It was a thirty minute drive to the garden centre. We went in, bought a selection of digging tools and went back to the car.

     As we drove home, I tried to imagine what this area must have been like back in Charles Towen’s day. I knew some of it from the view out of the windows in the dream, assuming that the dreams weren’t just the product of my imagination. Trees. Huge, old trees all around. Ancient woodland, dark and oppressive, probably a fragment of the original primeval forest that had originally covered the whole of the British Isles and that had been cut down to fuel the industrial revolution. Why this fragment of the forest had survived I didn't know. Neither did I know what happened to it since the destruction of Towen’s mansion. Maybe the trees had been felled to clear the site for development, and then something had happened to block the project, leaving bare ground with only enough soil to support small, scrubby bushes until the council had decided to build the new estate. I decided to do some research, as soon as I could, to find the answers.

     Arriving home, we changed into some old clothes and took our new purchases into the garden, both of us full of energy and excitement at what we might find. We peeled off the new turf and laid it carefully to the side, in case we found nothing and wanted to cover it up again. Then we set to work digging. As we did so, I told Sophie more about the dreams I'd been having. She paused in her work and stared at me, her clear, blue eyes wide with astonishment. “So, you think you’re dreaming of being Charles Towen?” she asked. “Like, you’re his reincarnation or something?”

     “I don't know,” I replied, leaning on my spade. I wiped some sweat from my brow with my gloved hand. “Maybe his ghost visits me in my dreams, or maybe it’s all just a coincidence.”

     “It can't be a coincidence. You knew there was a mansion where our house is now. You knew exactly where to find the basement...”

     “We don’t know it’s a basement yet. We don't know it's anything yet. Maybe there was a well here once, or maybe there was a large tree and it left a hole when they pulled the stump out. It could be anything.”

     “Well then, Let’s find out,” she said, and she returned to the digging with renewed energy.

     The top couple of feet was loose earth, smoothed level by bulldozers and containing pockets of sand, off cuts of wood and clods of thick clay, all left from the building of the new estate. Below that was the original soil, though, tangled with the dead roots of the shrubs that had once covered the ground here. We glanced around nervously as we worked. Everyone in the houses around must have been able to see what we were doing and were no doubt watching curiously. I saw the six year old son of Derek London staring at us from the upstairs window of the house two doors away and I gave him a friendly wave. He waved back, then continued watching.

     “We're not going to be able to keep this a secret,” I said.

     “Did you want it kept a secret?” asked Sophie.

     “Well, it would be nice not to have everyone knowing our business.”

     “So far, all they know is that we're digging a hole. Maybe we're digging a swimming pool.” I shrugged thoughtfully and returned to work.

     Then Sophie hit something hard with the edge of her spade, and as we cleared the soil from it we saw with excitement that it was a flagstone. Part of a paved stone floor. We followed it sideways and found an edge. A six inch drop that turned out to be the first step of a flight of stairs. The soil was harder here, having had nearly a full century in which to become firm and compacted, but we attacked it with growing excitement until my spade suddenly found no resistance and broke through into an air space below.

     “My God!” I breathed in disbelief. “It's real! It really is real!” I ran back to the house, came back with a torch and shone it in through the hole. In it, I saw a flight of steps leading down into the darkness.

     I could feel the eyes of our neighbours on the back of my head and I stood up, trying to look as casual and nonchalant as possible. “Would you think I was strange if I didn't want the neighbours seeing us go down there?” I asked.

     She looked at me, searching my face with those beautiful eyes of hers, and then nodded thoughtfully. I saw that her hair was a mess and that there were smudges of dirt on her face. I thought it made her more beautiful than I'd ever seen her before. “What do you suggest?” she asked.

     “That we leave this for now. We come back here later, under cover of darkness, wearing night vision goggles...”

     She laughed out loud. “You're serious?” she asked.

     “Yes, I'm serious!” In fact, so had never been more serious about anything in my life. I was suddenly filled with the conviction that nobody else must know about the secret basement. It was important. More important than anything else in my life. Even more important than Sophie... That last thought shocked me as it popped into my head, but the moment it was there I realised it was true. The basement was more important than my wife, and if I had to choose between them...

