The Boy in the Golden Vest
This time, before you could fully wake, you were already being pulled to your feet.
You forced open your tired eyes to regard the yellow-donning disturbance, who was shaking you incessantly.
"Mariah?" said the boy who must have been her brother. "God, I almost thought you’d died. You were lying there without moving a muscle. I seriously thought you were gone."
The boy clutched onto you, still babbling incoherently. You patted him awkwardly on the head and started to strategize on the most ideal path out of this level.
"God," your companion hiccuped, pulling back from you and wiping his eyes, "we have to get back to the elevator and find somewhere safe."
"I know a place," you said, identifying a pleasant route, "but you'll have to follow me."
Of course, you couldn’t expect the young boy to understand that there was no such thing as "safe" in the Backrooms. God knew you’d tried. And look where that’d gotten you.
The boy’s eyes shone with a newfound sense of hope as you took his sleeve and guided him past the ornate table and striped wallpaper. The two of you left the clearing and backed into the narrower hallway as the lights on the wall flickered more intensely. From time to time, you swore that you could hear distorted laughter echoing through the hollow walls, guffawing raspily in an ear-aching note. However, those were more distant now, and you could be safely assured that you two would not be bothered when the predators were preoccupied with more distant targets.
"How far ahead?" asked the little boy.
"Almost," you reassured him with a firmer tug on the arm. He winced beside you, and it incensed you that he seemed to be having second thoughts. You scowled beneath your lips and hurried your footsteps, heedless if they would carry down the hall. In the end, the two of you turned another corner and reached the elevator door before his maybe-doubts could become a problem.
"This wasn’t the way we came before," said the boy.
"Does it matter?" you asked, before guiding him onto the elevator. The door slammed shut behind you.
The next time the lights came on, the cage you stood in had become significantly wider, no longer the single-person size it had taken to accommodate the thin hallway. The spotless steel walls had also been swapped by dirtied wood, like the models that were used to transport furniture in high-class apartments. The cardboard that covered the floor supported that theory. The boy was still standing where you had left him, looking up and around the cage with wonder.
"Is it just me, or has it gotten wider?" he gaped, the slow shadows of an incredulous smile spreading across his face. You pinched his cheek and scowled.
"Look," you went on, and pressed the OPEN button on the door. The cage's doors slid open to reveal a dark, bottomless chasm, a little like a mine. The boy gasped and carefully inched closer to the edge of the cage.
"Whoa," he whispered into the chasm below, "Are we in a place between levels?"
You shrugged and un-slouched from your position against the back wall. The elevator truly had gotten bigger, and it took you at least five full steps to reach where the boy crouched by the edge. You could see the endless space and suspended metal rods passing by outside, the only indication that you were still moving upwards. At that moment, it occurred to you that this looked a lot like the inside of an elevator shaft, except a thousand times bigger and with an almost boundless scale. The boy was enraptured.
He did not notice your hand against his vest.
"Sit down," you hissed, as he yelped and nearly staggered. "Why must you be so troublesome?"
"Eep!" He lowered his eyes and mumbled something like 'sorry'. You dragged his back against the cage wall and left him there near the floor as you began to contemplate what you would do once you reached the next hellscape. Settled on the cardboard, the boy pretended to look ashamed for around half a minute before he went back to grinning stupidly at the shaft-mine outside. You allowed him. At least he was quiet this way.
"I can see stars," he muttered, and you couldn’t even muster the energy to groan. Instead, you turned away to the corner and thought some more. It brought you no closer to a conclusion. Eventually, you decided to go with the usual plan of spending ten minutes scouting the new environment before being inevitably chased back to the elevator by a monster in a suitably traumatic sequence.
🙥
Alerted by the sound of the door's hinges, three pairs of distorted eyes met yours, and you suddenly had the sinking realization that the laughter might not have been a part of the gramophone track at all.
Trapped with no other viable avenue of action, you scrapped all plans of exploration, and fled.
You tore back through the corridors, stark, mono-chevron hallways, feet pounding across the cramped matted carpet erupted into balls of dust in your wake. You passed more doors, all identical in design, your shoulders struck one side of the wall, then another, your fingers sought to find traction on the coated, dark wood—
(Behind you, you could hear footsteps, and low, warped laughter. No, shrieking, it could only be called unholy shrieking, what madness…?)
—as the accursed, familiar silver box came into view. You collided into the cold shadowy enclosure, oddly devoid of sunlight like the surrounding area, but no time to think of that now. Come, on. Come on, you prayed as you pounded on the L2 button with all your might, as the impossibly-cast shadow of your pursuer grew longer against the floor.
Against the odds, the elevator door began moving. It was cooperative then. That giddy breath of relief didn't last long, as twisted limbs crawled into frame from the right, eclipsing the fluorescent pouring in from the entrance. You watched entranced from the metal floor, the palm of your hands scuffed as metal maws encroached on the image, like the caps of a Venus flytrap.
The doors of the elevator were bold and heavy. But they were not especially quick.
🙥
"Twinkle twinkle," the boy was singing, but he had fallen asleep, and the song had gone without a proper end. After that, you remembered it would probably cause less safety hazards to close the gaping hole to the middle of nowhere and carefully made your way to the panel wall. Just before your finger pressed down on the CLOSE button, you remembered the boy’s words and decided to check out that vast open hellhole one last time.
Turning towards the door, you looked long and hard at the darkness shifting by outside.
But there were no pinpricks of stars at all.