Strange Highways

ordinary basement? Ten? Twelve?
     Not this many, surely.
     Quickly, quietly, I descended six steps. When I stopped, twelve steps were illuminated ahead of me. Dry, aged boards. Nailheads gleamed here and there. The same mottled walls.
     Unnerved, I looked back up at the door, which was thirteen steps and one landing above me. The sunlight in the kitchen looked warm, inviting - and more distant than it should have been.
     My hands had begun to sweat. I switched the flashlight from one hand to the other, blotting my palms on my slacks.
     The air had a vague lime odor and an even fainter underlying scent of mold and corruption.
     I hurriedly and noisily descended six more steps, then eight more, then another eight, then six. Now forty-one rose at my back - and twelve were still illuminated below me.
     Each of the steep steps was about ten inches high, which meant that I had gone approximately three stories underground. No ordinary basement had such a long flight of stairs.
     I told myself that this might be a bomb shelter, but I knew that it was not.
     As yet, I had no thought of turning back. This was our house, damn it, for which we had paid a small fortune in money and a larger fortune in time and sweat, and we could not live in it with such a mystery beneath our feet, unexplored. Besides, when I was twenty-two and twenty-three, far from home and in the hands of enemies, I had known two years of terror so constant and intense that my tolerance for fear was higher than that of most men.
     One hundred steps farther, I stopped again because I figured I was ten stories below ground level, which was a milestone requiring some contemplation. Turning and peering up, I saw the light at the open kitchen door far above me, an opalescent rectangle that appeared to be one-quarter the size of a postage stamp.
     Looking down, I studied the eight bare wooden steps illuminated ahead of me - eight, not the usual twelve. As I had gone deeper, the flashlight had become less effective. The batteries were not growing weak; the problem was nothing as simple or explicable as that. Where it passed through the lens, the beam was as crisp and bright as ever. But the darkness ahead was somehow thicker, hungrier , and it absorbed the light in a shorter distance than it had done farther up.
     The air still smelled vaguely of lime, though the scent of decay was now nearly the equal of that more pleasant odor.
     This subterranean world had been preternaturally quiet except for my own footsteps and increasingly heavier breathing. Pausing at the ten-story point, however, I thought I heard something below. I held my breath, stood motionless, and listened. I was half sure that I detected strange, furtive sounds a long way off - whispering and oily squelching noises - but I could not be certain. They were faint and short-lived. I could have been imagining them.
     After descending ten more steps, I came to a landing at last, where I discovered opposing archways in the walls of the stairwell. Both openings were doorless and unornamented, and my light revealed a short stone corridor beyond each. Stepping through the arch on my left, I followed the narrow passage for perhaps fifteen feet, where it ended at the head of another staircase, which went down at a right angle to the stairs that I had just left.
     Here, the odor of decay was stronger. It was reminiscent of the pungent fumes of rotting vegetable matter.
     The stink was like a spade, turning up long-buried memories. I had encountered precisely this stench before, in the place where I had been imprisoned during my twenty-second and twenty-third years. There, they had sometimes served meals largely composed of rotting vegetables - mostly turnips, sweet potatoes, and other tubers. Worse, the garbage that we wouldn't eat was thrown into the sweatbox, a tin-roofed pit in the ground where recalcitrant prisoners were punished with solitary confinement. In that filthy hole, I was forced to sit in foot-deep slime reeking so strongly of decay that, in heat-induced delusion, I sometimes became convinced that I was dead already and that what I smelled was the relentlessly progressing corruption of my own lifeless flesh.
     "What's going on?" I asked, expecting and receiving no answer.
     Returning to the main stairs, I passed through the archway on the right. At the end