The words were carved into the lintel above the cellar door, shallow enough that several coats of paint had nearly erased them. A historian friend noticed them during dinner and spent ten delighted minutes tracing the letters with his fingertip. Ealra worulda woruld, he translated, something close to the world of all worlds.
He called it an old religious flourish, the sort of phrase that could suggest eternity, and we treated the inscription as one more charming irregularity in a house full of them.
That winter the cellar door began opening at 2:13 every morning.
The first few times we blamed the latch. Then our daughter began dreaming about a corridor beneath the house. She described doors opening onto our kitchen with different wallpaper, our bedroom occupied by strangers who resembled us, and a nursery containing a cradle we had never owned. The dog would flatten himself against the opposite wall whenever the cellar opened and remain there until dawn.
I eventually went down.
The stairs continued well beyond the depth of the foundation. My flashlight picked out a passage lined on both sides with doors identical to ours. Behind one stood our renovated kitchen in afternoon sunlight. Behind another was the kitchen as it had looked before we bought the house, with a family eating silently around a table. A third showed the same room burned almost to the joists while someone moved through the smoke setting plates for dinner.
Our historian friend returned reluctantly. This time he spent hours with photographs of the inscription before admitting that his original translation had been too comfortable. The phrase, in this context, appeared to describe a place rather than bless one. Whoever carved it may have been labeling the threshold.
We sealed the cellar door the following spring. By November the nails had worked themselves loose.
We no longer go downstairs. Most nights the passage remains quiet, though sometimes we hear our cupboards opening somewhere beneath us and the unmistakable clatter of our dishes being washed. Once, our daughter heard herself laughing below the floorboards despite sitting beside us at the table.
What troubles me more are the occasional sounds overhead: footsteps crossing the attic in rooms our house does not possess, suggesting the worlds may not all be arranged beneath one another after all.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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