The House With A Door In The Floor

The house at 95 Huxley Place has a door in the floor.

You won’t find it mentioned on any of the MLS sheets or anything, but it’s there. Top of the stairs, just short of the guest bathroom—a 36x80” two panel hinged door of dark scarred wood built right up against the hallway baseboards.

We bought the house in the summer of ’02. The realtor—her name was Meagan or Reagan or something—anyway, she must have shown us the property half a dozen times before we made an offer. She went over every inch of square footage with us, recent upgrades to the kitchen appliances, HOA amenities and which area schools were best for the kids.

But Reagan or Meagan, well, she never said a word about the door in the floor.

So, imagine our surprise when, a few years later, we decided to pull out the tacky pastel blue upstairs carpeting to lay down hardwood and found it hidden beneath the cheap nylon.

“What do you guess it is?” I asked my husband.

“Beats me,” he rapped on the door with his knuckles. “Probably just an extra storage space or something.”

“In the floor above the Den?” He shrugged. “I mean, it’s an older house. Who knows what people were thinking back then? Could be the flooring was damaged at some point and they just jury-rigged a quick repair with what they had handy.”

Kneeling beside him, I ran my palm across the rough unfinished wood; tried to wriggle a few fingers around the jamb and pry the door open.

“Don’t bother,” said my husband. “Somebody’s nailed it down and broken the knob off here, see? So the carpet would lay flush over it, I guess. We’ll need some tools to get this baby open. You still have the real estate agencies card? Let’s give them a call tomorrow—see if they know anything about it.”

Our kids were much more intrigued by the newly uncovered addition to the upstairs hall and spent the rest of the night speculating on the value of the trove of fantastical treasures that must be on the other side.

“I bet its gold and diamonds,” said one.

“Or stolen Nazi art,” said the other.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I told them as we put them to bed and turned out the light. “It’s probably just a crawl space.”

<><><><>

In the morning I dug out the number for Greene Real Estate. Turns out our old agent Reagan or Meagan had long since moved on, but I explained why I was calling and was eventually transferred to a woman with a raspy smokers’ rattle.

“Thank you for calling Greene Real Estate, Sheila Greene speaking.”

“Yeah, hi,” I said. “This is Linda Alston. You guys sold us our house at 95 Huxley Place a few years ago?”

“Where? Ah, okay yes, the adorable American Craftsman, right? Surely you guys aren’t looking to move already?” she asked with a chuckle.

“No, no not at all. We love the house—we’re in the middle of a remodel right now, actually.”

“How lovely,” said Sheila Greene. “Nothing like giving a home a fresh facelift.”

“Yeah, in fact, that’s what I’m calling. See, we’re getting rid of the carpet and we, uh, found something underneath.”

There was a long stretch of stony silence over the line.

“Are—are you there?” I asked uncertainly.

“You found the door, then,” she said at last in a terse voice.

“Uh, yeah we did. So, you knew about it before?”

“You haven’t opened it have you?” She demanded.

“No,” I said. “We—”

“For God’s sake don’t. Cover it back up and just forget, okay?”

“Forget what? What is it?”

“It’s a—a bad door.” Sheila Greene lowered her voice to a near-panicked whisper. “Look, I can’t tell you any more than that. Just—please remember what I said. Don’t open it and don’t call here again.”

She hung up without another word.

<><><><>

The knocking started the day after the phone call.

A persistent and rhythmic kind of

THUNK

THUNK

THUNK

that reverberated through the house.

At first, we couldn’t quite pinpoint where

THUNK

THUNK

THUNK

the noise was coming from.

“Might be the pipes,” mused my husband after several hours of trying and failing to locate the source of the intermittent knocking.

THUNK

THUNK

THUNK

“The pipes, Mike?” I asked him incredulously. “It sounds more like someone banging away with a hammer.”

“Well, maybe a squirrel or something got up inside the vents and is running around?”

“It’s the door in the floor,” said our oldest son without looking up from his phone. “The one upstairs that’s probably just a crawlspace. You can hear them sometimes trying to open it.”

“Hear what?” I asked, unsure I’d understood him.

But Mike was already headed toward the stairs, taking them two at a time as he climbed, so I followed.

The knocking cut off abruptly

THUNK

THUNK

as we reached the second-floor landing; filling the house with an unnatural heavy kind of stillness.

“Well I’ll be goddamned,” said Mike, prodding the doorframe with the toe of his shoe. “It is coming from down there.”

“You think there’s something under there? A raccoon?”

