You’ve probably heard of those mysterious doorways and staircases that are starting to infiltrate remote forests. What you probably don’t know is that the phenomenon is starting to slowly infiltrate the urban environment too.
It took me around a decade to realize that the mystery doors and staircases that are not on any official maps of underground infrastructure are the same as those that appear in the forests. It all came out at a family Christmas one year as I was chatting with a cousin who became a forest ranger.
We spent most of the holiday comparing notes, stories and rumours and came to a frightening conclusion. The same force is behind both all the doorways and staircases no matter their location.
When I first graduated and became an engineer fifteen years ago my mentors who took me under their wing as an intern warned me to never enter any doorway that was not on the official maps and to never use any staircase that was on the official maps.
For the first few years, everything was fine as I was given easier jobs to ease my way into the career. I ignored the unmarked doors like I was told to even though the curiosity was building. But, things came to a head when the company was assigned to a job of mapping out the underground infrastructure of an older city I can’t name for legal reasons.
Their hall of records had burned down taking out all the paper copies of the maps and digitization had been scheduled for the following month. We did get some decrepit copies of the maps from older retired engineers who warned us to be careful of the underground and suggested that we go down armed.
Others in the crew laughed but, I took their advice seriously considering that there could be a mafia or cartel hideout in the tunnels. The old guys were right, there was something down there.
The first few days were all good. We were using the few maps we could salvage to plot the main routes of a tunnel used to hold both a major water pipeline and a gas pipeline. We had a remotely operated rover running gas sensors and lidar to map the tunnels. Everything was routine.
I started to drop my guard but on the fifth day, things went to shit. We were in the process of mapping an electrical tunnel. Those are a pain in the butt to deal with due to the required safety procedures and electrical equipment.
We were testing a new add-on for the rover, a set of electrical field sensors that could be used to check metal cable trays for stray voltage and damage to insulation. A new tool to make the job safer. The problem was that this was one of the sections where documentation was missing. We knew the start, the end and which circuits went to where but, that was it. We had no idea where the various entry manholes were or where the connections to other underground networks like the sewers or subway were.
We came to a strange door that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years and we had no idea where it went, but without documentation, we had to ignore the unofficial rule of opening strange doors, besides it looked harmless. I held the tablet that operated the rover. As one of the other guys, Sam opened the door the compass started to go wonky and the E-field readings picked up.
Normally this sort of thing happens when one opens the door to an underground substation or to a subway line with a passing train, not when you open the door into what appears to be an old decrepit fallout shelter. The dust inside appeared to be undisturbed as if no one had been inside for decades.
I went to send the rover inside to check for gas or bad air but, my tablet started to glitch out. Sam entered first with a flashlight followed by Max and they took their time to explore the room. I backed back, refusing to enter since I had to worry about a very expensive and potentially faulty rover.
About half an hour later we called it an end for the day. The rover was glitching out and I needed a workbench to properly debug it. Sam had grabbed a strange golden necklace with some kind of mandala-like motif. For some reason to me, it felt strange and the rover glitched out worse any time he brought it near.
Sam and Max decided to hit the pubs early while I put in the overtime to get the rover working again. Something seemed off with Sam and Max was acting oddly too. They never go drinking together yet at the time I thought nothing about it.
Back in the lab the rover functioned normally and passed all the tests. The video was heavily corrupted around the time we found the door but, the lidar data was intact. The thermal video was quite strange. When Sam opened the door something visible on thermal seemed to fly through him and enter Max.
I’ve got no idea what it was but, I do know that night Max was quite different when I got to the bar. Gone was the quiet introvert, he was drunk, loud and had a way with the ladies that was out of character for him.
I didn’t stay long at the bar since I arrived late but, Max was out all night or so I heard the next morning. He came into work surprisingly energized for someone who had drunk enough to be experiencing alcohol poisoning. That day I ended up on a different team and when we got back to where we finished the day before there was no door or fallout shelter to be found. Even the LIDAR data on the rover was different compared to the day before.
This wasn’t the strangest day of my career but, it was the beginning of when the strangeness had picked up. I warned my interns not to enter strange doors that don’t appear on documentation without first making sure that they know where the other side of the door is. I could not say that I witnessed someone getting possessed after neglecting to check so I had to come up with excuses like toxic sewer gas or damaged electrical wiring.
Several years later I had no choice but to enter one of these strange unmarked doors. It was in one of the more fancier tunnel systems with emergency telephones spaced every hundred meters or so. The day it happened a water main had ruptured somewhere in the underground maze and we got a call warning us to evacuate immediately. We were on our way back to the surface when we heard rushing water from ahead. One of the last sounds you want to hear this deep underground.
Our eyes were drawn to a door with a flickering light above marked emergency exit. I joked to my coworkers that we would need to see a priest after this. Those with experience with these doors caught my eye and nodded as the colleagues in the dark let out a nervous chuckle.
The room at first looked like an old decrepit basement covered in cobwebs and lit only by a single flickering half-burned-out light bulb. The flickering light and the movement of our flashlights cast dancing shadows all over the room. Everyone thought we were alone as Roger slammed the door we had entered through shut right as the sound of water grew to a roaring. I knew differently as I saw a pair of dull red eyes out of the corner of my vision.
