One June night in 1972, an early hurricane named Agnes rolled up the East Coast, raising rivers and drowning railroads and knocking out power all over the D.C. area. My family was living at my grandparents’ house in Silver Spring that summer while we waited for construction to finish on a new house. My parents and grandfather were out for the evening, and my brother and I were left in the care of our grandmother, who seemed not to know what to do with us at seven o’clock on a Saturday night when the lights winked out and the television blacked over and she found herselfalone with two bored boys only too eager to get busy in the darkness with the candles and the matches.

So she sent us to bed down in the basement, and though I remember being put out at the injustice of this decision, she was a grandmother in the quietly adamantine style, and there was no appeal and nothing to be done. My brother and I climbed into the convertible sofa bed we shared, and there was a clap of thunder, and I shut my eyes. A moment later I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder, his voice soft and taut as if some unpleasant business was at hand.

“It’s time to get up,” he said. Somehow, as though in an instant, the entire night had passed—the only time in my life I remember having experienced such a passage—and it was morning. “But be careful.”

My brother and I lowered our skinny legs over the sides of the sofa bed and plunged to our knees in cold rainwater. In the night, our basement room had been transformed, like Max’s bedroom in Where the Wild Things Are, into a swimming pool, a rippled lake, a midnight sea. It was like magic, in all the delight and fearsomeness of the word. We might have been drowned or washed away. We might have paddled on sofa-cushion rafts to the far-off shores of our parents’ bedroom. Magic, at both ends of the spectrum, is what happens in the basements of houses.

My grandfather had finished the basement sometime during the late 1950s in grooved plywood paneling and glossy black linoleum that, even on the hottest day of the summer, was as cold and hard as the frozen seas of Triton. With his tools, wiry arms, and pragmatic imagination, he had wrested four rooms and a bathroom out of a dank, dark hole under his house. There were two parlors furnished with cast-off and outmoded living room sets of the premodern era, the chairs creaky and stuffed with horsehair. In one parlor a neglected piano incrementally untuned itself, and in the other, on a small table designed expressly for the purpose, sat a great black piano of a telephone. It had a clacking iron dial that sprained your fingers, and when it rang like a firehouse alarm, you expected to find Alfalfa or Spanky on the other end of the line. The drawers of the end tables cataloged the entropy of board games, the history of typing supplies, the morphology of swizzle sticks and coasters. The basement bedroom in which my parents spent that hurricane summer had sheltered my mother’s younger brother in the latter days of his adolescence and was decorated with a large black-and-white poster, popular during the late-sixties “nostalgia revival” (which no one then suspected would turn out to be permanent), of W. C. Fields playing a poker hand very close to the vest. Fields wore a sour expression, and there was always some residue of sourness in the bedroom, some discontent in the recollection of my uncle’s time there, as if his tenure had carried an element of exile. Exile, too—the estrangement of the dungeon dweller, of the narrator of Richard Matheson’s classic story “Born of Man and Woman”—is part of the enchantment of basements. At night my mother and father, only a few years away from separation and eventual divorce, would shut the door that did not quite shut and consider with growing discontentment the hand they had been dealt.

There were long-standing, sometimes bitter tensions in the other marriage under the roof that summer, and whenever my grandfather wanted to partake of the magic of exile, he would retreat to his underground workshop. It was dominated by a massive workbench built from pine and pegboard and fitted with a formidable screw vise. He had a table saw and a table drill, an extensive library of hand tools for working wood, metal, and leather, and a small laundry area, nominally my grandmother’s territory but equipped with a sink and a stopcock to which you could attach the hose of a Bunsen burner. My grandfather, a patent lawyer, was an inventor in his own right, the holder of U.S. patent number 3826667 for something he called “magnetite paint.” He was also an amateur photographer and maintained an improvised darkroom, with developing pans ranged alongside the steel laundry sink and a wooden photo enlarger of his own construction hunched like a big plywood mantis in a corner.

In those days the pages of comic books were frequently home to cutaway diagrams of secret lairs and headquarters, each with careful arrows pointing to the Sleeping Quarters, the Recreation Area, and—of course—the Research Laboratory. A couple of years after the night of the hurricane (and far sooner than my judgment or trustworthiness merited), my grandfather gave me the run of his Batcave. As soon as we arrived for a visit, I would go down there and begin to decoct, construct, rummage, demolish, assemble, snoop, waste time, get into trouble. I took apart broken machines and appliances and, in the name of my research, broke things that had nothing wrong with them. I spoiled splendid plans and managed to turn worthless junk into faithful scale models of things that no one had ever seen. I smashed my fingers with hammers, cut them with saws and chisels, burned them on the tips of soldering irons. I bled. I wept furtive tears over my injuries, which, like a wounded gangster, I was obliged to treat secretly lest I be banned from the basement forever. I went spelunking in deep closets and cabinets and picked out atonal versions of the theme from Mission: Impossible on the piano. Mostly, I lay around for hours on the musty sofa, utterly bored with myself and the universe, flooded as by a passing hurricane by the kind of tedium a child can feel only at his grandparents’ house, wondering what it would be like to be somebody, somewhere, doing something, anything.

All of those activities, it seems to me now, helped form the basis for my life as a writer, a denizen of the basement of my soul. I suppose it is no accident that basements, hidden lairs, and underground settings have featured so routinely in my fiction: the gang rape of Happy the collie in the basement of the Bellwethers’ house in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the macabre hideout of James Leer in Wonder Boys, the numerous hiding places and fortresses of solitude in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the mysterious subterranean Untershtot of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, accessible by hole from the archetypical basement of the Hotel Zamenhof. In almost everything I’ve written, you can find buried treasuries, Batcaves and hidey-holes, half-forgotten underground worlds that perhaps encode the rapture and the bitterness of my own isolation.

The house that we eventually moved into after that summer at my grandparents’ had a fine dank basement of its own, not so well finished but spectacularly equipped with a couple of earthen crawl spaces worthy of Montresor and Fortunato and a mysterious deep hole at its heart that was the burrow of a strange, rumbling creature known as the Sump Pump. As my parents’ marriage fell apart, I took to spending more and more of my time down there, making stop-motion science-fiction epics with my Super 8 camera, curating and organizing and hiding inside the boxes of my comic book collection, listening to Casey Kasem count them down. It was a new basement, but it had the necessary residue of exile and mystery, and when you returned from a session down there, you could feel something following you, its hand at the back of your neck, racing you up to the light at the top of the stairs.

Now I live in Northern California, where, as if in obedience to some doctrine of spiritual health and equilibrium, houses do not, as a rule, have basements. My own children are reduced to the expedient—surely not to be disdained—of creating impromptu clubhouses from blankets, cushions, and chairs, or of seeking inspiration in the daylight quotidian fastness of their bedrooms. I wonder where it settles, the dark tide of magical boredom that was the source of all my own inspiration, in a house without a basement to catch and hold it like a cistern. I have often found myself wishing my kids had somewhere they could go to get away, get lost, feel frightened and safe at the same time. Someplace deep and buried, unsuspected by and inaccessible to any parent, and right underfoot.

Anyway, we built them a little tree house in the California buck-eye in the backyard. It’s bright, open, sky-bound, a crow’s nest for the brigantine of their play. I worry that it is insufficiently dank, gloomy, remote, mysterious, but as they have filled it with random things, randomly broken and repaired, I have had reason to hope: hope that when they shut its bright green door, the world with all its puzzling business feels muffled and distant. Hope that they lie up there on their backs for hours, feeling tragic, and happy, and terribly, terribly bored.