The Corpse and the Shadow

He could not see anything, but he could feel things.
Lucas Alders could feel his arms, legs, and head banging up against walls as he fell. By now, he could no longer see the light coming from the yellow labyrinth—it had long since disappeared beyond corners of the pit he was falling down.
Once again, he had no sense of time, but not because he had nothing to measure it with. Instead, the pain his body was covered with thanks to constant impacts with the walls blocked out anything else in his mind.
Finally, after hours falling—or was it seconds?—Lucas tumbled out of the darkness, landing with a thump on a carpeted floor.
He immediately passed out.
When he woke up, he found himself in a wooden room. It resembled the previous place he was in, but with one major difference—both the walls and the ceiling were made with brown wooden planks, rather like an old American house. And though there was still carpet similar to those in the mono-yellow hell, it was not moist.
Looking up, he could see the hole in the wall that he fell out of. Strangely, although Lucas had broken through the floor to get here, the hole in the wall didn’t look as if it was created by a desperate man trying to escape.
Instead, it looked almost machine-made. It was a perfect square, complete with perfect right angles. It looked as if it had always been there. And, crawling just a short distance into the rectangular “chute”, he could see the yellow-wallpapered maze he had come from just ten feet straight above him.
Where were the walls that had bruised him up and down his body? Where were the sharp turns which stopped light from reaching him?
None of this made sense.
But sense had gone out the window long ago.
His greatest fear, aside from his worry that he wouldn’t be able to find any food or drink and would likely starve, was that this new wooden room would just turn out to be like the other “different” area he had visited: just a finite space with no food, water, or escape, with nothing for him there but an exit back to the infinite hellish maze he had just egressed.
Instead, what he found was almost as worrisome.
This wooden room was, in actuality, a wooden maze. It was essentially the same as its yellow counterpart in its infinity, just with different walls, dry carpet (if there was carpet—some parts of the maze didn’t have any), and lightbulbs—some dim, some bright, some broken altogether—instead of loudly buzzing fluorescent lights.
In some ways, this served to begin tying back together the thin threads of Lucas’s sanity—deprived of some of the obnoxious elements of his earlier “home”, his mind was starting to recover from the experience. 
But there was still the problems of food and water—he knew he was on the verge of death, and that he had just traded one hellscape for a slightly more appealing one. Out of the fire and into the frying pan.
And there was . . . something else. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
For some reason, he always felt like someone—or something—was silently observing him. He could hear faint knocks coming from behind some of the walls, but he couldn’t find what was causing them. He found doors, often locked, with faint growling coming from behind them. He could feel its presence in a way he couldn't quite altogether grasp.
And, with every second, the fear seemed to increase.
Whatever it was, it was getting closer.
When he had first gotten down here, part of Lucas was hoping he could relax now that he was free of the moist carpet, buzzing lights, and endless hallways carpeted in a disgusting yellow. But the other driving factor of his mental deterioration—food and water—had never left him.
It had only increased over time. And the yellow hallways’ infinity had only been transferred to its basement.
He had lost all hope of survival, let alone returning to his old home—to his life. The breakdowns were more frequent now, and longer, and he was becoming too weak to move for long periods of time. His mouth had become bone-dry.
The strange fear of it that was lurking in this level was pursuing him also. Not a moment passed when he did not look over his shoulder, thinking he heard footsteps or an unnatural noise. But it never showed itself. Perhaps it had never existed, and was just a figment of Lucas’s imagination. But if it wasn’t real, what was he afraid of?
Often, he did not move for days—or were they hours, or even minutes? It was very difficult to be sure of things like time here. The isolation, the paranoia, the hunger, the thirst—it had gotten to him, finally. Though he often cried for the things he lost, he literally no longer had any tears to shed. His depression and anxiety had almost destroyed him—he was losing the will to live. And, besides, he knew he could not face it. It would destroy him.
But, in the Backrooms, one’s fortunes can be changed in an instant. The monster, about to attack you, is shot by your dying friend. You reach a fork in the hallways, and unknowingly go down the one which leads to Run For Your Life! instead of the one which would have taken you to The Promised Land.
Or, in the case of Lucas Alders, he would find something another traveler had lost.
And it would be his salvation.
