Painting: The Old Hall, Fairies by Moonlight by John Anster Christian Fitzgerald, c.1875
IV
The Paths
Six feet below my basement, we dug out the “first floor” for the haunted house.
This would be a house mimicking the one from our childhood journals, Greg’s journals, but our collectively imagined house. It would be as close as we could get it on our pooled funding, but this one would go down, not up, and we’d open it to guests year-round rather than seasonally, at least for starters. Because as one of us said when we were kids, haunted houses, the real ones, never slept.
The excavators had been beside themselves laughing at our expense (and running up expenses all the while) that we were putting a haunted house beneath another structure and that it was the reason we hired them to dig beneath my basement. “Why not do it the normal way?” they said more than once. “Put your DIY on a cheap piece of land or in a rental property, or out in your yard somewhere.” I didn’t have much of a yard myself, and the normal way wouldn’t have been Greg’s way. It wasn’t ours either.
We were planning to bolt the gnomes to the trapdoor leading down beneath the basement, as soon as we got them from the prop company we hired, because in our imagined house the gnomes were on either side of the doorway where flowerbeds flanked. But we couldn’t do that here where the haunted house began in the basement. I suppose we could’ve, but we thought it made more sense for it to start here, and then really start once you got down into that other zone.
Funny, because the fictional Greg in our Greg’s journals had drawn, in his fictional sketchbooks, dolls’ heads with the tops of their heads removed so they resembled pots, sprouting strange plants from the soil of their skulls on the front porch. The Greg within Greg’s journal, fitting inside smaller than something in a shoebox, had been a budding artist. Fictional Greg had even grown up to make a career out of it in advertising and had an entire life stretched out with its own paths, and that had been important because he’d stayed on the paths connecting back to our haunted house. It was all in the journals.
It was easy to get lost in the house within the house, and we suspected there were more houses within those houses but had never been able to prove it. Even though it all existed in our imaginations, it was like something had occupied the spaces where we hadn’t been looking. Maybe it was an always thing, in the layers beneath our conscious minds. Dredged up with our memories, it might get brought out onto the deck too.
From my basement where the open trapdoor was, I climbed down the iron rung ladder carved into the earth, down into what would be the haunted house’s first floor. A wooden framework for the ceiling was already above, held up by wooden beams, and the walls and the floor would start to go in next week. For the outer walls it would take something a little hardier than the typical plywood fabricated haunted house walls were made of, definitely more than tarp or sheets and PVC pipes. The outer walls would of necessity cost a little more to hold the earth back, but that was okay anyway if being hardier meant it might be built to last.
For the inner walls, we were planning to use 2 x 3 and 2 x 4 plywood, treated for fire resistance. With the inner walls we could rely on much cheaper material, and we could coat it with VacuForm imitation cinderblock and brick and decorated tileboard and the like.
The access hallways wrapping around the perimeter of the paths would go on the outskirts near the concrete walls, functioning as both access for the actors and other staff and emergency exits for the guests.
Flashlight in hand, I walked over the clean-cut cavity where earth had been excavated. Thirteen feet high, and thirteen hundred square feet. It was just me down there that evening. Sally, Patrick, and Jennifer had all left town to their respective homes until they returned in a couple more months to check on the progress. I’d be sending them pictures in the meantime.
Inward from the access corridor, we would stick as many rooms there as possible. We had enough excavated to get us started, but would one floor entice enough visitors until we could add the other floors below? Probably it wasn’t the most cost-effective way to go about it, but it aligned with how we added on floor-by-floor to our imagined haunted house as kids over the years. Keeping it open year-round would make us the odd duck, and hopefully the odd buck to cover operational costs and then some, when all the other I haunts I knew of were only open seasonally.
Some of the bigger haunted houses pulled in a million dollars or more in revenue, and then only from being open limited periods, six weekends plus or minus Thursdays and Fridays. But we weren’t approaching it from that perspective. Money from any guests would be to keep the lights on, to get a little profit towards building the other floors, and to keep the dream going as long as we could.
I was surveying this first floor that we were planning to occupy with paths, walls, static and moving props, and actors dressed in costumes. I was trying to visualize it made real from the blueprints we’d just created, which were themselves from notes gathered from Greg’s journals documenting our childhood imaginings.
And then something a little off center of the space moved.
About sixty feet away, it seemed to crawl towards me, low to the ground.
I shifted. The pebbles crunched beneath my shoes like bone fragments.
A murky head notched itself upwards, bright eyes staring.
Fighting a wave of fear that was potent enough to make me want to run, I finally got my flashlight directed on it.
What had to have been a rat fled out of the beam.
I tried again to find it with my flashlight but couldn’t.
“We have rats living under our basement?” I said loudly enough to hopefully scare any of the others away. “Big ones, too.” Wait ‘til I tell my husband. Maybe I can convince him to let us keep ‘em so we can incorporate them into our haunted house. I’d try that joke on him later, but for the moment my sense of humor had fled.
