the immediate feeling is one of transition, out of the finished-wood floor
and modern-wet-bar social environment into one of decay.  merely opening the
slightly off-white door with its polished brass series of locks makes one
wonder what is being kept out of the rest of the house; what, from within.
   the door opens and one is confronted with a musty odor,
tendrils of overpowering humidity...despite the thrumming dehumidifier and
furnace heard below.  a quick laugh at the mops hanging on the wall is in
order, as they were feared objects of early maturity, denoting times
of punishment by hard labor.  then on down the long ago painted, now worn
stairs of wood, past the cracking, peeling plaster lining the walls of the
place.  advancing, descending, passing on the right tools, hardware, on the
left, coming eye level with the innards of the secret workers of the big house,
pipes, vents, tubes--the traveller becomes more accustomed to the gloom and
still persistent humid mustiness.  the stairs being of standard height, the
base is achieved in short order, where one may note the signs of playgrounds 
of youth, in the crayoned marking "BATLIFT UP o".  
  for indeed, this place was not ominous in the days of most carefree inno-
cence, rather, it held undiscovered treasures, things assumed 'ancient'
and definitely out of the ordinary, to a 5-year-old and his best friend.  
still remnant from those days, only recently accidentally rediscovered is
a cabinet full of trinkets which held great value at that ripe age.  but that
still lies within...
  as one's eyes grow more accustomed to the dim light peeking in through the 
former coal chute, one notes the menagerie of semi-useless material, spread
out amidst a garden of debris.  certainly, at various times, various stimuli
were incentive to attempt to keep the place in some semblance of order, how-
ever, now, it is a decidedly dank, cobwebbed, unkempt horror to any good
homemaker (mother doesnt venture down alone).  the cobwebs exist mainly in the
corners and among the artifacts, which tend to group themselves near the 
walls in clusters of safety and sawdust, crust and condensation.  the first
sight, as previously mentioned, is lit with the vague spillage inward of light
through a cracked and dirty coal-chute covering, which only further contri-
butes to the eerie ambiance.  the ancient pipes tend to be either rusted over
or layered in deposits probably stemming from the early days of the now 80-
year-old rooms..
  advancing, one might run into the low-hanging bare light bulb that has never
worked, in a quest to avoid the edges of the room where slats peek and even
boldly maifest themselves through chinks and gaping holes in the wall's plaster
facing, itself an indiscriminate neutral color.  as one treads under the 
somewhat low-hanging pipes, past the rotting lumber and chunks of fallen 
plaster (neatly gathered into piles from times well past), two opposing door-
ways manifest themselves through the gloom..  peeking in, of course, one is 
greeted with darkness and more dust, even dust in the air, and the skitterings-
about of various 'little friends' as they avoid the echoes of foreign
footsteps. 
  the shafts of light that do penetrate into those side rooms reveal, actually,
very little of interest; some shelves filled with more hardware, paint, mis-
cellany, the innards of childhood experiments:  disemboweled telephones, glas-
ses filled with residue of some assuredly vile concoction, some confused mass
of scribbled notes; and the everpresent bodies of the deceased, insects of all
varieties.  a lonely bicycle wheel accompanied by debris of a more detectable
nature outside, in the room on the right;  things are present there that one
might associate with productivity in a tired, old sort of way.  on the left,
things which might be straight out of a mad scientist's lab..all enough to
pique interest without capturing it long enough or well enough to tempt entry,
without the aid of some light source, conveniently never-present in these
parts.
  dead ahead, as one passes through the ranks, lies a strange beast:  a winch-
looking thing, apparently rusted in place on the cement floor, with iron
cabling protruding up and through the ceiling, in two different directions.