It happened during one of his now-frequent bouts of paranoia.
The sense of fear he had first felt when he entered the wooden maze, that there was something watching him, had only grown over time. He didn't know why he felt it, but he didn't care about that. It was out there—he knew that.
And he had to find it before it found him.
He thought he could hear it now, just beyond the wall. And when he thought he heard footsteps, he knew it was time to strike. He punched the wall, not expecting for his fist to go straight through. He imagined footsteps running back behind the corner, as it ran away, startled at what had just happened.
Looking into the room, he could see that the wall he had punched through was as thin as a piece of paper. Strange, just like everything else in this . . . place. But there were other things to worry about.
Looking around the room he had just broken into, he saw it was empty. Except for a single metallic water bottle on the floor a couple feet away.
Moving towards it, he picked it up, and was about to throw it behind him when he noticed something. A faint "swish" when he moved it.
There was liquid inside.
Not thinking about how whatever was inside it could not be safe to drink, he unscrewed the cap and took a sip of the liquid inside.
He was immediately guzzling. Nothing had ever tasted better in his entire life. What . . . was this?
It looked just like water, but it had a nutty scent. Something that reminded him of better times, although he didn't know exactly what it was. But, as he chugged the rest of the bottle, he noticed something strange. Not only was his thirst quenched for the moment, but his mind was beginning to clear up. His paranoia faded away. His mind gained a calm sort of rationality. And the cuts and bruises over his body also were beginning to throb with a lesser intensity. The water was healing him.
Once he was done, his thirst mostly quenched, he saw the corpse.
She was sprawled out over a chair down a hallway, far enough out of view that Lucas had been unable to see it. His first thought was that this person was just asleep, but, as he got closer, he saw this was not the case.
There were bloody marks all over the woman's body, looking like they had been caused by fangs or teeth. Whatever had done this was clearly a monster—no human could have done something like this.
And the monster was still with him in this room—surely this was the "it" he was scared about. The magical water had done little to ease that fear.
But, as he was about to leave, Lucas turned back, unable to help himself. There was something strange about the body. Though it repulsed him, he leaned in for a closer look.
There were no signs of decay anywhere. The clothes and backpack on the corpse's back, despite being shredded, were in otherwise perfect condition, just with a thin layer of dust atop them.
And the woman's eyes had no pupils. They were milky white, staring into Lucas' soul.
The feeling that he was being watched had never felt stronger.
And as he turned to leave once again, he noticed something even creepier. Several feet away from the corpse was a face on the wall. It was created out of the swirls one would find in a wooden plank, but it was perfectly made. And it unnaturally resembled the dead corpse's face, mouth twisted into a scream of horror.
Lucas walked briskly away from the room, taking the dead woman's backpack with him.
Something about the scene awakened a primeval fear within the core of his being.
Taking the backpack had obviously paid off. Stopping a short distance later, Lucas opened it up, revealing an assortment of items which once would have seemed ordinary but now seemed as if they had been sent from God Himself. Several pieces of dried beef in a plastic package, three packs of dried fruit, seven cans of things like soup and vegetables, small stack of paper bowls with a plastic spoon, a flashlight, a pistol (with five bullets), and another bottle of the mystical liquid.
Despite him trying to tell himself that he should ration it, most of the food and drink were inhaled almost instantly, and Lucas kept the flashlight out for use in the darker areas of this wooden hell, but the gun was another matter. Lucas had always felt nervous among firearms, worrying that someone might suddenly turn it on him, or that it might misfire. But the growing sense of paranoia, which by now occupied almost his every thought, and the mangled body of the woman convinced him that, no matter what happened, it was better to have a weapon out.
He shoved it into his waistband, having nowhere else to put it for easy access, and continued on, jumping at a knock which emerged from a nearby wall. Almost instinctively, he pulled out the gun—or, tried to. He only got it out several seconds later, and even then immediately dropped it.
Once, it would have been a funny gag in a comedy movie. But now, it was deadly serious.
The pistol now lying on the ground was his only defense against whatever had killed the woman.
He picked it up, looked at the wall the sound had come from (which, frighteningly, also contained an uncannily accurate human face—this one of a screaming man), and continued on.
