I’d been living in my two-story house for many years before I discovered the top of the closet.

I live on the first floor, and I rent out the second floor to a tenant. Because it’s an old, weird house, the ceilings on my floor are 9 feet high, and the ceilings upstairs are only 7.5 feet. I don’t know why anybody would do that, but it was way too expensive to try and fix. Old houses were full of little compromises like this. I had gotten a ladder, a light one like stepladders people sometimes keep around to reach high places, but one where the highest step was 4 feet off the ground, to ensure I could reach anything at any height, and just found a place I could store it within my living space.

The closets on my floor seem normal, at first glance. They each have a rod to hang clothes at the normal height, about five and a half feet, and a shelf just above it, except for one closet too shallow to hang clothes in, which just has all shelves. I knew the space above the shelf in each closet was huge because of the high ceilings, and I’d stashed a lot of stuff up there that just needed a space to be stored. There weren’t any more shelves, though. You wouldn’t have been able to access them easily through the normal-height door. But I’d put boxes on top of boxes up there to fit things into the space.

One day I was trying to find something I’d stashed up on that shelf in one of my closets, and while shining a flashlight up there to look for the box it was in, I discovered a strange thing. The ceiling in this closet is even higher than that in the room, and it’s slanted at a 45 degree angle. What the heck?! What’s more, when I looked at the top of the wall, on the high side, I discovered what looked like the bottom of a staircase!

This seemed impossible. My tenant’s space was up there, and I’d repaired and painted the rooms up there before renting it out. The staircase seemed to run along the wall between this room and the adjoining one, which would have put it along the wall between the two rooms above. But I knew there was just a wall of ordinary thickness up there, nowhere near thick enough for this staircase to run inside. Surely, I figured, this was a remnant, a leftover from a previous configuration of the house that had been covered over and only remained in the space between the floors where wiring and piping ran. There would be only a couple stairs and then it would run into the floor of the room above. But when I shined the light up along the staircase, it seemed to be a full flight of stairs.

Was I mistaken? Was this an attic access I hadn’t noticed before? I’d been in the attic a number of times, and I knew there were no doors down from it besides the one obvious one, accessed from a staircase directly above the one in the vestibule which my tenant used to get to her floor. But it was an old house, and it was always possible that the door had simply been boarded over.

I went and looked up into the other closets, and the flashlight revealed each of them had a flat ceiling at the expected height and no weird stairs. It was just this one. Since that space more than 3 feet above the shelf had seemed irrelevant, higher than I could practically stack boxes up there, it was one of the few places in this house I’d never explored.

I already had the ladder in the weird closet to reach the higher things stacked on the shelf, so I started clearing the entire shelf so I could investigate further. With the shelf clear, I climbed the ladder and stood on the shelf, my head inside the impossible stair area. It was hard to climb into it, because the first stair was more than three feet above the shelf and there was nothing to grab onto to pull myself up.

Climbing back down, I found two big boxes of books and put them back on the shelf. I retrieved a third box of books that had been in another closet, and I stacked it on the other boxes to make two tall, makeshift stairs leading into the mysterious ones. When I got back onto the open part of the shelf, I could now climb up into the staircase that shouldn’t exist. It went up and up, beyond what should have been my tenant’s space and seemingly even beyond the level of the attic. At the top was a square landing, and on the right side of the landing there was a door. I opened the door and found another room.

Something strange happened when I walked into the room. I found myself transformed into a woman! I went back through the door onto the landing at the top of the stairs, closed the door behind me, and I was myself again. The placement of this staircase was impossible, but what just happened was even more impossible.

After a few minutes, I summoned the courage to open the door again and I walked through and found myself as the woman again. Exploring further, I found there was a whole other house here, and I encountered a woman.

“Michael?” she asked with a concerned intonation to her voice.

My name was Patrick, not Michael, but I didn’t say so while I tried to figure out what was going on and who this woman was. Instead, I just said, “I’m confused.”

“About the clothes and forms I bought you? I still love you, and you wanting to dress a woman doesn’t change that,” she said.

When I felt of myself some more, I realized I wasn’t a woman, but a man wearing a dress. There was a bra under it and pretend breasts in the cups. Pretty realistic ones, but they weren’t mine. I could tell there was no feeling in them; when I pressed my hands against them, I could feel them pressing against my real chest a few inches beneath them.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“How do you like it?”

“The dress and the breasts are both good.”

