We entered through the basement and what a basement as it stretched the entire length of the house. The front was a two-car garage, but then it went on like a hangar.

"Look at this room," our real estate agent Jon said. The desperation felt almost threatening. He had shown us over a hundred houses by this point. We didn't want to settle. There was something better out there, we knew. Something more than heated square feet and school districts.

We paced to the end.

"What kind of stuff do you have?" Jon asked.

I didn't answer, but my wife offered, "Normal stuff."

"You can store it down here. That's for sure."

In the back corner there was some strange light. When I looked up, a square of the ceiling was missing and disorientingly I could see up into the first floor bathroom, the showerhead aimed at me.

"Easy fix," Jon said.

"Really," my wife said. "There's no floor."

"You just need a new basin. I could do it," he said. "Hour tops."

Inside the house proper, the kitchen had the requisite granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. The open concept had hardwoods. It would make any HGTV denizen happy. The only surprise was no matter what room we searched we couldn't find the floorless shower. We counted a bath and a half but none with a view to the basement.

On the landing to the second floor, my wife pointed to the stairs that continued up. "This house didn't look three-stories from the outside, four with the basement."

"Finished attic space," Jon said.

We went up to find a large empty room with shag carpet and at the other end another stairwell.

"Where does that go?" she asked.

"Think of the possibilities of this bonus room," Jon said.

My wife went up and I followed, Jon trailing. The steps went from the same dark shag to cracked wood. We came out in what might be a master with a king-sized bed. The walls were round. In the center there was a spiral staircase going up.

"How's that possible?" she asked.

"You never know what you'll find on a house hunt," Jon said. "Maybe we should go back down."

My wife didn't want to, but I convinced her. As we did, the steps went not from wood to shag but to metal, and they began to curve. By the end, we were in a tight spiral that ended back in the round room with the king-sized bed.

We went up this time, but the steps didn't change. They ended in a library, a room with a lot of bookshelves, anyway—there were no books. A ladder ran on a rail, and it was lined up with a hatch in the ceiling.

"Anyone feel like going down again?" my wife asked.

I climbed the ladder and poked my head up the hatch. It was a long hallway. We went up. We went down. Some of the rooms were the same. Some were similar but off—a semi-circular king-sized bedroom. One galley kitchen had windows, but it must have been dark outside by then, nothing visible beyond the glass panes that we couldn't pry free.

"How long have we been in here?"

The phones said hours, but refused to say much else, the GPS telling us we were in the middle of a lake. The calls we made could not be heard on the other end. By two days, the batteries were all dead.

We drank out of bathroom faucets. When we lost the bathrooms, we peed and shat in corners. We ate the breath mints at the bottom of my wife's purse. Jon slept with my wife. Jon and I shared our childhood trauma and got close.

We were resting, backs to a paneled wall. "What do you think?" Jon asked. "Will you take it?" His weak smile drifted from a secret place he hid from us.

"It's home," I said.

S. Craig Renfroe Jr. is the author of YOU SHOULD GET THAT LOOKED AT, a collection of stories. He lives in Charlotte.

Read his postcard.





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