Hey hey! A quick note — today’s episode is a bit longer than usual (4000 words instead of the more typical 1000), so I’m recommending it for a pleasant evening read. Also, it would behoove you put on the wonderful album cambrain animals !! by camiidae in the background (also on Spotify and Bandcamp); it’s exactly the vibe of the story. Enjoy!
Rachel calls the city home, but she’s never really felt like she belongs.
It’s a big city, with well over five million inhabitants in the metro area. Her job pays enough to make it worthwhile to stay, and she has enough friends that it’s bearable. She’s not from a city, though, and had never spent a long time in one before this. There’s a lot to adjust to.
She’s gotten used to the food — what’s available, what’s not, and which stores sometimes get shipments of the special treats, like cheese.
She’s gotten used to the rain — how, while it doesn’t necessarily sting when it hits your skin, it’ll give you a nasty rash, and it’ll devour a wooden chair left outside.
She’s gotten used to the pollution — the days where it’s so thick that you can’t see across the street, and you have to bring out your heavy duty mask and cover all the skin you can without looking like a terrorist, but at least this way nobody can see how different she looks from them.
She’s gotten used to the traffic — it’s always there, always crawling along, whether on foot or by car or on bike or in the metro, whether commuting or running to the store. It’s noisy, but it’s a constant, and constants can be accounted for.
She’s gotten used to the nighttime lights and the bustle outside her window that last until sunrise — that was the easiest part, actually. She’s always been nocturnal, and she thrives on round-the-clock street food and flashing neon.
And it’s at night that she explores.
The buildings here do go up, and she gets to rooftops when she can, strolling past security guards with a smile and taking elevators straight to the thirtieth floor, or whatever that building happens to have, and the view never disappoints.
But the real fun is finding the places that have been forgotten, lost, left behind. Some are buildings constructed thirty years ago and abandoned after years of use, like the branch of the medical university that she found with dusty desks and anatomy posters still on the wall. Others are like the cement shell once destined to be a shopping mall that took up an entire city block but was now simply surrounded by construction fencing and an empty, four-story-deep moat, or like the dust-covered dinosaur amusement park built in an artificial cave next to an unfinished suburb — ambitious projects whose funding dried up and everyone just walked away from. Still others were condemned years ago, slated for demolition, residents forced out, only for the government to forget to schedule the destruction, leaving poster-covered walls and trash-strewn floors to sit in solitude.
Occupied buildings yield plenty of excitement, too — seldom-used service passages between office buildings; disused wings of metro stations; utilities access tunnels left open by careless maintenance workers — all places within easy reach of anyone, but overlooked, out of the way, cracks to be slipped into which themselves slipped into the cracks.
Rachel has never found any single object of value, or even interest, but that’s not what she’s looking for — there’s a joy in discovering something so close at hand, however mundane, and yet still so unknown. It’s like finding a tiny family-run shop that sells handmade noodles that nobody else knows about, but even more intimate for how unshared the spaces are. It is these hidden delights of the city that Rachel lives for.
Lately, though, her job and social obligations and life in general conspire to keep her from wandering too far from where she lives and works. Life is tiring, and full, and it wears you down when you’re least expecting it. It doesn’t help that it’s late autumn, and that the sun disappears earlier and earlier every day. And being around the same places, the same darkening streets, the same blurred faces rushing by, Rachel begins to feel as though she’s trapped in a cage that she may indeed have wrought herself. This, of course, is discouraging, and discouragement is tiring, and it becomes a vicious cycle until one day Rachel finds herself standing up from her desk after working far later than was warranted and looking out the office window to see almost nothing at all, only the lights of the neighboring building piercing the smog, and darkness beyond it.
She rubs her face wearily and shoves the documents into something like a pile, dumps what she needs into her satchel, dons her heavy hooded jacket and takes the elevator down to B2, where her bike is locked up. As she descends, her ears throb; it must be winter and pollution and stress and a gazillion other awful things, she thinks.
