The House Under the Street

by F.W. Armstrong

Take care of the child who dwells within, for he is far stronger than age alone.

When the Monroe County Department of Public Works tore up part of St. Paul Street so workers could lay new pipe, they found a small green clapboard house 20 feet below street level. Only the front of the house and its rusted tin roof were visible from the street; there was a chimney, though half of it was gone, and small sections of the roof’s cap were missing, exposing portions of the framing beneath.

Subsequently, two people from the Monroe County Historical Society were summoned. They peered down at the house and exclaimed it was, indeed, of great and consuming interest, if only a way could be found to get down to it. A way was found; workers widened the big hole, a ladder was carefully lowered in, and the two people from the Historical Society climbed down with hardhats firmly in place and encountered the front door of the house.

One of these people, a man in his late forties, who was wiry and bright and always wore a colorful bow tie, said, “Should we knock?” and chuckled.

The woman with him, also in her late forties—her name was Blanche—said through tight, thin lips, “This is hardly a joking matter, Alex. This house could be of extreme historical importance. And you know, of course, that there may be people in it.”

Alex gave her a feigned look of alarm. “People? You mean dead people?”

“Yes,” she told him grimly. “Dead people.” And she stepped forward in the few feet between the ladder and the oak front door and tried the brass knob. She stepped back.

“What’s the matter?” Alex asked.

“It’s locked,” she said. “The door is locked. It was something I hadn’t expected.”

From above, a workman called, “You people okay down there?”

Alex said to Blanche, “What do you mean it’s locked?”

“I mean it won’t open. I need a key.”

“Maybe the people who live here stepped out for a few minutes.”

He smiled. “Maybe we can leave them a note and tell them when we’ll be back.”

She gave him a hard look. “Alex,” she proclaimed, “if there are people here, in this house, then I would say that in all likelihood it is their mausoleum. So my guess is they’d be even less responsive to your so-called humor than I. If that’s possible.”

Alex continued smiling. “Well put,” he said.

Again the workman, twenty feet up, at street level, called, “Are you people okay?”

Blanche called back, “We have a problem. The house is locked.”

“Locked,” the workman said, parroting her.

“Maybe we can get in through a window,” Alex suggested.

There were three windows in the front of the house—two, with lace curtains drawn, to either side of the door, and one very tall and narrow window six or seven feet above it, in what apparently was the attic. Blanche and Alex could not get to either lower window easily because there was water pooled around the house; since the house rested on what appeared to be a natural limestone hump, they had no idea how deep the water could be. (“You got some troughs down there,” a workman had told them, “that you could step in and never come out of. It ain’t no place for no one to go walking alone.”)

Alex got back on the ladder and climbed it so he could peer into the attic window.

Blanche called to him, “Do you see anything?”

He called back, “Yes, I do.”

Blanche waited a few moments for him to continue. When he didn’t, she called, “What do you see, Alex?”

He answered, “I see…toys.”

“Toys?”

“Yes. A rocking horse. some blocks. Wooden blocks with the alphabet on them. A train set. And a doll; no, two dolls. Raggedy Ann, I think…Blanche, I think it’s a Raggedy Ann and a Raggedy Andy.” He smiled. “I had a Raggedy Andy.”

And I had a Raggedy Ann, Blanche thought, but she said nothing and, within a few seconds, had chased the thought away.

“That’s about it,” Alex called. “Toys,” he whispered, and when Blanche looked up at him through the gloom below the street, she saw a tiny, quivering smile on his face.

“Come down from there,” she told him. Reluctantly, he came down.

She said, “It’s remarkably well-preserved,” paused, continued, “and it has no business being here, but it is here, of course, so it’s something we’ll have to deal with.” She studied the house a moment. “I think it is possibly pre-Victorian and, well-preserved though it is, it lacks character, of course, so it is clearly the house of a laborer of the day—“

A workman called down, “You two have to come up outa there now.”

Blanche called back, “I’m sorry, we can’t do that. We’ve hardly begun our investigation—“

“You don’t come up outa there, you’re gonna get awful wet.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s gonna rain, sister. It’s gonna rain hard.”