A long time later—but, again, it might have been minutes or days—he noticed the sparse lights flickering. He was terrified now that something might come around every corner, the paranoia having begun to undo the threads of his mind the water had knit back together.
And then, the lights went out.
Dark gray fog coated the floor.
There was an unearthly screech.
Lucas crept around the wooden corridors, flashlight in hand. Strangely, his paranoia had disappeared now that the lights were off. Perhaps it was because the thing he had been dreading had finally come, but something within him told him otherwise. The rational part of his mind was now frightened.
In this "nighttime", the halls, once looking a little homely despite their infinite and hellish properties, became horrifyingly mysterious. A thick, dark gray fog had coated the floor, making it difficult to even see where he was walking. It was as if he was trapped in a suspense movie, always waiting for whatever was coming to finally show up around the corner.
Suddenly, a piece of the ceiling just feet away collapsed, causing Lucas to jump back and grasp for the gun. Strangely, he couldn't see the fluorescent lights and yellow halls beyond it—just a black void. Perhaps even the lights up there were off.
He swung the flashlight around in shock, looking for something—a natural response to the surprise he'd experienced. But what he found was anything but natural.
The beam of light coming from the flashlight briefly illuminated something. A dark area on the ground, a silhouette cast by the flashlight's beam, resembling an emaciated human's shadow with an unnatural height and strange, elongated limbs with claws for fingers. But there was nothing between the shadow and the beam. 
It started moving.
This . . . thing didn't just look like a shadow. It was a shadow. A shadow of an invisible creature running at him.
Lucas grasped for his gun, and put a bullet straight through the space the thing would have been, had he been able to see it. The shadow stopped for a moment, and a tortured groan emerged from the invisible creature. It, or at least it's shadow, dropped to the ground on one knee and stopped for a moment—before it started running towards him again.
He felt claws rake across his chest, shredding his shirt and causing blood to flow. Turning around, he sprinted, spending his last four bullets in a futile attempt to slow down the thing.
But, although the bullets didn't do anything but slow the beast down, it did attract others. All chasing him down the hallways, around the wooden walls of hidden horrors.
Lucas had never felt more afraid.
He began running for who knows how long, with the screams and groans of the monsters behind. He did not want to imagine what they could do—would do—to him if he was caught. He paid no mind to the beads of blood leaking from his chest; it was like his wounds had never existed. All that mattered was flight.
But the scariest thing was that he had no way of knowing where they were. The flashlight was what revealed them, but its beam was swinging all over the place as he was running. He could not afford the luxury of constantly looking behind him or in any other place other than in front.
He was running blind.
He was out of options.
They were at the door.
Lucas had no idea how long he had been running, but knew how long it would be until he died. If not from his wounds, which had been “bandaged” by what remained of his shirt, then from the creatures—whatever they were. The chair blocking the door to the room he was in couldn’t hold forever. Already, he could see the chair budging as they pushed at it, waiting to open it. The planks of the door were bulging, and he could hear the sound of tiny cracks forming.
Frantically, he looked around for things to bolster the makeshift barricade. Deep down inside himself, he knew that whatever he did would only delay the inevitable. There was no point in forestalling it; the door would break sooner or later. He would die eventually, whether from the monsters, from blood loss, or from infection.
But, once again, in the Backrooms, one’s life may depend on chance.
Desperate for another thing to put in front of the door, Lucas’s eyes landed upon an old TV—the only other appliance or piece of furniture which was in the room. He picked it up, running back to the door, when he dropped it in shock.
When he had been carrying it over, his hand had accidentally turned it on, causing it to light up and start playing a black-and-white video of a laboratory, despite not being plugged in. After he regained his composure, Lucas picked it back up, putting it on top of the chair. It wouldn’t do much, but it helped in some strange way.
The creatures pounded on the door, causing the TV to wobble on its precarious perch.
Seeing it was about to fall, Lucas reached to steady it. But instead of pushing up against the curved screen, Lucas’s hand went through the glass, and into the lab shown on the TV.
It wasn’t a TV—it was a portal to another place.
Although he had no idea what lay on the other side, he at least would not be dying today.
=———=
=δ=
=———=
This page is part of War is Over, a multipart story.
« No Files Found | | Coming soon! »
__NOTOC__
Category:War is Over
Category:Tales