Backrooms: Delvers and Dwellers - Chapter 1

Noclip In, No Way Out…

All Dan wants is to find a way home. He’d settle for a beer, a bite to eat, and a place to sleep off his hangover.

But, in an endless, ever-changing dungeon cobbled together from twisted carnivals, abandoned shopping malls, janky laundromats, and condemned insane asylums, getting a bit of shut-eye is harder than it sounds.

Dan has accidentally “Noclipped” into the Backrooms—a bizarro, extra-dimensional Alice-in-Wonderland world, overrun with horrific nightmare creatures known as the Dwellers. No one ever gets out. Hell, forget about leaving, if Dan wants to survive the week, he’s going to need to harness the strange game-like magic of the Backrooms, make some very sketchy allies, and carve out a little safe haven to call his own.

And he’s going to need to do it fast because Dan is being hunted. The Flayed Monarch of the 999th floor has marked him for death and no one walks away from the Skinless Court with their hide intact…

One – The Hangover

I was going to die. At least, that’s what the floating box told me.

The prognosis for your long-term survival is vanishingly slim, the message read in bold, blocky letters. I suggest you come to terms with this reality and prepare yourself accordingly. If you happen to be a person of religious conviction, now would be an appropriate time to make amends with your preferred deity.

My eyes skipped frantically from word to word as I reread the prompt for the third time. I found myself staring slack-jawed at the partially transparent, off-yellow box, which looked almost like one of those eight-bit Nintendo Game notification prompts from the early eighties.

A cold sweat broke out across my skin, and I momentarily pulled my gaze away from the prompt and looked down at the ground.

I was in a wide hallway with short gray carpet—the kind they use in hotels and office buildings—and walls covered from floor to ceiling in stained yellow wallpaper, peeling in places and covered with water spots in others. That wallpaper was shoddy work and the whole place was badly in need of renovation. Blue-white lights ran along the ceiling, illuminating everything with a harsh, sterile glow that reminded me of an industrial warehouse or maybe a hospital.

This couldn’t be real. It didn’t make sense. None of this made any sense.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where I was, how I’d gotten here, or what in the name of sweet baby Jesus was happening to me.

Maybe I was going crazy.

Or maybe I’d died, and this was my own, personal version of hell.

That was the most plausible option, all things considered.

The last thing I remembered was from the night before.

I’d been at the bachelor party to end all bachelor parties with the rest of the guys from the general contracting crew. Joseph, Joe-Dan—not to be confused with Joseph—Zack, Jake, Dave, Cameron, Chad, and Niko, of course, since he was the lucky groom.

There’d been a stripper dressed as a clown for reasons I couldn’t quite recall. Also fireworks. Well, maybe not fireworks per se, so much as sticks of Tannerite and a wee-little bit of Dynamite, which our buddy Jake had procured from a demo site in Dayton.

I was pretty sure cow tipping had been involved at one point.

I vividly recalled cannonballing off of my buddy Zack’s roof and into an oversized kiddie pool filled with an unholy amalgamation of Natty Ice, Bud Lite, Corona, and whatever else the rest of the crew had lying around. Pretty sure Dave had dumped two or three boxes of Franzia red wine into the unspeakable alcohol concoction at one point.

That probably explained why it felt like I’d slept in a churning cement mixer filled with boulders and broken beer bottles. Leaping into kiddie pools full of booze was a young man’s game, and I wasn’t as young as I used to be. Not old exactly, but even at thirty-six, I found I didn’t bounce back quite the way I had at twenty-six. The copious alcohol consumption also explained the ragging hangover and dull ache radiating through my skull, pulsing steadily behind my eye sockets with every thump of my heart.

But none of that gave me any insight, whatsoever, into where I was, how I’d gotten here, or what in heaven above was happening. There was just a blank hole, big enough to drive an Abrams tank through, between the party and waking up in this barren stretch of industrial hallway.

One minute I was laughing with Jake and Zack, telling old war stories about our time in the sandbox together, and the next I was peeling my ass off the gray carpet with the glare of harsh fluorescent lights stabbing into my eyeballs like an ice pick.

The hallway dead-ended directly behind me and though there was a glaring red neon exit sign hanging from the ceiling, there wasn’t a door to be seen. The hallway stretched onward for fifty feet or so, before letting out into a wide room with a series of white, square columns.

Guttural, inhuman roars and the sharp clang of steel clashing against steel drifted toward me from the direction of the desolate conference room at the end of the corridor. This place might’ve appeared barren, but it wasn’t empty.

Something was in here with me.

Something dangerous.

Which probably accounted for the ominous warning, tattooed on the air itself.

Feeling the cold edge of panic creep into my chest, I turned my gaze back to the yellow box and reread the message once more, this time from the beginning.

Warning! Temporal Boundary Displacement Breech!

As Standing Chair of the Variant Research Division, it is my responsibility to inform you that due to an unstable temporal anomaly—and circumstances outside of VRD control—you have accidentally experienced a temporal displacement event (TDE), sometimes referred to as “Noclipping.”

Fortunately, you survived the event and have NOT been integrated into the Progenitor Engine or reduced to “Meat Slurry” by the Influx Processing and Randomization System.

Less fortunate, the prognosis for your long-term survival is vanishingly slim. I suggest you come to terms with this reality and prepare yourself accordingly. If you happen to be a person of religious conviction, now would be an appropriate time to make amends with your preferred deity.