Blanche noticed, then, that the light had grown even more deeply sullen than when they’d come down the ladder. “We must get into this house. You can understand that, of course.”

“You got about a minute and a half, then you’re gonna go swimming.”

“Dammit!” Blanche whispered.

On the way up the ladder to the street, she looked briefly into the attic.

Alex, ahead of her, said, “You coming, Blanche?”

She said, “This is a strange place. This is a very strange place. I’m not at all certain it makes me comfortable.” She paused and realized she wasn’t sure what she was talking about. “There’s light in that room,” she said, meaning the attic. She said room because that’s the way it looked—like a child’s room no child had ever used. It was too neat, too much as if in waiting.

“Not possible,” Alex said.

“I’m aware of that,” she said. ‘I was speaking…metaphorically.” She closed her eyes in brief embarrassment, then added, “You understand that, of course.”

“Of course I do, Blanche,” Alex lied.

She finished, “I would say, in fact, that this house makes me extremely uncomfortable.”

“I thing it’s great,” Alex declared.

And she told him, her tone very serious and very instructive, “Alex, I believe you are 47 years old going on 12.” It was very similar to what she’d told him many times before: “Alex, I believe you are 43 years old going on 13…Alex, I believe you are 45 years old going on 15.” She kept him in adolescence because it was very reassuring for her.

It rained that night. It was not a gentle rain, not comforting or restful, not the kind of rain that soothes and heals. It was a torrent, as if an ocean were draining, and the things that got caught in it—hoboes, night workers, trees, cats, flowers—were marked by it and their lives were made shorter because of it.

Blanche was sent stumbling to her window by it and she watched in awe and fear as it wailed at her that there were things beyond her control, after all. It was not something she would have admitted aloud, although she understood it. There were many things she understood. Things about the world she had grown into and become a part of—a world made up of meetings and lunches and decision-making and exhaustion. A world she’d moved about in for centuries. A world that pinched. A world without toys.
She stood for a long time at her window. She watched the storm reach a peak, then watched it groan back to practically nothing; then, as if it were relieved or sated, almost instantly to nothing at all. Then it was morning and there were shiny black streets and a peach-colored sky. And there were people, too. They moved tentatively, like small animals, out of their houses. And they nodded at each other and began to piece their worlds together from the debris left behind by what the earth had hurled at them the night before.

When, late that morning, Blanche arrived at the hole in the street and looked down, she saw that sunlight was bouncing gaily off the sides of the hole all the way to the bottom. She saw, as well, that the house was not there.

She looked at a workman standing beside her and gave him a small, incredulous, quivering smile. “The house isn’t there,” she said.

“I know it isn’t,” he said.

Alex came up alongside her. “The storm washed it away, Blanche,” he said.

She shook her head slowly. “How could the storm do that?”

The workman said, “Hell, lady, there was a lot of rain last night. It had to go somewhere.” He nodded at the hole. “That’s where it went.”

Alex repeated, “And it washed the house away, Blanche. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“It was probably of great historical importance,” he said, and adjusted his colorful bowtie.

She said nothing. She looked stunned, Alex thought. He said, in order to comfort her, “Chances are that it broke up.” He had no real idea why such a statement would comfort her. He might have decided, had he examined it, that it would have comforted her because there was much work to do elsewhere. And besides, working below the street was a dirty business, and smelly, too, and was without a doubt extremely dangerous.

“Broke up?” she said.

He nodded. “Yes. Broke up. Into pieces.”

“And?”

“And so…and so…” He smiled. “It got swept away and is beyond us, and we can move on to other pursuits.”

She shook her head. “Alex, we have to go and find it.”

He shook his head. “We can’t do that. We’re not equipped to do that.”

She looked from his face to the hole in the street, then back to his face. “As you pointed out, Alex, as you pointed out, that house was of great historical importance. And besides…” She stopped. She looked confused.

“Besides?” Alex coaxed.

“Besides,” she said, “there were toys in it.”

The workman said, “Toys?”

“Yes,” she said. “In the house.”

“Toys?” the workman said again, as if it were a word he just then had encountered.