“It was the least I could do for you after I finally got you to open up about wanting to be a woman. Now do you have a name for this woman you are now?”

This last comment reminded me. The woman was Rebecca. She used that exact phrasing to ask for Michael’s female name at the end of a story I had recently read on BigCloset TopShelf. Rebecca was Michael’s wife, and the man-turned-woman didn’t choose an obvious name like Michelle; instead, she was Diana.

So I told her, “Diana.”

“Diana. That’s a lovely name.”

Now that I understood what was going on, I let myself get into it. I spent hours with Rebecca. We went out to a salon, got my hair done in a less manly style but one which wouldn’t be ridiculous for me to have as Michael later, and did some other things. Hours later, when I we were back in the house, I went back through the door, and found myself at the top of the impossible stairs in my house, as Patrick, in my usual male clothes again.

That had been the last story I’d read on BigCloset. I didn’t remember all those things happening in it, but Rebecca had caught Michael wearing her clothes, without him knowing, and after she finally got him talking about it, she bought him his own clothes and breasts as a present. I didn’t remember any of it past Michael giving his name as Diana. But part of that story while Michael was dressed in Rebecca’s clothes involved him finding Rebecca’s old Barbie behind her bras and panties, and it was what had inspired me to locate mine. That was what I was supposed to have been looking for on the shelf when I discovered the stairs.

---

Worrying that I’d wasted too much time at this, I climbed down, searched through all the boxes of stuff I’d removed from the shelf, and found the Barbie my parents had bought me when I was 3. I had apparently insisted to my parents that I wanted it at the time.

I had actually forgotten how I’d acquired the doll until, around the time of the sex talk, my parents told me the story. They were glad that I never showed any other tendencies in that direction, though they were surprised that I was able to produce the doll after they mentioned it. But I’d never forgotten about the doll itself. Even before they reminded me of what they had considered my strange behavior, all along I knew the doll was mine, and I kept it in a secret place, where my brother wouldn’t see it and make fun of me for having it. I moved it a few times, for its own safety, I reasoned. I kept it buried among other possessions of mine that were still at the house while I was at college, and took it with me only when I was moving out for good. But I had never tried to acquire girls’ clothing for myself, or anything of that sort during all that time; my exploration was limited to putting on some of my mom’s clothes a few times, which she never discovered.

When I was older, and it was starting to be more accepted to be transgender, I had to question whether I was transgender. Had I wanted to be a little girl when I was 3, and did I sometimes want to be a woman now? I had, since moving here, acquired women’s clothing, and I sometimes wore it, at home alone, but I had perceived it only as a fetish. Sometimes, in order to turn myself on, rather than fantasizing of a beautiful woman, I fantasized that I was the woman. Does that make me transgender?

I enjoyed the fantasy, but I never felt that I wanted to be a woman in real life. I didn’t want to dress up in women’s clothes, makeup, and more, and go out and face the world as a woman. It wasn’t that I was afraid to, but simply that I didn’t want to. That’s not who I was; I had, at most, a curiosity for it. But I let Rebecca get me out because I’d figured out it wasn’t real. It was a way for me to explore the fantasy further.

There was probably a name for it, one of the dozens of new genders people had invented, but none of the ones I had read descriptions of ever seemed to fit. Maybe I could just call myself Queer, the Q in LGBTQ. Sometimes that seemed to be used as an umbrella term for those who didn’t fit into other clear categories. There is something about me that is not quite straight, but apart from my parents, and maybe a few people who’ve known me who are very good at reading people, nobody knows I’m not simply straight. I’m not Asexual, either, the A sometimes added to that acronym, despite the fact that I’m living alone. I definitely like women. I’ve dated women. But I’m very untrusting, and never found anyone I wanted to get into a long-term relationship with.

But I’ve always enjoyed the fantasy. In college I found the Gender Change Fiction List, and I acquired and read dozens of the books on it. The books I read on the train to and from work after moving here didn’t always involve gender changes; I had other stuff on my reading list as well. And not everything on the GCFL was to my liking, but I figured out what I did like, and read every printed work on the list that seemed to fit within those boundaries and which I could locate.

Eventually, I moved out of the apartment I was in, and bought this house. They don’t really make houses for one around here, but I had significant handyman skills my father taught me, dear old Dad, may he rest in peace. It was legally a two-family already, so it just required some work to fix some things and I could rent out the other unit to help pay for it.

