Nightmare Egress, Part 1 - "Hell in Hell"

HELL IN HELL
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This page contains sensitive content not suitable for all audiences. Readers including you might consider these topic(s) disturbing, anxiety inducing, or inappropriate: Macabre Themes, Mentions of Suicide, Gore/Body Horror Descriptions.
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Three years in the Backrooms, of sorrow, distress and entropy, of the perpetual terror crawling underneath my skin. These three years have taught me not how to live, but instead, how to survive. Every day, I wake up to the vision of The Lobby’s piss-yellow walls, seemingly nonsensical combinations of words crudely written on them, the mosaic of ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights, the latter’s ceaseless buzzing noise tampering with my thoughts like a child with a string-puppet. A disfigured carcass, its parts cut up into morsels and scattered across the floor. Maybe even several bodies, if the carnage has truly ensued while I was sound asleep, dreaming of home.
It was not easy to become accustomed to, but this has become my habitat. I cannot make a move or take a breath without thinking: “Is this even right? What if I die?” and yet nothing happens. This place is tormenting me, by playing on my primordial fear of the unknown. Since the day I arrived here, I often find myself curled into a fetal position, whimpering, reminiscing of when I was an infant in a crib, waking up in the middle of the night, gazing beyond the door frame, into the very end of a dark hallway. I didn’t know what was there, and I did not like it. I cried until my mother woke up, and cradled me in her arms. It worked like magic, one that scared away all the monsters, and gave me the chance to sleep in peace. It’s the same situation now that I am in “The Backrooms”, except… what sympathy does life still have for me anymore? Now, I am all alone, left alone to fend for myself, and incarcerated in this byzantine monstrosity. The desperate will to come back to a time where I did not have to worry about anything but being loved by my friends, by my colleagues… and the tenderness of my parents. It’s closer to my heart than my jugular veins, yet... a part of me isn’t thankful that I am still alive. I do not want to be just alive; I want to either be thriving… or to not be at all.
My late friend; David Heavers, had a sort of diary where he would write about everything that happened to him during his travels with me in here. Every few levels we no-clip into, we get sent back here, as if there was something drawing us in. The poor man met his untimely demise not long ago. After he was gone, I had nothing left to care about but myself. For how young he was, his health was already deteriorating from how long he was in here, and once he realized that he was unable to pursue his dreams of survival, he handed me his journal. He pleaded me not to open it until my own time has come. I remember how he told me that even if he doesn't live on physically, his memory will remain dispersed throughout his writings. 
Strangely, I don't remember what took him. I only remember his death. I have tried to not break my promise for months now, and I am happy that despite everything, I was not deceitful. However, as I write this, I really do feel like that time has come. I do not know if I’m getting weak or going insane, but if I am insane, and nobody’s around to see my current state, then am I really so? David told me that the last few pages of his journal contained everything every wanderer wants and needs to know, not about survival, but about the dark reality of this realm, yet he gifted all this information to nobody but me; his best friend. Either it’s his final “thank you” to me, because I helped him go through the roughest of times, or he knew that I will forever be alone, and that I needed this information most.
 
I feel guilty, knowing that he passed something onto me, something strong, and told me to keep it all to myself. I hear him whispering to me sometimes. Indecipherable things. Supercilious things. The guilt feasting on my mind has forced me to share his word. I was pretty shook up reading the last entry, entitled “egress”, and from the title alone, I knew exactly which adventure of ours he wrote about. I keep hoping death will take my soul before I tell the tale, just so I do not break my promise.
I hope this satiates a wanderer or two, as I had to find out that I am not worthy of friendship just to write it here, from my perspective.
It was the fifth time me and David had no-clipped into Level 0, not much for three years, but enough to make us realize that there was something we had to find, or gather, for us to break this cycle. At the time, we were pacing the rooms like anxious dogs, because as I mentioned before: It’s a different reality, anything can kill you here. It felt like we were reborn to mark the beginning of a new history: that of The Backrooms. The oldest records of this place David knew of dated back to the 19th century, so maybe the first man to ever no-clip was somebody from that time, and therefore, only 200 years of exploration, of a dominion where supernatural reality-benders exist, might I add. We humans knew how to navigate the Earth for over two-thousand years now.
 