#
Bolted or welded to the top of the trapdoor were four stony garden gnomes. It was as though there were four for each of us: Jennifer, Patrick, Sally, and myself. Their expressions seemed to be of fear, pain, joy, and sadness, their faces grotesque representations of each emotion. We had passed through the between place to this haunted house that wasn’t the one we had cooked up as kids, and then descended to the basement because in my separate set of rules was one about only going down. I had been careful to only suggest this but not outright say it to the others, because also in my set of rules was not sharing my rules with the others. I suspected they had that rule about not sharing our separate sets of rules, too, or at least some of them did.
The trapdoor in the basement with gnomes standing on it would not budge, neither would the gnomes, and the four gnomes had their empty cups raised like they wanted them to be filled.
And now Jennifer was practically brandishing the box cutter she’d found in the basement, suggesting we use our own blood to fill their cups.
We had searched the floor above for liquid of any kind, finding none. The faucets hadn’t turned on. Another problem this raised was that we had forgotten to bring drinking water, even not knowing how long this little venture might take.
We tried to get our heads out of that space for the time being, instead working out how to open the trapdoor on which the gnomes were standing. We needed to go down.
Patrick snapped his fingers. “What about the fluid in that SUV parked in the garage? It might have gasoline or oil.”
It was easiest for us to get the oil out, and in the garage we found the tools we needed and even a drip pan. We let the vehicle’s oil out into the drip pan and carried it back down to the garden gnomes in the basement. As we poured a little oil into each gnome’s cup, and then a little more in each until it was all gone, Patrick could barely stifle his giggling.
“Out with it already,” Jennifer said.
“I just like us feeding the house oil if what it wants is blood.”
“Let’s hope this is all it needs,” I said, “a little weight below to open the way.”
The thick black liquid oozed down into the gnomes’ cups, vanishing into the holes at their bottoms and going seemingly further down into their wrists, their upraised arms, their torsos, their legs, down into the trapdoor and whatever receptacle waited inside it.
And nothing happened.
We tried to move the trapdoor again, but neither it nor the gnomes would budge.
We threw around looks, paced the basement floor. I sat down at the only chair at the craft table, slumping forward heavily. Sally wheeled across from me and leaned over to put a hand on mine. I must’ve looked pretty dejected.
“Heard something just now,” Jennifer said, striding towards us from where she had been examining the gnomes.
“What?”
“Like, a clicking noise.”
We tried the trapdoor again. We grabbed laughing gnome by the waist and heaved.
It pulled the trapdoor open with it, all four gnomes angling to the side.
But the trapdoor did not open all the way.
We had to wriggle through the gap.
From there, we climbed down an iron rung ladder into a well-lit space. Bare lightbulbs hung from a drop-down tiled ceiling. There wasn’t wheelchair access, so we had to carry Sally and leave her wheelchair above. Fortunately, she was still rather light. But there were only about a dozen feet ahead of us before the space was interrupted by a large structure. It cut off all other routes but the entrance through it.
Concrete ground led to a large, blue painted brick gate extending up to or through the ceiling. Perhaps it was a façade. The entrance, which gaped into a reddish semidarkness beyond like an open mouth, was guarded by two limestone monstrosities. With heads of bearded, crowned men and the bodies of bulls, the monstrous sculptures nearly reached the ceiling themselves. They may have been eleven or twelve feet tall. Their beards, which appeared braided, extended past their bull chests.
The sculpted creatures had two legs from the front, but if you went around to the side you could see that the sculptor or sculptors had carved in four feet, so that it became unclear if there were two, four, five, or six total legs. The effect was disorienting, though I got the feeling it wasn’t intended to be an effect but an accurate representation.
To the right of the right limestone guardian was a five-foot or so tall cylindrical map made of darker stone, or perhaps painted to nearly match the lapis lazuli blue of the gate. The map was etched across its surface, and that and the designs on it were in a similar style as the feast or banquet scenes wrapping around the newel posts of the first floor stairs going up—stairs we had not taken.
On the side of the cylindrical stone map directly facing the front of the gate, there was a portion circled and disproportionately enlarged as if to say YOU ARE HERE.
The five-foot-high cylinder map was so close to the gate wall, though, a matter of inches, that we couldn’t get our heads in to see what was on its backside. It was like the situation on the first-floor stairs but worse.
We kept trying to get our heads behind it, scraping against the stone and the spongy structure covering the gate wall. It was frustrating, because you kept thinking the spongy material would give enough to let some of your face through.
There was a hole in the wall just behind the cylindrical map. Light strobed or guttered from out of this hole. The hole was also too close to the big stone map for us to try to reach it. We would have to access it from the other side, and maybe it was intended to use this as a viewing window from the other side in order to see what was on the back of the cylindrical map.
Soon, we were occupying ourselves again with what we could see.
“But YOU ARE HERE isn’t a room,” Jennifer was the first to point out. “It’s this house.”
On the map, there were pairs of progressing lines all around the house we were currently in that were like paths inside a haunted house, going through the forest we had gone through, back the direction we had come from our day-to-day world, and seemingly beyond.
How far did the paths go? How far back did they begin?
Meanwhile, the archway between the two limestone monsters, framing the path through the gate ahead, exerted a pull that I think none of us could have resisted for long.
