The Backrooms (Inktober, Sunday, October 18, 2020)

For Inktober, Sunday, October 18, 2020. Prompt word: "trap." Tuckerization: Danie Martin 

Author's notes: A reminder that volunteering for tuckerization only means a character in the story shares the participant's name. Other than that, there are no other similar characteristics implied. 

This story is based on The Backrooms, a creepypasta and Little Girl Lost, episode 91 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

On May 12th, 2019, an anonymous 4chan user started a thread in the site's paranormal board /x/inviting users to post pictures of "disquieting images" that just feel "off." The user posted a picture of a yellow room at an off-center angle posted below. Another user replied with a narrative about the picture quoted below the title and the story of The Backrooms was born.

The Backrooms

by Alan Loewen 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it surely has heard you."

Danie yawned and eyed the alarm clock critically. Prepared to enjoy the day off, she could have slept for another thirty minutes, but another alarm clock was scratching at the bedroom door impatiently waiting to be fed. 

Stepping into her slippers, she groggily walked over to the bedroom door and found Arnie, one of her two cats, eager for breakfast. A small tabby, Arnie curled around her ankles, trying to speed up Danie's journey to the food dish. 

"Hey, furball? Where's Jeffy?" Danie asked. Adopted at the same time as Arnie, Jeffy was mostly blind, and the two had bonded in the shelter. Unwilling to separate the two, Danie and her boyfriend, Jared, adopted them both. 

"Jeffy?" Danie called. "Kitty, kitty, kitty?" She sighed to herself. Most likely Jeffy had gotten trapped on one of the old-fashioned heaters that kept the apartment warm or else trapped on top of some piece of furniture that he couldn't get down from due to his limited vision.

"Jeffy?" 

From another room, Danie heard the plaintive meow of a cat and, leaving Arnie impatiently waiting near the empty food dish, went in search of her second cat. 

She followed the sound of Jeffy's cries to the living room where they got progressively louder. Clearly coming from behind the couch, Danie looked behind it but saw no cat. 

"Jeffy?" 

Again, she heard the meow, but this time it sounded as if Jeffy was meowing for her from inside the wall. 

Danie shuddered. The apartment was part of an old brownstone, and she did not want to picture Jeffy having found some way to crawl behind the wall. Danie pulled the couch from the wall and searched for any way the cat could have crept into the wall. 

Trying to ignore Jeffy's calls as they pulled at her heart, Danie knelt next to the wall and went to lean against it to hear Jeffy better. 

To a combination of her shock and horror, the wall failed to support her and Danie promptly fell through it.

It took a few moments for her senses to take in her surroundings, the first sensation being the uncomfortably damp carpet she had fallen on. The second sensation was the faint stench of mold. 

Shocked, Danie looked up to find herself in an empty moderately-sized room with nondescript yellow wallpaper. Open doorways led to similar rooms, all illuminated by flat-panel fluorescent lights in the drop ceiling. 

Staggering to her feet, Danie turned to discover a simple wall behind her without any door. 

A faint meow came from somewhere behind her. 

"Jeffy?" 

She turned and walked into the next room, similar to the room she had left, trying hard not to think of the impossibility of her situation. The small apartment where she lived could not support so many rooms; the wall she fell through merely separated the living room from the kitchen. 

Through one set of open doorways, she only saw more rooms appearing to recede into infinity. 

"Jeffy?" 

From some distance away, she heard a plaintive meow from her cat. As Jeffy was blind, it was unlikely the poor creature could find his way through the maze. Suppressing the growing wave of horror she felt at her odd circumstances, Danie focused only on finding her lost pet. 

Calling out in every room, Danie wandered further into the maze. 

She felt a wave of relief when she finally found the little tabby sitting by a wall in one of the rooms. She swept the cat up in her arms, speaking words of comfort, and within seconds the cat was nuzzling her neck and purring safe in Danie's arms. 

Turning to make her way back to where she entered this odd maze of rooms, Danie realized to her terror that finding her way to the original room might not be possible 

She took a deep breath and began to reconstruct her journey back to the original room. Being blind, Jeffy could not have made his way too far into the labyrinth, and Danie felt she had to be no more than eight rooms away from the wall. 

Fifteen minutes later, Danie paused and tried to calm her growing fear. Not all of the rooms had doors on all sides of their walls, and Danie had to admit she was lost in the maze. 

Then she heard the growl. 

It was faint and many rooms away, but still audible, and Danie turned to listen more carefully. It repeated itself, a little louder and indeed a little closer. 

Panicking, holding tightly to Jeffy, Danie started to run randomly through the rooms. Whatever the source of the noise, Danie did not want to meet whatever now stalked her through the rooms. 

It was then, Danie heard another cat's plaintive meow. 

"Arnie?" 

Ignoring the growling sound that pursued her, Danie called out to her other cat. Most likely impatient at being fed, it had followed her into the maze and was calling out to her. 

Listening carefully, Danie followed the sound of her cat and, to her immense relief, found Arnie rubbing himself against the side of a doorway. Purring, he began rubbing himself against Danie's ankles. 

The growling that pursued her sounded louder, but Danie ignored the threat. 

"Hey, you want to be fed? You want food?" she asked. "Let's go get food." With that Arnie turned, his tail held high and began walking away from her at a fast walk. 

Following Arnie, still holding tight to Jeffy, Danie followed the cat who eventually led her into a room with only three doors and one blank wall. 

Danie felt a wave of relief when Arnie walked through the wall and without pause, Danie tried to follow. 

However, the opening or portal or whatever it might have been was unusually small,, and to her terror, Danie could actually feel the hole growing smaller by the moment. 

Ignoring his protests, Danie shoved Jeffy through the wall and started to squeeze her way through. 

Through the wall, Danie could see her living room. She continued to worm her way through the wall as the portal continued to shrink, threatening to constrict and vanish completely before her escape. 

Exerting herself, ignoring Artie's cries for food and Jeffy's desire to once again be held, Danie concentrated only on getting herself through the wall. 

Suddenly, something seized her right ankle in a hard grasp. 

With a scream, Danie pushed as hard as she could and dragged herself through the hole. 

That afternoon, she told her boyfriend the story. He clearly found her story incredulous, but his doubt was erased when Danie showed him what lay near the wall. 

A large clawed, scaled arm lay on the floor. 

Danie had managed to make it through the wall before it closed completely, severing the arm that grasped her ankle as cleanly as that of a surgeon.