Not a Story

Post 3— Room 306

Hey guys, I’m back.

I’ve got a hot chocolate beside me and my cat, Whiskers, is currently curled up on my lap, purring away like she hasn’t got a care in the world.

Honestly, I envy her sometimes.

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty good right now, so thought I’d carry on with what happened.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.

The creepy people who weren’t really people.

Ugh.

Even writing that sends shivers down my spine.

I still remember how they looked when they stopped walking. The way every single one of them turned to face me at exactly the same time.

No expressions.

No eyes.

No nothing.

Just those horrible, smooth faces.

I think what disturbed me most was how ordinary they’d appeared before that happened. If I hadn’t approached the man, I probably would have walked straight past them without thinking twice.

And that’s something that still bothers me.

How many things do we pass every day without really looking at them?

Anyway, I eventually realised they weren’t going to hurt me.

At least, not as long as I left them alone.

They didn’t seem interested in me unless I tried interacting with them. If I kept my distance, they simply continued doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing.

Which, apparently, was walking.

Just walking.

They wandered aimlessly along the shopping-centre corridors, passing the same shops over and over again.

None of them went inside.

None sat on the benches.

Nobody stopped to look at anything in the windows.

They didn’t carry shopping bags or talk to one another.

They just walked.

Sometimes two would pass each other without so much as turning their heads.

Other times, one would reach the end of a walkway, turn around and start walking in the opposite direction.

It was like watching those background characters in old video games, the ones that exist purely to make a place look populated.

Except these weren’t characters on screen.

They were right here.

And I had absolutely no idea what they were.

I started wondering whether the place itself was somehow trying to imitate the real world.

As though it understood that shopping centres were supposed to have people in them, but didn’t quite understand what people actually did.

It knew they walked.

Apparently, that was enough.

I made sure to stay well away from them after that.

The shopping centre itself was another problem.

This definitely wasn’t Westquay.

I’d never seen this place before in my life.

At first glance, it resembled any ordinary modern shopping mall. Wide walkways, glass railings, polished floors, shopfronts with bright displays and artificial plants dotted around the seating areas.

But the longer I looked, the more things I noticed that simply weren’t right.

The architecture, for one.

I remember standing near the middle of the ground floor and looking up.

And up.

And up.

I actually had to tilt my head so far back that my neck started aching.

The ceiling was impossibly high.

I couldn’t tell you exactly how high, but it looked as though it stretched for miles.

Two miles, perhaps.

Maybe more.

It was difficult to judge distances in that place.

Rising through the centre of the mall was an escalator.

Well, several escalators.

Except they weren’t arranged like normal escalators.

They twisted upwards around one another, spiralling towards the distant ceiling like some enormous mechanical staircase.

Imagine taking the escalators from an ordinary shopping centre and wrapping them around an invisible tower.

That’s the closest I can come to describing it.

The steps seemed to curve in ways escalator steps shouldn’t be able to.

Some sections rose steeply.

Others flattened out before twisting up again, and the whole structure just kept going.

Higher and higher, until it eventually disappeared into the ceiling.

Not through an opening, by the way, but into the actual ceiling.

As though the building had simply been constructed around the top of it.

There was nowhere for it to lead.

No platform.

No upper floor.

Nothing.

I stood there staring for ages, trying to understand what I was looking at.

The escalators weren’t even moving.

They were completely still.

I wondered what would happen if somebody climbed them.

Would they eventually reach the ceiling?

Would they find another floor that I couldn’t see?

Or would they just keep climbing forever.

I wasn’t keen on finding out.

Especially after what had happened with the slides.

The pillars were wrong too.

Most looked fairly ordinary at first, huge concrete columns supporting the upper floors.

But some were slanted at strange angles.

One leaned too far to the side that I couldn’t understand how it was supporting anything.

Another seemed to bend halfway up, almost like a tree trunk.

And then there was the chair.

It was one of those cheap white plastic garden chairs you see everywhere during summer.

Except it was sticking out of the side of a concrete pillar.

