Perfect! The hole was big enough for me, so I crawled through. It smelled damp and musty and of animal urine. I guess a snake had lived there previously. There was nobody watching, so I walked on, and found that some of the bricks were crumbling when I pressed against the factory wall. I removed them quickly, avoiding the bugs, and replaced the bricks. The room was lightly lit, and a great slide was sitting opposite the door. I found no other ways to access the chambers below, so I decided to use the slide.

The wind whooshed past me as I slid down at great speed, my buttocks getting hotter and hotter. When I thought my backside temperature had reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, the slide finally sloped upwards, and then I was sailing through the air. I landed on some foam mats, bounced a few times and landed in a ball pit. I blinked as the lights shone bright here, as it was dark on the slide.

“Whew!” I breathed. “I must’ve come flying down at 65 kilometers per hour, or faster! Good thing the foam mat got me, or else I would’ve crashed down like a comet and burned the floor.” I estimated I had been on the slide for about seven minutes. The slide was tilted at a 45-degree angle, I figured.

I thought it was a fun way to get down to the work area. As I climbed out of the ball pit, I noticed a sign nailed to the rock.

“Left Is The Manufacturing Place For New Candies. Right Is For Old Candies.”

I bolted to the left, as I knew that Scrumptious Caramel Crunch was new, and could not believe what I saw. Lengle’s Candy Department was one of the most successful on the continent, but I still could not believe what I saw. It seemed like the factory spent only 20 dollars on the hallways: a dark corridor-cave lay before me. Tremendous amounts of earth covered the walls. Rock was sometimes split, creating stalagmites, and water dripped constantly from above.

This looked more like an old broken-down cave than a rich candy factory’s hallways. Nobody was there, and I didn’t want to waste time, so I began to dash forwards. It could be a suicidal idea, but it was still worth a try. Splat, splat, splat...

This was the sound that my shoes made when they hit the floor. The light was really dim here, probably because the CEO didn’t want to waste time and money on lighting. The first thing I met that was not rock nor dirt was an immense orange door, and a sign above labeled “Mint Gobstoppers” coarsely. I could make it out if I squinted and looked extremely carefully.

I kept my eyes on it as I walked past, and when I rotated my eyes back, I saw rows and rows of orange doors, all labeled crudely as if the painters were in a hurry and had shaky brushes; the ink above looked like a spider had crawled in it, but at least you could see what it originally meant to say.

As I walked past the doors, I came across many familiar treats that I had saw in newspapers or on flyers posted up by Lengle’s Candy Department, such as the famous Halloween Treat, the sweet Mint Mouthwash, as well as many others.

I found out that the further you walked forward, the newer the candies were. From their website, I remembered they said that the old candies stay in production forever, unless they are so unpopular that they are discontinued.

The new ones were produced for just a few months, until they won the approval of the public (they chose 100-200 lucky testers for each new product). I strolled along the corridors for a long time, too long. Eventually, I lit a match (I always keep a matchbox in my backpack) and checked the time. Man! It was 8 on the dot.

My hands trembled as I watched the clock tick past. My mom was usually home from work by 6. I needed to think about my choices, quick.