She’s standing next to her bike, heavy duty mask already on, hood already up, satchel slung over her shoulder, debating whether or not she should ride with her headphones in on a night like this, when movement catches her eye. She glances up to see someone going up the stairs maybe fifty paces away. It strikes her as odd, and it takes a few moments to figure out why, but when she finally realizes it, she’s suddenly fully alert.
Rachel locks her bike up again and looks around, making sure she’s the only one down here. Then she strides over to the stairwell as fast as she can without making too much noise, not a challenge, given the coal dust that’s settled on the pavement. B2 is the lowest floor on the elevator buttons, but the stairs keep going down; at the bottom of the next flight of steps is a locked steel wire mesh security door. She knows it’s locked because she’s tried numerous times to see what’s behind it. Probably a furnace room or the electricity exchange box for the building, but that’s still fun to discover. More so, since there’s a locked door in front of it.
She had just watched somebody come up, and the only way to come up is to have come through the door. Unless they were just sitting down there, or she hadn’t seen them go down in the first place, which are definitely more likely, she thinks, but maybe not.
And when she arrives, the mesh metal door is slightly open.
She wonders if she can hear noises drifting up from below, or if it’s just the echos from some other part of the subterranean parking garage.
Would it be better if the sounds were real or imagined? she wonders behind a grin. She’d given up on this door years ago, after months of intermittently hoping she would one day find it open.
No footsteps on the stairs above her. No indication of any kind of human presence from beyond the door.
The open door beckons.
Safety first.
Rachel examines the door. The lock button is on the opposite side, and she checks to make sure it can be opened even when locked without the need of a key. There’s no hook or eye she can see that could be used for a padlock. If this is the only way up, it should be openable no matter what, if common sense safety had anything to say.
And her phone. She pulls it from her pocket and checks the battery. That’s essential: first, a flashlight, and second, almost more importantly, a way to document what she finds. She’s always considered uploading photos to social media, here or back home, especially the occasional “perfect shot” of a strange scene that she finds. But little image-mementoes that capture her experience, her feelings, that bring her back to where she was — that’s what she really wants. She doesn’t need to share them, just keep them.
Fortunately, her phone is still mostly charged from being plugged in at the office all day.
That’s enough for her.
Rachel pushes on the door and it gives way with a metallic creak. She pauses, listening for a reaction — the sound of a vocal acknowledgement from far below, footsteps rushing back down the stairs toward her, an alarm, anything — but aside from the short echo up and down the concrete stairwell… nothing.
Whoever was watching the door won’t be gone long, she thinks, so just a quick down, peek around, right back out. She knows this will never happen, unless there’s literally nothing more than a concrete wall at the bottom of the stairwell. But she tells herself nonetheless.
She slips through the open mesh door, her coat brushing against the concrete wall, and goes down the steps.
Rachel doesn’t keep track of how many floors underground she is, but she is aware that she’s on her third flight of stairs when she reaches anything besides smooth walls. It’s a door, solid metal painted teal, and there’s no doorknob on it, only a keyhole. Weird if you’ve never seen it, but Rachel has — it’s a storage closet, probably stuffed full of the custodial equipment that keeps these cement floors so clean, next to long-forgotten buckets of paint, if her experience is anything to go by.
She nods to herself, listens for signs of anyone else, above or below, and continues down.
Two more flights and the walls drop away to reveal hallways in each direction, white walls interrupted by corners and doors splitting into a literal labyrinth. Tubes of cold fluorescent lighting flicker here and there, illuminating spider webs, leaving dark patches here and there, and the stairs descend to at least one more level of the same just below her.
The first time Rachel had found a place like this she had nearly panicked. Empty, once-sterile, abandoned mazes beneath a building; doors open and closed and locked and half-remembered — what sort of surreal hellscape had she stumbled into? She’d wandered through it for what felt like hours, peeking into doors, seeking some sort of explanation, hoping she’d be able to find her way back out again.
