Game Boy awakened with a shuddery jolt and found his neck was sore. He’d been clenching his jaw in his sleep. His hands curled into fists involuntarily as he gasped for air, breathless in the wake of the not-quite-a-nightmare intensity of his dream. When he unfisted them he grabbed at the threadbare neck of his sleeping bag: “Waaaa-urgh,” he groaned, then worked his jaws and swallowed. Unlike his nightmares of the second type, where awakening brought relief, this one clamped down hard. He closed his eyes and focussed on deep, slow breathing, intent on thwarting an impending panic attack. What’s happening to me? he wondered. He didn’t have to ask what brought this on—that much was obvious.
“Yo, Boy?”
He triangulated on Doc’s voice. It came from the kitchen. He wormed his way out of the sleeping bag, aching and stiff. He’d gotten so stoned that he’d slept in his binder again: top surgery, already on his priority list, climbed another couple of notches. (Not that he could sign up for it before his eighteenth birthday without his parents’ consent, which would never be forthcoming.) He ran fingers across his scalp, checking: Is my hair getting long again? was part of his morning ritual.
“Doc?” he called.
“Need coffee?”
“Yeah.” It was a pointless question, little more than a network latency check, meaningless as an early morning how are you? Still, it served to warn Doc that he was inbound. He slouched out into the hallway, then through the kitchen door, and did a double-take as he saw Doc leaning against the fridge-freezer—which, to his infinite relief, looked nothing like the ones in his dream.
“We’re fresh out of cow juice,” Doc grumped. “Imp must have guzzled it all with his Weetabix.”
“Where is he?”
“Went out.”
“Move over—” Doc moved and Game Boy opened the freezer compartment. He pulled out a frozen cardboard carton of milk, its waxed sides bulging. “Lemme run this under the cold tap.”
“Ugly, Boy, ugly.”
Game Boy flashed him a grin from the sinkside: “It works, doesn’t it?” Soon there was a frozen carton of milk bobbing in a saucepan full of water, slowly thawing. Doc pulled out a mug as the filter machine coughed asthmatically and shut off. “Thanks,” Game Boy said, accepting his coffee.
“Plans?” Doc was monosyllabic in the morning.
“Brr,” Game Boy shivered, both because of the morning chill and the memory of a near-nightmare. “Gotta work out, you know? Drink this, then train.” Training meant three hours of straight Dota 2 in All Random mode with his teammates, practicing for flexibility.
“What about going upstairs?” Doc unerringly put his thumb on the pressure sore.
“What about it?”
Doc looked puzzled. “Yesterday you were shit hot to go exploring.…”
“Yeah, but that was yesterday.” Game Boy flapped his free hand irritably. Coffee slopped on the worn kitchen lino. “This morning it creeps me out. All that history hanging around up there.” He was gripped by an unaccountable fear of refrigerators in kitchens. “Maybe there’s something horrible just waiting for us to stumble into it.”
Doc gave Game Boy a disbelieving look. “Are. You. Chicken?”
“Am not!” Game Boy straightened and puffed his chest out, a bantam rooster defending his base. Then his eyes narrowed. “Hey, no fair. You cheat!”
“I cheat?” Doc raised an eyebrow.
“Stop pushing me!” His voice broke into an adolescent squeak. “I hate it when you do that!”
“Busted.”
“Fuck you!” Game Boy stormed out, gripping his mug as if he meant to throw it.
Doc’s “hee hee hee…” haunted Game Boy all the way back to the games room, like an irritating mosquito whine. Fuming, he drained the scalding coffee mug, then grabbed Imp’s dumbbells and worked out his anger through an overly abrupt warmup set.
Over the course of the morning, work took the edge off Game Boy’s irritation. Doc’s attempt to push some curiosity into his head had been so totally transparent it was almost pathetic. Doc was terrible at projecting positive and abstract emotions—he worked best with things like hatred, despair, and fatigue. So when Doc brought him lunch (a bowl of Szechuan noodles and two microwaved Greggs sausage rolls) he decided to accept the peace offering in return for conditional forgiveness. “You wanna go upstairs?” he demanded, slurping noisily with his mouth open because it totally annoyed Doc.
“Stop that, you’ll catch flies—” Doc shook his head. “I walked into that. Upstairs?”
“Yeah.” Game Boy kicked at the edge of his desk and his chair spun around lazily. “I was thinking we’ll need to hit a stationers for supplies first, though.”
Supplies were procured from a high street Ryman, where Doc made sure that the somnolent store detectives ignored the Dalek-like shrieks of rage from the automated checkout when Game Boy pretended to scan his loot. They made their way home uneventfully and unpacked the spoils of shoplifting: dry powder markers, spray paint, school stationery kits, a pad of graph paper, and a clipboard. Then they huffed their way to the top floor, shouldered their exploration kits, nodded at one another in a spirit of intrepid dungeon-crawling brotherhood, and said as one, “Let’s do this.”
And that they did, for the next hour and fifty-two minutes.
They quickly fell into a routine. Doc would open a door, give a terse description, then recite