     “Is that the ghost of Charles Towen making you think that?” asked Sophie.

     I gave a guilty start, as if fearing I'd inadvertently spoken out loud, and I forced myeelf to relax, to give no outward sign of what I’d just been thinking. Of course Sophie was more important than a stupid hole in the ground! What was I thinking of? I loved her! I would die for her!

     I looked back at the hole we’d dug. We should just fill it in, I told myself. Just fill it in and forget that there was anything down there. Even as I thought it, though, I knew that I couldn’t do that. I needed to know what was down there. I felt that there was a part of me that already knew what was down there and needed to see it with my own eyes. And needed to make sure that nobody else ever found out. Not ever!

     I took off my gloves, pulled out my phone and did a Google search for night vision goggles. “There you are,” I said when the page came up. “They're quite cheap, too. The cheapest ones, anyway.”

     Sophie came to stand beside me so she could see the screen too. “We wouldn't want to get the very cheapest,” she said. “They’ll probably be rubbish. If we're going to do this, we’ll want something decent.”

     I stated at her. “So you're up for it then?”

     “She grinned impishly. “Yeah, why not? It'll be fun! Sneaking around in the dead of night, secretly exploring a buried basement that no-one in the world knows about than us... It’ll be great!”

     I grinned back at her in relief. “Let's do it then!” I said.

☆☆☆

     It took a week for the goggles to arrive. My week off had ended by then and I had had to go back to work at Frank Tipping’s antiques shop, so we waited until Friday midnight to go digging. No matter how long we spent down there, no matter how late it was in the morning before we emerged, we could have a good long lie in on Saturday. The dream didn’t come once during that week. It was as if the ghost of Charles Towen, if that's what it was, knew that he had succeeded in attracting me to the basement and knew he didn't have to try any more.

     That was a long, long week for me. I had to curb my impatience with all the customers who were keeping me away from the basement in my garden. All the ignorant idiots who couldn't tell the difference between a genuine Gallic French table and a cheap thirty year old knockoff. I could have sold most of them a self assembled piece of rubbish from Ikea and told them it was Regency rosewood. Tipping was a man of principle, though, and he was keeping a close eye on me, as if he could sense the turmoil going on in my head. I had to keep myself in rein, therefore, and treat everyone who came in with patience and respect while glancing back at the clocks on the timepiece shelves every few minutes, as if I could make the hands turn faster by sheer power of will.

     Finally, though, Friday evening came. I pushed the speed limit driving home, we had a quick evening meal of toad in the hole warmed up in the oven, and then we settled down for a long evening as we waited for the sky to darken. The urge to make a start while it wasn't fully dark was almost overpowering. Sophie sensed my impatience and cuddled up to me on the sofa, her head on my shoulder, while we watched seemingly endless episodes of old soap operas together. She fell asleep for an hour or two, but I couldn't sleep. I was too afraid that we might sleep the whole night through and miss a whole day.

     Finally, midnight came. Sophie wanted to wait a little longer, in case any of the neighbours were still awake  watching the late night movie or something. They all had their windows open, after all, to let a cool breeze in, and the sound of a spade hitting stone could carry a long way through the still night air. I couldn’t wait any longer, though. The mystery of the hole in our garden burned at me, and so we picked up our night vision goggles, picked up our digging tools and went outside.

     It was as black as we could have wished. There was no moon. The only light was the yellow glow of a street lamp filtering in between our garage and the one next door. I looked around at the houses surrounding us. Every window was dark. Good. We put on our goggles and turned them on.

     Everything remained dark until I turned on the infra red illuminator, and then everything in our garden came into view in shades of grey. Sophie waved at me, to see if I could see her, and I waved back. Then we walked across the dying grass to the tarpaulin we'd placed across the pile of dug earth.

     We had covered the hole with a wide sheet of plywood, held down at the corners with breeze blocks, and it took us only a moment or two to pull it aside. Sophie picked up a spade and dug down hard. It hit the stone step with a loud clang and we both tensed up in sudden fear. We looked around, half expecting to see windows lighting up as our neighbours were awoken by the noise, but nothing happened and we relaxed.