OK, it had required quite a bit of work. I had gone over every square inch of the place. I found some of its other secrets, like the place where paneling was covering over a big hole in the wall. Another secret was a place in the basement where there is a horseshoe mounted at the top of the wall, above where there is not a door. I know it was a tradition once to do that for good luck, the open end of the horseshoe pointing up so the luck doesn’t run out, but it’s supposed to be over the door. Looking at the wall carefully, I saw where there used to be a door there, and it was bricked in, slightly not matching the other bricks in the wall. Presumably they had done that and then cut the current door several feet to one side. This made sense with the story the real estate agent told me about the original house burning down and another house being moved here in its place. This house has a first-floor door right above the horseshoe, and there wouldn’t have been room for the bulkhead to enter the basement from the outside if the stairs to access the first floor were immediately above it. I don’t know what possessed people in those days to move houses around rather than simply build another, nor how they found one that was just the right size.

The carpet had needed to be replaced when I bought the house. On the first floor, under the carpet, there were amazing hardwood floors that needed some small repairs and refinishing. On the second floor, under the carpet, there was decayed linoleum, and under that, tiles, and under that, a cruddy wooden subfloor that couldn’t be used as a real floor. So that was a bigger expense, but I made sure my tenants had some decent floors.

I knew a lot of things like that about the house, so I was surprised that I had never discovered it had a secret, impossible staircase. Figuring that I wanted to go back there, I put the other things I had removed from the shelf away in other places, including taking some of them up to the attic. And to my surprise, only an hour had passed. Surely I had spent three or four hours with Rebecca, but it seemed I’d only lost the time needed to move my stuff around. I couldn’t explain it.

Reminded of where Rebecca had kept hers, I put my Barbie behind my underwear. Not in plain sight, but out of sight of any visitors I might have. Nobody was going to be in here rummaging through my stuff. It wasn’t like I was going to do anything with the Barbie. I just wanted it to help me remember times long past.

Between work and other things, it was somehow a week and a half later when I thought about the staircase again. I’d left the ladder there so I could access it easily again, but it just took a while before I actually did it. The next time I felt like I wanted to play dress-up, instead of putting on the female clothes I owned, I decided to go be Michael again.

Except when I went through the door, I wasn’t Michael. The setting on the other side of the door had changed. Now I was in some sort of science lab, and I was an actual woman, with real breasts that were really a part of me. I didn’t run back out; this still satisfied my urge. But what the hell had I walked into now?

A man walked into the room. When he bellowed “Clara” and started running toward me, I figured it out. This was another story I had read on BigCloset TopShelf. The man was a mad scientist named Hugo. For most of the story, my character was Clark, his assistant. Hugo had turned some other man into a woman here. That man had wanted to be a woman, but Clark figured out Hugo had drugged her afterward and was using her as a sex slave. So Clark helped her get away. But Hugo figured out Clark had done it, and he drugged him and turned him into a woman who he called Clara. That was the end of the story, but it was clear he meant to use Clara as his sex slave now. So now I headed for the exit, and Hugo stepped in front of me, trying to stop me. But I had the door open, and pushed him through. And he vanished.

Moments later, Hugo came back from the other side of the room, bellowing “Clara” again. I realized that I had only reset his character. This time I left through the still-open door immediately, and escaped back to where I was Patrick.

---

After I had read everything printed from the GCFL that I cared to and could get my hands on, I started reading the stories posted on the web sites it mentioned. At first that meant Whateley, a fun site with several authors writing stories in a shared universe where some people develop special powers and even go to a school where they learn how to use their powers safely and effectively. Some of them became superheroes, or were on their way to doing so; others villains. Kind of like X-Men, except with a lot of characters changing sex when they got their powers. And there were plenty of others who were neither trying to be heroes nor villains, but just live their lives with whatever situation fate had given them. But despite Whateley having a huge archive of stories, I eventually read all of them, and moved on to BigCloset.

I’d looked at BigCloset before, and initially I was turned off by it. I didn’t really go for the stories that were just about a guy dressing up as a woman and starting the journey toward transsexuality, the way people did it in real life. Even though I did that myself, privately, that’s not what it was about for me. I wanted the fantasy, the unreal, impossible scenarios. When I took a second look at it, I found that the kind of story I wanted was there, too. In fact, there were many different kinds of stories. And having exhausted Whateley (not completely, because they continued to post new stuff, but at much less than the rate I could absorb it), I started to find my fantasy at BigCloset.

