Everybody on Mercer knows the abandoned store at Nineteenth. Nobody knows what it used to sell. The building has been closed longer than anyone in the neighborhood can remember. No faded sign. No old advertisements. No former owner anyone can name. Just boarded windows, rusted bars, and a green metal door that never opens. Then Aven Holloway comes home from college with no degree, almost no money, and a dying video channel. Looking for something that might finally get people watching again, Aven convinces her friends Jace, Mireya, and Kellum to break into the abandoned store and film whatever they find. Behind an old freezer is a steel hatch. Under the hatch is a staircase. And beneath their neighborhood is another one. Fluorescent corridors stretch beneath Mercer, with passageways marked by symbols matching businesses above them—the barbershop, the church, the boxing gym, the laundromat, the funeral home. Then Aven accidentally livestreams forty-seven seconds of their discovery. An unknown account sends one warning: GET OUT BEFORE THE LIGHTS TURN RED. Seconds later, every light underground turns red. And Kellum reacts like someone who has been there before. The deeper the friends go, the more they discover that Mercer’s history has been deliberately rewritten. People the neighborhood buried may not be dead. Families have been watched for generations. Records have disappeared. And whatever was built underneath their block was never meant to be found. Because Mercer isn’t the only neighborhood hiding something underground. It may not even be the first. THE BLOCK BENEATH US is an urban mystery thriller about four friends, a forgotten neighborhood, buried history, secret tunnels, missing people, and the terrifying discovery that sometimes the biggest secrets aren’t hidden across town. They’re underneath your feet.
