I. The Place Nobody Notices

Substation No. 9 existed in a place people passed without seeing. Forests, streams, and empty service roads surrounded it, swallowing sound and light equally. From above, it looked like any other small transformer station, a squat concrete hut surrounded by fencing and warning signs. Nothing about it suggested danger. Nothing about it suggested mystery. That was precisely why it worked so well.

I worked for an electric company that supplied power to warehouses, factories, and treatment facilities scattered across an enormous rural zone. My job title was driver and inspector, which meant I spent nights alone, moving from site to site, checking circuit breakers and equipment. Most shifts were boring. Long hours inside a container office, struggling for phone signal, waiting for time to pass.

The work only became interesting when it rained.

II. What Rain Reveals

Rain changed everything. Light rain activated automatic pumps below each substation. Heavy rain overwhelmed them. When water rose too fast, basements flooded, and flooded basements meant damaged equipment. That was when I was called to act.

Substation No. 9 covered land that once held a mining town. Decades earlier, a dam flooded the valley. People were relocated. Mines collapsed. When the water drained, factories replaced houses, but the underground remained. Basements, tunnels, and corridors formed a massive network beneath every transformer hut.

No complete map existed. Original plans were lost to war, neglect, and bureaucracy. What remained was a labyrinth nobody fully understood.

III. Down Below

My responsibility was simple. Enter the basement, check the pump, fix it if necessary, leave. Veteran workers repeated the same warning during my first week. Do not explore. Do not wander. Do not get curious. Bring two flashlights.

The tunnels were old, some nearly a century. Concrete crumbled. Metal rusted. Water pooled in unexpected places. Vertical shafts dropped into darkness without warning. Entire rooms sat submerged for decades, preserving machines like artifacts from a drowned civilization.

We all explored anyway, at least a little. Human curiosity is stubborn. The furthest anyone ever went was nearly half a kilometer into a descending tunnel before floodwater blocked the path completely. Pumps never lowered the level. No one knew how far it continued.

IV. The Rule Written in Blood

The two flashlight rule existed for a reason. Lose your only light down there and you were finished. No signal. No landmarks. Only darkness, water, and crushed concrete stretching endlessly.

A colleague once fell into a shaft half a meter wide and many meters deep. He survived, barely. Others were not so lucky. The company did not talk about them.

We carried oxygen meters, gloves, boots, masks, and filters. The smell underground was always wrong. Oil, rot, stagnant water, and something metallic lingered everywhere. Sometimes it was worse. Evidence of the old mining town still surfaced. Concrete slabs. Rusted trucks trapped by roots. Forgotten remains of lives erased from the surface.

V. John

John worked the night shift with me. Quiet, methodical, stubborn. He broke the flashlight rule, insisting he was careful. When winter thaw caused severe flooding, he proposed reactivating old centrifugal pumps abandoned for years. It was exhausting work, but it saved several substations.

Days later, I replaced him for a shift. His truck sat outside a station, engine cold. John was gone.

I searched for hours before calling the police. An investigation followed. We combed tunnels for weeks. Volunteers worked overtime. Nothing was found. No body. No clothing. No trace.

The official conclusion was simple. He wandered into the forest and drowned. None of us believed it.

VI. What Came After

A year later, Patrice found a flashlight lodged in debris. The battery was dead. A scrap of paper taped to it bore John’s name. It raised more questions than answers.

Then we found John’s phone. It still worked. The photos were wrong. They showed tunnels none of us recognized. Metadata placed the phone at Substation No. 9 on the day he vanished, despite records showing he never went near it.

The final image showed a tunnel leading toward the collapsed mine.

We handed the phone to police. Nothing came of it.

VII. The Draining

Eventually, the company drained part of Substation No. 9 completely. Beneath the water, stairs descended deeper than expected. A bridge crossed an unseen gap. Doors welded shut lined the walls.

They claimed they found a body. It was not John.

Most workers refused basement assignments afterward. The company paid extra. No one volunteered.

VIII. Silence Below

Stories spread quietly. Music heard deep underground. Knocking behind sealed doors. Pale figures glimpsed briefly. I never experienced any of it myself. What terrified me more was simpler.

John went farther than anyone else. He did not scream. He did not leave evidence. He simply disappeared into a place designed to swallow people.

Substation No. 9 still operates. Power still flows. Rain still falls.

And beneath it all, the tunnels remain.