     “Sorry,” whispered Sophie, grinning guilty.

     “Let's be careful,” I said as I picked up my own spade.

     It took just a couple of minutes to dig away the last bit of soil blocking the staircase, and then the entrance was clear. We looked at each other, and she gestured for me to go first. My heart pounding with excitement, I stepped forward and began to descend.

     The staircase went down thirty metres, just as it had in my dream. The sides were slimy and covered with roots. Some of them hung from the ceiling and tangled in our hair. Sophie muttered with disgust as she swept them aside. The steps were partially covered with soil and burned wood, left behind from the destruction of the manor house a century before, and we had to watch our steps as we descended.

     “Why is it so far down?” asked Sophie. “Who builds a basement this deep?"

     “Maybe he really was carrying out ritual sacrifices,” I replied. “He didn't want anyone to hear the screams.”

     “No, seriously, why? No kidding any more. This place is real. What's it for? Why is it so far down?”

     “He must have had a reason. Maybe we’ll find out at the bottom.”

     “Do you suppose... You don't think he had a...” She paused, as if she knew how ridiculous it would sound. “You don't think he had a dungeon down here, do you?”

     “You mean with manacles attached to the walls? Instruments of torture? The rack? An iron maiden?”

     “Don't mock me, I’m serious. Who knows how old this mansion was. Maybe it went all the way back to the seventeenth century, to the witch trials. Maybe they tortured witches down here.” I laughed and she punched my arm angrily. “Those things happened!” she insisted. “They tortured witches to make them confess. They thought they were saving their souls. To them, torture was an act of mercy.”

     “So why hide it? Why hide it so deep underground?”

     “I don’t know, but I don't like it. This place suddenly gives me the creeps.”

     “Do you want to wait at the top?”

     “I think we should both go back up. Fill the hole in, pretend we never found it.”

     “You know we're not going to do that. You're as curious as I am to see what’s at the bottom.”

     She grabbed my arm. “Let's go back. Please, Will!”

     “I'm going on. You can go back if you want.” I continued to descend, and with a muttered oath she followed after me.

     The staircase eventually ended at a short stretch of level floor, and a few feet further on was the stout wooden door. I had expected it to be rotten after all this time, but when I put a hand on it and pushed it felt as strong as ever.

     “Feels like oak,” I said. “What they used to build warships out of.”

     “Look at it!” said Sophie in astonishment. “It looks like the door of a castle! It looks as though it were made to resist battering rams.”

     “No room down here to swing a battering ram,” I said. “Not on this side, anyway.”

     “What do you mean by that?”

     “What if it wasn't built to keep something out, but to keep something in?”

     “You mean like a prison?”

     “I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”

     “No you’re not.” She stood right in front of me, so close that the lenses of our night vision goggles almost touched. “You know something, don't you? Something from your dreams that you haven't told me.”

     “I don't know any more than you do.”

     I was lying, though. I didn't know for sure what was behind the door, but I knew that it was bad. She saw it in my face, though, and pressed me for more details. I insisted again that I didn't know anything, which I didn't. Not for sure.

     “You've never lied to me before,” she accused.

     “And I'm not lying this time either.” I pushed against the door again. “Maybe we could break it down.”

     “That’s a really bad idea,” she said.

     I agreed, but not for the same reason as her. I thought it quite likely that, if we ever did find a way to open the door, we might want to close it again, quite quickly. I still had to open it, though. I had to see!

     There was a keyhole about half way up on the left. About the right size for the key I'd had in the dreams. Where was that key now? Left in the ruins when the mansion burned down, probably, which probably meant that it had rusted away to nothing by now. I wondered how hard it would be to make a duplicate. If I saw it in my dream, if I got a really good look at the shape of it, the size of it... The trouble was that it would have to be exact, down to a fraction of a millimetre, or it wouldn’t turn in the lock. It was probably hopeless. I either needed the original key, if it had somehow survived, or I would have to simply break down the door.

     “Let's get out of here!” begged Sophie, sounding genuinely distressed. “Please, Will!"

     I nodded. We’d done all we could for now, and so we turned and climbed back up the stairs.