The Architect

Prologue

Most houses and other types of constructions these days are designed by an architect, unless a person is way out in the sticks slapping lumber together. Years ago, according to eighteenth century Gothic novels, many buildings had secret chambers, false bookshelves, basement passages. That was part of the dark, haunted atmosphere the readers of those books were seeking. That darkness has many explanations, but we’ll just assume you have some familiarity with their psychological dimensions.

The existence alone of these hidden corridors ought to make persons looking at the drafts drawn up by their designers wonder if the lines and angles visible on the paper really showed all the parts of the buildings. Maybe there was another architect's plan that showed the complete structure? Maybe the architects’ secrets gave them access to the residences of nobles and aristocrats?

The next question, naturally, was where would the complete plans be stored? Who would have access to them besides the architects?

Really the only plan she had ever looked at up close was the one that they gave her when she was looking for a house in Maine. It had to be on the coast, because that was where the air was and because it was a border, the line between land and sea. Between the one and the other.

She always had to live on the edge, so the choice to reside on the coast was natural. It wasn't really a good thing, that need to be on the edge of what is and what is not. She didn't mean to, but it helped combat boredom or loneliness. It was something she had been taught, long ago.

She ran across the plan in a green folder sandwiched between a yellow one and a blue one on a high shelf in the crowded basement. She was always trying to reduce the amount of things there, but progress was slow. Slogging, even. Not everything belonged to her. Everything was hard to throw away.

Some impulse now made her unfold the document (she always thought technical things were very boring, lacking color) and place it on a table. She could have passed over it, but she didn’t. There was her little house, laid out before her in skeleton form.

Since she had been doing the searching and sorting in the basement, her gaze went first to that part of the blueprint. There were two halves, divided by the staircase that led to the first floor. The half that lay opposite where she was, where there was a lot of shelving, was where the furnace had been installed. The pipes led upward, to the main part of the house, but behind the heating unit was a small square opening in the cement wall. It was too small to be a window and of course the fact that it didn't look out onto open space confirmed that. 

There was no indication in the architect's plan as to how the opening was to be utilized. Still, now that she had moved over to the area to look more closely, she realized that hole had once been quite a bit larger. A person, moving carefully and ducking down slightly, could get through it. She saw that because the part of the basement wall that surrounded had blocks that had been arranged differently. It looked like when they block off a door or a big window in a medieval building in Europe. The mending of façades tends to be quite good, unobtrusive.

She knew she would either have to find out where the original opening had once led or she would have to sell the house. The need to know was too urgent when she was close to it. At the same time as she faced the challenge of excavating the square hole in her own basement, she chided herself for falling into the same trap as many characters and writers: they find an opening and enter it, walking or tumbling. For Alice it was a rabbit hole. And everybody knows about hobbits. For Gothic heroines, it was often a closet. For a character named Lavinia who was staying temporarily in Santiago de Compostela, it had been a closet door as well, one that had led beyond her modest bedsit.

She didn't care if it was a worn-out topic; she felt now that she too had to get into the area on the other side. Did it end right at the basement wall or did it open up into an unexpected region? (The latter possibility seemed more attractive.)

Look at it this way, she told herself, even Stephen King's latest novel, Fairy Tale, has a tunnel experience. A very long tunnel experience. Fairies and reality and stories that created us as children. Not an easy path to follow, but with rewards at the end.

Remember, sometimes architects want us to know these hidden passageways exst. Other times they don't. It depends, obviously. What do we do when presented by a threshold?

She began to prepare herself for the task of exploring the as yet untraversed beyond that began in her back yard, beneath what was now lawn. That meant consulting online and through the research desk at the local library about secret passageways created by architects. (It seemed there were more in literature than in real construction.) Some secret passageways were used by groups to escape from pursuers in antiquity. Some were metaphorical, like the Underground Railroad. Some were pure fantasy, but also scary, like in Alice's case. Or repurposed, like the catacombs of Paris came to be used for refuge. There were legends everywhere, even in her town.