Not leaning against it.

Not attacked with brackets.

Actually embedded in the concrete.

All four legs disappeared into the pillar, leaving the seat and backrest protruding at a ridiculous angle.

It looked as though the chair and the concrete had somehow become part of the same object.

I walked around it several times.

There were no c.racks.

No obvious signs that somebody had forced it into the pillar.

The concrete simply continued around the plastic as though it had always been that way.

I remember reaching out and touching the edge of the seat.

It felt completely ordinary.

Smooth, slightly cool plastic.

Which somehow made it worse.

I carried on walking.

Every so often, I’d pass one of the fake people.

They continued their endless wandering, completely indifferent to the impossible architecture surrounding them.

I wondered if they even noticed it.

Or whether they were simply another part of the building.

Something else it had created to make itself look normal.

At one point, I stopped beneath an overhanging section of the second floor.

Something above me caught my attention.

I looked up and nearly jumped out of my skin.

There was a table attached to the underside of the floor above.

An actual table.

Upside down.

Its legs pointed towards the ground, while the tabletop seemed to be embedded in the ceiling.

For a moment, I genuinely thought it was going to fall.

I stumbled backwards, staring at it.

But it didn’t move.

It just hung there.

Perfectly still.

Like the chair in the pillar, it looked as though somebody had somehow built the furniture directly into the architecture as some bizarre form of art.

I remember thinking how ridiculous the whole thing was.

A shopping centre with endless escalators, crooked pillars and furniture growing out of the walls.

It would almost have been funny if I hadn’t been trapped inside it.

Eventually, I found a normal staircase.

After everything I’d experienced, I was reluctant to trust anything that moved between floors, but at least these stairs looked normal.

I climbed them cautiously.

One flight.

Then another.

Thankfully, I reached the third floor without ending up somewhere completely different.

Small victories, I suppose.

The upper floor was quieter.

Not that the lower floors had been particularly noisy, but at least there I’d occasionally heard the footsteps of those things wandering around.

Up here, there was nothing.

Just the lights.

And me.

I passed several shops, a clothing store, something that looked like a jewellers, a shop with shelves full of boxes I couldn’t identify.

Then I stopped, because the shop on my left wasn’t a shop at all.

It was a classroom.

An actual school classroom.

I stood outside for a moment, looking through the enormous glass shopfront.

There were rows of wooden desks.

Chairs.

A whiteboard mounted on the far wall.

A teachers desk positioned near the front.

It looked like somebody had taken a classroom out of an ordinary secondary school and placed it inside a shopping centre.

There wasn’t even a proper shop display.

Just a classroom.

I walked up to the entrance.

The door was open.

I hesitated before stepping inside.

After the faceless people, I’d become increasingly nervous about approaching anything that looked even remotely unusual.

But the classroom was empty.

And I was curious.

The floor was covered in dull grey-blue carpet tiles, the kind schools seem to love for some reason.

The walls were painted a faded cream colour.

There were a few educational posters hanging up, although I couldn’t make much sense of them.

One had colourful shapes.

Another appeared to contain a timetable, but the writing was too indistinct for me to read properly.

There were pencil marks scratched into some of the desks, little grooves in the wood and a few chairs tucked neatly underneath.

Others had been left slightly crooked, as though pupils had only just stood up.

I ran my fingers across the nearest desk.

The surface was smooth in places and scratched in others.

It felt real.

Solid.

I pressed my palm against it.

Then I tapped my fingernails against the wood.

A faint knocking sound echoed through the empty room.

I don’t know why I kept doing things like that.

Touching walls.

Running my hands across furniture.

Checking whether objects felt the way they were supposed to.

I suppose I was still trying to reassure myself that I wasn’t dreaming.

That the things I could see actually existed.

Although, by then, I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘real’ meant anymore.

I walked between the desks, the room reminded me of being at school. Not in any particular classroom, but that general feeling of being a child again.

The rows of desks.

The empty teachers chair.

The faded posters.

