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When I was 5-6, my grandfather worked as a head of one of the branches within the school district. The school which held his office was labyrinthine and enormous, but most of it was fairly mundane. Sometimes there were shortcuts or whatever that we'd take to other places in the building that didn't quite make sense, but I just chalk that up to my poor sense of direction and youth. The thing I can't really explain is the fact that there were tons of these shortcuts that amounted to nothing short of straight up secret passages. A few of them were just dark, musty, etc, but a couple had, at ground floor or higher, lighting that resembled firelight (e.g. a furnace or torch or whatever) being seen through grating, casting flickering shadows and orange and golden glows about us. I also heard grinding, bustling, clanking, and banging noises.
I reiterate, this is a school I am talking about.
We only went through those routes twice, to my recollection, and stopped after I asked about them later on. I wondered if we could take those back passages again so I could see them more closely (he rushed me through last time) and he just frowned at me like I shouldn't be making requests and that I was being given a treat to sit there with him at work (he was always weird, but he usually meant well). After that, though, we never saw those places again, and only took the other routes. He acted like that had to be what I meant, and that the other place didn't exist. I insist that it was just as infernal and Silent Hill-ish as I described here, but I work at that building now, and I haven't seen hide nor hair of those blasted hell-paths. Fuck if I know what happened there.
Maybe my grandpa was a cultist. Wouldn't surprise me, actually. He always hobnobbed with the upper echelon, and he would totally fit in with a Skull and Bones group...
