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spoonguy · 2 days

Text

Blue House On The Left

Pairing: Backrooms Entity x Gender Neutral Reader

Word Count: 4061

Synopsis: You get lost in level 10 of the backrooms, and something doesn't want you to leave.

AO3 Link

The first time you glimpsed the faint outline of the run-down shack on the horizon of otherwise endless grass, you thought you had finally lost it. You blinked, almost certain you were losing it. Even as the shack grew larger and drew into focus, you couldn’t be sure your mind wasn’t playing tricks on you until you were physically touching the splintering wood.

It had probably once been a vibrant blue but faded in the sun to a weak, flaky slate, perforated sporadically by bare wood and mold. The shack leaned slightly, but it seemed structurally sound enough, so you ducked through the doorway, letting your eyes adjust to the low light level.

The inside was slightly larger than you had expected, and the back wall was much deeper than it should be given the width of the building. Inside, there wasn’t much: a bucket, a few cans of paint, a rake coated in rust, and an old boxspring mattress in the back. Strange, but it wasn't the weirdest thing you had seen that day.

You made your way over to the mattress, acutely aware of your aching joints and muscles. When was the last time you had even sat down, let alone slept, since you fell through the corner of your dentist’s office? You inspected it for damage while wracking your brain for the last time you had had a tetanus shot.

Gingerly, you sat down on the edge, bracing yourself for one of the springs to slice through the fabric and impale you in the leg, but it never came. To your surprise, the mattress was just as comfortable as the one on your bed back home, albeit slightly mustier.

As soon as you laid back fully, the wave of fatigue you were just barely holding back crashed over you, and you were out like a light.

A new level? No, the subtle hum of the cicadas in the grass was still ringing in your ears. The smell of pollen was just as omnipresent. You blinked repeatedly, but the unfinished drywall surrounding you refused to yield. You were still on the mattress, but the shack was gone, replaced by four bare plaster walls with a single white door.

Quickly, you scrambled up from the mattress and escaped through the door back out into the endless field. Nothing stopped you, or even tried, to your surprise.

From what you figured was a safe distance, you circled the house, if you could even call it that. It was a roughly square frame of drywall, two by fours, and fluffy blue fiberglass insulation. By the time you made it around once, you noticed a single window next to the door, which you were certain was not there before.

The window was covered in a semi-opaque plastic film, but you could sort of make out the mattress you had spent the last however many hours on. The room seemed devoid of entities, but with the way it seemed to shift and morph, you weren’t sure.

The one thing you couldn’t wrap your head around, however, was the fact that you were still alive. If something wanted you dead, wouldn’t it have gotten you earlier? While you were out cold? You cursed yourself for being so careless.

Or maybe that was part of its plan? Did it like the chase? No, that’s stupid. Houses don’t think. But, then again, houses don’t change while you aren’t looking.

Your head ached, and you brushed it off. Whatever, it's great that you got a good night’s sleep, but you had to keep moving. Who knows what lurked out in the knee-high grass, and you hadn’t seen any way to refill the nearly-empty almond water bottle in your pocket.

Something compelled you to turn back around and check the house one more time. If the house was under construction, maybe some tools were lying around. A weapon, maybe?

While nothing had come for you yet, the suffocating atmosphere and movement in your peripheral vision triggered something in the deepest part of your lizard brain, trapping you in a never-ending cycle of fight, flight, and freeze.

One more look couldn’t hurt, could it? You knew it most certainly could, but curiosity was gnawing at you.

Reluctantly, you pivoted and walked back up to the front door, which was now a deep navy with a brass doorknob and matching knocker. Beneath your feet, you noticed a mat with what looked like writing on it:

cOM e IN! W eɭ

Oh, hell no. You had seen enough horror movies to know a trap when you saw one. You turned and hightailed it back to the path you had been following. You had made it here from somewhere else, so if you kept walking, you could probably get out.

With what was probably the last of your energy mixed with a spike of adrenaline, you sprinted until the house was no longer visible in the distance, slowing to a walk only when your legs threatened to give out on you.

You took a swig from your bottle of almond water, cringing as you realized that would be your last drink for the foreseeable future. You thought about digging for water, but the ground beneath your feet was as dry as bone.

If there was grass here, there had to be some sort of water source. You pushed on, ignoring the ache in your dry throat and the rumbling in your stomach.

Finally, you saw something in the distance. A way out? Bleary-eyed, you pushed forward until you realized you were approaching a now-finished, light blue house.

The door was propped mostly open, and a single bottle of almond water rested just inside. Screw this. If you were going to die, you might as well die hydrated.