Logically, it’d take at least three other millennium before we’re the dominant species in The Backrooms too, and by that time, I doubt any of us would still be alive. Historical bullshit aside, something felt off about The Lobby on this specific “visit”. The more we walked through this place, the more these yellow, interconnected rooms felt like hallways. It was as if we had to walk for miles in the same direction. Not like that hasn’t happened to us before, but this time, it was gradually becoming more concrete, as David said it. Eventually, we would turn back, and see that we were, in fact, walking in a hallway.
That god-awful fluorescent light noise. It was beginning to sound more like a choir, and second after second, more like a song, with lyrics, of course. The noise was forming words, but I didn’t know what it was singing. If I took the time to listen closely, I don’t hear anything unusual, but whenever I was distracted, I was certain that there was humming in the distance. Was it hallucinations? No. I and David reported it independently to each other, caressing our guns for fear that it was another one of those “entities”.
He was already pointing his Desert Eagle at the other end of the hallway, something that surprised me, knowing that he was contemplating suicide then, and wouldn't seek survival. He was shivering, badly. I can see why, given how these types of situations escalate. I still recall, not long ago, he couldn’t even recall what some animals sounded like until I reminded him. He’s arguably been through more than I have, and even though it’s hard to not have him around anymore, I am happy that he is finally at peace.
He accidentally shot a round, and I started thinking that it was an entity, because whatever made that noise stopped by the time it seemed like his bullet hit something. Naturally, we stood there a moment, and then marched forth. We found out that the very end of the hallway was an intersection point of two other hallways. Do we go right, or left? Before I realized it, David was already heading to the right, so I followed him. While I didn’t take the time to wonder why, I noticed that the walls and ceiling of that hall were heavily ink-plastered. Familiar sight, I should add. It was all dry. There wasn’t anyone there except for us, or at least that’s what I thought until I heard my companion shout and shoot another round.
I tilted my head up and he was coughing. He took another look at whatever he shot and gagged. The lights didn’t work wherever he was heading so I couldn’t see it well, and when I asked him what he saw, he gripped my shirt, and pointed at the darkness, shivering, without saying a word. He sat down and rocked back and forth, grabbed his journal, and started frantically writing in it. Whatever he saw was truly unpleasant. I approached the unknown, holding my own gun, and suddenly, the lights turned on, and something fell beside my foot. Startled at the sight, I was so close to firing at it too. 
It was a corpse, a human corpse. It was stripped of all clothing, and the smell was horrible. This poor man’s face, or at least what was left of it, was hacked into slices that slowly slipped down his lap. His lower jaw and lower half were nowhere to be found, and his viscera was shredded and spread out. Half of his organs were missing. This victim’s hair was clumped together into a single pile next to his remains, his ears and eyes buried within. The bullet went straight through one of the chunks. He was disfigured in a manner too appalling to be a mere human’s doing, or even that of an entity’s. As far as we knew, such thing was unprecedented.
 
Dave had calmed down by the time I finished analyzing the cadaver. By simply looking at what happened to this man, it felt like every atrocious thing I have ever seen during my time here has been multiplied by zero, nullified, leaving room for the traumatic view of this one greatly maimed man’s body to haunt my thoughts for eternity. As I write this, I have to admit that this complex has succeeded in frightening me by a sight I cannot forget. My friend didn’t have it any easier until he died. We stood there, looking at each other, trying to process what we just saw, and how it even came to be, lost in our thoughts.
By the time we snapped out of it, David held his gun even closer to himself, and so did I, because whatever was crawling within this part of the complex was nothing we had encountered before, and thus, we agreed on the fact that we had two choices: Prepare for anything, or die. Subsequently, the aforementioned chorus resonated again, except this time; it was getting closer, almost as if it was coming from the mutilated body. David told me he started feeling something “wet” pressing against his back, and there it was: The body, once on the floor, now crawling on his back, clambering. It was rotting and falling apart, almost as if it was struggling to stay alive. I could swear I saw something from hell itself that day. I shouted at him, and told him to run, until my voice gave out, and the body kept running him in circles. He said he could sense something weighty moving around him, but could only see it in his peripheral vision. We were both paranoid.
It clawed David’s skin and tried to attack him, so I grabbed my own gun and fired at it, sending it back straight behind his leg. Without a second thought, he clutched a cutting knife, looked down, and stabbed the thing several times in multiple areas, all while screaming like a terrified kid. It was something genuinely awful and horrendous masquerading as what was left of a man. Something alien, not to us, but to this complex itself. Something told me that it disfigured its own body to play tricks on the mind of whoever sees it, petrifying, yet impressive, no entity we knew of did this before. David ran beside me whilst the orchestra got louder and less comprehensible. 
The entity, or what was left of it, began to look less human progressively, getting more spindly and intact, still bloody and disfigured though. It grew back legs and stood up, still shivering from the bullets and stab wounds. It cocked its head to the side, and spread its arms wide, its insufferable odor still making it difficult to concentrate. Without hesitation, we shot at it again, a few more times. Despite the aggravation, David still took the time to write this all in his journal. Its fingers, piercing and looking pretty similar to a crab’s legs, began moving as if the wind was blowing on them intensely. We were so used to the air being still, but now, it fucking crackles with consternation. Unexpectedly, the unholy choir of the lights was cut off by the entity’s roar of displeasure. It had no mouth, no eyes, yet it can speak, see, and mostly importantly, it can feel. We are not talking about feeling pain, but instead, feeling ire.
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Concept, Art and Writing by veryunusualshrimp/Nexnap, image by Endrey.
Category:Tales
Category:Nightmare Egress
Next: Connections