On the edge of a small suburban neighborhood in the woods, I'm entering a broken-down trailer with my mom behind me. The trailer looks like it had been through a tornado; the walls were falling apart, furniture was strewn about and upside down. It looked like it had been torn apart then left to sit for 20 years. Halogen lights somehow lit the place like it was a storage closet in a high school, with some rooms remaining dark or pitch black. Couches and mattresses are overturned or half-overturned so that walking is difficult, the rooms only being 7 or 8 feet wide. I start noticing that a good portion of the furniture is actually musical in nature. A tweed amp appears in my sight with the mesh speaker ripped up. Nonetheless, it's a vintage Fender amp and looks awesome. Then, I see a guitar with an unusually thick neck and no strings. I realize that this is the hidden treasure trove of musical instruments no one has been able to locate for years that I read about on Atlas Obscura (not real). The trailer is part of a complex, wonky grid of more broken-down trailers which are connected by crooked, cramped openings that were probably at one time functional, upright doorways. As I pass through a broken doorway to find more instruments, I find myself in a maze of rooms connected by endless doorways. However, instead of tornado-damaged rooms in a trailer, they become highly-decorated, luxurious, and pristine children's bedrooms. Each one is filled with expensive-looking stuffed animals made with intricate fabrics and encrusted with fake gems. They are life-size and take up most of the space in the room. The beds and furniture are almost always white. Each cramped, triangular bedroom has a Victorian structure with tall, thin doors that connect them to the next room. The connecting doors appear first as closet or bathroom doors, whereas the doors at the entrance (one of the triangles' corners) of each room lead to a circular (or hexagonal) hallway with white walls and pinewood floors. The rooms seem to vary in color scheme and general organization, but each has little lamps on nightstands, eloquently made beds, and stuffed animals. Each looks like a little girl's dream bedroom. Eventually I find myself in a room different from the others. It takes up a good quarter of the whole rotunda. The theme is wood paneling, like a 1960s science classroom. The wall on the inner side is covered in hardcover books in a dark wooden bookcase. At first it appears impressive and even beautiful, but upon a second look it is sparsely filled and the books don't seem nearly as antique or interesting. The outer wall looks outward with three very large windows. A long, polished wooden counter runs along the outer wall, waist-high. There are bevels, ledges, and compartments in the angled counter that make it appropriate for studying or reading one of the many books in the room. The windows face a steep, shadowy bank of rocky soil and weeds bounded by concrete walls at either side. At the top of the bank, where the concrete walls come to a small opening, there are one or two metal grates that suggest the rooms are underground and hidden from the world. I recognize the building right outside the sewer grates as the Phoenixville High School. The trailer I started it must have been in the little neighborhood near the high school, and the confusing maze of mysterious, underground rooms must have led me all the way to a spot underneath the high school's roundabout driveway. My mom is now a whole party of her side of the family, and they call to me until they finally find me in the library room of the hidden stronghold.
