staticthief

[staticthief]

[staticthief]

I Went to Get an Eye Exam

by Krennthief

The optometrist’s voice was strangely harsh in this neutral, inoffensive exam room. An ancient CRT monitor hummed as I nervously gazed down a blurry road that led to a blurry old house, intermittently and briefly popping into focus with a click only to ease back into a colorful fuzz. My head was killing me.

“Just focus on the house, Laurel,” the doctor said, his tone betraying the irritation he had been attempting to mask behind a formerly friendly demeanor.

I felt my struggling eyes buzz against the entire hour of sleep I’d managed to get that week due to an awful headache I’d been unable to get rid of with the usual over-the-counter painkillers. Suffering, desperate for a solution, I called my mom for advice.

“Have you gotten your eyes checked lately, bub?” her helpful, muffled voice chimed over the phone. “Last time I was getting intense migraines like that it was time to get my eyes checked, and they said my prescription improved! Got my new glasses and no more migraines for this lady!”

Figuring her idea made sense, I drove my throbbing cranium to the closest eye doctor I could find, praying my insurance would cover at least something. So there I was.

“I can’t get a good image if you aren’t focusing on the house, okay?” said the doctor.

“Got it.”

After a few more clicks and varying clarity of that giant house inexplicably built in the dead-center of that long stretch of dusty road, the image began to burn itself into my mind, even in its absence as I closed my eyes.

A moody, gray expanse of sky looming overhead. A seemingly endless ocean of yellowing green pastures surrounding a beaten dirt road. The huge, country-style house, its aging whitewash peeling off the exterior’s wide wooden panels. A large, oaken door in the middle with gaping, dark windows hanging on either side. The peak of a gray-shingled roof pointing beyond the house’s zenith. A single, circular window for the second floor with the soft amber glow of a light within. Something’s up there.

I opened my eyes once more to look at the image. It was clear again, but I could have sworn that the second floor window had been lit only a moment ago. Maybe I had imagined it.

I blinked again and heard another click. The burned-in image returned, and like I had thought before, the light upstairs was on.

As soon as it hit me that this was strange, the hum of the room gradually evolved into a sharp ringing in my left ear and my headache returned in full force. Not even the clinical busy-work of the eye exam could distract me from this pain anymore. I let out a moan and rubbed my fingers against my temples.

“That bad, huh?” the doctor tisked. “Alright bud, you’re done with this one. Let’s move on.”

The remainder of the visit was just as miserable. The migraine rocked my head in waves that seemed to only increase in intensity as the optometrist tried as hard as he could to maintain his patience with my constant groaning.

Sighing, the doctor said, “So your vision is worse than last time. Like you told me earlier, a massive change in prescription is probably why you’re getting these crazy headaches.”

Bad news. I knew she didn’t mean to raise my hopes only for them to be dashed, but I was somewhat annoyed at my mom. I was probably just jealous of her good eyes. I shouldn’t hold that against her.

“Your insurance covers 40% of a pair of new eyeglasses, and 50% of a set of contacts,” he said. “I recommend you get some disposable contacts from us today while you wait for your glasses, too. That’ll probably help the headaches in the meantime.”

His mouth grinned, but his eyes did not. Did I ruin his day or something?

I shelled out the remainder of the bill after picking some frames out and getting one box of contacts for each eye and popped them in, years of contact-use leaving me unfazed by the action. Instant relief.

Later that day, I was so happy that I cheered out loud alone in my kitchen after not feeling an ounce of pain for several hours. Cautiously, I took my contacts out to go to bed, feeling no inkling of pain hinting at the corners of my brain like I had every night before. It was so worth it to use that sick leave.

Lights out. I lay in bed and closed my eyes. Again, the farmhouse in the pasture haunted my retinas. Peculiarly, the image had changed since the exam.

The light is on upstairs. The door is ajar. Was the door always ajar?

Troubled, I tossed and turned, refusing to open my eyes for any reason, clinging onto the fragile exhaustion that I had hoped would lead to the sleep I had been seeking all week.

