Like I’d told Tub, it had been my closet that had scared me the most when I was little. Still, it was awful small for the thing I had seen drifting through the house—though with all those eyes moving around it had been impossible to accurately gauge its size.

My heart was hammering as I put one foot down. The floorboards creaked. I winced at the noise but kept my eyes on the closet, trying to catch any motion behind the slats. Then, carefully, I put my other foot down. Again, the floor creaked. Still no movement inside the closet. All the fears of my childhood came rushing back. I had no choice but to go up to it, fling it open, and take whatever came next.

I stood and craned my neck for a better look.

The computer’s light revealed that the closet was empty.

Then two massive furred paws shot out from under my bed and locked around my ankles, sinewy palms greased with hot sweat, jagged yellow claws cold as a river. After the paws yanked but before my head struck the floor, I had but a single, rueful thought:

Tub was right. Under beds, that’s where the monsters live.

Water dripped into my eye. It was acidic and stung. I rubbed at it and became aware of stiff needles of straw poking at my skin. More drops of liquid splashed down, and I sat up, wiping at my face with an elbow. I saw that I still wore my bedtime sweatpants and T-shirt. A pile of dirty straw, though, had replaced my bed, and a cave had replaced my room.

On unsteady legs I rose, brushing off the straw. The room looked to be carved from rock, though what I could see of the ceiling was threaded with the bottommost layer of the real world: gurgling, ancient water pipes; openings of moss-coated sewer canals; and scorched electrical grids covered with soot. Orange rust water dripped steadily from a dozen outmoded joints. A single passageway led out of the room into a hallway. A claustrophobic instinct told me to take it.

My sight adjusted as I walked, and I began to make out piles of junk all around me. Had it been random trash, I would have been less frightened. Instead, it was painstakingly organized. To my left was a hill of typewriters, old-timey ones with manual return carriages as well as models from the 1980s featuring miniature display screens. The whole pile reeked of ink. To my right was a wall of microwave ovens stacked like brickwork—black ones, white ones, brown ones, red ones—some of them old and dusty, others newer and still spattered with the remains of their last meals. All of them were unmistakably broken.

I moved into the hall. To my surprise it was illuminated by oil sconces hung higher than I could reach. Lamps didn’t light themselves—I reminded myself to walk softly, though it didn’t much matter. The place was loud with the hissing of the lamps, the babbling of water through the overhead pipes, and a subterranean rumble that must have been the foul-smelling air churning through the underground passages. This was worse than any Trophy Cave I’d ever imagined.