When I Next Visited, There Was A Painting Of A Lighthouse In The Window

Throughout quarantine, I’ve noticed a frequent theme in my dreams. They involve my grandmother’s house in Augusta. Specifically, how the house had evolved with our absence.

With each dream, I was completely alone in the house. Given free rein to the location, my natural instinct was to go for the attic door. The attic was the only area I never got to see during our frequent visits, I’m not sure if it was from it being small or just the fact there wasn’t anything that interesting in it. I think I saw one of my uncles open the latch once, revealing the collapsible ladder that led up into the cramped space. The roof of the house isn’t that high, so there’s probably just a little bit of crawling room there. It took a bit of fighting to get the attic door to budge this time around, probably from years of neglect. After some effort I finally made it crack, nearly getting a bruised eye from the collapsible ladder. Looking into the attic, I saw, instead of a cramped room, immediately before me, a rickety wooden spiral staircase that went upward out of my point of view. I have a fear of heights and was anxious, but one moment I was looking up at the staircase and the next I was already several feet up, ascending it.

The steps creaked and this made me nervous as well. Despite my fears I continued and came to a place where older steps had already collapsed. The spiral formation of the steps wrapped around a concrete interior wall and I couldn’t tell the full height of the stairwell or how much further I had to go to reach the top. At first, it was completely dark but some light started to bleed in on the higher flights. The walls were also closing in on the steps somewhat. It was from this that I figured that the attic wasn’t actually an attic, but a small lighthouse. My guess was confirmed when I reached the top, finding the steps led directly up to a tiny floorless room. Shelving occupied the lower walls, above which were windows looking out over the area where the house resides, but I had never observed this lighthouse from outside the house. Looking through the shelves, I found one small book. Everything in the room was clearly left untouched for years and the book was on the verge of falling apart. It seemed to be a journal, but it was all written in cursive and I don’t know how to read cursive. Trying to make out a few words, I noticed out one of the windows that a black car had pulled up to the long driveway, the house set in reality on a steep hill. The car looked nothing like any of the cars my family members drove, and something about it felt off. I tried to close the journal, but it started to fall apart in the process, pages falling through the open steps down to the bottom of the stairwell. I had no clue to whom the car belonged and didn’t know which was best, to tell them to get lost or hide and hope they didn’t find me. I knew for certain they would tell something was up when they came in to find the gaping attic door, so I decided the best option was to close the door behind me and hide there until they left. I’m not sure how that would’ve worked out. What I do know is that I did the worst thing I could’ve done. I tripped. People can die falling down flights of stairs. I’m not sure if that’s what happened to me, I woke up before I could find out.

This next part is the product of several dreams that had built up in that short frame of time, I’m not sure where some began and others fused. One of my earliest dreams about my grandmother’s house actually involved the basement, where I found an angular crawlspace. The opening was just large enough to fit a person while it got more narrow the deeper it went. From that experience though, the basement evolved significantly, literally expanding.

The basement doorway is in the same hallway as the attic ceiling door, and other doors that lead to the main bathroom, a closet and the three bedrooms.

Opening the basement door, I saw that the steps had changed. Instead of being covered with brightly colored carpet, they were exposed steel gratings. The top of the staircase was illuminated by the lights in the hallway. This staircase had no walling around it, with a thin set of rails as the lone means to prevent people from falling off. As with the attic stairs, they didn’t look exactly stable. As I progressed down this stairwell, I realized that it was also a spiral. At least this time around I could get a loose idea of how much further I had to go to reach the ground. From the top I had a full view of the basement, and just how much it mutated since my last visit. It was impossibly large, the ceiling wasn’t even at the top of the steps, but extended up far beyond where the roofing of the house would’ve stopped. Mid 20th century style, striped wallpaper and a carpeted floor had combined with aspects of a parking garage. The top was all concrete, with rectangular windows providing light for the ground level area. The ground level area was decently lit. It was just enough where you didn’t need to feel around the walls. The rest of it was pitch black. Along the wall left of the stairs was a long line of doors, at least ten. Most of the room had effectively expanded to accommodate for all these doors, one of which led into the angular crawlspace. The doors appeared to open onto pitch black on the other end, but some of the rooms would have light when you entered.

I figured that at least a few of these doors would lead to rooms belonging to the real life layout. The basement, in non-dream time, has two doors on the left-hand side, leading into a storage room and hallway. The hallway also had a small bathroom, but it is rarely used, and the last time I was down there the light in the bathroom stopped working. Going through the first door, it did go into the hallway like I expected. As with the bathroom, the lights in the hallway were dead. I remembered the space well enough though to make a straight line to the door that went from the hall into the storage room. Upon entering, I found the storage room expanded, at least twice its original size, the ceiling reaching high. Unlike the rest of the nonexistent rooms, the storage space had lighting. It was minimal, just an exposed lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, but it was adequate. The walls were lined with, in large part, DVDs and CDs, and there were shelves in the middle of the room that split it off into smaller subsections. I returned to the main basement, and had a look in through the next several doors. They also led into storage rooms, all of which were impossibly large given how densely packed the doors were next to one another. Lighting was reserved for just the first storage space, the rest were pitch black beyond the first several shelves that were just in view from the doorways. Somewhere around the third or fourth storage room, I heard one of my uncles call out.

“Hey, check this out.”

He was a media collector for a while, keeping DVDs and old PC games in their original cardboard boxes. I would have followed his voice but I wasn’t sure if what I heard was actually him. Something was shambling deep in the storage room, wandering around clearly confused. It knocked over one of the shelves. Then it froze for a moment before deciding to run back in circles around the deeper shelves, far away from sunlight.

My second visit to the basement, I decided to go directly for the door furthest away from the stairwell. All the doors were already opened, and though all seemed to open onto similar dark rooms, this room was even darker than the other storage rooms. There weren’t any shelves visible in this one, and as I entered a spacial anomaly occurred so that I wound up in an outdoor area. I was facing a small dock that looked over a lake, an island barely visible in the distance. A small motorized boat fit for just one person was patiently waiting at the dock. I don’t know how to operate boats of any variety, and I don’t know how to swim, but I still managed to get to the island. I still got to that island anyway. In contrast with the area with the dock (which was largely untouched), the island was littered with manmade rubble. Large chunks of grass were missing, with most of the plant life being only what grew from the rubble. I have some memories of seeing a kind of carnival children’s play park that was sinking into the ground, but the most clear artifact in memory was the car park. After wandering around for a bit, I found this open field of concrete with dozens of abandoned cars spread out across it. The top part of a tent was spread out over the slab to umbrella the cars, which were already rotting to the point that moss and other greenery had somehow eaten through the tires and glass in the windows. From here I also noticed how most of the island was covered in fog.