I could almost imagine the sound of pupils talking before a lesson started.

Chairs scrapping against the floor.

Someone laughing.

A teacher telling everyone to be quiet, while some children quietly giggled at being told off.

But, of course, there was nothing.

The silence seemed even stranger in a classroom.

Schools aren’t supposed to be silent.

Even when lessons are taking place, there’s usually something happening somewhere.

Footsteps in corridors.

Doors opening.

Children shouting outside.

A bell ringing.

Here, there wasn’t even the distant ticking of a clock.

I was beginning to realise that almost every place I’d visited had something in common.

They were all places designed for people.

Shopping centres.

Restaurants.

Swimming pools.

Schools.

Places that existed because people needed somewhere to shop, eat, swim, learn or spend time together.

And yet, there were no people.

Or at least, none that were human.

By this point, I didn’t have any idea what to do.

I couldn’t keep wandering around aimlessly forever, so I decided to work on instinct alone and to think of everything I knew about the backrooms.

I know.

It sounds ridiculous, taking survival advice from an internet horror story.

But what else was I supposed to do?

Everything I’d experienced seemed to resemble the concept.

The impossible architecture.

The endless rooms.

The strange transitions between locations.

The unnatural emptiness.

I’d heard that the backrooms consisted of different levels, each within its own environment.

I’d also heard that once somebody became trapped there, escaping was practically impossible.

I refused to believe that, I had to.

If I accepted that I might never get home, I honestly don’t think I would have been able to keep going.

So I decided to focus on moving forward.

Finding doors and exploring different areas, trying to reach somewhere new.

Maybe eventually I’d find a place that connected back to the real world. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing.

That was when I noticed a school bag.

It was sitting on the floor beside one of the desks, leaning against a chair leg.

I crouched down and opened it.

I found water and a snack bar and nearly cried.

I was so hungry and thirsty by then that I didn’t even stop to wonder who the bag belonged to or whether the food was even edible.

I opened the bottle and drank, it was cool, it felt like water, but there was something wrong with it.

It had no taste.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, water doesn’t exactly have a strong flavour anyway.

But it does have something.

Even bottled water tastes slightly different depending on the brand.

This didn’t.

It was like drinking the idea of water.

Cold liquid sliding down my throat without any flavour whatsoever.

I opened the snack bar, it looked normal, some kind of cereal or oat bar, from what I remember.

I took a bite and almost spat it out, it was disgusting because it didn’t taste of anything, nothing at all. It had texture, I could feel myself chewing, but there was no sweetness, no grain flavour, no hint of anything recognisable.

It was like chewing cardboard, or bark.

Something that looked vaguely edible but had never actually been food. I forced myself to swallow anyway, I was desperate enough to eat it, and strangely, it seemed to satisfy my hunger a little.

Which made absolutely no sense, then again, nothing did.

I finished what I could and left the classroom through a door at the back and found myself in a school corridor.

A long one.

Very long.

Rows of grey metal lockers lined both walls.

The floor was a shiny beige colour, polished enough to reflect the overhead fluorescent lights.

It reminded me of those American high schools you see in films.

The sort where pupils stand beside lockers chatting between lessons.

Except there were no pupils.

No teachers.

No posters advertising school events.

Just lockers, hundreds of them.

Possibly thousands.

The corridor stretched in both directions.

To my left, the lockers continued until they disappeared into darkness, to my right, exactly the same.

I turned to look at the classroom door, it was still there.

For the moment.

I remember standing in the middle of that corridor l, trying to decide which way to go, and noticing something else.

The temperature.

Or rather, the lack of any noticeable temperature.

It hadn’t occurred to me properly until then, but most of the places I’d visited had felt strangely neutral.

Not hot.

Not cold.

Not even comfortably warm.

Just…nothing.

I don’t know how else to explain it.

It wasn’t like standing in a room with perfect air conditioning, there was no gentle coolness against my skin, no warmth, no movement of air.

It was almost as though temperature simply didn’t exist unless the place needed it to.