closer inspection reveals that it isnt quite rusted over, and somewhere on it,
caked over with the signature of the passage of time, is the word 'lift'..an
elevator motor as old as the house itself, diesel powered, and indeed, in 
somewhat working condition.  were one to ascend with the cable, it might be
discovered that the elevator lives on the second floor as the closet of a room
emptied by the departure of a teenage boy.  as the motor is given attention,
a suddem *whoompf* accompanied by drop in air pressure might assault you, due
to the immensity of the most modern appointment in the room:  the gas furnace.
rather an antithesis to the decay, its at least non-decrepit appearance might
be assuring if it werent for all those rows of tiny blue flames and the fact
that it tends to belch fire on startup if it doesnt catch immediately...
  as you hit the back wall of the long room, it is for the first time unclut-
tered.  the wall in its full glory of descending shades of dirt and scum, no
doubt the result of countless floods in years before sealant was correctly
applied to the new source of light:  a window in the western wall.  this win-
dow, while at least 50% obscured by a variety of films, is not especially in
a state of disrepair, and illuminates the remainder of the room quite nicely.
  as one gets into the true body of the main room, just around the corner
lurks a pair of legs dangling from the ceiling.  the legs, dangling freely
with the feet at about chest level, are not decayed or even dirty...they
actually belong to a chest-high fishing/wading outfit which lives there when
not in use.  while the legs themselves are nothing special, it's just the
atmosphere a pair of legs hanging about contributes...
  once youve reached the back wall, there is the even more foreboding crawl
space, a gaping hole at shoulder level with nary a drop of light within.  
barring speculation on it, one looks around,  crowded by the furnace, a
small sink in the corner, the strangely bright white water heater, and the
elevator motor.  looking to the floor, it could be noted that the residue of 
leakages past remains, along with quite a few leaves scattered along the
floor and piled in the corners, a result of the tidal waves that seeped in
under the ill-fitting back door...which is the next focus of the investigation.
  it was mentioned before that the inside door had locks...and so it did, on
account of this less resolute door.  a descent into the chamber can be made
from from outside the building as well. a very steep stairwell leads into a con-
crete-bounded cavity next to the house, a dry-on-top, mulch-inducing on bottom 
deposit of leaves to rival the mulchheap a few yards up-westward.  the rickety
screen door no longer swings to without the help of a crowbar, and the wooden
door to the inside could most likely be kicked in by my (little) sister...

  thus is the territory of fantasy, eerie and spooky in the echoes of time
it produces.  in the days of innocence, it was a haven, an inspired
and inspiring world to explore with all its oddities and anomalies from
the staid world upstairs, and of course, its enjoyers too young to worry
much about the worlds of dark fantasy beyond the wicked witch of the west.
in those days, it was a fortress, a laboratory, a stage to all the world,
performing through us...happiness was a place where mother wouldn't
come and disturb the fantasies and secrets of youth.  now, looking back, it
has an air of eerieness and even intimidation;  evidence that innocence
isnt ageless and perfect.  innocence is in fact the beauty that that des-
cent held, as age advanced, its image was tarnished, ever eroded, by first
assignments by higher authority to cleaning duties in the nether-regions, 
then by the creativity of an openminded teenager into something weird and
scary...something fed by the fantasies of other people and the freshly awa-
kened creative mind of a young man.  fear has never been an air that the 
place gave off;  rather, that of the slightly out-of-tune piano, the near
miss of the sensation of normality.
  the atmosphere is suitably described as an absolute description, above.  it
is the passing of time that makes the place such a descent into the unusual.
through the veils of time are memories worn away, but in this case, the place
itself has been eroded from the childish happiness into the eerie oddness that
experience in the world of the jaded has given it.  the eeriness exists not
only in the changing of the place but the _ability_ of a place to change, not
of its own accord or of times accord so much as through the eyes of the be-
holder, which is the only way a place ever exists anyway...the spookiness of
life, closer to earth, exaggerated through the extremeness of the atmos-
phere as well as the locale, the extremely distinct fuzziness making it easier
to blur the lines already smudged by years, the intensity of the weird sens-
ation created present day.