The Perfect House
He would know it when he saw it, he'd been saying. After looking at eighty-seven houses, his wife was beginning to show a less than angelic temper, but Professor Howard Plummer was adamant. It had to be the right house.
This morning, he'd found the key to house number eighty-eight resting on the counter in the kitchen of the house they were renting. There was a note informing him that his wife and daughter had gone to the playground. They'd seen the house yesterday while he was at work and thought it was wonderful, but he probably wouldn't like it any more than the rest of the wonderful houses he'd said no to in the last four months, three weeks and five days.
Oh, that wasn't good. When Julie starting getting...precise...like that, it meant she was annoyed with him. Their lease on the rental was going to be expiring in six weeks, and Howard had the feeling that if he suggested renewing it, she'd want a divorce. No, maybe not--not with another baby on the way--but their family life would suffer.
Finding the suburb was easy enough--they'd looked at several homes that had been on the market in the neighborhood. The schools were excellant, it would be a great town in which to raise the big family they both wanted--but it had to be the right house. His precious angel didn't understand that...if Julie was frustrated, it was nothing compared to Howard's feelings--he couldn't articulate what he was looking for, but so far, eighty-seven houses hadn't had it.
The street was lined with a canopy of mature trees. It wasn't some suburb that had sprung up overnight. The architecture of Eight-eight was traditional, which Howard liked; it reminded him of the house he'd grown up in. But then, so had houses, Four, Five, Seven, Twelve, Nineteen--quite a few of them.
Howard explored the house--lots of room, enough for a half-dozen kids. The garage was spacious. Plenty of room for two cars, the bikes the kids would have...
At first, he chalked up the grate in the corner of the garage to the fact that the space was at the bottom of a sloping driveway, with the house set into the hill above it. It probably allowed drainage in case of heavy rains. Looking down at it, Howard frowned. That was awfully big for a run-off pipe...
Tugging at the grating, he slid it to one side, and realized with a thrill that there were rungs going down.
At the bottom was a space a little bigger than a phone booth, and a door of dull metal with a yellow-and-black icon he hadn't seen in years--a bomb shelter? Hidden under this perfectly ordinary-looking suburban home?
Howard had to throw his weight against the door several times before it yielded--that would have to be taken care of, he thought. Inside was an area about the same size as the garage above it--probably the original builder had simply excavated twice as much dirt and tucked this little gem of secret space beneath the unassuming garage. There wasn't much to be seen in the modest space; shelves held stacks of old magazines. Judging by the dates on them, he surmised that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this place had been mothballed and forgotten.
The professor knew most of the houses around here were at least fifty years old, so there probably weren't any of the original neighbors left who remembered the fallout shelter. Keeping the secret from Julie wouldn't be easy, but this would be the perfect place to keep the notes for his research, all the important, classified, special documents that he didn't want the kids to get into. His own private place...
Climbing back into his car a little while later, Howard Plummer smiled. His angel was going to be very happy to hear that he'd finally found the perfect house.
Okay, call me compulsive, but the whole "secret underground complex" at the end of the movie made me shake my head in disbelief. In suburbia? No way. Unless, of course, there was already something down there, and Howard just customized it later.
Disney owns it. Don't sue me, I'm just a poor fan-fic writer!