The swimming pool had been humid.

The water had felt cold when I’d first fallen into it, but here, in that school corridor, the air seemed to have no quality at all.

I couldn’t feel it against my face, it was just there, or perhaps it wasn’t. I know that sounds stupid, but that’s how it felt.

Eventually, I chose to leave.

No particular reason why, I just had to pick a direction.

I started walking, the lockers continued, grey metal doors, little ventilation slits, numbered labels, occasional dents.

The floor reflected the lights in long, pale rectangles.

My footsteps squeaked faintly against the polished surface.

I kept looking ahead, trying to judge whether the darkness was getting any closer.

It was impossible to tell.

The corridor seemed to stretch every time I moved.

I walked for what felt like ages.

At one point, I stopped and looked behind me.

The other end now was now swallowed by darkness too.

I couldn’t see the classroom door anymore.

I couldn’t see anything except lockers and the small section of corridor illuminated around me.

I started feeling uneasy.

Then I heard something.

A low sound.

Almost a grunt.

I froze.

It came from somewhere ahead.

Deep in the darkness.

At first, I thought perhaps I’d imagined it.

I’d spent so long surrounded by silence that my brain had started playing tricks on me.

But then it happens again.

A low, guttural noise.

Not quite a growl.

Not quite breathing.

Something inbetween.

It sounded wet somehow, like air being forced through a throat that wasn’t shaped properly. I stood completely still, listening, then I heard movement.

A faint scraping sound, something shifting against the floor. My stomach dropped, I couldn’t see anything, whatever was making that noise was somewhere beyond the reach of the lights.

For the first time since encountering the faceless shoppers, I had the horrible certainty that something else was in there with me.

Something alive.

Or at least, something capable of making sounds.

I didn’t wait to find out what it was.

I turned and ran.

My shoes slapped against the floor, lockers blurred past, I kept expecting to hear something pursuing me.

Footsteps.

Claws.

That horrible grunting noise getting closer.

But I couldn’t tell.

My own breathing was so loud that it drowned almost everything else out.

I ran until my chest hurt and until my legs started aching, until the lights behind me seemed to stretch into one, long, flickering line.

I glanced at the wall where the classroom should have been, but it wasn’t there, just more lockers, more beige flooring, and I almost screamed.

There was nowhere else to go, the corridor was too narrow to hide properly, there were no side passages, no stairs, no nothing.

So I kept running.

Straight towards the darkens at the opposite end.

I didn’t know what was waiting there, but whether it was, I hoped it wasn’t worse then what was behind me.

The lights grew dimmer, then stopped altogether.

For a few terrifying seconds, I was running through complete darkness.

I couldn’t see my feet, couldn’t see the lockers. I stretched one hand out, terrified of running headfirst into a wall.

Then ahead of me, I saw a light.

A faint, flickering yellow glow.

I stumbled towards it, and found myself standing in a hotel corridor.

I stopped so fast I nearly fell.

Behind me, the school corridor was gone, there was only darkness.

Ahead stretched a long hallway lined with closed doors.

The carpet was thick and cream-coloured, patterned with faded reddish-brown shapes.

The walls were covered in old-fashioned wallpaper, a pale yellowish cream with subtle floral design.

Small brass lights cast pools of warm light along the corridor.

Some flickered occasionally.

Others gave off a faint electrical buzzing.

It reminded me of an old hotel.

Not one of those modern places with minimalist furniture and bright white walls.

An older one.

That sort you might have stayed in during a family holiday in the eighties or nineties.

The carpet looked slightly dated and the wallpaper was the kind you rarely see anymore.

Even the wooden doors had that old-fashioned appearance, with brass handles and little rectangular number plates.

It should have felt comforting, and in a strange way, it did.

At least I wasn’t in that horrible school corridor anymore.

But I was beginning to understand something.

Every new place offered a moment of relief, then the relief faded and I was left wondering what was wrong with this one.

I started walking, the carpet muffling my footsteps.

