It was my friend Tommy's 11th birthday and my first sleepover. My mom dropped me off at his house in the afternoon. It looked modest from the front, but when Tommy led me inside, I discovered that it was actually fairly big, with at least five large rooms on the first floor alone.
"My mom set us up in the basement." He said, leading the way to a small door just off the kitchen pantry.
I envisioned a dingy cellar like the one my family had. Ours was a single, tiny room that looked like miners were still in the process of digging it out. Nobody spent the night in our basement unless they had eight legs and six eyes and shot webbing out of their ass.
Tommy's basement was like a whole other house. There was a small room with a couch at the bottom of the stairs, but in the far wall was a swinging door leading into a kitchen almost as big as the one we had just left. In the basement kitchen there was another door leading out to the back yard, and a long hallway that extended deep under the house.
"Jesus," was all I could muster.
"The basement was set up as an apartment to rent out by the people who lived here before us." Tommy explained. He pointed down the dim hallway. "The first door on the left is the bathroom. Second door is a closet. We'll be sleeping in the bedroom on the right."
"What's the door at the end?" I asked.
