.

—

Down, down, down…

Minutes gave way to more minutes, time unspooling before them. How long had it been now? No way to know. Lore’s arms ached. Her calves were cramping. She worked out sometimes. Hamish definitely did. But the others? She didn’t think so. Everyone was still okay, but they were grunting more, panting more. How long could they hold on and hold out?

Fuck .

This was a mistake.

She saw it now.

“We have to go back,” she said.

“I…” Owen started. “I don’t know that I can. I can keep going down. I’m not sure I can do up.”

Fuck!

“I think we gotta try,” she said, suddenly desperate. She looked down. The pipes continued to descend. The wires, now in a fat bundle thick as both her thighs, also snaked down into shadow. “We turn around.”

“No fucking way,” Nick said.

“Nick. Please .”

The pipes hissed and gushed as water ran through them. Louder than usual this time, so loud it drowned out Nick’s response to her—though she could tell it was more of the same contrarian denial. He wanted to keep going, she wanted to turn around. At first, the water traveling through the pipes was cool—

Then it grew warmer.

No, no, no—

And warmer.

No!

And warmer still, until it was starting to get hot .

Her mind raced, a scattering of panic impulses. She started to yell out over the hissing pipes, “Okay! Okay, try to— try to use your sleeves, you don’t want it to burn you and—”

Two words rose up from beneath her.

Nick’s two words.

“Fuck this,” he said.

Then he let go.

Lore screamed.

His body fell, feet pointed down, through the darkness. She looked up and still saw Owen and Hamish up there, both quickly changing hands on the pipes as the metal grew hotter and hotter—soon it’d be hot enough to blister their palms.

“I’m letting go,” Owen said.

“No, Owen, wait, hold on to me, don’t—”

Down beneath them, a voice calling up: “I’m okay,” Nick said. His voice echoing. “Let go. Just let go.”

Fear caromed through her. What if it was a trick? The house fucking with them some more? Mimicking Nick’s voice? Or worse, having taken him over once more, puppeting him to say those things?

But the pipes were getting hot, now.

Owen told her to trust, then he let go. Hamish, too.

Why am I the scared one—

What is happening—

She kept her palms free, the pipes in the crook of her arm, but the heat was burning through her clothes, and she could feel it radiating out, hot on her face, hot against her legs and her hip and—what else was there to do?

Lore cried out as she, too, fell.

She fell a hundred feet.

Or ten.

Or only one.

She had no sense of it. She only knew the bottom of the world fell out, and she plunged through darkness—

Until, soon after, wham, her feet landed—

Right on a fucking staircase.