The light goes out. The door creaks open. A figure walks toward me along the road, its wrong shape lumbering toward me. I hear a click and its face becomes clear to me—pallid, sickly lips stretching, ripping into a too-wide grin, piercing, bloodshot black eyes below a mop of greasy yellow hair staring deep into my soul. Its body is covered in faded blue coveralls (or is it skin??) lumpy and misshapen. Something is wrong.

I screamed and woke up, heart pounding in my chest. Something was in here with me. I turned the light on, but my darkened room was only a blur of colors to my poor vision.

A click. I stare in horror at the only thing in the room I can see without my contacts. I shouldn’t be able to see it, but there it is amid the murky blur of my room.

Paralyzed, I watch as it grins and stalks toward me. My headache returns and I black out.

[staticthief]

It is a common misconception (at least, to those privy to it) that the Backrooms contains some form of predatory creature, waiting, listening, stalking. While yes, there could be any number of so-called monsters lurking about, the one thing you should be concerned about when it comes to the Backrooms is...the Backrooms itself.

Ever-expanding, flirting with our dimension and consuming anything it happens to Intersect with, leaving no discernible trace of what it’s taken. What it consumes—and who it consumes—is consolidated into its geometry. Intersecting Rifts are rare, but when they happen, whole buildings, objects, people, animals—they’re all consumed. And worse yet, the longer they remain in the Backrooms, the more they homogenize with its features, its contents.

And having consumed a number of things from our dimension, with so much form to work with, it can seemingly play tricks on the unfortunate living beings trapped inside its walls, amalgamating structures, objects, and...things...toying with a lost individual’s wants and needs. Like an AI-generated image, it can create things that are close to correct, but ultimately unfamiliar and bizarre.

Any food absorbed in this yellow abyss is usually slightly moldy or rotten because the amount of time it takes for things to completely consolidate is a few days, but it strings its desperate victims along by forming something that resembles sandwich that may look less than fresh on a table-like structure whose dimensions are impractical, for example.

Deeper and deeper through its seemingly neverending passages it lures its victims, slowly digesting them. The stale air is breathable, sure, but the cocktail of gases mingling about through its corridors function for the Backrooms in a way similar to how our stomach acid does for us. Not many will realize that that is the reason for the gradual burning and deteriorating they will experience as the days go by wandering the halls, but the abject horror of this revelation will only enhance the victim’s derangement and desperation.

The Backrooms will spontaneously and occasionally attempt to generate organic lifeforms based on its previous meals, possibly having stored some memory of the structure within its unknowable systems. Not that these beings necessarily live for very long. But the ones that do either go mad and perish quickly, or they survive long enough by hunting and eating the rare victim. One or two of these predatory creatures may wander the rooms at any point in time, famished, yet ready to hunt when the chance arises.

The only known stable entries (or exits) to the Backrooms have been sealed off by the small number of researching teams around the world that have clandestinely exchanged terrified notes, or discussed in hushes at academic conventions for the natural sciences. Some of these entries still have staff posted at them so that whatever may approach can be evaluated for entry back into our dimension. There have not been any reported recoveries of surviving Backrooms victims, however. A cynic would assume that instead of being returned home, it is these scientific facilities’ prerogative to conduct research on these unfortunate subjects, who I can only hypothesize may not live very long after escaping their yellowing hell.

There is no way to know if the Backrooms is sentient. All that is known about it is that it exists and functions in this way. There is no way to predict or prevent being Intersected with it, or even how much of your surroundings may come with you should you have such misfortune.

Do not trust anything you see in the Backrooms. It may be a swifter mercy to die upon arrival, because otherwise you will be subjected to an unthinkable variety of grisly demises. It is completely within the possibility of the Backrooms to fabricate a facsimile of the only means of escape—the research entries. It preys on your hope. The longer you are alive, the better it eats. And as you die, presumably burning away, your features and mind becoming nothing but the dull, endless yellow of the Backrooms, you will finally, tragically understand firsthand the meaning of entropy.