The Words - An Autobiography

Home or what had once been

The waterfront estate was a ruin, an actual ruin, like pictures I'd seen of bombed buildings from one of the wars before my time. There'd been a fire at some point, and only a debris-filled pit remained where the house had once stood. It reminded me of the empty hole alongside the house I'd helped my stepfather restore more than four centuries earlier. The rest of the property was trying to return to wilderness.

Trees, vines, brush, and grass had not been tended for several hundred years. A few hundred yards from the pit, a barn remained partially standing. This barn and my old garage were the only somewhat intact structures above ground. An underground cistern beside the pit where the house once stood appeared untouched. As did the wine cellar and a massive storage area below, once I was finally able to reach them.

The wine cellar and storage area were in a section of a natural limestone cavern that extended beneath the meadow of my estate and beyond. I had no idea how large it was. So far as I knew, it hadn't ever been thoroughly explored, and I wasn't much for crawling through dark, narrow passages deep beneath the ground.

The wine cellar, storage area, and cavern had once been accessible from the house's basement. I'd had stairs carved into the limestone down a tunnel that led to a large metal platform sixty feet beneath the ground, which was the top level of the metal framework secured to the cavern walls and floor. A metal staircase led down another sixty feet to a second platform, outside what nature had long ago carved into one side of the cavern wall. The metal stairs then continued down another hundred feet to the cavern floor.

A freight elevator, part of the same structure as the metal framework supporting the stairs, ran up to what had originally been a sizable outbuilding. The entrance to the elevator was a section of the concrete floor, which lifted hydraulically, so there were no hinges or handles to give it away. It had been buried beneath the rubbled remains of the old outbuilding, so the elevator had been safe from discovery, and I was the only one alive who even knew to look for it.

My old groundskeeper - who, even two centuries earlier, had been the multi-generational descendant of my original groundskeeper - had taken deliveries in the warehouse during the day, then taken them down in the elevator to the storage area below in the evening. The elevator was large enough to support a forklift with a heavy load. I discovered one old forklift buried beneath the debris of the warehouse and knew there'd been several more in the storage area below. So, a forklift wasn't required to travel down with each load. I wasn't sure any of them were still operable.

The entrance to the tunnel from the basement was also concealed, which hadn't been necessary at the time it was constructed, but having a hidden, secret door appealed to the kid in me. Frivolous as it was, that, along with the hidden elevator entrance, were likely the only reasons that nothing in the wine cellar and larger storage area of which it was a part had been disturbed during my long absence. The hidden entrance from the basement was also buried behind debris from the house, which I hadn't been grateful in the least to find burned, but thankfully I was left with only a few large charred pieces of lumber to clear.

The elevator appeared to be in perfect working order once I reached it. But I decided I'd worry about clearing the debris from the warehouse above when I had anything that I needed to bring in or take out. For the present, I thought it probably best to leave it concealed. It turned out that most of the food stored in the cavern was still good because I'd purchased it from my old prepper friends, and it had been packaged to last forever. The wine did not fare near as well - especially the bottles with corks. Of those, only a few bottles of the best wines of the best vintages remained drinkable. Removing the corks intact was nearly impossible. I gave up and got them out in chunks as best I could, then poured the wine into a decanter through a strainer. If I'd had a sword, I would have tried the old 18th-century cavalier trick of just knocking off the necks of the bottles. I had no idea whether that would have worked with anything other than champagne, but in most cases, it wouldn't have mattered; the wine came out in globs of brown sludge. The odds that those bottles with screw tops were still drinkable were much better - maybe one in three, even though they hadn't generally been the better wines, just those with the better closure method.