I trust that this letter has come to you as would a man stumble upon a corpse in the woods, alone, only a skeleton to keep him company.
I had been once an adolescent that spent the bulk of his time engaging in communities beyond my understanding. It was a poor way to grow up normal, as I had now come to know, but in that present I was happy doing nothing else. I recall a time in which I carried a certain adaptive propensity, in what I had known as "fandom" culture at the time, but have now seen it as a reflection of a much more sinister manifestation: demons, as they were, generational demons of a cruel machine.
Children achieve fluency in their teens. Those who talk less, possibly later yet. The crime was explicitly simple; what child that grows inside of the subversive, under the tree, will sprout roots that are unfamiliar. The repeatable process of indoctrination, pollination, and suicidal ideation was but words in minds before actualization, with what terrible ideal in place to drive it all. It was the work of demons; those who replace their words with symbols and hymns that nobody other than them could understand. It wasn't difficult to imagine that I was much the same. A child that spoke as little as he could, with only his thoughts to blame, would cling with not talons but nails on cliffside homes.
It was the summer after the pandemic that my unfortunate self was to watch "THE HIDDEN DANGER OF THE BACKROOMS (PART 1 OF 16)" that I was flung down a bottomless pit of derivative content, group fiction, as it were, off a certain imageboard screenshot. It would be hours I would find myself perusing past wiki after wiki, database after database of Backrooms mythology and lore. The vague details and wishful origins were quickly to be filled in with further nonsense that people just found cool; monsters that fit every human sensibility imaginable with human origin stories and ghost-like features, separate floors with their own biomes based on other liminal images, exits, entrances, magical places, like a wonderland beckoning explorers to discover its secrets if not for its comically impossible size.
I wasted no time joining this bleak theatre with my often less than stellar contributions. They were as welcome as any, of course, as it was not as if my predecessors' contents were of any higher quality. There was quick acceptance of me into most of the communities; the top forums would all welcome newcomers with open arms, especially those that were similarly underaged to the concurrent members. It was by the second week that I would find myself having conversed with anyone the most I'd ever been doing in my life, and for the first time, with people that I felt understood me.
It was then that I would come to meet a boy, a bit older than I was at that age, that was the first to have sought me out specifically. His name was either Tommy or Thomas; I called him Tom after his username "TimTom351", the kind of username that to an older me might've come off as suspiciously mundane. But Tom really was exactly that kind of person. His interests numbered essentially 2, playing Roblox and writing Backrooms lore, and his personality was as generically upbeat as you could possibly imagine. It turns out Tom was raped by his dad, and he didn't really come back online after that.
I was angry at him for abandoning me with such short notice, since he was more or less my only friend. He told me with his last message his address, a surprisingly close hundred kilometer drive from where I was living at the time, and to visit him if I had the chance. I wasn't too interested at the time, but as fate would have it, my family would move to the same town when I entered middle school.
Tom was expectedly proclaimed dead, and an obituary was erected in the local cemetery that I would come to find after asking around for his information. It turned out that his father was interested in more than just sexual assault, and slaughtered his wife in a murder suicide in front of his kids. I had difficulties finding Tom at all; Tom had likely been transgender, and hadn't yet told anyone in real life about his sexuality. I don't quite remember what his "real name" was, but I do recall that it had been something quite stupid, the type that British millennials loved giving away.
Curiously, however, nobody ever found his body. He was thought to have died along with his mother and sister, but his body hadn’t been located. What was left untouched by his relatives was his diary, which local news had described as an "unsettling and disturbing account of childhood abuse". It was a pretty funny read. It turned out Tom loved putting things in his rectum.
Of course, the hopeful person that I was, I set out for the woods the next day, in search of Tom and his hermithood. He would be chewing on bamboo and wearing bark, naked with his hair hair long and his eggs fertile. With me, I took with me a hatchet and lighter, and set out into the woods of Tom’s backyard.
The scenery wasn’t terribly interesting. It was mainly stumps on a wild plain and an occasional badger avoiding the claws of an eagle, and what awaited me was mostly nothing, but the distant sounds of the urban world and a fickle smell of gunpowder. Her room was similarly empty. The backdoor to her house was unlocked, the keyhole slightly rusted. What was left of the building was bloodstains that were still visible on the floor marking the shape of the furniture, and boxes of cardboard littered throughout the building that held a few spare bolts and nuts.
It was then that I turned around, and I had realized that the same empty building that I had stepped into had not an exit. It was there, empty, with stains on the carpet, continued, forever.
I couldn't feel the air on my skin. The carpet shifted underneath the soles of my sneakers, my body encompassed in a lukewarm hue of brown. The ceiling cackled in a vibrant symphony of a flat, intonal hum. What surrounded me was walls, and beyond that was silence. It was a hilarious sight. It was the backrooms. Indeed, the backrooms. The rooms of which were in the back. The back of the rooms, of which were behind the back of the rooms in the back.
In defeat, I sat there, at the center of a thicket beige wall that had the slightest texture of moisture but was dry at the touch. My eyes would not close. My breath would not follow. The only motion was of my feet, and the only vibration the stuttering noise of my hand jaunting along the wall as I lean into it to feel something.
There wasn’t much else of notice. The lights were an incandescent yellow as you would expect a typical lightbulb to be. I wasn’t ever thirsty or hungry, and I never felt the need to perform any of my normal bodily functions, and I would never sweat, or feel wind, or be subject to anything else other than walking. It was mostly a lot of walking. Walking is what of which I did, and sometimes there would be a cool landmark on the way where the terrain generation was a bit fucked up and walls would bleed into each other or make some cool shapes if seen from certain angles.