After the echoing of the school corridor, the sudden softness of the sound was unsettling.

It was almost too quiet.

I passed the first door.

306.

Then the next.

306.

I frowned.

The third door.

306.

I stopped and looked back, then forward.

Every single door had the same number.

306.

On both sides of the corridor.

I walked a little farther down and the numbers changed, now they read.

603.

There must have been dozens.

Maybe even hundreds.

I couldn’t see the end of the hallway.

The wall lights continued into the distance, growing smaller and dimmer until they disappeared into darkness.

I remember wondering whether I’d somehow ended up on a floor containing nothing but room 306 and 603.

Which obviously made no sense, but by then I’d stopped expecting sense.

I tried the nearest door.

The handle turned.

Inside was a hotel room, completely normal.

There was a double bed positioned against the far wall, covered in crisp white sheets.

A folded red throw lay neatly across the foot of the bed.

Two bedside tables stood on either side, each with a small lamp.

The lamps had that old-fashioned fifties style, with cream-coloured shades and rounded bases.

There was a wooden wardrobe.

A small desk.

A chair.

And a window.

The carpet was the same red as the hallway.

Everything looked clean, not freshly cleaned, exactly.

Just untouched.

As though the room had prepared for a guest who never arrived.

I walked over to the bed and pressed my hand against the mattress.

Soft, ordinary. I sat down for a moment, the springs shifted beneath my weight.

It was such a familiar sensation that I almost felt relieved.

Then I remembered where I was.

I stood up and opened the wardrobe.

It was empty, no hangers, no spare blankets, nothing.

I checked the desk drawers.

Empty.

Then I went back into the corridor and tried the next room.

306.

Same layout.

Same bed.

Same white sheets.

Same red throw and even same lamps.

I stood there starting, there was something deeply uncomfortable about it.

Hotel rooms are often similar, obviously.

But they’re never completely the identical.

There’s always some tiny difference.

A lamp positioned slightly differently, a crease in the bedding, a mark in the carpet, or a chair pulled out further than the others.

These rooms and none of that.

They looked copied.

As though someone had created one room and duplicated it endlessly.

I went back into the first room.

At least, I thought it was the first.

There was no way to tell.

I approached the window.

Outside was black.

Not ordinary nighttime darkness.

Not the kind where you can still make out silhouettes of buildings or the faint glow of distant street lights.

This was absolute blackness.

Like staring into a wall of ink.

And rain.

There was rain hammering against the glass.

Heavy rain.

Violent enough that the entire window seemed to be covered in moving water, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from.

There were no clouds, no sky, no landscape, just darkness.

And water streaming down the glass, it seemed endless, it poured down in thick, uneven sheets.

Occasionally the glass rattled beneath the force of it.

I pressed my hand against the window.

The glass felt cold.

It was as though the hotel existed in the middle of an endless black void, with rain falling down.

I stepped away not liking that window.

I didn’t like the way the darkness seemed to press against it, and I didn’t want to think about what might happen if the glass ever broke.

I started feeling scared again, not just because of the strange hotel, because the noise I’d heard in the school corridor.

That horrible grunting sound.

Until then, most of the places I’d visited had been empty. The faceless shoppers had been terrifying enough, but at least they hadn’t chased me.

Whatever had been making that noise in the darkness felt different.

I couldn’t explain why.

I hadn’t seen it and I didn’t know what it was.

But I had the unmistakable feeling that if I’d stayed in that corridor, something terrible might have happened, and now I couldn’t stop wondering whether it could follow me.

I listened carefully.

The rain continued beating against the window.

The wall lights hummed faintly outside.

But there were no footsteps.

No grunting.

Nothing moved in the corridor.

I tried to reassure myself, maybe it couldn’t follow.

Maybe whatever lived in that school corridor was confined to that particular place.

Or perhaps it had simply been another strange sound produced by the building itself.

I’d been trapped there maybe two weeks and already felt like I was going insane.

It was the true definition of sensory deprivation, absolute t.orture because before that grunting sound there had been no sound other than myself breathing and walking.

