The bunker that ate the world

Growing up, we had a sweet cave in our backyard. A natural cavern that the previous owner, (I'll call him Mr X) had fortified with a vault door from a defunct bank and cleverly hidden air shafts emerging under lichen encrusted boulders or disguised to look like fallen trees. The whole shebang wasn't even listed on the deed, I found it playing by myself, coincidentally looking for secret caves. I never told anyone else about it, fortunately.

Tucked behind a dense thicket of willows and thorny brambles, the vault door was closed but not locked, the locking mechanism had been reconfigured to work from the inside only. It was pretty eerie opening that big round door the first time. Negotiating dangling curtains of willow branches and thriving saplings, and then gingerly picking through an even thicker growth of pricker bushes. I found a partially exposed granite face about 8 feet high, curving into the hill. By pressing my body against the rock, I avoided most of the sharp thorns as I side stepped along the curve. About 90 degrees from the face there was a split in the rock just wide enough for an adult turned sideways. Being a lanky kid at the time I fit in there no problem. The crack turned tightly 90 degrees again and about 10 feet in it opened up. I groped forward into the empty dark but could feel nothing.

I got out of there and went home for a flashlight, the chromed tube kind that took D cell Eveready batteries. I checked it and the light was bright, which was kinda surprising. More often than not the family flashlights were dead or nearly so. Anyway, after hastily repeating the whole procedure and getting way more scratched up than I did the first time, the flashlight lit up an irregular granite chamber about 12 feet deep and high with a dirt floor. There was a big tarp draped over the far wall, brown and roughly woven, probably burlap. I pulled the tarp aside and holy fucksticks! Polished stainless steel bounced the light back like a mirror. I freaking almost dropped the flashlight. Make a long story short, there was the big round door, set into the rock with a thin seam of concrete around the edges. The tarp was stuck up high somehow, i couldn't pull it away, so I drew it aside and wadded it into a cleft of granite to the side, which also created a sparkling column of dust wherever I swung the light around. I grabbed a brass handle the width of a baseball bat opposite the massive hinges and pulled. There was a tiny scritching sound as two or three trapped grains of sand were atomized and then the massive thing swung open, perfectly balanced and frictionless.

Ok, so the rest of the adventure was what you'd expect, kid finds a secret stash of carefully packaged bulk food, books, weapons. There was a orderly box of vintage Playboys in sealed plastic envelopes, smelling fresh printed, not like musty dirty magazines kept in potting sheds or behind the seats of old pick up trucks, I'd found plenty of those before. The Playboys was how I dated the place, the most recent issue had a Tim Leary interview, September 1966, 75 cents. Man, money was really worth something back then! You could buy a magazine packed with pretty, mostly naked girls for under a dollar.

I found the cavern in the 70s by the way, when I was 11 or maybe 12. My parents started building the house earlier in '63, so Mr X must have still been stocking the bunker even after we bought the land. Weird.