At first, I only read BigCloset stories from the archive, searching on one or another keyword, such as magic, that implied the kind of story I wanted to read, and when I found something good, I read it all the way through, even when it was a story with dozens of parts. But there was one other thing I did. I started writing down my own stories.

To tell the truth, I started writing down my stories a long time before that, even before I started reading Whateley. I had registered to post non-canon stories in the Whateley forum, but I’d never actually done it. Writing in the Whateley universe was too constraining for me, and even though my stories would have been non-canon, I felt myself trying to keep them believable as canon, and I’d just never come up with anything I liked enough to post.

After years of never posting stories on Whateley, I signed up on BigCloset, ending my years as a lurker there, and started to post some of my non-Whateley stuff there, after lots of re-reading and careful editing. One of the things that bothers me reading fic is when it’s poorly edited, and there are spelling and grammar errors everywhere. It makes me aware I’m reading some amateur writer’s rambling rather than something professionally published. But my editing wasn’t just for spelling and grammar. When I looked back at my old stuff, it was sometimes embarrassing to find glaring inconsistencies, like one character who lived on the east coast of the US in one part of the story and the west coast in another part without any indication that she’d moved. But eventually I had some stories in what I considered a good enough state to post.

This also got me watching the newly posted stories more closely, when possible checking it daily and watching my new story go down the home page as other stories were posted after it. And that was how I’d read Michael and Rebecca’s story, even though it was not really my kind of story. I didn’t read every new story, but I was actually reading from the new stories, the way I never had before. When thinking about this, I found their story and re-read it, to test whether that made them appear on the other side of the door again. It did!

But on my return to life as Michael, I tried to see how much control I had over the story. The part where Michael gives her female name is actually the end of the story, so everything after was my doing, right? Instead of Diana, this time I told Rebecca my name was Lorelei. I had intentionally chosen the most outrageous female name I could come up with, but Rebecca accepted it. And everything else we did was different, too. I declined going out with Rebecca, and we ended up having a tender evening there in the house, eventually with us having sex while I was still in the dress.

When I excused myself to go to the bathroom, I actually left through the door back into the landing at the top of the mysterious stairs. After closing the door, I went right back in, as a test. Would I still be at the at the part after we had sex, or would that reset it?

It reset it. Rebecca asked me how I liked the clothes and for my name, and I told her Michelle this time, taking the obvious name for once. By changing my responses, I was able to guide the story in yet a third direction. I had Rebecca dress up in some of my clothes that we could make fit (largely through the use of a belt), both of us wearing makeup for different purposes, and we went out on a completely cross-dressed date to a restaurant and movie.

And when I finally went through the door into my house again and climbed down the stairs, no time at all had passed.

Being with Rebecca was fun, but what else could I try? For both those stories, I had entered in the final bit of the story. But what if I stopped reading part-way through? Specifically, what if I re-read Hugo and Clark’s story before Clark gets turned into Clara. Could I stop it from happening? I decided to try.

In the original story, Hugo had knocked Clark out to get him into the conversion chamber by the old staple of drugging his drink. I entered the scene as we were starting that meal, and swapped our drinks. Once he had drunk enough that he was getting woozy, I told him, “I found your notes, Hugo. I know what you were planning. But I swapped our drinks. You failed.”

Hugo seemed upset, but was too far toward unconsciousness to do anything about it. I took the scene to its logical conclusion, stuffing Hugo into the conversion chamber and having him come out as a woman. I thought she’d be mad, but she was as sex-crazed as a woman as she’d been as a man, and wanted nothing more than sex with me, right then. I eventually had to push her through the door into my house to stop it, following her on through so as not to relive the scene from the start.

It was useful to know I could change the story, even part way through. What else could I change? Could I roll the story back further and keep the first patient from that story from ever getting trapped as a sex slave?

I tried it. After rereading that part of the story several times, I decided to intervene right after Marcie (the patient’s chosen female name) came out of the conversion chamber. In the original story, Hugo took her to what he called a rehabilitation room, but he imprisoned her there, keeping her drugged so she could not escape. I eventually discovered what he was doing, set her free, and that led to Clark getting turned into Clara.

“Now let me take you to the rehabilitation room where you can get used to your new body,” Hugo said.

“No, let me do it,” I said. “I’m your assistant. That’s my job. You can work on finding the next patient.”