You glared at the house, convinced it was laughing at you somehow, reveling in your misery.

The welcome mat now read:

w El cO ɱ

ɘ i Nn : )

Breathing deeply, you steadied yourself and reached in for the bottle. As soon as you had wrapped your fingers around it, you bolted in the opposite direction, nearly tripping over your own feet as you ran for safety.

When you were at least a hundred yards away, you paused to inspect your prize. The bottle looked fairly normal, albeit slightly cleaner and newer than the one you were carrying.

You unscrewed the top, breaking the plastic seal, and sniffed it. It smelled just as sweet and slightly nutty as the last bottle. You took a tentative sip before caving and drinking most of the bottle in one gulp.

You sat awhile in the grass, scanning your body for any sign of distress or sickness. In fact, you felt better than you had in a long time.

Free of dehydration and delirium, you wandered back over to the house, only to see it had grown a little dirt path leading up to it off the main one. At the corner of the intersection, a little metal mailbox with a bright red flag had sprung up out of the grass.

You opened it to find another bottle of almond water, which you stashed in your other pocket. As you snatched the bottle, the unfinished metal caught your hand, ripping a small gash on the side of your palm. You yelped, clutching your hand to your chest.

Inspecting the cut, you realized it wasn’t nearly as bad as you thought. A few drops of bright red blood beaded around the cut, but you’d had similar outcomes from paper cuts. Oh well, at least you have your water.

You shut the door to the mailbox and flipped down the flag before collapsing to the ground in a heap. God, you really had to get some food in you. You pushed off the hunger pangs a little longer with a hearty glug from the new bottle.

The grass felt softer here, free of barbs and stickers that coated your boots and socks anytime you ventured off the path. It was still knee-high, at least, and blocked off everything from view except a small piece of overcast sky. You felt boxed in, surrounded by an impending storm, but the clouds never broke and the rain never fell.

You spent that night, or what felt like a night's worth of time, drifting in and out of a hazy unconsciousness. You almost missed the musty shed mattress. Almost.

You stood and turned back to the house, which had spawned another window while you were out.

The mailbox next to you had an address when you turned your head:

1 Z 7 42 b

And the flag was back up in the air. You checked the mailbox and found a single brightly colored bandage with some sort of cartoon character on it that you didn’t recognize.

You shrugged and stuck it to your (mostly healed) hand wound. You guessed the house wasn’t trying to kill you, at least for now, if it cared enough to leave you a band-aid.

Sighing, you made your way over to the front door. The door was the same, but the message on the doormat had changed once again:

W Elo cm

t o e

ɟ Ri e n dddddddd dddd

Yeah, it really wasn’t getting any better with the spelling.

It wasn’t that you did think it was going to kill you; it was that you just didn’t particularly care anymore. And death by house monster was probably faster than dying of thirst.

You gripped the brass handle, only to realize the door didn’t latch, and you could just push it open.

The house had one large room, darkened by heavy curtains. You stepped inside and pushed them aside, letting the dim sunlight flood the room. Illuminated specks of dust floated aimlessly through the air.

The room itself seemed mostly fine, with bare walls, except for the two windows in front. The light couldn’t reach the back wall, leaving it draped in shadow. No lights, and barely any furniture. The mattress, now slightly newer-looking and patterned with a vintage-looking floral print, was positioned in the back right corner. A single dining room chair was sitting facing the left wall, and one more almond water bottle was standing in the center of the room.

The floor was still unfinished, but the room seemed clean enough, so you reluctantly agreed to rest for a while. You weren’t sure, but you were beginning to think you could hear something else besides the cicadas in the grass.

The chair screeched awfully as you dragged it over to the window. The windowsill was big enough that you could use it as a little table, and you began emptying your pockets. Four bottles—two empty, one halfway there. A hotel pen with barely any ink left. Your wallet, with a few bucks left, and your ID. House keys. Hard candy you snagged from the receptionist’s desk.

Jackpot.

You slumped back in the chair, savoring the artificial blue raspberry flavor until long after the sugar had melted completely. It was the best thing you’d ever had. You finished off your third bottle of almond water and collapsed onto the mattress, blacking out before your head even hit the pillow.

When you woke up again, the house had morphed into some facsimile of a living room. The mattress was now a periwinkle couch covered in a gaudy floral pattern with matching pillows. A mahogany coffee table, too low to be used for anything, sat beside it. A tall bookshelf was turned over and shoved into a corner. A window, this time with no curtains, took up most of one wall.

You noticed a wall separating the “living room” from the rest of the house. You stepped through the empty doorway into what looked like it was supposed to be a kitchen.

