The Cellar Door

I watched Donnie Darko the other day, which introduced Tolkien's notion of 'cellar door' as the most beautiful phrase / word in English. Wikipiedia has a good piece on the provenance of this idea - including Stephen King's use of the image on the cover of his On Writing, all light on the surface with something dark lurking beneath.
The Scotsman has writers choose their own compelling words.
My own is a choice between pool and pond. I like the sounds of the words, strong and simple, while both have that 'cellar door' notion of opening into depths.
One of the hardest parts of my new novel Ectopia involved a scene set in a cellar. Such scenes are potentially fraught with subconscious material. In Donald Antrim's weird Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World the cellar is home for a torture chamber for children. Ian McEwan puts cellars to dastardly use in The Cement Garden. John Fowles similarly in The Collector. Cellars in literature are a place of sick turbulence waiting to unleash itself.
The cellar door in my novel was taken away to make fortifications, and replaced with bricks. I took my cellar scene out until I had worked on what I saw were faultlines in my own make-up ... then wrote a different scene back in. 'Cellar doors' are nothing to do with beauty, a lot to do with the excitement of fear as you plunge on down through the subconscious, wondering what you might drag back up to the surface.