The Unopened Room

Or: The things we haven’t explored (yet)

“I don’t know how to get out of here and the coffee is terrible.”

In 2017, a group of scientists used a technology called muon radiography—a kind of cosmic X-ray that detects high-energy particles passing through matter—to scan the inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza. What they found was surprising, even a little startling: A previously unknown chamber, just above the Grand Gallery. Completely sealed. Unreachable. Untouched for more than 4,000 years.

We still don’t know what’s in it.

Maybe it’s a structural feature. Maybe it’s symbolic. Maybe it’s just a void left over from the build, the sort of thing the original builders never figured anyone would ever see. Like all those food bits that fell into the crack between the stove and the counter. Functionally non-existent.

It could be anything. We haven’t opened it. We haven’t even tried.

And that fascinates me.

I’m a sucker for a good ancient mystery, obviously. I’ve spent most of my writing career penning adventures about lost things—buried knowledge, vanished civilizations, hidden chambers beneath desert sands. The book I’m currently outlining plays in this space, as does practically every Dan Kotler thriller. The book I just wrote with JD Barker taps into this, too. It’s kind of my thing.

So it probably makes sense that I see these unopened rooms everywhere.

I remember hearing a story a few years ago—it was about a guy and some friends who had been evicted from their apartment so the whole block could be leveled and turned into a shopping mall. These guys were artists. They didn’t have the means to fight back against this kind of eminent domain takedown. They were just renters, and the lease was up.

At some point, this guy was wandering by the site of the new mall. He could see the construction, get an idea of the layout. And he noticed something...

Through some quirk of design, the layout of the mall included a void. Where two squared-off spaces met, there was a gap. A space between spaces.

Over the next few months, he watched the mall go up, and kept expecting them to get around to resolving that gap. But to his surprise, they never did.

That’s when he had an idea.

Freshly homeless, and thanks entirely to this monument to capitalism, he gathered his friends and told them about the gap in the mall. And, as the saw horses were taken down and the floors were swept, as the construction was completed, they went to work on their own. They closed the gap themselves. But not before giving themselves a way in.

What followed was four years of these guys moving in and out of the space, sneaking in items from the mall—furniture, televisions, a Playstation 2, even a waffle maker. They powered everything from extension cords. They lived there, rent free, for almost half a decade, mostly undetected.

They had only one rule: Tell no one of this place.

Of course, they all told someone, eventually. The ruiners. And the result was indeed ruination.

Eventually the jig was up. They got caught. And now, tragically, they are trespassed from the mall for life.

The way malls are going, these days, that may not be quite the sentence everyone initially assumed it to be.

The the point is, these guys found and utilized this space that no one even knew was there. A secret room, hidden from everyone, where they lived their lives—undetected and unperturbed. Isn’t that fascinating?

(Look up Michael Townsend and Providence Place Mall to get the full story. I’ll probably write about it in more detail in the future... let me know in the comments if you’d like to see a full post about it)

Stuff like that fascinates me. Hidden spaces. Lost history, Secret archives. I eat it up. You probably to, too.

There’s something about unopened rooms and lost spaces that sparks a fire in us. Secrets intrigue us.

I don’t know what we’ll eventually find in that space in the Great Pyramid. Maybe treasure. Maybe some lost history. Maybe nothing. It’s hard to say.

And, frankly, the Egyptian government tends to draw some hard lines on sites like that, and control what information gets in or out of the country. All that does is fuel more speculation and interest, though.

We love a good secret. But we love a forbidden secret even more.

A NOTE AT THE END

When I was a kid, I stayed for a week or two with my cousins. They lived in an apartment in Houston. The sort of place I wasn’t all that accustomed to, as a Wild Peach boy, running barefoot and carefree along the blacktop streets and open pastures of my homeland.

So, without knowing it was a thing I shouldn’t do, I wandered off one day.

I met up with some other kids, mostly older. And at that time in my life, every stranger was just a friend I hadn’t met yet. So, I ended up going with them as they explored a nearby construction site.

At the back of the site, a large, round culvert had been dropped off at some point, and forgotten. It was shrouded in tall weeds, hidden by mounds of earth. It was likely, thinking back on it, that it would someday be reclaimed and used in the site. But at the time, and for a moment, it had been captured in the name of the Lost Boys. It had been turned into a secret space.

Plywood, probably reclaimed the from the site, had been fastened to either end. A makeshift door had been made. And inside, all manner of reclaimed furniture and detritus had been arrayed. The kids and I hung out there for hours, playing a board game, drinking warm soda.

Eventually we left, went back to their apartment, and hung out there until a frantic knock came at the door.

For some reason, I was the only one compelled to answer.

My aunt, disturbed and frazzled and worried as hell, had been going door-to-door, looking for her lost nephew. When she found me she scolded me, right there in the doorway. And I left with her, never to see or speak or hang out with the Lost Boys again.

I wonder if they ever noticed I was gone? Am I a legend, among these boys who are now grown men somewhere? Am I the ghost they saw once?

I was informed that one does not simply “wander off” in these semi-urban areas. It’s not like Wild Peach there. It’s dangerous. I nodded and said I was sorry, that I would never do it again.

I still do this, all the time.

Every city I visit, especially when I’m there on my own, get’s a thorough walking. I’ve found myself in some truly dangerous areas, in the name of exploring. I’ve been approached and accosted by some pretty scary Lost Boys. I keep doing it. I don’t seem to learn my lessons very easily.

But again, there’s that unopened room, that hidden space. That secret chamber, hidden almost in plain sight. I don’t remember much else about that visit with my cousins, one summer when I was a child. But I’ll always have that culvert filled with discarded furniture.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, BUY A BOOK...

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Because like I said, I write about this kind of thing a lot in my novels. Dan Kotler spends most of his time exploring the literary equivalent of an abandoned culvert full of discarded furniture, or newly discovered chambers below archaeological wonders and monuments. It’s a hoot.

And if you’ve already read all my books (thank you!), please feel free to tell someone else to read them, too. Share this post with them, it might whet their appetite.

This pyramid leads to a secret place.