The decor consisted of a single saucepan sitting on white tile, a table pushed up against the windowsill you sat at yesterday, and a white fridge with a dozen or so multi-colored alphabet magnets stuck to the door.

S T

W P

E P X L

Q F

A D Z O

You, embarrassingly, tried for several minutes to decipher some sort of message before acknowledging the shape of the letters. The house did seem to love smiley faces.

You pulled open the fridge, which was unnervingly warm, to find a pile of hard candies roughly the size of a basketball. You filled up the saucepan and carried it over to your table by the window.

One by one, you unwrapped each piece of candy and devoured it systematically. God, your dentist would hate you. Although rotting teeth seem to be the least of your worries right now.

Overnight, your empty almond water bottles were replaced with full ones. You paused halfway through your candy pile to weigh your options.

Stay, maybe be alright, maybe get murdered by a magic house. Leave and maybe die; maybe find your way out of this hellhole. Something deep in your gut was telling you to keep moving, to stay on the run. Running had kept you alive this long, and with food and water, you were more prepared than ever.

After much deliberation, you stuffed the rest of the candy into your pocket and stuck the almond waters in the saucepan, which you planned on using as a basket. And potentially for hitting.

You set off, not like it would make much of a difference when you left, considering there wasn’t a day-night cycle. But you were feeling better than you had in the last however long, so out the door you went.

You barely made it twenty yards away before the sky opened up and heavy droplets of sulfur-smelling rain came pouring down. Almost immediately, the dusty field flooded, trapping you up to your ankles in black muck. You pulled with all you might, extracting each boot from the mud, and booked it back to the house, running up the steps to the white wooden porch.

Soaked but safe for the time being, you kicked off your boots and slunk down into the newly formed porch swing, silently thanking the house. You peeled off your muddy socks and wandered back into the house. The latch worked this time, opening with an audible click.

The house had divided itself into four rooms while you were out. A cozy living room, a small kitchen, correctly furnished with appliances this time, and what was probably a bedroom and a bathroom.

You stood in the kitchen for a while, afraid to track mud onto the carpet. Finally, you stripped off your soaked clothes and leaned over the sink, staring at your distorted reflection in the shiny chrome of the basin.

You weren’t dead. You were just wet.

And tired.

You sighed and headed for the bathroom, praying the house would give you somewhere to wash up.

Luckily, a white clawfoot tub sat in the middle of the bathroom, and you ran yourself a lukewarm bath. Even as you waited for the water to run, the temperature never got warmer, and you plugged the drain and let the tub fill.

As you ran your bath, you realized the water smelled just like the bottled water, and you scooped up some with your hand for a taste test. At least you knew it was safe. People paid money for fancy bath bombs and salts, right? You thought you had seen some sort of almond bath bomb at the mall, so it couldn’t be that bad.

To your surprise, the room-temperature water wasn’t as bad as you expected. You were more excited to scrub off the layer of perma-dirt. Time held no meaning since you had fallen out of reality. The grime that covered you gave you a pretty good idea of how long you had been here—far too long.

The water was stained an ugly, brackish brown by the time you stepped out of the tub. You cringed as you stuck your hand down into the muck to pull the plug.

You could almost forget you weren’t in some regular house as you toweled yourself off and stepped into the bedroom. The closet was even fully stocked, albeit with some weird items. They all seemed to be about your size, but the items all seemed several decades out of date.

You settled on a pair of silk pajamas that reminded you of something you saw your grandparents wear. You collapsed into bed and wrapped the quilted comforter around you before drifting off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

You took a better look around the room when you woke up. The room had filled with more stuff overnight and lost the window. The bed was centered in the room, surrounded by a dresser, a lamp with a dangling brass chain, and a little ottoman with a cream-colored blanket placed awkwardly on top of it. The layout almost felt natural, as if someone might have actually lived here but then had their house ransacked.

Your old clothes were neatly folded up in the top drawer of the dresser, free of mud, but your boots were nowhere to be found. Regardless, you got yourself dressed and headed into the living room to check the weather.

The rain still fell in heavy sheets, flooding the grass field and turning the path into a river of black mud. Despite the rain, the cicadas’ low hum was still present, leading you to believe that it was as intrinsic to the landscape as the endless grass.

The living room and kitchen had merged into one joint room, forming a strange gradient from tile to carpet. Other than the strange intersection between the two rooms, the living room looked okay enough. A couch, a little dining table, and a framed picture of the grass outside. The kitchen was furnished with an oven, as well as a sink, an old coffee pot, and an unplugged blender. The fridge was still the same, but the magnets had moved.

