Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Cliffside ·
The Cellar Below the Cellar on Cliffside
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.
The house at number 17 Cliffside has a cellar that is not quite the size it should be. The Harrises have lived in it for four generations, and each of them has known the same thing about it: the cellar is three steps down from the kitchen, and the floor is flagged in red brick, and the walls are lined with shelves of preserves and old tins. It is an ordinary cellar. But if you open the door beside the coal chute and go down another flight of steps, you come to a second cellar, lower and damper, with a floor of packed earth and walls of rough stone. And if you go down a third flight from there, you come to a third.
Nobody in the family has ever found the bottom.
Gregor Harris, the current head of the household, took up the digging in the year his father died. He had a theory that the house had been built on the back of an old quarry, and that the cellars were the mouths of galleries that had been cut into the cliff face below the street. He hired a small digger from the council and spent a summer clearing rubble from the third floor down. The walls became older and rougher with every metre. He found the bones of small animals in the stone, and a clay jar with a stopper of wax, and a row of iron hooks set into the rock at the height of a man's shoulder.
At the bottom of the fourth flight he found a door.
It was an old oak door, low and narrow, with a brass ring for a handle and a keyhole shaped like a cross. It was not locked. Gregor pulled the ring and the door swung inward on silent hinges, and a warm breath came out of the dark, smelling of bread and cut hay and wet stone. Beyond it there was another cellar, a fifth, far larger than any of the others, with a vaulted ceiling and a row of stone pillars, and between the pillars, small and pale in the light of his torch, a line of chairs.
Gregor did not go in. But he heard a sound from the far end of the room, a soft murmur of voices, and then a laugh, and then the clink of cups being set on a table.
He ran up the steps and slammed the door, and sat in the kitchen for an hour with his hands shaking. His wife, Lottie, found him there and asked what was wrong. He told her. She listened quietly and then said, with the calm of a woman who had lived in the house for thirty years, that she had always wondered who lived below.
The family decided, after some argument, to leave the digging alone. Gregor filled in the lower flights with rubble and sealed the oak door behind a concrete slab. He told his children never to go down past the third cellar. For a year nothing happened. The house stood quietly on Cliffside. The kitchen was warm and the preserves were sweet.
Then, in the second spring, the Harris children began to set places at the kitchen table for guests who did not arrive. Small things at first. A cup laid out for a visitor who had never come. A chair pulled out, and pushed back, and pulled out again. Lottie found bread on the table each morning, a fresh loaf, still warm, and a row of tiny footprints in the flour that led from the kitchen door to the coal chute.
Gregor, when he was told, went down to the coal chute with a lamp and stood at the top of the first flight of steps. He listened for a long time. From below, very faint, came the sound of a table being laid, and voices calling to one another in a language he did not know, and then a child's laugh, and then, quite distinctly, his own name, said by someone who had been waiting a very long time to say it.
The Harrises still live at number 17. They have stopped digging. The children have grown up and moved away, one by one, but they always come back for the summer, and they always set a place for whoever is still below, and in the mornings, when the kitchen is quiet, Lottie finds the bread on the table, warm, and the cups washed and set out on the shelf, and thinks, without quite meaning to, that the cellars must be getting larger.