As he slowly walked toward the next room, Parker tried to calm himself, “If this is Jake and Bill… I swear to God guys… “.
I’m going back to bed when I get home, he laughed to himself again… It better not be Ryan.
Ryan was a little weasel that hung around with his group. The guy was a jerk! He reminded Parker of that that little piece of garbage on the T.V. show, The Office… a sniveling, arrogant, a-hole.
Parker vowed to punch Ryan in the face if he was responsible.
No more Fireball… punch Ryan in the head… it’s good to set goals.
The next room seemed further away than he thought when he first stepped out of the first area. Worse than the length of the hall, was that the dark tight space was beating Parkers fake bravado. Talking himself up, and imagining his friends poised to jump out at him in the next room wasn’t working to relax him. This hallway was winning.
Winning? That requires intent, right? Man, I’m weird.
He started walking faster through the dark. The feeling that something was creeping up behind him, began forcing him to quicken his pace.
He was almost speed walking as he made it halfway to the threshold of the next room.
Another thought entered his mind, and he slammed his right shoulder into the wall as he suddenly stopped walk-jogging. What if they’re on either side of the entrance, in the places I can’t see, waiting for me to enter?
He glanced around the room ahead of him quickly. He could see nothing but the puke yellow walls and a couple of hallways. Nothing moved, no sound except the low buzz of the lights.
Screw it! I got this, he thought as he bolted forward, running into the room at full speed.
“Shit!!”, Parker yelled as he stumbled through the entrance.
He quickly stopped and whipped around to look at the hallway… nobody was waiting for him… nothing was chasing him. “Well, that sucked!”, he yelled.
Parker realized that he was panting. His head was throbbing again, worse than before. He leaned forward putting his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath… and to keep from puking. His heart was beating a mile a minute. With each beat of his heart, his head felt like it was going to explode.
The flickering light in one corner of this new room was blinking in and out in time with Parkers heartbeat. Thankfully his head started to calm down, unlike his nerves… which were still doing the Hokey Pokey.
Still leaning on his knees, Parker began slowly looking around. Nothing awaited him here, but he felt like he should run away, far away. This area was a lot bigger. There were three hallways here, including the dark and scary one which he bested moments ago. Bested… mmehh… ran through like a seven-year-old girl evading the monster under her bed, maybe.
The two new hallways were both bright, with the same buzzy lights as the room he was in, but they were lit. He counted that as a plus.
The floor was still damp and blah, the walls were the same pus yellow hue of nasty. This room was at least twice the size of the first, which somehow made him feel more uneasy. Again, no windows anywhere.
Parker stood upright as his heart slowed to a more normal speed. He was so sure his friends would be here, ready to jump out to scare him. After only a few minutes, he was almost frantic for his friends to appear and finish this terrible prank.
A soft rustling noise came from the room to his right. He realized how on edge he was, and the subtle noise caught him by surprise. The room didn’t seem to hide anything. He could see the entire area from where he stood, but the hall was less of a hall, and more of a wide doorless entrance to the room.
The hair on the back of his neck, stood up. He can’t see anybody… but, “Hello…?” His voice was dry and cracking, but at least there was no echo he could hear.
Like before, there was no reply.
Parker stood fully upright. His fear giving way to a sudden burst of anger, “What the actual Hell, Man! Stop being a bunch of jackasses, and just come out!”
He took two steps toward the room. His third step was directly on what felt like, a red-hot spike.
“Son of a BITCH!”, he yelled as he grabbed his injured foot with both hands, while jumping up and down on the other. The searing pain was surely caused by the mother of all beartraps, at the very least. Never before had anyone been as gravely injured as Parkers foot now was.
Looking down, he saw the culprit which caused this unimaginable pain… a small silver metal ball.
NOW he understood his fathers’ pain from when Parker had left one solitary Lego on the floor when he was 8 years old. A Lego brick which his father found under HIS foot in the living room. Sorry Dad.
“What the Hell… what the HELL?!”, Parker angrily muttered to himself as he shifted his gaze from the room ahead, to the ball, and back to the room again. Suddenly, the absurdity of his current situation came crashing down around him, causing him to begin laughing uncontrollably… while he continued to hop on one foot.
He tentatively put his sore tootsie back on the ground and tested his footing. His damp sock cloaked foot would survive for now.
Still laughing, he bent over and picked up the ball. The 2-inch ball bearing was slightly warm in his hand, and had a scorch mark on the bottom. The carpet, where the ball had been laying, was also scorched and burnt, as if the metal was red hot when it was dropped there.
Okay, why?
Confusion, and a slight wave of dizziness, stopped his laughter. He felt like he was losing his mind.
“This is just effed up…”, he said to himself. The ball didn’t make any sense to him, but in his hungover state, he decided to stick it in the small side pocket of his backpack.
The pain must have shaken an old memory loose in Parkers mind… the backrooms… the effin backrooms!
Two years ago, during the end of his senior year in high school, Parker remembered watching a bunch YouTube videos on the backrooms. They were a viral, fictional, 3d rendered, alternate reality where a person could “no clip” out of reality, into a creepy yellow walled mushy carpet nightmare. “No clipping” in a video game, is where you find a bug in the programming and your game character slips into game space that wasn’t meant to be accessed. Only “no clipping” in reality causes a person to land in the backrooms. At least, it does in the videos.
Parker could feel the panic beginning to rise again. The backrooms?! Looking around wildly, Parker began mentally checking the backroom lore he could remember against where he was.
Crappy yellow walls were a big part of the backrooms. They were dull and weird and bathed in the terrible artificial fluorescent lights that buzz insanely. Check.
The damp, ugly office carpeting covering all the floors. Check.
Rooms that go off in every direction with no rhyme or reason. So far, he’d only been in two, so… check-ish?
It isn’t possible that the backrooms are real though. Those videos were creepy, sure, but they were totally fake… right? What else is there about the backrooms? Parker knew he was missing things, after all, he must have watched a hundred of those videos. Besides the 3D rendered videos, there was that YouTuber guy that detailed all the Wiki entries on the backrooms. What was his name… Boogiely… BuggyBooBoo… Broogart… no, Broogli! His name is BROOGLI… but, shit… that doesn’t help.
Panic now setting in, “HELLO!!?”, Parker screamed.
Holy crap, that’s it. It’s the backrooms…
Parker was frozen in place. His first thought, this can’t be happening. Second thought… yeah… there was no second thought.
“No…”, Parker said. … I can’t handle this. I’m hungover. I’m walking around in wet socks… IT’S freakin SATURDAY!
Okay, now a second thought… why didn’t he JUST FEED THE CAT? Wait, the cat? Was there a cat? He had his eyes closed when Tabby started bugging him. Could Parker hear the buzz of those damn lights, or was it quiet?
Parkers panic started to recede as he focused on the one detail he thought he was sure about… being awakened by the cat. When his roommate left early, and he always left early, that damn cat would wake him up to be fed.
He knew she was growling when he woke up. But wait, has Tabby ever growled?
Parker remembered when he was falling back to sleep, his face was wet from the pillow.
Panic slammed home and his eyes widened as he made a bone chilling realization… the first time he woke up, he HAD to be here in the backrooms. The buzzing was there, he could remember hearing it now. The damp gross feeling on his face was from the carpet. He wiped the wet nastiness off his face with his shirt a few minutes ago. That all tracked.
What he realized… what made him shrink in panic-soaked fear?
There was no fucking cat.
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