Alex explained, “There was a rocking horse, yes. And a train set. And some blocks.”

“With the alphabet on them,” Blanche cut in, smiling a broad, childlike smile that Alex had never seen on her before. “And a Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy.”

The workman shrugged. “Well they ain’t there no more, and that’s about as true as yesterday.”

It was a week of storms, all of them as angry and as destructive as the first, all of them interrupted, during the day, by sunlight and still, clear air. It was a week that sat on Blanche like a bullfrog, a week she moved about in leadenly from place to place, from responsibility to responsibility, as if her world were some grim amusement park where the carousel horses didn’t move and the fun house consisted only of darkness and the prize for knocking over milk bottles on the midway was a trip back in time to do it all over again.

To grow up all over again. To be here. And be precisely who she was.

“Did you ever wonder,” Alex asked her at the end of that week, “how it got there?”

“It?”

“The house under the street.”

“No,” she said. “I never wondered. It was there, that was all we needed to know. It was all anybody needed to know.”

Alex smiled. They were in a big gray Victorian on Mount Hope Avenue, and they were trying to decide if it qualified for landmark status. “Or why it was there, Blanche? Did you ever wonder why it was there?”

“No,” she answered at once, as if the question frightened her.

“You don’t need to know very much, do you, Blanche?”

“Sorry?” she said, though she knew what he meant.

He explained, “You don’t need to look around the edges of things.
You don’t need to see around corners. You’ve got your eyes glued only on the road ahead.”

“No,” she told him. “No,” she repeated thoughtfully, as if to herself. “I do want to see around corners. I want that very much. But I don’t know how.”

Alex adjusted his bright bowtie. Adjusting it was a nervous habit and he often adjusted it when it didn’t need adjusting. He was nervous because he wanted to tell her something had had pounced on him just then, but which he didn’t have the nerve to tell her. He wanted to tell her that he cared for her.

“It’s possible,” he said, “that the house under the street wasn’t there at all.”

He didn’t know why he cared for her—now; perhaps it was a fault within himself that had caused it, perhaps some growth had taken over a lobe of his brain and had made him stupid. He’d worked with Blanche for five years and, in that time, she had said only one kind thing to him: “I’m sorry about your hamster, Alex. I had a hamster, once.”

“Yes,” she said now, in the gray brick Victorian. “I know. It’s possible that the house under the street wasn’t there at all.”

This surprised him. “But it was there,” he said. “I was only…joking. It was only a joke.”

“The room we looked at could have been anything,” she said. “It could have been a concoction. It could have been a dream, Alex.”

He looked at her and saw that she was smiling oddly, as if at the memory of something that warmed her slowly from the inside, like pudding. “But it was there, Blanche,” he insisted.

“And now it’s gone,” she said. “And that’s what matters. It matters that it was there, under the street, and now it’s gone, and we can…get on to other things.” It sounded to Alex like a plea. She looked away, as if embarrassed.

I care for you, he said, but it was to himself, in his head, in preparation for saying it aloud, and he didn’t say it aloud because it didn’t make any sense to him.

That night, Blanche threw her cool sheets off her cold legs, put on her terry-cloth robe, and her blue slippers, and padded to the window that overlooked her street. The rain has stopped, she told herself.

She smiled. Light from a streetlamp below bounced off her face, then off the window, and she saw her reflection. It was, she realized, the first time in a very long time that she’d seen her own smile.

Suddenly she wished she had a cat. Something to talk to. She didn’t know for sure what she’d say to it, but she knew that she would make sounds at it and that it would respond, in its way. Maybe she’d tell it what she’d been afraid to tell herself all these years, that there really was a world made up of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andys, toy trains and wooden blocks. A world that didn’t pinch. A world buried as deep within her as the house and its wonderful attic room were buried beneath the street. “And all I have to do is find it.”

She turned from the window, hesitated. Her smile broadened. She slipped out of her terry-cloth robe and her slippers. She dressed, left her apartment, and walked out into the night.

***

The following morning, a little before noon, a workman at the hole in the street, where the house had been, handed Alex a hardhat and told him, “The hole wasn’t closed up because we weren’t finished working in it.” He paused very briefly, then continued, “You know it’s going to rain, right?”

