Smokingboot

Some while ago I was taking R and her kids for green card photos, and as we left their apartment, her two middle children, the boys (about nine and twelve years old), started asking me urgent questions along these lines:

"Under here," (indicating the apartment building) "is there something?"

"Something like what?" I asked.

"Something ... like another house? Where people live?"

"Most buildings around here have basements," I said. "So there's probably a basement. A place for storing things and for machinery for the building. But no one lives in it." Then, thinking about how there are, in fact, basement apartments, I said, "Sometimes people do live in the basement. But if people are living there, then there are little windows here." (I pointed at the ground line of the apartment building.) "Your building doesn't have any, see? So no one lives down there."

"No, no," said the older one. "Not just under here. Under all this." This time he spread his arms to indicate the roads, the other apartment buildings.

Remembering the Spanish teacher I had in Medellín who confessed to believing in lizard people in her younger days (and still seemed to find the possibility credible), I said, "No. There's no one living under all this."

"But then what's this?" they both asked, taking me over to a mysterious circular trap-door-like thing in the snow:

mystery portal in situ


mystery portal up close


You can't tell from the photos--which I took some days after the fact; we were in a hurry that day--but it's quite large, maybe twice the diameter of a manhole cover, maybe a little larger even than that.

"I don't know what that's for," I confessed. "But I promise you, no one lives down there."

They looked at me half skeptically, half pityingly, and honestly, in the moment I definitely felt doubtful myself. Maybe there was a secret research center down there? A hidden playground? Handy micro nuclear missile silo? Storehouse of extortionate landlord gains? Might not the evil apartment management company, when it receives payment, convert it directly into gold bars and store it under there?

Who can honestly say?