More and more, reports have surfaced of odd occurrences involving the sudden appearance of elevator panels, doorways, ladders, and the like, all of which have in common the fact that they disappear as suddenly as they appeared.

These strange thresholds of one kind or another have in common something else: They all lead downward into what have been termed “Transient Basements.” Information varies on the exact details of both the way down into these “basements,” as well as what is contained therein. 

Some commonalities regarding the way beyond the threshold: A sudden shift in the light toward orange and blue; a tremendous feeling of time dilation, as some reports indicate that the individual felt as it “years, even decades passed” in the descent into the basement; a smell of burning herbs; and most often reported, the fact that the second threshold—that which leads from the “descent” into the “basement”—is marked by a deafening sound and a blast of heat, ceasing after the individual enters the basement.

Unlike the way, or descent, into the basements, the basements themselves have few commonalities. In the way of having no common features, one could say that they do in fact, though perhaps technically, have a common feature: They appear to be packed full of “existential detritus.” That is to say, in one way or another, the impression is given that there is no order, structure, or meaning to what is found in any given basement. They are strewn with a great variety of objects—artifacts of humanity; of our presence on the planet, evidenced by a plethora of garbage and other discarded things, “pre-garbage”—sometimes seemingly-ordered on crooked, collapsing shelves; other times in utter disarray on the floor (which is always flooded or in the process of being flooded); and occasionally being held in the shaking arms, appendages, or appendage-like extensions of what can only loosely be described as “mannequins.” Obsidian daggers, nuclear waste, bronze dross, false eyes, oyster shells, moldering phonebooks—there appears to be neither order nor limit on the sorts of human trash found in these basements.

There is a singular, terrific danger found in some of these basements. Just as the transient entryways to the basements appear at apparently random times and places in the everyday world, so do further transient entryways show up within the basements. 

It is absolutely imperative that no one ever attempt to gain entry to these secondary entryways. The primary basements do not seem to have a lifetime that is shorter than the duration of the “visit” by the individual who descends into them—though, obviously we would have no way of knowing if there were—but these secondary, Transient Subbasements, are believed to have such. Indeed, it is believed that they necessarily exist for a duration just shy of the exploration of the incautious explorer. Put simply: These Transient Subbasements are traps. Furthermore, from the handful of testimonies given by those who either opened the door to a subbasement and were able to resist the urge to descend further, or those who were unfortunate enough to accompany a friend or acquaintance into the basement, and him or her to the lure of the subbasement, we know that the latter is no place any human belongs.

No human is meant to see the basements, let alone the subbasements. It is unclear what sort of “error” these phenomena represent, but it is clear at this point in our understanding that they should be, generally speaking, avoided. When a door, elevator panel, or ladder appears suddenly within a Transient Basement, the curiosity as to where it might lead is almost irresistible. If the basements represent the disorder and haphazard arrangement (or lack thereof) of the innumerable existential middens of the human sojourn across this sour sphere, the subbasements represent something far stranger, if they can be said to “represent” anything at all. The laws of reason, logic, and any order known to us in the everyday world—those ontological substructures which allow intermittent episodes of sanity in this world—are utterly absent. There is not even chaos lying within the subbasements. There are things therein—many, many things—but they are inconceivably ancient and defy further description, beyond that, were they said to have “will,” “volition,” or “desire,” these could only be described as, perhaps, “dismantling.”