— The Researcher

Yep. None of that was even remotely helpful.

I’d never heard of the Variant Research Division, and I couldn’t even begin to wrap my mind around what a temporal displacement event was. To me, the whole message was just a bunch of nonsense bullshit that sounded more or less like corporate speak for go fuck yourself.

I squinted, examining the box itself a little more closely.

I’d been so panicked and shocked by the message that I’d failed to notice there was a tiny “X” in the top right corner of the notification. I let my gaze linger on it for a beat and when I mentally “clicked” the button, the window blinked away. Gone in an instant as though it had never been there at all.

Another thunderous boom rattled the floor, sending fine dust motes spinning and dancing through the air. A second later I heard an odd mewling noise followed in short order by the dull thump of footsteps and the whoomph of an explosion. Rolling tongues of flame flashed into view at the end of the hall before quickly dissipating.

The sounds of battle were getting progressively closer, and it was impossible to miss the long shadows stretching across the carpeted floor.

I glanced down and took stock of what I had to work with.

I wasn’t optimistic.

Drunk me had made some interesting choices the night before. Choices that I was deeply, deeply, regretting right now.

Slung around my shoulders and trailing down to my thighs was a knock-off red and gold, baroque Versace bathrobe. It was a hideous assault on taste and sensibility, and it actively made me despair for the future of humanity. I had never hated something so profoundly, or so quickly. Where it had come from or why on god’s green Earth I was wearing it, were mysteries that beggared the imagination and defied all attempts at explanation.

I had on a white wife-beater beneath the robe and a pair of Marine Corps issue green silkies, so short and tight they looked like cammo green daisy dukes sprayed painted onto my nethers. They were somehow both the most and leastmainly shorts that had ever been manufactured, and every single Marine—current or former—had at least one pair shoved in a dresser drawer because they were always mandatory attire for company and battalion formation runs.

Instead of tennis shoes or flip flops, Drunk Me had opted for my clunky Red Wing work boots, which were missing the laces. Then, to complete the look, I’d apparently decided to don my tool belt, which connected to a pair of leather suspenders that wrapped around my broad shoulders. Although I didn’t have a mirror, I knew exactly how I must’ve looked. Like a strung-out hobo who’d managed to raid both a Home Depot and an upscale Department store during a city-wide blackout.

Still, of all the terrible choices I’d made last night, grabbing my work belt had been the best of the lot. I instinctively ran my hand over the various loops and pockets, fingers lightly touching each of the primary tools of my trade.

Tape measure and multi-bit screwdriver. My 19oz rip claw hammer and the gray Stanley utility knife. On my other side was the beastly demolition screwdriver, capable of punching through damn near anything, and a steel, triangular speed square. Those were the big ones, though a had a host of lesser-used tools tucked away as well. Maglite, slip-lock pilers, cat’s paw pry bar, torpedo level, and a small army of Sharpies and carpenter’s pencils.

Everything was present and accounted for.

I wasn’t sure how much good a 19oz claw hammer or a carpenter’s pencil would be against whatever inhuman, flame-throwing horror was waiting for me at the end of the hallway. Not as much good as a Glock with a full mag, that was for damned sure, but it was still a shitload better than trying to go at it with bare knuckles and attitude.

Though, truth be told, I was far better with a hammer or wrench in my hand than I’d ever been with a rifle or a pistol. I’d spent eight-year in the Marine Corps, and though I’d done a couple pumps overseas to combat zones scattered across the middle east—Kuwait, Iraq, a short stint in Afghanistan—I’d served as Motor-T driver. I’d spent most of my time behind the wheel of a troop carrier, pounding Rip Its and chain-smoking cigarettes, not kicking in doors or raiding insurgent stash houses.

And that was the better part of ten years and thirty pounds ago. Other than the occasional hunting trip with the boys, I hadn’t picked up a rifle or shotgun in ages.

Steeling myself, I slipped on a pair of tan Mechanix work gloves, then pulled the hammer from its loop on my belt. If I was going to die, I’d die fighting with a tool in my hands and a shit-eating grin on my face. Although I might’ve left the door kicking to the hard chargers in the infantry, I didn’t have any problem busting a few skulls if push came to shove.

With my hammer clutched in one white-knuckled hand, I crept up to the edge of the hallway and pressed my body against the wall, heart thudding like a jackhammer.

The hallway let out into an open, empty space with high ceilings that looked like it could’ve been a generic conference room inside any of a thousand rundown hotels across America. The walls were plastered with more of the nondescript yellow wallpaper and the white columns rose to a drab white tiled ceiling which was dotted with more recessed, flat panel lights. The flickering florescent bulbs cast pools of jagged illumination and oceans of darkness across the carpeted floor.

There was no furniture. No end tables or cheap wing-backed chairs. No reception desk or receiving area. Just an enormous, abandoned cavern of gray carpet and wallpaper, which reminded me of a yawning mouth.

I counted four more hallways that branched off from the main room, and three sets of wooden double doors, which presumably let out into more hallways still. There wasn’t any signage indicating where any of these various hallways went.

This place was a modern-day, corporate labyrinth.

But I was a little less worried about the lack of signage and potential building code violations, and a little more worried about the amorphous, oozing blob of red tentacles rushing toward me from one of the hallways on the left…