Once she had a catalogue of tunnels and the like, she began to study the geography of the area of the Maine coast where she lived. There was a high water table and much of the area was lacking soil. That much she knew. She needed to talk to hydrogeologists and other experts to feel really confident about what lay in her back yard and the adjoining properties. 

It began to seem as if her back yard was where her unconscious was located, as if it had some control over who she was when outside, away from the basement and its contents (which she was currently trying to purge).

She went on to study the presence of the people who were indigenous to the area, even though there was far too little information available. So much had been destroyed or removed around the part once known as Pejepscot. New place names had been inscribed on the landscape. What remnants might still remain were long-buried beneath landfill, northern types of rugged vegetation, or silt.

She was not going to attempt to excavate the way the main character did in Shawshank Redemption. That was risky and too slow. No prison guard would come and punish her for trying to dig her way out of her own basement, but she wasn't sure how the hole would stay open. There were too many stories of mines that had collapsed on people who knew what they were doing. She did not. And she was beginning to feel she was in over her head. It was hard to breathe. Her skin prickled and for several night she had only fractured sleep, in spurts, flooded with claustrophobia. Yet images flashed through her mind.

Sleep on it.

Edward Hopper. Approaching a City. She was approaching something, like the eye of the spectator approached the tunnel of a train in a nameless city. It wasn't good. Like the painting, it was beginning to feel like there was no escape. Sad isolation, the Hopper had called it. So why would she want to go there, creep under the ground level (next to lots of worms) beneath the deck, through stone, to a brook full of slippery algae?

She awoke, aware of what she had to do. Most people reading this will be thinking she had to push ahead with her plan, brave the unknown, face danger. That is the aesthetic nowadays. She felt differently. She no longer had the need to rush or clash with things around her. She had never felt so wise, so happy. All of which explains the rest of this story.

After. A well-made cup of espresso, which she drank while watching the sun rise, she headed to the basement so she could say what she needed to say. Drawing within three feet of the square opening that had once been something else, she spoke:

I have seen how the architect left you out of the plan for this house. There must have been a reason for it. After all, this is neither a castle nor a palace with treasure and wealth. There is nothing hidden beyond your four sides.

Then she turned and calmly ascended the steps to the first floor. She had made the decision not to let another person lead her search while perhaps making fun of her gullibility. She would be her own architect, although that sounded like a rather childish thing to say. It wasn’t, though, because at this point in her life doing her own independent construction seemed like a monumental task. It would require a very serious, coherent effort. A plan.

She needed very little time to figure things out. She knew this realization had come to others, too. She knew that in order to continue to fit in the world, she no longer needed to take things from it, no longer needed to forge a path. Those paths had been forged. No, she needed to take what she had and give it to others, let them figure out what to do with her things. Books, paintings, certainly clothing, were up for grabs. She found it easy to rid herself of things, allowing them to be useful to others. 

From this point on her life was different. How is something better left for another story. Suffice it to say she had found something she’d been seeking for a long time.

None of this, however, caused her to forget about the square opening in the basement wall, just behind the furnace. If it hadn’t been for that space, invisible to the architect but not to her, she wouldn’t have started trying to discover its mystery and ended up discovering that it was not her mystery to solve. She did not need the trauma it meant, the uncertainty, the sense of helplessness.

She still felt the need to recognize what the anonymous hole in the wall had offered her. It seemed important to recognize that perhaps it had been the portal to something now buried, lost in time. Something she did not need to know and could not justify spending thousands of dollars on excavating. It felt as if the square and she had become friends.

After further ruminating about the situation and how she felt toward the hole, she came to a solution, simple, frugal, respectful. She got a few containers of paint from her studio and with almost no effort, painted a door frame around the too-small opening. There was a handle as well.

And that was it. Except she also installed a glass pane in the square that was too small to be a window and was useless. After all, the only view it had was the dirt of the backyard.

Her story, meanwhile, was finally being designed by her.

Author’s Note: I am aware that this story is still in rudimentary form and plan to address the stylistic issues at a later date.

Editor’s Note: Ignore the author. She’s making up excuses.