The door creaked open slightly.

Moving as softly as a kitten, I slowly treaded out of my room into the hallway, shutting the door behind me and muffling it with a towel to prevent any sound. My eyes widened to accommodate to the pitch black hallway, and I started my tip-toe adventure to the laundry room with a single goal in mind: chocolate.

This was not the first time I had done this, and I doubted it would be the last. My late night video game sessions often meant my sugar cravings came deep into the darkest hours of the day. My wristwatch read, in luminescent ruby lettering, 2:46 AM. If my parents somehow discovered me awake at this hour, the descent of the gods themselves would not be enough to save me from the beating that would undoubtedly follow.

However, I was determined to escape undetected. Nine minutes of stealthy treading later, I found myself in the laundry room, and the gentle, calm snores of my parents from the adjacent room confirmed my success. I made my way towards the laundry basket, where my secret box of Oreos calmly waited for me.

However, just three steps short of arriving at my coveted Oreo stash, I halted suddenly. The warm, fluffy carpet under my feet was no longer the only thing I could feel. Under the littlest toe on my left foot, the cold, evil touch of metal travelled up my nerves. I glanced down and detected a glint of metal in the carpet, just adjacent to my toe.

Moving as slowly as I had until then, I bent down and tugged at the carpet next to my toe. To my surprise, dread, and utter bewilderment, the carpet readily came out in a large square shape, to reveal an unnervingly large metal square on the floor

A bullet train of emotions speared through my mind: dread at what my parents would do if they found a huge chunk of carpet missing, confusion as to what this square could mean, since I had lived in the house for eleven years and never seen anything under the carpet except for dusty plywood, and also an unexplainable sense of childish curiosity, the kind of feeling the only hits in the middle of the night, when your mind craves mystery. I wanted to know what was underneath.

The few rays of moonlight coming from the vents in the corners of the room allowed me to see the corners of the square. Upon inspection, the square seemed to be a door, with grooves on the side permitting someone to lift it open. I hesitantly put my fingers on the grooves. The cold touch of metal almost stung me, making me stifle a sharp exhale. My heartbeat tripled.

I took a second to think. It was well past midnight; accidentally awaking my parents would put me in an extremely undesirable situation, to say the least. But some unexplainable voice deep inside my head kept nagging me to do it.

Against my better judgement, I pried open the door.

It was mercilessly heavy, and took every bit of my muscular power to lift the thick metal lid and rest it noiselessly against the wall.

Underneath the square was darkness.
I could see nothing. Just pitch black air. Despite their efforts, the rays of moonlight from the vents revealed no secrets. I had absolutely no perception of how deep it was. It was only empty space. I slowly, cautiously lowered my arm into the door space, in an attempt to judge the depth.

And I fell.

In my mind, the space would not have been more than one or one and a half metres deep. But as soon as I descended my arm into the ebony space, my whole body lost balance and I tumbled ungainly into the hole.

I must have been falling for two or three seconds, with nothing but intense fear flowing through my mind. Eventually, I landed on solid ground. Pain impaled me like a knife, and a sharp burning sensation possessed every limb in my body. I had managed to fall on my back only, and my head took minimal damage, which was fortuitous. With my back on the ground, I stared upwards. I could vaguely make out the square pattern of the hole I fell through. It seemed miles, miles away. Gingerly, I tried to get up.

Thankfully, I was able to move my upper body enough to assume a sitting position, but not without the feeling of boulders weighing on my limbs and chest the whole time. I let out an audible groan, no longer concerned about stealth, since my body thumping against the floor might have woken up my parents already.

But the floor of what? For the first time, I tried to survey my surroundings, but the absence of light meant I could see nothing but pitch black. I had no idea where I was. Our house didn’t have a basement, meaning I had to be in some undiscovered room under our laundry room. A sinking feeling settled in my rapidly beating heart.

How would I get out of there?

It was dead silent; even the rustling sound of outside trees and bushes that I could hear from the laundry room was absent here. My sporadic breaths and the thuds of my heartbeat were the only sounds in the room.

Painstakingly, I got to my feet. By some stroke of good fortune, my legs were perfectly fine, indicating my upper body took all the impact.

I started moving forward. The surface under my bare feet was rough and sandy, as if it was made of cement. A sinister chill ascended my spine. I felt like a protagonist in a horror movie: stuck in an unknown setting with no place to go. But then, just a few steps later, my foot hit a solid wall.

From the tiniest of light rays entering whatever small underground room I was in, I could distinctly make out the pattern of a staircase. Out of the ocean of panic in my mind, a small fish leaped out. Was this my way back up?

My chest resisting every step, I started to ascend the staircase. What must not have been more than two minutes felt like two hours. Flares of agony burst through my ribs with every step, and I could picture the ugly wince forming on my face.

Eventually, I reached the top of the staircase. I had gotten to about ceiling height, with my head brushing the rough cement. I tentatively reached out my hand and touched the ceiling above the stairs. With a jolt, I realized that it was an identical metal square to the one I fell through. This meant I could open it.

Using my shoulders and head, since my arms were likely to snap off if I applied force to them, I pushed upwards. The metal lid flopped open and banged hard on what appeared to be, to my relief, the floor of my house. The noise was muffled, though, thanks to the carpet. I popped my head above to see… my bed stand.

Least of all was my surprise at the fact that there was a doorway to a hidden basement in my room, because the writhing pain in my upper body demanded my immediate attention. In two minutes, I flopped my body up onto the carpet floor, and used my feet to slam the door shut. At this point, my parents had probably already awoken and were on their way to exterminate me, but the excruciating agony in my chest didn’t let me think of anything else.

I never even got to eat my Oreos.