Other Side of the Dryer

"Alright, I'm done for a while," Steven said as he pushed against the desk to roll his chair away. "I've hit a mental block and I can't come up with the next part of this outline."

"What was that?" Andrea asked as she pulled out her right earbud. She glanced over the back of the couch at him before returning her attention to her laptop as she typed away.

Steven stood up and stretched. "I can't sit here for any longer, I have got to do something. It has been six weeks since we started working from home. Six weeks!" He heaved an exasperated sigh.

Andrea giggled and looked up at him, "That's what you said yesterday. And the day before that, too!"

"Why don't we make a run to the grocery store?" He asked.

"We did that Monday," She replied, still typing away.

"What day is it?" He asked as he pulled out his phone to check.

"Wednesday," She said.

"All of my days are running together at this point," he sighed and shoved his phone back in his pocket.

"Why don't you go explore the house like you've been meaning to? We have only been here for a couple months now. Surely there's a few nooks and crannies you haven't found yet?" She suggested. They had purchased a modestly sized home. A ground floor, an upper floor, and a basement. Plenty of space to find hidden corners.

"You know, that's not a bad idea. I'll start upstairs." He stepped toward the couch and reached over it to give Andrea a hug.

"Don't get lost!" She laughed.

Steven spent the next hour looking around, hoping to find something of interest. He had searched the master bedroom and bathroom, the storage room, and the attic. He had found nothing of note until he made it to the closet of the guest bedroom on the second floor. When he stepped inside, he heard a creak. The entire house had hardwood floors, and each room had its own creaks here and there but this one was different. It sounded louder, more distinct. Maybe even hollow. 

"Was this rug here when we moved in?" He spoke softly to himself. The widow they had bought the house from had left it partially furnished. A few rugs, one of the couches, and curiously enough, the dryer. He never got the story as to why she had left the appliance, but it still worked, and it was one less thing they had to worry about when they moved in.

As Steven lifted the rug and prodded at the floorboards beneath he noticed three of them seemed to be loose. Driven by sheer boredom and cabin fever, he ran downstairs to grab a flathead screwdriver. He quickly returned to the closet and began to pry up the floorboard, hoping to find something exciting underneath. The three loose boards were connected, so he made sure to be careful as he pried them up together.

Underneath he was greeted by what looked to be insulation. He kneeled down to brush it aside and found that it was much thicker than he expected. He got down on his hands and knees and began to reach down farther into the whole in the closet. "I can't believe it's this deep. The laundry room ceiling should be right here," he muttered to himself. As he started to consider pulling his arm back out, he lost his balance and fell into the hole.

He let out a yell as he fell. After falling for what felt like ages, he landed softly. Steven let out a grunt as he opened his eyes to see that he had landed amidst a pile of socks. Lots and lots of socks. In fact, it looked as though he was surrounded by socks. Socks of all kinds, shapes, and sizes. Colorful socks, bland socks, patterned socks. He recognized a few of the socks that lay at the tops of the piles.

He slowly slid off of the pile and took in his surroundings. He stood in a rather large sized room. He could see four walls, and a ceiling. He could see the hole in the ceiling where he had fallen through. The floor, however, was nearly covered in socks. In the center of the room, there was another hole, full of what Steven now recognized as lint, not insulation. Up against the wall directly across from him was a desk with a small lamp on it, as well as a journal and a stack of papers.

He walked across the room to the desk, careful not to fall into the second hole in the floor. He turned on the lamp and began to look over the stack of paper. Some of the papers were diagrams of the closet and the room, some of them were of the dryer and the laundry room. 

He let out a low whistle. "Wow," he said aloud. “Seems like the previous owners left behind more than a rug.”

Steven picked up the journal and read the name inscribed on the cover: Sebastian Bean. “Where have I heard that name before?” He asked himself. He would need to confirm it with Andrea, but he was certain that the name was the same as the last name as the widow. Steven imagined this journal was likely written by the widow's husband. The widow's husband had been a professor of some sort before he had passed, which would help explain the detailed notes that sat before him.

The journal itself was full of theories about the nature of the hole in the closet floor. What he gathered while skimming the notes is that the professor considered it to be a portal of sorts into a pocket within the house. A pocket in-between the upstairs closet and the downstairs laundry room. There was an entire page dedicated toward explaining why socks were sucked into the pocket and not any other article of clothing. What caught Steven's attention was the dozen or so pages that suggested this was not the only portal of its kind, and that there may be others connected to the very room he stood in. Steven's excitement grew the more read through the journal. Gone was the boredom and the heavy case of cabin fever. He had found something far more interesting than he had anticipated. 

Once he had finished skimming through the journal, he set it back on the desk. He straightened the papers and then took a short step back, satisfied. "Now I just need to find my way out of here."

Steven turned around to face the hole in the floor. It took him a minute to build up the courage to jump into the hole. After many failed starts and near leaps, he paused near the desk and took a deep breath. He then exhaled and took off toward the hole. Once he got close he jumped upward, tucking his knees up to his chest and hugging himself tight as he dove into the hole.

After another eon of falling, he fell out of the dryer in a cloud of lint and socks, just as the diagram had suggested. He tumbled outward and landed with a thud on the hardwood floor.

“Are you okay back there?” Andrea called from the living room.

Steven quickly picked himself up and dusted himself off, and then ran to where Andrea still sat.

"Did you find anything exciting upstairs?" She asked. “And where did all that lint come from?” She added, eyeing him up and down.

"Andrea, you won't believe what I found!"