We looked for a way out as water started to leak under the door we had entered and found that the staircase into the room had rotted out a long time ago and would collapse under the weight of even a single person.
We had to explore the decrepit basement even as water started to slowly fill the room. I remembered what happened to Max and brought up my thermal camera, I got a couple of strange looks but then another coworker explained that I’m using it to look for temperature differences to hopefully find a different way out. Half right, it was one of the things I was doing. I was also looking for ghosts, spirits or malevolent entities to avoid. I’m not going to let what happened to Max happen to me when I have half a dozen others I can throw under that bus first.
I found a warm spot by a bookcase and got a coworker to try and push it aside. This revealed the entrance to a Cold War fallout shelter complete with one of those sealable doors. We quickly got inside and closed the door as the water was starting to lap at the base of the raised entryway.
We found something worse in the bunker. Although at first it looked like it had been used for raves by goths we quickly discovered that a cult had been using it. What caught my eye was the room that looked identical to the one Max and Sam had stumbled onto years before but, this time I had entered it from the door inside of the bunker.
I tried to open it but, the door to the outside was locked tight. I spotted something out of the corner of my eye, a figure dressed in a dark cloak with glowing eyes and went to investigate but found nothing but a shadow visible to only the thermal camera. I backed away into a bookshelf as the figure entered one of my coworkers, Adam. He fell down twitching like he was having a seizure.
We quickly dragged him to what was once the bunker’s infirmary but I would call that room a butcher’s den. It was covered in old blood and esoteric symbols beyond my comprehension. A friend of mine would later say that they sounded like ancient Sumerian cuniform after I explained what I saw.
Half of us remained with Adam while the rest went with me to find the main exit. We did find it but, it was locked from the outside and we could not get out. We found the phones to be dead and went to check the bunker’s telephone switchboard but that had no electricity. We went to the main power room only to find it full of a dark fog. James entered and fell down twitching and we dragged him back to the infirmary.
There was only one way out, the ventilation stack. My thermal camera, now low on battery showed a slight temperature difference that is a sign of air movement. Ellie and I decided to climb and see if we could get out of the facility. We both had body cameras and the video of my thermal camera as evidence of something funky going on down here and we needed to get to the main entrance to rescue our friends and coworkers.
It was a hard climb through some tight bends but, whoever built the place was smart and used the ventilation stack as an emergency exit and nicely included a ladder. It wasn’t much but, it was better than nothing. We found ourselves in a sub-basement machinery room of an older building, the type built in the late 40’s to mid 50’s. I didn’t want to touch anything since these places are asbestos-central.
The place seemed to have been an old hospital that was later renovated into an office building owned by some pharmaceutical company that I had never heard of. Although the parts of the sub-basement that I had seen made the place look more like a cult. Hiding behind medical research and an old hospital would be a good place for a cult to hide. People die in hospitals all the time, would not take much to sneak someone who would not be missed down into that bomb shelter.
As we explored the basement looking for the main entrance to the fallout shelter we found that the water from the flooding had reached our ankles. Not a good thing when we came across the main electrical room for the building. The buzz of a cranky old power transformer did little to ease my fears. I decided that it was probably not the best idea to see if power could be restored to the shelter. We then skipped that room and explored the basement a bit more.
My thermal camera failed right as we entered a room full of what could be described as roaming shadows. They dived for us but were kept away by our flashlights. I can tell you that nothing’s better for the dark than a good modern LED and lithium battery. We found both an exit sign and a faded sign for a fallout shelter through the room.
We finally had a direction. Do we go get help first or rescue our coworkers? We decided to crack open the shelter. There were half a dozen padlocks on the door jamming the locking mechanism but, what use are padlocks in keeping people out when there are half a dozen sets of bolt cutters amongst the tools strewn through the nearby rooms? We got those locks off the door and raced into the shelter to find our coworkers. Only two were well. Three were recovering from strange seizures.
The four of us managed to get our injured coworkers to the lobby of the building through two more basement levels where we were confronted by a bored security guard who thought he caught a gang of kids trying to sneak into the basement again by the tunnels. He had heard rumours of strange things in the basement and had been too scared to go down. The guard believed us about what we saw and called the paramedics for us. He called the police too but it was a federal agency that arrived instead of the police.
This Bureau did tell me that the official story of what happened down there is that we discovered an old chemical weapons lab that was improperly decontaminated.
Rescue was certainly fun. We were held by some government department for hours and were interrogated over what we had seen and encountered down there. They confiscated our bodycams and my thermal camera much to my annoyance, that will come out of my paycheque. Although curiously they did give me both a job offer and a business card for when I am ready to accept. I’m not sure if I really want to join some Bureau of the Occult but, in this industry, the perks of a government job only get better as you get older and I’m starting to get sick of the private industry and becoming a public servant does sound kinda easy.
What I learned during that time is that many of these doorways are thresholds to the other side, Some open into our world and some open into their world and some of these doors connect two different places within our world if you know how to manipulate them.