The First Shovelful

At approximately half past nine in the evening, Johnny Ryman drove a shovel into the packed earth floor of the cellar beneath 56 High Street and lifted the first measure of clay that would eventually become twelve metres by eight of hidden space.

He had waited until after dark. The visible renovation—the work that contractors and curious neighbours could observe—had progressed enough to provide cover. During daylight hours, electricians rewired the shopfront and plumbers addressed the antiquated pipework. Deliveries arrived. Noise occurred. The building presented as a legitimate commercial premises undergoing legitimate refurbishment.

The excavation could not occur in daylight. It could not involve contractors. It could not generate the noise and debris that earthmoving typically produced. It had to happen in darkness, in silence, by hand alone.

Johnny had prepared meticulously. The shovel was new, purchased from a hardware store in Hobart rather than New Norfolk, paid for in cash. The torch was heavy-duty, capable of sustained operation. A wheelbarrow waited in the laneway behind the building, positioned for loading. The route to the river—where excavated earth could be disposed along the overgrown banks without attracting attention—had been walked twice in reconnaissance.

The cellar greeted him with the same damp chill it had offered six days earlier. Four metres by three of inadequate space, soon to become something far more useful.

He positioned the torch to illuminate the area where the first expansion would occur—the eastern wall, where the stone foundations met the packed earth floor. The stones themselves would remain. They provided structural integrity and, more importantly, sound dampening. But the earth beyond them could be removed. The space could grow.

The shovel bit into the floor with a sound that seemed impossibly loud in the enclosed space. Clay yielded reluctantly, compacted by decades of pressure, requiring effort that Johnny's desk-job muscles were not prepared for. He levered the first shovelful free and deposited it in the bucket he had positioned nearby.

One shovelful. Perhaps two kilograms of earth. The beginning of what would eventually be tonnes of material removed by hand over the summer months.

Johnny paused, breathing hard, sweat already prickling along his spine despite the cellar's chill. The magnitude of what he had undertaken pressed against him with sudden weight. Twelve metres by eight. The expansion he had calculated. The space required to house the climate-controlled terrariums and secure enclosures that his operation would eventually demand.

He did not know how long it would take. He did not know if his body would withstand the labour. He did not know what would happen if someone discovered the excavation—a contractor arriving early, a neighbour investigating strange noises, anyone with authority and curiosity enough to ask questions he could not answer.

He knew only that the work was necessary. That the shopfront above could not serve its true purpose without the hidden space below. That he had committed to this path when he signed the lease and his father signed the loan, and commitment meant following through regardless of difficulty.

The second shovelful came easier than the first. The third easier still. A rhythm established itself—dig, lift, deposit, repeat—that bypassed conscious thought and settled into the body's mechanical persistence.

By midnight, Johnny had filled the wheelbarrow twice and made two trips to the riverbank, navigating the darkened laneway with muscles that screamed and lungs that burned. The cellar floor showed a depression perhaps half a metre wide and fifteen centimetres deep. Insignificant against the scope of what remained. But visible. Real. A beginning.

He climbed the ladder, lowered the trapdoor, and concealed it beneath the tarpaulin he had positioned for this purpose. The storeroom showed no evidence of what had occurred below. The shopfront, when he walked through it, retained its daytime innocence—half-renovated retail space awaiting stock and signage.

Johnny drove back to Glenorchy at half past one in the morning, his hands cramped around the steering wheel, his shoulders knotted with tension that would not release for days. He did not stop for food or fuel. He did not think about what the coming months would demand.

He thought only of the depression in the cellar floor. The first shovelful. The beginning of something that could not be easily undone.

The excavation had started. Whatever came next, that much was true.