“Dunno. But we’re gonna open her up and see.” Mike tromped off down the stairs and vanished into the kitchen.

Alone upstairs, I got down on my belly parallel with the door and pressed my ear flat against the only opening in the wood—the keyhole.

Maybe I expected to hear the squeak and scuttle of tiny vermin under the floor. Or, maybe, the clang and bang of old duct work falling apart.

Instead, as I strained to hear movement on the other side, I gradually became aware of what sounded like very faint words.

openitopenitopenitopenit

The voice—if you could call it that—was soft and brittle like October leaves scudding across a parking lot.

openitopenitopenitopenit

Over and over and faster and faster, like someone with their lips hovering just beside my earlobe; I could almost feel a ghost of breath against my cheek.

When Mike reappeared with his battered yellow toolbox I jumped up from the floor as if burned.

“Mike, I don’t know but I think—I think there’s someone down there.”

“Hmm?” Mike was busy sorting through his jumble of nails and screws and Sawzall blades.

“Under the floor,” I hissed. “I heard someone—talking or, or—and the realtor she said—”

“Babe, there can’t be more than a foot of space under here—probably less.” He’d found a mini pry bar somewhere and was struggling to ease it between the jamb and the door. “And besides, if there’s some critter stuck somewhere, we gotta get it out before it dies and starts to stink up the place.”

He moved methodically around the door with the occasional straining grunt as he worked the pry bar up and down.

“Maybe we shouldn’t—” I started to say, but the words died on my lips as—with a final protesting shriek of wood and nails—the door ripped free.

Mike tossed the pry bar aside triumphantly and used his left shoulder to leverage the door up and it swung open with a clatter and a rush of cool air. From where I stood, near the foot of the door, I could see only darkness inside.

“Alright, easy peasy.” Mike said reaching for a small Maglite in the toolbox, “Now let’s see what’s making all that racket.”

We leaned forward in anticipation of something that wasn’t there. We were looking for rusty pipes, floor joists and insulation—that kind of thing. Only, well, those things were gone. Gone as if they had never been installed. The door in the floor opened into an impenetrable inky black void. Into nothingness.

“I don’t understand,” said Mike, the beam of the Maglite playing weakly over where the sheetrock and masonry of our first-floor ceiling should have been. “What is this? Where are the supports?”

“It looks like the opening of a cave or something,” I guessed. Mike stuck his hand through the opening and felt carefully around the length and breadth of the doorframe. He leaned in further and further still—first his elbow then his shoulder disappearing below the floor. “I can’t feel the bottom,” he said, eyes wide. “I should be halfway in the Den and I can’t feel the fucking bottom.”

“Mike stop you’re going to fall,” I hissed, tugging anxiously at the back of his shirt, but he swatted my hands away.

“Lemme look,” he insisted. “Hand me that screwdriver. We have to see how deep this thing goes.”

Dutifully, I retrieved one for him and watched as he held it over the mouth of the hole and let go.

The Phillip’s head was immediately swallowed by darkness.

“Did you hear that?” he asked after an eternity of silence. “I think I heard it hit bottom.”

“I didn’t hear anything. Please Mike, lets close the door, go downstairs and call the—the cops or someone.”

Mike ignored me; muttering about the impossibility of it while dropping another handful of nuts and bolts into the hole.

“There’s defiantly something down there. You can hear it.”

“There shouldn’t be anything there,” I argued. “This thing isn’t safe–close it up. It isn’t right.”

“All the more reason we should see how deep it is,” said Mike without taking his eyes off the abyss. “You can’t hear that?”

I wanted to involve the government or something, but Mike was adamant that no one know about it—at least, not until he’d had a chance to examine it himself, first. “After all, we don’t know what we’ve got here,” he reasoned. “I mean, this could be the biggest discovery in the history of ever and I’ll be damned if I let some pencil neck FBI man get credit for it. It’s my house, after all.”

So, for two days I stayed downstairs with the boys while Mike went about his “experiments” with the door.

He dropped countless flares and flashlights through the hole, he bought the longest measuring tape Home Depot had and spooled it out to its end, he knocked a hole in the Den ceiling directly below the door (and was disappointed to find just ceiling fan wires and dust) and—most disconcertingly—he spent hours on all fours in front of it just staring into the depths.

When he broached the idea of using ropes and carabiners to climb down through the door himself to explore, I tried to put my foot down. Told him, if he was going to do something so dangerous and stupid, I was taking the kids and going to my mothers until he came to his senses.

