His old house had a new and perfectly normal basement.

  It looked very ordinary; a ten-meter square storage space that was hardly lit up by a single lamp and filled with sets of can-filled shelves. It had no hidden trap door leading to some creep’s bunker, no sex dungeon–either the supernatural or mundane kind–no chained gimp moaning in a corner.

  All in all, it would be a basement unworthy of notice… if not for the fact that it shouldn’t exist.

  “Could the new owners have built this room?” John asked as he searched every corner with a searchlight.

  “No fucking way,” Maggie retorted. This room’s discovery unsettled her as much as Matthew himself. “I would have noticed construction workers walking in and out of the house.”

  “My Key and spells all tell me that this basement was built before the rest of the house,” Kari added. “As far as they’re concerned, it has always been here.”

  “It wasn’t,” Matthew insisted. He had searched inside his memories and found no hole that could obscure this room’s existence. “I’m sure of it.”

  “His parents never had a basement,” Maggie confirmed. “That’s the whole reason we had to record our sessions in the living room. There wasn’t any space anywhere else for us to practice.”

  John stroked his chin. “This room must have materialized after a timeshift.”

  Matthew found that odd. Only the layout of places of historical significance changed after a timeshift, and mostly if past changes rippled all the way down to the present. The Neverland’s basement bar weathered five of them without so much as a scratch on its paint job.

  Why would his house of all places change with a timeshift? Especially since he had cleared it of its Dungeon years ago? Could it have happened before?

  Matthew felt as if he had been struck with a lightning bolt.

  “It wasn’t a Dungeon’s entrance,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Matthew?” Kari asked upon overhearing him.

  “What if that phantom door was just a normal door?” Matthew pondered, the puzzle’s pieces falling into place. “Except that it suddenly stopped existing for me because history changed?”

  Kari immediately caught on, her eyes widening in horror. “You underwent a timeshift in 2015 midway through the recording session.”

  “That’s not possible,” Maggie argued immediately. “You would need to have a Key to remember it at all.”

  “The Doc said I might have awakened it earlier than 2019, but kept it suppressed through Disbelief,” Matthew replied; a possibility which he now found to be entirely credible. “My closet's Dungeon might just have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  Maggie scowled so much Matthew could hear her teeth crack. “Those things have been preying on us for decades.”

  “Maybe more,” Kari pointed out, a dark look forming on her face. “Matthew would need to have a Key to remember anything from before the timeshift. He must have been in contact with the original Dungeon at one point, even if that phantom door didn’t lead there.”

  “I wonder if this house is a naturally unstable location,” John said. “The Neverland hasn’t changed across five timeshifts and it’s oddly impervious to historical alterations. We can assume that other places are in the opposite situation and extremely mutable.”

  Matthew quickly caught on. “My old place’s layout changes with each timeshift?”

  “Probably,” John confirmed. “Disbelief weakens and Dungeons multiply with each timeshift, which in turn should increase the number of potential Crawlers worldwide. A timeshift striking Evermarsh in 2015 would explain why everyone in the area gained a Key.”

  “I’m more worried about the pace of timeshifts,” Kari said while stroking her chin. “If one of them happened in 2015, then it took five years until another happened in 2020. The pace then accelerated to one timeshift per year, and now we’ve had two six months apart.”

  “Dungeons are forcing their way in from wherever they come from,” Maggie stated the obvious. “They bring in more of their pals each time they kick the history door open.”

  Matthew listened to their arguments in silence, his mind trying to process everything. Something about this basement made his skin crawl and his head hurt whenever he looked at its angles. Although he didn’t detect any hint of a Dungeon’s entrance nearby, this room felt wrong to him.

  A catlike noise drew Matthew out of his thoughts. Articat had emerged from the nearest wall and clumsily pointed at the ceiling with his paw.

  “You found something upstairs?” he guessed, his art monster nodding in confirmation. Matthew turned to his allies. “I’m moving up in the world.”

  “We’ll keep investigating this room,” Kari replied. “Call us if you find anything.”

  Matthew nodded and then followed Articat along the staircase leading to the upper floor. He heard Sasha and Petro checking out the bathroom nearby, but Articat instead guided him to Matthew’s own former bedroom.

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  Matthew expected to find it entirely unrecognizable, but it had changed surprisingly little besides card boxes being piled up in a corner; the owners probably hadn’t found a good use for it beyond storage. He found the same yellow wallpaper whitened by age, the same table where he used to play on his computer, and the same closet that nearly ate him alive… even the bed hadn’t changed in the slightest.

  Amélia clumsily searched the room while her Handy monster tried its best—and failed—to peek through the window. His small size and lack of arms somewhat limited his options…

  “How do you like my old bedroom?” Matthew asked after grabbing Handy and letting it take a look outside. The monster let out an eerie gurgling noise that could pass for a cry of happiness. “I used to have a bookshelf full of D&D stuff and a Venom poster in the corner.”

  “I have a Wednesday poster,” Amélia replied. “This place… it’s very small.”

  “Really?” Matthew scoffed. His dorm room made this one look like a four-star palace. “How big is your bedroom?"

  Amélia blushed shyly. “Four times this size?”

  Whoa, that much? Then again, Matthew had heard rumors that Amélia’s family was loaded. She had her own chauffeur picking her up after school when not hanging out with Sasha, Maggie, and the others.

  “When I build my maid mansion, my playroom will cover an entire floor,” Matthew promised. Articat emerged from a wall and instantly pointed at the closet. He had expected as much, but feigned surprise. “No? Not the closet! Who could have seen it coming?!”