Now that she’s seen dozens of them, the corridors are still surreal, but she knows their mundane explanation — more storage for everyone, a room for each tenant of the building, at least in theory. She’s seen everything from boxes of old baby toys to broken toilets in places like this.
There won’t be anything unique here — maybe important documents from the companies that rent out floorspace high above, filed here decades ago for safekeeping and promptly forgotten, but nothing she would care to read, even if it were in a language she knew. She’s not looking for those kinds of secrets.
Rachel scuffles past the vacant security desk — a literal wooden office work desk with a folding metal chair behind it, with a phone charger plugged into the wall — and through the dust on the floor, looking left and right for signs of anything good. A few doors sit open, revealing dark rooms beyond, empty, cluttered, everything in between. Only one disconnected porcelain throne, resting derelict, waiting for the end of time. Nothing really good, but an acceptable amount of creepy. And most importantly, her curiosity is finally being satisfied.
Back at the staircase, she heads down to the second level of storage. Same as the first. But the stairs continue down.
A third storage level. There’s a loud and sudden humming and buzz, and Rachel starts, then hears it for an elevator. That only makes sense, she realizes — even though her office doesn’t use it, there must be at least one elevator somewhere in the building that reaches down here to bring up people’s pasts.
More stairs down.
There are no lights on in the room at the very bottom of the stairs; all light flows down from the storage above. Rachel looks into the shadows: the harsh shapes of heavy machinery; the organic nests of cables; the flashing colored lights of connections. It doesn’t look like there’s a labyrinth, but there is a humming, almost subliminal rhythm — or, she thinks as the sounds resolve, perhaps several deep pulsing noises layered on top of each other, each at a different frequency, that combine to create the illusion of rhythm. There’s a soft, steady movement of warm air from somewhere.
This level, at last, shows potential.
She switches on her cell phone’s flashlight.
In front of her, as she stands at the bottom of the stairs, is a wall lined with electrical boxes, and the cables that snake out from them come together and then punch through the wall, presumably the meters that link the building to the city’s power grid. To the right, an empty doorway leads to a room with two gas-powered backup generators — undoubtedly touted as a feature for investors and tenants, but just as undoubtedly far too small to fulfill their promise.
To the left is another door, slightly ajar.
Rachel tries to get her bearings and remember which way she would be facing with respect to the building, but she’s not sure whether she’s been down an even or odd number of flights of stairs. Not that it matters down here.
She closes her eyes. She listens to the pleasant cacophony around her, breathes deeply, inhaling the musty, dusty scent of the artificial underground.
She feels something fall away from her — her worries, circling in like vultures over the past days, weeks, months, left behind next to her bike up on B2, loosing, losing their sticky grip on her.
Down here, closer to the heart of the city, the living, breathing, mechanical, self-sustaining, meta self of all these buildings and people and streets and lights and cars, down here, for the first time in what feels like a very long time, Rachel feels… connection, awe, reverence, peace. It’s not dissimilar to when she hikes a mountain by herself, or takes a long walk down a trail into the woods without encountering another soul for hours.
How many people have seen this place? Hundreds, probably — maintenance workers, utility workers, guards, safety inspectors, the original builders. But the probability of her being here — of anyone at all being right here, right now, let alone her — is so low that Rachel feels almost like her tether to the world, to the bustling, overworked city above her, has been severed, that she’s blissfully adrift somewhere indeterminate, down in the depths.
Another deep breath. A smile. She opens her eyes.
No sense in coming all this way and not going through the door at the end, she thinks. It’s probably more storage, or another pair of generators. Maybe the internet connection, or a big pipe to the septic system.
The thought does occur to her, of course, that it might be a trap, that the door will swing shut once she steps all the way through, and that she’ll be caught on security cameras and held here until the police come here and question her, confused about what on earth a foreigner is doing down here and utterly baffled by her honest answer. She thinks that every time, and has been seen by security more than a few times, and not once has anyone cared enough to give her a second glance.
She opens the door and shines her light through.
