The moment he fell, he expected the jolt of impact—broken bones, compressed lungs, pain biting into his ribs.
Instead, the fall lasted longer than the floor should have allowed.
The apartment dissolved into a pure yellow, faded, diseased, and endless.
His knees hit damp carpet, the fibers cold and spongy beneath his palms.
A low buzz hummed overhead like an insect nest tucked into fluorescent lights. The air smelled of mold, stagnant water, and something faintly chemical.
He slowly stood. His vision swayed.
The room around him—if it could be called a room—stretched outward in every direction, with infinitely repeating patterns of stained wallpaper and carpeting.
Rows of flickering ceiling lights hummed out of sync.
He recognized none of it, not inherently, yet he did at the same time. The Backrooms, a piece of internet fiction.
To exist in such a place, with all that he'd experienced, remained odd and horrific in a way.
It was all wrong. But something, in particular, was off, terribly so.
He inhaled. The air tasted stale. His hands trembled—a rare crack in his calm.
A distant noise echoed.
Something like a marker dragged across paper, scratching rhythmically in the dark.
He swallowed and exhaled through his nose.
He turned slowly, memorizing each corridor, each stain on the fabric wallpaper, each flicker pattern of the lights. He reached into his pocket and found the same pen that had dropped moments before. All things had a use.
He marked the wall with a line.
The wall absorbed the ink like thirsty skin.
He frowned.
Interesting.
He moved.
Every few meters, he left another mark.
Every corridor he walked down repeated after a while.
Every corner returned him to something he had seen before.
A looping structure.
A shifting topology.
A trap with no center.
Time passed without meaning here; he couldn't tell whether hours or minutes had gone by.
He forced himself into a routine: walk in one direction, count steps, count breaths, and analyze repeating patterns.
But the space rearranged itself faster than his logic could track.
And then he heard it again.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
It was closer this time.
He turned slowly.
A shape stood at the end of the corridor. Black.
Or rather an absence of shape, like a scribble a child might make, line atop line atop line, but moving, writhing, and pulsing.
He froze.
The entity shifted mechanically, as though studying him. Lines wavered. The edges frayed like smoke.
He took one step backward.
The figure expanded—unfolding upon itself.
He ran.
His footsteps slapped against the wet carpet.
The scribble chased, dragging marks along the walls, ink soot spreading like rot.
He didn't look back.
When the impact came, he barely felt it.
A sharp pressure against his spine. A tearing sensation. A muffled gasp he didn't remember making.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
***
He woke up lying exactly where he had fallen.
Same damp carpet. Same humming lights. And the same yellow corridor.
He touched his chest. There was no wound, nor any pain.
'…' he thought, his mind an empty vacuum. This was not logical, not at all similar to anything he had ever tackled before.
Why. Why was he resurrecting again and again, without any answers or anything to go off of?
He stood up.
He looked at the pen still in his hand.
Survival was all he had.
The only way toward understanding.
He began walking.
***
The Backrooms did not welcome him.
They pressed against him, rearranged around him, tested him.
But he adapted.
He learned that moving quickly led him to dead ends, and that sound attracted entities.
He learned to sleep lightly, to ration the food and water that manifested irregularly in strange rooms, to listen—for the scratch, the hiss, and the wet dragging sounds.
Time became a distant concept.
Days.
Weeks.
Years.
He aged slowly, physically and mentally sharpening in ways only suffering could forge.
He mapped what he could in notebooks torn from abandoned office supplies. When paper ran out, he carved lines with sharpened metal. When metal dulled, he catalogued mentally.
He encountered more creatures:
A tall shadow with too many arms. A wandering mass of bones fused together impossibly. A childlike weeping in empty rooms without a source. A humanoid shape that walked just out of sight, always aligned with his blind spots.
He outsmarted many.
He outran some.
He hid from the rest.
Sometimes he found other survivors.
Rarely.
They never lasted long.
And his heart hardened with each loss, but never enough to extinguish his desire to survive.
He saved who he could, and buried who he could not, when he could.
Years turned into decades.
***
He found a young girl while wandering a narrow corridor with peeling wallpaper. An entity of blurred limbs and white noise had cornered her. She screamed, swinging a broken pipe uselessly.
He charged.
Pain flooded his bones as he struck the creature, drawing its attention. His body was too old for heroics; every movement sent fire through his joints.
The creature pinned him to the wall. His ribs cracked. His vision blurred.
He saw the trapped girl crawling away.
With a weak smile, he thought; 'Good…'
He tried to push the entity back one last time, and something snapped inside him.
His heart, maybe his spine.
He couldn't tell.
He smiled faintly through the pain.
The world dimmed.
He died.
For the third time.