The loneliness is sometimes maddening, and it doesn’t help that my employment consists of me sat alone in a room inputting numbers into a computer. No human interaction there either. When I inherited the house, it wasn’t in a particularly liveable condition. I don’t know how my parents had managed it. Windows were boarded up, the garden was overgrown, and the houses interior was just dusty and dirty from neglect.
After about a week or so, I managed to get the place looking pretty decent, but after a while, the massive size of the house just proved to be way too much for me to handle and care-take. I decided that rather than selling up and moving out, I should convert the house into 2 smaller attached houses and rent one of them out. I wouldn’t have to clean as much, and I would be able to collect rent money from whoever moved in. The renovations would pay for themselves in no time that way. It sounded ideal.
In the town where I live, before making any major modifications to your lot however (having a pool fitted, demolition, building expansion etc.) , you have to first visit the City Hall, discuss your plans, and ask for permission. Most of the time it’s pretty straight forward and simple. Apparently, my case wasn’t though. I visited City Hall after making an appointment with a Mr. Alan Carter, who was the acting Lot Development Supervisor at the time. I took a seat in his office, and after I discussed my idea to develop my house into 2 attached houses, he used his intercom to ask for someone to collect the blueprints to my house from the records room so I could clearly explain exactly what I was talking about, and what I planned to do. After a couple of minutes of small-talk, a rather attractive young lady entered the room carrying a rolled up piece of A3 paper. She handed it to Mr. Carter, and after a smile at me, she left and didn’t return.
Everything was going fine, until Mr. Carter showed me the blueprints. I didn’t even see it at first, but after a little while, I noticed that there seemed to be a door leading to a small room with a set of stairs in what was at the time- my kitchen. I pointed it out to Carter, and he gave me an odd look. “Mr. Luciani, this appears to be a basement staircase.” I was astounded. I had lived in this house for almost 20 years altogether (born, left home and returned again) and I had never once known about any basement. I asked Alan Carter if I could take the blueprints home with me to investigate the new-found area, but he refused, stating that he couldn’t let me leave the building with the original. He did however give me a copy.
When I returned home that night, I made myself a cup of coffee, grabbed a flash-light and took a look around my kitchen around the area where the supposed door was. Mom and Dad had wallpapered the kitchen many years ago, and since it was in such good condition still, I hadn’t stripped it during my first decorating session. It was an ugly yellow floral pattern thing, and now that I was up close, running my fingers along it to find any sign of an indentation, I kinda wished I had torn it down before. After a little while of fumbling around with the wallpaper, I did indeed find a small area that seemed uneven. Now relatively excited to find out what was in this new room, I took a kitchen knife off the sink drainer, and hacked away at the area of wallpaper.
After some tearing and cutting, I eventually tore most of it off, revealing a door. I tore the rest off. The door was made of a relatively sturdy looking wood, and had no handle. Instead, it had an indent which allowed me to open the door in a sliding motion, similar to how an automatic door opens in supermarkets. The door opened into a cold emptiness. Judging by where this door was, the room was under my first set of stairs. I used the flash-light to look around. There wasn’t really anything interesting about this room. Or at least, there wasn’t anything to indicate any reason why it would be wallpapered up. There was a strange smell of dirt and earth, and it was at that point I realised, my parents must have known about this place, as they were the ones that had decorated the house before I was born. With the flash-light in one hand, and the kitchen knife in the other, I entered the room. Sure enough, there was the set of stairs. It led into what seemed like an endless, deep black abyss.
I wondered if I should turn around and go back, but the idea of having this mysterious strange area open to me while I would be fast asleep just upstairs was kinda creepy, and I just wanted to check it out before I did anything else. I went down the stairs. My footsteps were incredibly loud against the wooden stairs, and as I went further and further into the abyss, the air became more bone-chillingly cold, and the smell of earth became stronger. Eventually I reached the bottom, and discovered that I was now standing not on wood, or carpet, or what you’d expect in a basement, but mud. The flash-light revealed that I was now stood in a massively long corridor. Cautiously, I began to walk down it.
Eventually, I came across a room to my left, which was separated from the corridor by a thin, decaying curtain. I entered, and was horrified by what I saw. Inside the room, I found what appeared to be decaying human corpses. Each was completely torn apart, and left in an uneven pile. There had been a relatively mild earth smell up until now, but as I entered the room, the stench of meat had hit me. I immediately felt sick, and had to step out of the room for a minute to gather my senses. I panicked.
I was about to head back upstairs to call for the police, when curiosity got the better of me. I stepped back into the room, and took a better look around with the flash-light, while using my shirt to cover my nose from the stench. Inside the room were many strange items I didn’t expect to see, given the circumstances. There was a small, broken radio on a shelf, several small teddy bears strewn across the floor, and a rocking horse, which had been completely destroyed. Worryingly, I also saw a single bed. Had some kind of sick murderer been living beneath me this whole time? I caught sight of a small, worn book which was lying open on the shelf next to the radio, and I grabbed it and got the hell out of there. The police could check where else the corridor led. I wanted to get the fuck out of there before whatever got those people came back.
As I came through the sliding door, I tossed the book I found onto the kitchen worktop, and closed the door. I was absolutely terrified that whatever had killed all of those people would come back and somehow see that I had been there and come up after me. There was no way for me to block the door however, and so I decided to grab my cell-phone, call the police and sit across from the door with the kitchen knife. The police told me they would arrive as soon as an officer was free. I sat at my kitchen table opposite the new-found door, and tightened my grip on the knife. Eventually, after a couple of minutes, I realised just how filthy my hands and clothes were from being down there, and got up to just quickly rinse my hands under the tap. However, I caught sight of the book I had brought up. I picked it up and took a closer look at it. It was made of worn leather, and looked well used. It was also incredibly thick. I opened it, and immediately confusion set in.
There were strange childlike pictures drawn of a weird looking creature, and scribbling that I didn’t understand. It appeared to be a diary because there were dates on every page, and it seemed to be a diary specifically for 1978. Throughout the diary, the pictures of this strange creature, along with two other scribbles that looked vaguely human was a recurring theme, and occasionally, I saw the word “dUG” scrawled the pages. I was in the middle of trying to discipher one of these pages, when there was a stern knock at my front door. I got up, still clutching the kitchen knife and answered it. It was the Police finally.
They searched the house, and took me away to the Police Station. One of my worries was that they would think I had committed some kind of sick series of murders, but the police were actually quite open minded, and once I showed them the diary, they asked to keep it for investigation. Of course I let them. I was sent to a police half-way house until my home had been investigated, and when they called me into the Police station about 3 days later, they had some news for me. A rather chubby, yet stern looking cop (Officer… Beeves?… Reeves? I think?) informed me that the corridor beneath my house led to a small electrical shed quite a way away from my house, that had been forcefully smashed open- from the inside a few years ago and hadn’t been repaired.
He told me that someone had indeed been living in that room under my house, and after doing some DNA analysis of the hairs they found on the bed in the room, they discovered it to be a very similar match to mine. They also found that whoever had been living under me this whole time had been partially devouring the corpses in the room. He also told me that they had checked the previous medical records of myself, my siblings and my parents, and had discovered that my mother had in fact given birth to 9 children, the eldest of which was born in 1972, and had been diagnosed with an unknown illness which caused it to have several horrific mutations.
I was presented with a birth certificate of the said child also, and when I saw the name on it, it suddenly hit home, and my knees went weak.
Born 29th May 1972- DOUGLAS LUCIANI
I am the youngest of 9 children.