I thought the place would smell stale and old but so far the places I’d seen had absolutely no smell, food didn’t taste of anything, water didn’t, the whole place felt like pretend play, and although I could see things visually, it didn’t help because I’d spend long amounts of time trapped in places that seemed to loop or never end.

I found the pool room especially difficult because it was so dark and eerie, but the fluorescent lights made the dull white tiled walls hurt my eyes after seeing them over and over and over again.

It was the same with the pools, it felt like seeing the same pool over and over and over again even if the style was slightly different, sometimes in different places my eyes would hurt so much and get overwhelmed by the same thing that I’d have to close my eyes for a while just to escape seeing the same damn thing continuously.

These areas seemed empty yet not at the same time.

It was like being alone in a house at night and suddenly becoming convinced that somebody else was standing in another room.

You hadn’t heard anything.

Haven’t seen anything.

But every instinct in your body tells you not to go and look.

That’s what this hotel felt like, and it was exhausting.

I think that was one of the worst things about being trapped there.

The constant uncertainty.

Never knowing whether somewhere was safe.

Never knowing whether the next door would lead to another empty room or something far worse.

Never knowing whether the silence meant I was alone, or whether something was simply being quiet.

By then, I estimated I’d been trapped for about two weeks.

Although I could have been completely wrong.

Time had become meaningless.

I slept when I was exhausted, ate when I found something edible.

Drank when I could.

Walked until my legs ached.

Then did it all again.

There was no morning.

No afternoon.

No evening.

No bedtime.

Just one long, endless stretch of existence.

And the strangest thing was how much I missed ordinary sensations.

I’d never realised how important little things were until they were gone.

The smell of fresh bread.

Coffee brewing.

Rain on warm pavement.

Someone’s perfume as they walked by.

Even the sound of traffic outside my window or a dog barking somewhere in the distance, the annoying things you’d complain about especially when trying to sleep.

People talking too loudly, children screaming, a neighbour slamming a door.

I’d have given anything to hear those sounds again.

Sometimes I felt like the silence was so complete that I felt as though my senses were slowly shutting down.

I started wondering how long somebody could survive this sort of isolation before they completely lost their mind.

Every time I managed to sleep in this place I always hoped I’d wake up back in the real world, or wake to find it was all just some insanely bizarre vivid dream, but I never did, I always woke to this lonely place.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for tonight.

I’m starting to feel uncomfortable talking about this so late at night.

I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen for ages, trying to decide if I should write the next part.

Because there’s something I haven’t really explained yet.

Sometimes, when I talk about what happened, I get this feeling.

It’s difficult to describe.

Like a heavy pressure settling over me.

Not quite fear.

Not quite anxiety.

More like the sensation of standing somewhere you know you shouldn’t be.

The same feeling I had in that stairwell.

That horrible awareness of being somewhere completely removed from everything familiar.

I know how crazy that sounds.

It’s like I can feel it watching, listening, pressing down on me like a heavy oppressive weight that wants to swallow me back in.

Deep down, I know it’s not really watching me, but sometimes I get this feeling when I talk about it too much, like it wants me back, that I was never supposed to leave or escape.

The strangest part?

It doesn’t always frighten me.

Sometimes, I’ll remember those empty shopping centres.

The old McDonald’s.

The swimming pools.

The hotel corridors.

And I’ll feel this sudden overwhelming nostalgia.

Almost homesickness, for somewhere I absolutely hated being.

Somewhere that terrified me and I spent every waking moment desperately trying to escape.

It makes no sense.

But sometimes I find myself missing the strange quietness of those places.

The soft fluorescent lights.

The empty rooms.

That peculiar feeling of being somewhere outside the ordinary world.

At times it’s like it almost wants to lure me back, but then I’ll remember what it was actually like, the loneliness, the silence, the fear, and the feeling eventually passes.

Usually.

Yeah, I’m shivering just thinking about it, I’m going to go to bed and I’ll carry on tomorrow.