While preparing your garden at the beginning of spring, you find the blueprints for your house buried in the earth. When you pull it out and examine it, you find that there is a room in the blueprint that doesn’t exist in your house. Both disturbed and intrigued, you set off to find the missing room. Write what happens next.

While preparing your garden at the beginning of spring, you find the blueprints for your house buried in the earth. When you pull it out and examine it, you find that there is a room in the blueprint that doesn’t exist in your house. Both disturbed and intrigued, you set off to find the missing room. Write what happens next.

My shovel hit something metallic. This is odd, I’ve only dug down a couple of feet, preparing the bed for a new azalea bush. It’s in the one area of the garden that I haven’t transformed since moving into my dream home and before this it was just a grassy area. I reach into the hole and feel a hard surface. It’s a tube, and I try to pull it out of the hole but realize that part of it is still buried. I grab a spade and dig around the object and realize that the tube is wider than the hole, so I widen the hole until I can pull out the tube.

It’s about 18 inches long and has caps at both ends. I try to unscrew the caps without success and head over to the hose to see if cleaning off the dirt will help me get this tube open. As I run the hose over the tube I notice an etching on one of the end caps: 1945. That’s the year the house was built! Could this tube have been buried for seventy years? Once the dirt is cleaned away I give the end caps another go, and this time one cap reluctantly opens. I peer inside but can’t see what is in there. I head over to the patio and tip the tube over the table. A tightly rolled piece of piece of black or dark blue paper slides out. The roll is about twelve inches long and it isn’t too thick, perhaps two or three pages. I try to unroll them but they’ve been rolled up for so long that I can’t get them to lay flat. I can seen that they’re blueprints of something, and I bring them into the house. I grab some fat books from my huge book collection in the living room and use them to pin down the corners as I unroll the three blueprints on my dining room table. 

The address for my house in the lower right corner of each blueprint, and there is a sheet for the first floor, the second floor, and the basement. There doesn’t appear to have been any work done to the house since these blueprints were made, because the first and second floors look right- same rooms, same walls. When I move to the third blueprint, the one from the basement, I was puzzled because it didn’t look like my basement. I have a full, unfinished basement but the plans show a basement that is larger than than mine. According to these plans, there are two rooms in the basement and one of them extends under the patio in my backyard! I don’t hang out in the basement very much but I know that there are no doors in that one large room. Intrigued, I decide to do a little investigating.

The basement has a couple of naked bulbs but I take my big bad flashlight downstairs with me. This flashlight is long and heavy and really bright. I love the new LED flashlights! When I get to the bottom of the stairs I turn toward the back of the house, where the mystery room was supposed to be. The patio is in the back and at the left end of the house, so I head to that corner of the basement. I had to shift some boxes before I could get a good look at the wall. I turn on the flashlight and play its powerful beam over the wall. This wall, like the others, is cement block and on first blush I see nothing that would indicate a room  behind the it. I rap on the wall with the flashlight but feel pretty foolish- cement block wouldn’t sound hollow, and indeed, there was no hollow echo. I get closer to the wall and examine it closely. At first I see nothing to indicate that this was anything but a solid cement wall, but when I bend down I see what appears to be a small crack at the bottom that goes up about three feet. The crack is fairly straight and as I trace it with my fingers, I realize that it turns ninety degrees at the top. I feel a bit of a flutter in my stomach- was this it? I decide to bring some more light downstairs and run up to get a couple of lamps.

Once the corner is brightly lit I can see the faint outline of the crack. It goes up those three feet and then across, to the other wall. It outlines an area about three feet square on the wall. It has been painted over and is hard to see, which explains why I have never noticed it before. I get a scraper and screwdriver and get to work, digging out the paint until I am down to the bare block. As I work I notice that the cement block in this square is not as cold as the blocks in the other wall, further evidence to me that I may be on the right track. After two hours of scraping and digging I have the crack completely exposed, but if this is a door, how does it open? I don’t see any hinges. I also notice an inch-wide indentation in the center of the square and decide to dig the paint out of there as well. It turns out to be a hole with threads in it and looks as if something could be screwed into it. But what? Will this open the door? I am convinced that I have indeed uncovered a door. As I mull this over, I suddenly remember that after moving in, I had found a jar with odd-sized screws in this basement. I had thought at the time that they might turn out to be important and had stashed them on the other side of the basement, on a shelf above the laundry tub. I walk over and find the jar; in it are a couple of long, fat screws and some pieces of metal that look like long pieces of chalk, with a hole in the middle. The screws look like they would fit in the hole! Were they the keys to open the door?