“I—just—I need another couple days, okay?” He said from the top of the stairs. “Then we can call someone. Just—don’t you want to know where it goes? Aren’t you curious?”

“No,” I said, and went to pack suitcases for the kids.

When we left, he was too busy trying to lower a camera through the door on a bungee cord to even say goodbye.

<><><><>

“Dad’s going through the door in the floor,” our oldest son told me the next morning from the backseat as we drove on toward Virginia and my parents’ house.

I flicked my eyes at him in the rearview mirror. “How do you know that?”

“He texted me. See?” He leaned forward between the seats and showed me a picture on his phone of Mike in a ridiculous hard-hat with a light on it and a garish orange reflective vest.

going n! said a little gray text bubble beneath the picture. wish me luck. love u guys.

“Jesus,” I mumbled. “Your father has lost his mind.”

A few hours later another couple of texts came in from Mike’s phone.

its real cold in here. said one. cant see for shit.

3 hrs in & still no bottom. said another.

made it! said the third at around 5pm. land ho! omg this is amazing guys. there’s floor and walls here. He included a photo but there wasn’t much to see.

wish pixs were better! its huge n here. were gonna be FAMOUS.

I tried texting Mike from my phone several times, but all the messages bounced back as undeliverable. I figured he must be too deep underground to get a signal. All I could do was wait and worry.

I was jolted from sleep that night in my parents’ spare bedroom by the rumble of my phone vibrating on the nightstand.

INCOMING CALL: MIKE

Still groggy with sleep, I fumbled with the phone and brought it to my ear.

“Mike, it’s three in the morning.”

At first, I thought it was a butt-dial or he’d hung up on me, as all I could hear on the other end was silence. And then, faintly, I became aware of breathing on the other end.

“Mike answer me. Are you okay? Where are you?”

“…Lin…you…ear me?” Mike’s voice was muffled and broken.

“I can barely hear you,” I said, my fingers tightening around the phone.

“Listen…need…to list…don’t…back to…don’t…the door.”

“Mike, speak up. Are you hurt? Please tell me you’re not still down there.”

A burst of static stung my eardrum.

“…lost down…can’t find the…don’t bring…home…hearing me? Close the…there’s someone else…with me…can’t see…I love..”

And then he was gone.

I spent the rest of the night in a panic—dialing and redialing his number to no avail as it rang on unanswered. Somewhere around dawn it started sending me straight to voicemail. In the morning I told my parents I wanted to fly home and check on him, but they overruled me; suggesting I call the police and let them do a welfare check.

It was during my statement to an Officer Boyle that my phone lit up with a text from Mike.

Hey, I miss you and the kids. I’m sorry. I think you’re right. We should seal up the door and contact the authorities. Please come home.

So, the next day we packed up and made the seven hour drive back to the house at 95 Huxley Place.

Mike was there, waiting in the front hall, with a big smile and welcoming hugs. I pressed him about what had happened on the other side of the door in the floor, but he shrugged me off. Said we’d talk about it later. And if his mannerisms seemed off or his smile seemed tight and too big for his face, I chocked it up to whatever stress he’d endured.

“What about the door in the floor?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, don’t worry we’ll call someone in the morning,” he said smiling that too big smile that twisted his cheeks up and didn’t touch his eyes.

“Are you okay Mike? Honestly?”

“Oh, don’t worry I’m fine I’ll see a doctor in the morning.”

That night I fell asleep spooning up against him, trying not to think about why his body felt different beneath the thin cotton of his tee shirt.

In the morning, I thought. We’ll deal with it in the morning.

I awoke in the dark with a start. I didn’t know what time it was or what had snapped me out of slumber in the still of the sleeping house. All I knew was that the bed beside me was empty and cold; the sheets and coverlet all twisted up.

“Mike?” I called softly, sitting up and swinging my legs to the floor.

No answer.

Creeping slowly through the bedroom toward the hall, I called again.

Still nothing.

And then I saw it—dimly lit by the glow of the boys’ bathroom nightlight—the door in the floor stood wide open.

I didn’t have to close the ten feet between me and the door to know that Mike had gone back. I didn’t have to check the boys’ room to know that they were gone too. Gone from their beds and into that dark grinning maw.

I knelt numbly there beside the door and felt the cool upward rush of air from below the floor that beckoned me.

And in the pocket of my flannel pj’s my phone dinged.

A message from Mike.

me and the kids miss you. please come home (:

Submitted June 20, 2019 at 10:53PM by JayGetsHazy http://bit.ly/2Y9sIS9