It’s pipes. Not one or two big ones, but dozens of medium-sized ones, coming out of the wall and burrowing up into the ceiling, presumably ascending all the way to the top of the building. A couple of stenciled signs warn of heat and fire danger, their illustrations straightforward enough to cut through the language barrier.
Steam pipes, Rachel realizes with a strong mental hmm. These connect the building to the city’s central heating system, where water is heated in one of the dozens of coal plants that pump pollution out into the winter sky. It makes sense that this is here — the system is common knowledge among the locals, and it clearly all has to happen somewhere — but Rachel never thought to wonder about the where or the how.
And this is exactly why she enjoys this.
She wanders through the room, being mindful of the hot metal all around her. The connections are fascinating to her, the myriad pipes and wires and nuts and bolts, the cement, the metal, the paint, the design, the manpower, each ingredient of the equation coming together in a synthesis, a symphony. And to think that this marvel, this juggling act of time and energy and matter, is repeated ad infinitum in every building across the city, in every city across the nation.
A superbly worthless secret, an invisible infrastructure secret only from her. The best kind of revelation is when you realize you can see what you haven’t seen all this time. Rachel smiles.
She’s about to turn to go when she spots a dark rectangle in the corner. She shifts her light and the rectangle’s shadow doesn’t move. Another doorway, cut out of the concrete.
This one is surely storage.
Carefully, carefully, she ducks under pipes and steps over ducts, almost banging her head more than a few times, and getting what’s probably just a first degree burn on the back of her hand.
It’s not storage.
Through the door, she can smell something more… natural, earthy. And at the threshold, the cement floor stops, and what beings is… dirt.
This is the end of the foundation and the beginning of the actual planet. But why is there a doorway into it?
Rachel steps onto the rocky soil and looks left first. Pipes jut through a narrow hallway — cement on one side, dirt on the other. At the far end she sees a square of electrical-looking light; this must be the next building over. That would certainly be an interesting foray.
But to the right… to the right, the earthen passageway continues unhindered, no conduits or other manmade objects blocking the way, just a rough ramp descending into the dark.
Probably connecting to the metro, or to the underground mall, Rachel thinks. But her “correct” ratio has been decreasing with every guess she’s made for a while, now, and she’s starting to doubt what she knows. And that, being taken to the edge of what she knows, is truly exciting.
She double-checks her phone battery, again — still almost full — and follows the path downwards, slowly, trying to keep her anticipation in check. Down the stoney corridor, light out in front of her, its beams catching on the shadows of small rocks.
After maybe thirty feet, the passage makes a hard left turn. Rachel glances back up the way she came — it’s light enough up there, and dark enough down here, that it’ll be easy to tell where to go when she comes back. She takes another deep breath and continues into what’s quickly becoming a tunnel through the earth.
There’s definitely a smell now, something almost familiar, and that worries her. Not the smell itself, either its existence or its nature. What worries her is that the smell makes her want to know what it is.
The door — calling her for all these months, finally open, waiting for her.
The sounds — the rhythmic, pulsing, comforting ambience that called her on.
The air — the touch of warmth, of movement, rather than decay and stillness, inviting her downwards.
The possibilities — her own informed guesses proving just wrong enough that she’s compelled to go a little farther to find the truth.
Rachel stops. She takes a few deep, slow, calming breaths. She analyzes the scents that rush in against her brain. Something about them continues to make her curious. She nods and sets it all aside and thinks.
She yawns, and her ears pop, and she presses firmly on her ears massaging them. It’s as if there’s a tremendous subsonic rumbling sensation happening somewhere, reverberating through rock and dirt and bone and flesh, vibrating at frequencies that are altogether unusual.
No phone reception. Not that she expected any, six or however many floors underground.
Prepared, Rachel follows the path on down.
There’s one more bend, but even before she reaches it, a faint glow catches her eye and she switches off her flashlight. Low, mild light emanates from around the corner. Cautiously, she steps around the corner and into the relative brightness.
She sees life, and death, and life in death, and death in life, and she smiles gently.