I open the jar and take out the longest screw and start to thread it into the hole. It takes awhile- there is still some paint in there- but eventually I work most of it in. Now what? I had expected that the door would pop open as I advanced the screw, but no such luck. I look in the jar at the other metal pieces and belatedly realize that the screw would fit through the hole in the metal and form a handle of some sort when I inserted the screw. I can believe I missed this. I remove the screw and slide it through the hold of the metal piece. It made a very nice handle, and I quickly re-insert the screw. As I work at the screw, the section of wall becomes looser and I realize that I might be able to move it in or out. I try pulling on the handle and screw but other than a little movement, the door stays put. I switch to pushing and as I put my shoulder into it, the door starts to slide inward. This has to be it! I push a bit more and then sit on the floor and give a few big shoves with my feet. Bit by bit, the door moves inward and then suddenly it pushes all the way in…to the mystery room.

Of course it is completely dark in this newly-revealed place. Clearly there are no windows and none had been indicated on the blueprints. I grab the flashlight and shine it into the space. I see a lot of dust and some vague shapes but they are too far away to identify. If I want to know what is in there, I will have to go in. I have some qualms- there might be any manner of creepy things in there like bugs, mice, spiders…but there is a mystery in that room and I have to discover what is in there! I grab one of the lamps and bring it close to the opening, then  realize I can probably get it completely into the room. I push the lamp in and then with just a few misgivings, I crawl into the room with my flashlight in hand. 

There is a lot of dust and I stir up enough to make me cough and make my eyes water. I shine the flashlight upward to make sure that it was taller than the three-foot door; it seems to be the same height as the rest of the basement. I stand up cautiously and turn the flashlight onto the wall with the door. No sign of a light switch. It is so dark that even the lamp and the flashlight don’t provide enough light. The room is big- at least the size of the patio overhead- and the walls are either painted black or were very dirty. I decide I need more light, so I hook up some extension cords and bring all of the lamps into the mystery room.

Do you ever dream of buried treasure? Of riches beyond compare? Do you hope to win the lottery? Once the room is lit, I deflate a little bit because I see no treasure chests, no pots of gold. At first I am disappointed because all I can see are books, a desk, and a chair. Everything is so dusty that I decide to clean it all off; perhaps the desk is an antique and worth some money. I crawl out of the room to get some cleaning supplies and then set to work clearing out some of the dust on the floors. I work my way over to the desk and for the first time I get a really good look at the desk and the items piled on top. As my cloth wipes, titles come to light and fine leather bindings are revealed. These are not just books; these are finely made treasures of leather and parchment with gold found in the lettering of title and author. This is a collection of first editions Dickens, Sand, Eliot. I am not a book dealer but even I recognize the worth of these volumes.

I had purchased my home from the estate of the woman who lived here alone for many years. When I moved to this town my neighbors regaled me with story after story about her, a simple woman who loved books. One neighbor in particular told me that there was a rumor that the former owner was a rare book collector but no books or papers to that effect were found after she died. Her children had long ago left the area and left her; when she died their only desire was to see that the house was sold as soon as possible. I bought the house within a year, seeing a diamond in the rough in its simple lines and spare architecture. Now it seemed that I had acquired even more.

As I continue to clean, a thought runs through my mind. Why did the former owner hide this room and hide these books? Surely a treasure like this should be shared, not hoarded! These books are priceless works of art and literature; as a lover of books myself, I am certain of this. I pick up a volume of “A Tale of Two Cities” and reverently clean the dust from the cover. I open the book to find the publication date, and find an unsealed envelope tucked inside the cover. I reason that an unsealed envelope is not private and I reach into it and withdraw a sheet of rose-colored paper. There is an embossed, ornate R in the upper left corner and I recall that the former owner of this home was named Rosa. As I read the last letter that Rosa ever wrote on her special notepaper, I begin to understand the reason for this room and why it was sealed. It was not just the architecture that drew me to this house. The spirit of Rosa had reached through the walls and called a fellow book-lover to ownership. And like its previous owner, I will keep its secrets.