  “That’s…” Amélia’s cheeks turned from pinkish to pale. “That’s where you were abducted?”

  “It was just a set of yellow walls with no doors nor windows,” Matthew reassured her upon trying to open the closet and finding it locked. “I didn’t even realize I’d left my bedroom at first, since Dungeons didn’t have monsters back then. I nearly starved until I dug my way out though.”

  “I see…” Amélia sat on the bed and stared at him without a word. He could tell she wished to ask him a question, but couldn’t find the courage to do so.

  “What’s on your mind, Amy?” Matthew inquired as he created a hole in the doorknob and opened the closet to find it mostly empty. Weird. “Can I call you Amy?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s… that’s my name.” Amélia shifted on the bed sheet. “How did you… how did you handle it? When your parents split up?”

  “One day at a time.” Matthew could tell where this was going. “Are your parents divorcing?”

  Amélia nodded without a word, her fingers intertwined. Her Handy critter hopped to her side and pressed itself against her thigh like a cat in need of comfort. Matthew guessed that her creations could either respond to her emotional state or were smart enough to feel empathy.

  “Personally, I threw myself at Dungeons until I ran out of them,” Matthew admitted. “Carving new buttholes on monster faces helped me blow off steam. I wrote a lot of stuff during that time too. Bad ideas lose their hold on you when you expel them from your mind.”

  While genuine, he could tell that Amélia would have preferred a different answer. “You didn’t try to… I don’t know, smooth things over between them?”

  “That’s not how it works, Amy. Getting in the middle of two sides will get you pulled in two directions.” It didn’t help that Matthew had been dealing with his trauma related to the Mall incident during his parents’ divorce, so he lacked the mental headspace to play Switzerland for them. “I say you should stay away until the eruption cools down.”

  “I… I see.” Amélia bit her lower lip and mulled over his words for a moment. Matthew immediately felt guilty for not improving her mood in the slightest.

  He would make a terrible therapist.

  “You know what, how about I pay you a visit soon?” Matthew suggested. He and Amélia had already tossed the idea around for a while. “We can read manga and practice spells together. That’ll be fun.”

  “Oh?” His proposal drew a small smile from Amélia. “I’d love to.”

  At least she sounded a little happier. Matthew considered that a victory.

  Now, if only today’s mystery could have an easy solution too. Articat insistently pointed at the closet’s unused hangers, but Matthew didn’t see anything wrong with them. He checked them thoroughly and read the inscriptions carved on its plastic surface.

  M??????????????a??????????????????????d???????????e??????????????? ?????????????????i??????n??????????????? ???????????????O???????????s?????????????????????t??????????????e???????????n???????????????????d?????????????????????e.?????????????????? ???????????????????????

  Matthew’s brain burned inside his skull.

  A sharp pain erupted in the back of his head the moment he read the line. His Doom Sense awakened all of a sudden, while a warm and moist liquid dripped from his nose and onto his lip.

  “Matt?” Amélia’s voice had become little more than a distant echo. “You’re bleeding!”

  Matthew’s mind could hardly make sense out of her words. The hole beneath his eyepatch itched the longer he stared at the hanger, while his Flux sight detected particles floating around it. He expected shades of yellow, perhaps a remnant of his first Dungeon.

  Instead, the Flux was all black.

  The hanger glitched out.

  Matthew could find no other word for it. He barely had time to blink before the hanger in his hand vanished without a trace; and when he looked up, he found himself staring at a plain yellow wall rather than a closet.

  His Doom Sense only grew more intense, like a needle hitting up in the back of his mind. He heard Amélia’s cry of surprise followed by a thump noise. Matthew turned around to find his classmate sitting on the floor, his bed nowhere to be seen.

  The entire room was now drowning in black particles. They came from the walls, the ceiling, even the windows. Every inch of this place oozed darkness.

  That’s not good! Matthew thought as Petro and Sasha barged into the bedroom with equal panic. That’s not good at all!

  “What’s going on?!” Sasha asked Matthew. “The bathtub vanished into thin air!”

  A chill traveled down Matthew’s spine. The whole house was bugging out.

  “We need to get out of here!” Matthew shouted. He quickly opened his notebook and dragged Articat back inside, then took Amélia’s hand to drag her back to her feet. “Out, out!”

  Amélia barely had time to grab her Handy pet and place it in her bag before the group ran out of the room and down the stairs. Sasha nearly tripped after them when a step vanished beneath her feet, though Petro managed to catch her before she could fall. Black particles continued to swell across the house, swallowing furniture and obscuring the lights.

  Matthew heard thumps at the bottom of the stairs, a wall cracking where the basement’s door used to stand a few minutes ago. Maggie quickly crashed through it with her skin of stone, the hole wide enough for Kari and John to run through. None of them exchanged a word.

  They simply ran.

  The group burst out of the house through the front door and onto the front lawn. Fleeing from an unoccupied home in broad daylight would likely give them trouble in the future, but none of that mattered right now. When Matthew’s Doom Sense finally grew quiet, he finally allowed himself to take a look at the house in which he spent his entire childhood drowning in darkness.

  And then, it was gone.

  Matthew watched decades-old walls filled with memories vanish in the blink of an eye. The garage, the basement, and even the front lawn glitched out of existence. A storm of black Flux particles swirled around the area and swiftly dissipated to unveil an empty spot of land invaded by wildgrass.

  His old house had disappeared.

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