Well, she doesn’t really see that, but the metaphor is so obvious, so ham-fisted that it’s almost literal. What she really sees is mushrooms, glowing in the dark.
There’s a crack right across the middle of the chamber’s stone floor — the cave, it must be a natural cave, somehow — and dirty water burbles through it, flowing downhill. Disturbingly natural slime spills up out of it, and glowing tendrils emerge, running upwards, defying gravity, growing together, merging suddenly into thick stalks bigger around than Rachel’s thigh, topped with wide caps the size of umbrellas. The fungi stand taller than her, reaching to within a few feet of the cavern’s roof, and each one is a slightly different palette of shimmering, opal-like, in their own forever twilight.
Rachel doesn’t move. It’s not that she’s afraid of scaring the mushrooms away, although it does feel like they might scamper off into the crevices at any moment. But that reverence, that peace, that connection with something so unknowable, so unfathomably larger than herself, wells up inside her and washes over her again.
As her eyes adjust, she sees that the giant mushrooms are not just the cave’s centerpiece — trails of mycelium luminescence wind across the floor, wander up the walls, entwine across the ceiling in swirling fractal patterns.
There are seven or eight big individual mushrooms, each one tall enough for Rachel to walk under. They’re all variations on the same familiar toadstool shape, but there’s something different about them, as though each is its own unique mutation, a subspecies that has never been documented before. Not that Rachel knows much about mushrooms in general, but it also seems only logical that something like this, developing in isolation, would be different. Somehow. Maybe.
With a self-conscious smile, Rachel tries to turn off the analytical part of her brain. She doesn’t need to know what each of these mushrooms is, because she’d probably never find an answer.
No, that’s not it.
The only way out of the cave, besides the tiny crevice in the stone through which the water runs, is the passage she entered through, but somehow she knows that this is not always the case. She does not know what that means or why it is true. And she realizes that she doesn’t need to know.
That’s it.
She doesn’t need to make an excuse for not needing to know. She doesn’t need to know, and she’ll probably never find an answer, and both of those are okay. Acceptance can coexist with impossibility; there is no need for one to be predicated upon the other.
She takes a few steps into the cave and sits, her back resting against jagged stone. Just the act of pausing feels profound — her urban exploration adventure a pause from the litany of daily life, and this rest in the midst of that adventure a pause from her thirst for something more.
A pause, for her to look in wonder upon something she never imagined.
A pause, in which she can simply be.
Impossible, tangible, unknown, giant, glowing in the dark, life emerging from death and decay and nothing at all, disgusting, slimy, beautiful, otherworldly, immensely of this world.
After a pause that seems like enough, Rachel pushes herself to her feet. She brushes dampness off her butt, stretches, shifts so that her clothes feel cozy.
Before she leaves the cave, he raises her phone and takes a single photo, then puts the device away. She doesn’t look at the photo. She doesn’t try to take a better one.
When she goes back, later, to look at it, if the natural castle grown from mushrooms in a little natural cave six stories below her office building is just a bright, blurry, colorful blob in the midst of digital dark… that’s okay. She doesn’t need proof that this is real. She doesn’t want proof that this is real. The proof that it might have been real… that’s enough.
When Rachel bikes home that night, into the winter smog, flickering with neon, she rides slowly, her ride a pause despite its motion.
Hello hello!
I hope you enjoyed a little bit of urbex! As you might guess, this is a more personal piece than most — it’s about a real locked door that I was always curious about when I lived in Shijiazhuang, China, and Rachel is my stand-in (if I’d been a girl, my parents had planned to name me Rachel). And let me tell you, I saw a few things… it’s interesting to think about my experiences as if they belonged to another person.
For legal purposes, I do not endorse trespassing or any other illegal activity, but if you think trespassing is on par with enslaving sentient alien dinosaurs and mothmans as far as crimes go, well, I don’t know what to tell you.
See you next time, and keep your eyes open for mushrooms!
:: Jaer