Hugo wasn’t happy, but let me proceed. I led her to the room, but as she went through some exercises to familiarize herself to her new body, I whispered her, “Hugo means to trap you here and make you his sex slave.”

Marcie screamed, “What?”

“Hush, hush, don’t let him hear. He did this before. I found out, and helped the woman escape. I had to let him go through with converting another patient; he threatened to change me forcefully and keep me trapped here as his slave forever.”

I showed her a package of one of the drugs he used or at least planned to use on his convertees, which I had pocketed.

“So what do we do?”

“You have to go. Go back to your life, whatever you had planned to start a new female life, except don’t go anywhere you told Hugo about.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be OK,” I told Marcie.

“No, you’re not safe. Go grab your stuff and come with me.”

I would have done it, but doing that would have meant leaving the door behind. I went back to the space where I, that is, Clark, lived. I sat and thought for several minutes, but I didn’t see any way out. Clark could have gathered his things and left this place and gone on to live a new life with Marcie, but I had to just treat it as if he had done so, and for myself, just sneak back into the lab and hurry through the door and end the story.

---

Safely back in my own home as Patrick, I realized a huge flaw with my new-found ability. If I ended up isolating myself from the door, I’d be stuck in that other life forever. Avoiding doing so had caused me to end the story in an unsatisfying way. So that was the end of me playing around in the world of that story. For that matter, I decided I was done with Michael and Rebecca’s story, too. It was safe there, and I enjoyed some of what I did with Rebecca, but there were tons of other stories. I decided to read something else, some other story where I could turn into a real woman under better circumstances.

I had already devoted about an hour every evening to reading stories on BigCloset, or writing my own when there was nothing else interesting new, but now I devoted that hour to looking for interesting stories I’d like to go into for real. And I found them, lots of them. Each time I found a story I thought I’d like to live for real, I re-read it to the point I wanted to live, and headed upstairs. The more interesting ones got bookmarked for potential re-use.

Sometimes I was upstairs for an hour or two of subjective story time, but sometimes for days or even weeks. You would think that when I went to sleep in the fantasy world that it would end and I would wake up in my own bed, but I didn’t. I woke up, seemingly immediately afterward, refreshed and ready to go on with whatever story I was in. I didn’t dream as a story character unless that was part of the plot for a particular character, and then I only had relevant dreams.

I explored more than a hundred stories, some of them more than once. I lived as magically transformed women. I lived as chemically and surgically  transformed women. I lived lives where I had a way to change between being male and female. I lived lives where I was male but there were trans-women in my life. I lived lives where I had both male and female attributes. I lived lives where I wasn’t even human.

I experienced every aspect of being a woman, in every possible way. I experienced puberty as a girl, dating, sex, getting married, getting pregnant, and giving birth. I experienced getting hit on, denigrated, denied opportunities offered to men, and other negative aspects of being a woman as well. And of course, there were ordinary times as a woman, too. I experienced those events in realistic ways, and in bizarre, unrealistic ones only possible in fiction. Over the next year, I spent a dozen years as various women. I also spent several years as men and as beings that can’t be clearly classified as women or men.

After noticing that the new obsession had disrupted my own writing, I had another thought. What if I read my own story?

I went back and read my last-posted story, Frosty, up to the point where I animated Frosty at the start of Christmas vacation my first year of college. Then I went through the door. It was wonderful. I wasn’t a woman in that one since it’s told from Jacob’s point of view, not Frosty’s, but that didn’t matter. I was living a fantasy of my own that I had liked so much when it was in my head that I wrote it down, expanded on it to make a coherent story, and posted it for the world to see. I lived more than two whole weeks of fun with the water-girl on campus while everyone else was away, celebrating Christmas and doing all sorts of silly things. It was great, even being male, but being young again, and living a happy-go-lucky life where nothing really mattered and we could just have fun.

When the calendar told me classes were starting again soon, instead of having Frosty go away, I went away, through the door into my house which had incongruously been in my dorm room all along next to the one leading into the dorm hallway.

And of course, no time had passed in the real world. I had to face the reality of going to work the next day. But I knew what I needed to do now. Go write some more stories! Instead of trying to find the story that fulfills another of my fantasies, write my own!

Author’s note: All the BigCloset stories mentioned in this story, apart from my own, are fictional, but they are meant to represent typical stories found on BigCloset.