“Yes, I know,” Alex said.

“And you know,” the workman pressed on, “that if you get caught down there, and it’s raining hard, then you’ll probably drown. There are troughs you could walk into and never come out of—”

“I know that.”

The workman shrugged. “You got your lamp?”

Alex help up the battery-powered lantern the foreman of the work crew had given him.

“Good,” said the workman. “There ain’t no lights down there.”

“Yes, I know,” Alex said, and, a moment later, he was climbing down into the hole in the street on the same ladder Blanche had used eight hours before.

He could hear the other rescue workers. He could hear bits of conversation, grumbled curses, and he thought, as he listened, that those men could be anywhere in the maze of tunnels under the street, that he could head in their direction and get to where he’d thought they were and find that they were somewhere else entirely.
But he knew this, too, as he listened: he knew that they were not going to find Blanche. He knew that he was going to find her.
He could see their lights, then, and he realized they were moving in his direction. He stayed still. He said nothing. He did not call out to them, as he’d been told to do. For a few moments, he watched their lights—dulled by reflection from half a dozen wet stone walls—then he turned and walked in the other direction, through ankle-deep water. As he walked, the dull orange glow of his lantern showed him only the angles of dark walls intersecting other dark walls.

He walked this way—slowly, through the water—for ten minutes. Then he saw the house.

And, at that same moment, he heard from far behind him, “I found her. God, I found her!”

He smiled. No, he thought. No, you haven’t found her.

“Bring a light,” shouted the same voice. “Mine ain’t much good no more. Bring a light.”

The house was listing in the tunnel, like a ship starting to sink, the left side in one of the troughs he’d been warned about, so his lamp could not show him much of it—only the lower right-hand window, some of the right-hand wall, green clapboards training off into the darkness, the softly glistening front edge of the rusted tin roof. And all of the attic window, too, which he could see well because it was illuminated from within.

He heard, then, from far behind him, “It’s her. God, it’s her!”

And another voice answered, “How are we going to get to her?”

No, Alex called to them in his head, smiling. No, you’re mistaken. That’s not her, at all. No. She’s here!

He set his light down on a ledge near where the tunnel wall intersected the floor. He moved forward through the ankle-deep water, toward the little house under the street. He longed to peer into the attic window, but he couldn’t; even though the house was listing, the window was still too far above him. He stepped up to the door, saw the reflection of his lamplight on the brass knob, reached out, grasped the knob hard.

He heard from far behind him, “She’s rolled over. I can see her face!”

“Can you get to her?” another voice shouted.

“I don’t know,” answered the first voice. “I don’t know. Give me a line.”

Alex turned the knob. “Blanche?” he whispered. The door was locked. He heard from behind him, and above—at street level, he guessed—“Come on outa there!”

He shook his head. No, he thought. He stepped back from the door and peered up, through the gloom below the street, into the attic.

He saw the attic ceiling; he saw a shadow on it. The shadow moved.

And he watched as a small face, the face of a child, appeared at the attic window.

He heard from behind him, and above, “It’s raining. Get outa there!”

He smiled at the face of the child in the window. The face smiled back. “Blanche,” he whispered. The child’s lips mouthed his name. “Alex.”

From behind him, he heard again, “It’s raining, dammit! Get outa there!”

“We can’t. We ain’t got her. We ain’t got her, yet!”

“She’ll have to wait. Get out there, now!”

Alex stepped up to the front door of the house under the street. He grasped the knob. Turned it. The door opened.

Above, at street level, it rained. It was not a gentle rain, not comforting or restful, not the kind of rain that soothes and heals. It was a torrent, as if an ocean were draining.

Alex stepped into the house.

*****

F. W. Armstrong is the pseudonym of a New York State writer whose novels and short stories have been a staple of dark fantasy fans for decades.
(The House Under the Street was published previously in: Upstate Magazine, October 26, 1986
Shadows 10, edited by Charles Grant, Doubleday and Co., 1986
The Year’s Best Fantasy, First Edition, St. Martin’s Press, 1988
Whispers, an Online Journal of Horror, 1998)