I never found any trace of Tom, either, despite having had the initial assumption that I was just the second victim to fall into this bottomless pit. Actually, I’m pretty sure I recall now reading in his obituary that his body probably was found but it was just burnt and they didn’t bother DNA testing the ashes so the police didn’t record it as found officially but they did still bury it so they probably found it already and it’s pretty much just me in here.
There weren’t any cool shadow monsters to greet you or put you out of my misery. There wasn’t anything at all, actually. I had a rather powerful set of expectations, so I was rather powerfully disappointed. It was nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing and nothing was what greeted me when I had expected so much. There wasn’t much as I walked along the planes either, it was mostly just more nothing. I was expecting maybe a change in the fluorescence or the room or maybe the carpet would look or smell different or maybe I would get tired or something but, no, alas, it was just nothing. Not anything. No tatami, instead it was nothing.
There were quite a number of things I had wanted to do before I was trapped in Backrooms. Like writing and directing a play. I thought that idea was cool. Like I would be the director to a play about the Backrooms and it would be like the Backrooms and there would be these cool science men and monsters and stuff and like a bunch of floors that would go on infinitely and you would be able to see more things as you went down the floors so it was more like an adventure instead of just nothing. Didn’t quite happen though, ended up here instead, alone with my thoughts. Never went insane either. How boring.
Still, I kept the pace of my march, and followed the corridors past. There wasn’t not anything to see at all. It was just very little. Some of the walls sometimes would look a bit strange, and sometimes I end up in a place I swore I had been to before only to realize that it just looked similar. There was a little game I would play where I would close my eyes, spin around for a few dozen seconds, and then just keep walking forward. I’m not sure why I did it, since the change of me now having backtracked all the way through went from zero to a non-zero chance, but I thought it was pretty funny.
Every now and then too there would be a few scratches on the wall. It wasn’t mine or a sign of somebody else or anything; the wall marks were a texture that would be applied procedurally, most often in the top right or bottom left corners of a wall surface, and infrequently in the direct middle or other two corners. Every time I saw the infrequent marks I would get reminded about the fact that I never got to play Tavern Keeper by Greenheart that had been sure to release the year I sunk into the rooms. What a disappointment. I was looking forward to that game too. I wonder what it would’ve been like. I wonder what kind of cool procedural things that game would’ve contained.
I thought that maybe I would’ve written a book or something after I got out, and people would treat me like some sort of schizo but then the government would confine me into a small room and interrogate me all day about this place where there was an infinite amount of electricity running. Or so I think. Sometimes one of the lights would go out. And then another. And then another. And then eventually it was all black, everywhere.
I bit my toes off to see what would happen. I bled like usual, and it hurt the first time, but they stopped hurting, but they also didn’t grow back. I have no toes. No legs either, actually, since I decided to see whether or not I could manage to snap them off by twisting them the wrong way and then chopping into them to see what would happen. Not a lot happened. Nothing happened actually, except I got to see a colour other than beige for a few moments there. But then I realized I was acclimated to red too since the blood vessels on my eyes kept popping and I didn’t even notice cause I didn’t have a mirror and my blood pool mirror showed a handsome, well adjusted guy that didn’t have any legs and I couldn’t see the redness of my eyes because my eyes were red and the blood was red too. I couldn’t really see the red though. Just kinda felt it. Couldn’t really see anything, actually, because the lights went out a while ago.
The space felt a lot smaller after I was forced to echolocate the place. Just kidding. I scraped my bare arms against the walls and then tried to remember the shape of the room to draw a picture. Just kidding. I didn’t really care what the place looked like. I just crawled around once in a while and then starting to lay down and do nothing when I didn’t want to.
Tried out breakdancing a while ago too because I thought spinning around would be funny. Turns out I just started spinning indefinitely on my head and I never stopped. The carpet felt a lot more carpety this time around. It was a pretty cool place. Lots of carpets. Enough carpets that I think I could probably overload the processor if I set the place on fire.
It took what I assumed to be around a week to climb up and knock one of the lightbulbs down. Turns out the lightbulbs were still very hot and probably still on and it wasn’t the lightbulbs that went out but my eyes. The flames came immediately. They scorched the carpet floor ablaze, and I sat and felt the heat emanate from the floor. The wool turns to ash. I feel the heat slowly fade. And then there is nothing again.
The room was ultimately legislated, what I perceived to infinity all but finite. Marks that were made by me, angles that had always existed, the same room was what I had stumbled into each time, from a slightly different angle. It was only by obligation that I marched forward, backward, closed my eyes and spun to turn around and march headfirst into the same room I’d always been in.
What thoughts I had betrayed the thoughts that I had about what thoughts I was supposed to be having. It was a lot more boring than just that. A lot more boring. A lot more. The only starway is that which had been nested in the crevices of my mind and not a single other manifestation outside; as does the god inside your head not transcend the borders of reality because you’ve willed his character to do so, so do I not transcend me.
In the next town over is another me, living another life, living similarly without much else to say. So similarly, in fact, that he may even be me, with the same interests as me, doing the same things that I do, having the same hobbies, liking the same stuff, and surely he will be slightly different than me and have a cool story to tell of his own.
Determination! The world is cyclical, the engines of our creator in a prayer wheel spinning from the head of him to his knees.
Isolation! My world is silent, what is over the countertop a representation of me, again.
Imagination! The universe that is black will be coloured by the bloody tears that will flow when you realize there isn’t much else.
Revelation! There is nothing, and there will be nothingness forever.
My father is outside my room right now, and he isn’t doing much at all but watching TV.