H I

F R I Ǝ N D

H A P

P Y ! !

Every nerve in your body screamed at you to go, to get out of there, that this was the most obvious trap you had ever seen, but you didn’t. Your feet stood firmly planted on the floor. You pulled open the (still room temperature) fridge door and found a single watermelon twice as big as your head. At least you weren’t going to get scurvy out here.

You dug around in the drawers until you found a knife—a little paring one with a plastic sheath. It went through the rind just fine, but barely penetrated a quarter of the flesh. You cut most of the way around the circumference before you gave up and smacked the melon on the counter a few times, cracking it open.

The force of the melon hitting the granite countertop dislodged the knife, sending it flying onto the floor. Just barely, you dodged the blade, letting it clatter onto the tile, before reaching to pick it back up, hands trembling.

You shook it off and started rooting around the drawers again until you found a spoon, then plopped down at the dining table by the window with one-half of the watermelon and one of your bottles of almond water.

Although you were starting to get sick of almond water by this point, the rainwater had smelled pretty rotten yesterday, and you figured it would be best not to get any of it in your mouth, even if just to taste.

The melon was good, but not nearly filling enough, so you returned to the fridge to see if anything else had appeared. There was an entire glazed ham, complete with pineapple and maraschino cherries, skewered with frilly toothpicks. Sure. Food is food.

Finally satiated, you wandered over to the single couch and collapsed in a heap. You couldn’t remember the last time you had eaten anything besides wallpaper and that one weird mushroom. You cringed. Never again.

As welcoming as the house seemed, you couldn’t help the nagging feeling eating away at you. What did your parents say about these kinds of things? God, you couldn’t recall a single thing your parents said if you tried.

What did they look like again? Did you even have parents? The harder you thought, the more your head hurt. Each question that came to mind poked more and more holes in the fragile tapestry that was your mind. The harder you pulled, the more the whole thing unraveled.

The only thing you could do was scream. So you did. You screamed at the top of your lungs until your breath ran out and your throat was ragged. You weren’t sure, but you thought you felt the house shudder.

Was this what losing your mind was like? You weren’t sure, but you thought you had heard someone say that if you knew you were going crazy, you weren’t. Or was it the other way around? Your thoughts continued to spiral for what could have been hours or weeks until you passed out, surrounded by sagging couch cushions.

When you awoke, you were back in the bed, tucked in, and dressed in a different pair of matching silk pajamas. Your brain felt fuzzy, and your brain failed several times at retrieving memories from the previous day. Something about a ham? And then you just went to sleep? No, something else had to have happened; that couldn’t be it. You had the sneaking suspicious parts of your memory were gone, but you couldn’t be sure.

The thought spooked you so much that you threw off the cover and bolted for the door. The front door was jammed, but a few kicks to the area below the knob sent it swinging open. Shoeless and empty-handed, you sprinted back to the main path, your feet sinking deeper with every step.

The pace was impossible to maintain, so you slowed to as fast of a walk as you could manage, given that you had to pull your feet from the mud with every step.

You trudged on for what felt like hours, your muscles straining with every step. Howling winds whipped past you, sending rain and mud flying directly into your eyes. The more you struggled, the more you sank into the mud before eventually your knees buckled and you fell, flailing, face first into the mud.

By the time you came around, the rain had stopped completely. You were surprised to find that you hadn’t asphyxiated face down in the muck, but you must have landed sideways because you were still breathing.

You sat up, doing your best to wipe the dried mud off your face and failing badly. At least you were able to see, though, and you looked up. The grass waved lazily in the breeze.

You turned your head from side to side, stretching out the crick in your neck, only to catch the blurry outline in your peripheral vision. You turned to face it, only to see the blue house come into focus.

You had barely made it ten feet before collapsing in the mud. Defeated, you picked yourself up and stumbled up the stairs. Pausing with your hand on the knob, you glanced down to see the doormat had changed messages again:

W E LC O M E

B A C K

You turned the handle and stepped into the house. The living room was finally decorated, albeit several decades out of date, with a fluffy couch piled high with throw pillows. A modest fire crackled in a brick fireplace, gently illuminating the room.

At the dining table. A full spread of your favorite foods was laid out, but the thought of eating made your stomach turn. The only thing you could think about was getting clean.

You headed back to the bedroom to get yourself ready to take a bath. As you pulled a set of pajamas out of the dresser, you spotted a framed photo of a person on the far wall. As you approached it, you realized the person in the photo was you, a radiant smile plastered across your face. You were standing in front of the house, leaning against the porch railing. Under the photo, engraved on a gold plaque, were the words:

Home Sweet Home

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