The Cellar Below the Cellar

What it looks like, and what it does

A narrow brick stair descending from a trapdoor in a cellar floor. At its foot a larger cellar with a vaulted ceiling and a single bare bulb. Beyond it another stair. The walls dating backward: concrete, brick, rubble, bare earth.

Passive. The trapdoor is found at dusk and not at dawn. A rope tied at the top does not reach the lower levels.

What is known

The house at 6 Dyer Street has a cellar by plan. Beneath its flagstones a trapdoor is found after dusk, which opens on a stair not shown on any plan.

Surveyors who descended eleven steps found a second cellar, then another eleven and a third. They counted nine levels before the air failed. Climbing eleven steps from the ninth does not lead to the eighth, but into a cellar of a different house.

What it can do

• Adds a level for every eleven steps descended
• Returns climbers to a different house

Where it stops

• The trapdoor is found only after dusk
• A rope tied at the top does not reach the lower levels

An encounter

Karim reached the sixth level and found a wooden bench against the wall, and on it a flask of tea, still warm, and a note in pencil: “Back in a minute.” He drank none of it. He went up. The house he came out in was not the one he went into, and its owner offered him tea.

Idris Karim, building surveyor, Dyer Street, number 6, A survey, three evenings

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Three surveyors descended and returned. Their reports on the number of levels agree.
• incomplete: The house into which Karim emerged has not been identified.
• rumor: That someone lives at the bottom and is always just out.

Still unresolved

The note is dated in the surveyor's own handwriting, to the next day. He does not recall writing it.

Where it has been recorded

• Dyer Street (confirmed) — Recorded by Idris Karim, building surveyor.

Stories about it

• The Cellar Below the Cellar on Cliffside (Entity story, 4 min) — A terrace house on Cliffside has a cellar, and beneath the cellar a second one, and beneath that a third, each a little older and a little larger than the one above, and the family who lives there has been digging down to find the bottom for four generations.

Connected entities

• The Extra Corner — Both are places in a house that exceed the house. Records of both mention a sense of having been expected.