Dial Tone (Backrooms Fanfic)

Part 2

I step away from the wall, keeping the flip phone close to my chest, and venture a few steps further away from where I first landed. The sound of the phone still attempting to dial is comforting somehow, reminding me a little of myself. Neither of us is giving up.

As I walk farther, I get my first glimpse around the side of the left wall. I hope to see something new, maybe even a table or chair or desk or something that means someone lives or works here, someone who I can ask for help. All I get is more of the same.

The same yellow walls. The same headache-inducing lights. The same spongy, flax-coloured carpet. As far as I can see, past the next walls and uneven pillars and doorways and...

My gaze lands on the far wall, where I can just make out a variation in the layers and layers of ugly wallpaper. I'm drawn toward the anomaly, finding it to be about as out of place as I am and right now I can only hope that's a good thing.

The closer I come, the more clearly I can make out something that resembles human script on the wall, choppy and uneven as though it were gouged instead of written. I run my fingers over the scratches, then drawn them back quickly when I notice the flecks of dirty auburn. The flecks turn to blotches which turn to smears, and I step back, feeling sick.

Whoever scratched these messages into the wall did it until their fingernails were bleeding.

My heart stutters a bit as I take it all in.

I'm drowning, it read. The lights are drowning me.

I let out a quiet, squeaky laugh. Because, in a horrible way, I understand. If I were in here for days, maybe, or weeks, I know I would feel the same way. I can feel all my courage draining out of me, dripping in the cold sweat I feel on my hands. I rub them hastily on my jeans.

Surely, whoever wrote this wasn't trapped here. Surely...

I feel my breaths come a little faster. I'm hyperventilating. It's coming and I can't stop it. My lungs are being wrung inside my chest and I'm collapsing in on myself. There's no room for reason, not in this place, so I sit down against the wall and put my head between my knees until it passes.

It takes its time. By the time I can breathe normally again, there are tears on my face and I've had my first taste of the desperation that led someone to paint the walls with their own blood-

I push the grotesque thought away. I whisper to myself, needing to hear the sound of something other than the lights and the dial tone and my own dysfunctional breathing.

"I don't know how I got here. I don't know where I am. I don't know how to get out." It's the only place I know to start, the things I don't know. I would move on to the things I do know but there are basically none of those. There are the basics, I suppose, like my name, which I repeat to myself in just the way that Jeremy said it to me some time ago (I'm not sure how long).

After that, I move on to the things I want to find out, trying to twist my fear into something steadier, like curiosity.

I look around, then up. I know the drop ceiling well enough to know that there might be vents or wiring or something above the tiles. This is an interesting idea, though not practical. I'm not nearly tall enough to get up there.

"I can keep going," I say, looking doubtfully beyond the graffitied wall. I take a step, another test, trying to see what more I can get into view without wandering too far.

With that step, the dialling of my phone gets fuzzier, interspersing itself with static. I frown.

I step sideways. The static stops. Forwards again. Clearer still.

Back where I was before. Static.

I regard my flip phone in a whole new light. Is it possible...

I start to move quickly and a little surer. It's not much; pretty much nothing honestly. But something about it gnaws at me - the way the signal seems to better when I move in this direction, the ounce of confidence at feel at having some kind of guiding modem.

After a few dozen steps of focusing on nothing but the sound of the dial tone, I stop and take another look around. Very little has changed. Except for...

Over the corner. A chair.

I approach it slowly, not sure what to make of the development. When it's directly in front of me, I realize what's so offputting about it. It's proportioned strangely, with one leg longer than the others and the back spanning two sides of the seat instead of one. Still, it's something a little closer to new.

I know I'm tired. I've been tired since I woke up this morning and definitely since I fell into this place. And while I can't bring myself to use the chair, I settle down next to it, ignoring the damp coolness of the carpet.

I sit and I breathe and I close my eyes. Try to pretend I'm somewhere else. Try to pretend I'm somewhere from Before, when Jeremy was home from school every afternoon and I was waiting tables in the local cafe and playing board games in the evenings. The way that life should be.

I reach into my pocket, where I know I have something else. And though I regret opening my eyes and exposing myself once more to the hateful palette of colours and light, looking at the face of another human is worth it.

Dark hair, like my own. But green eyes, like mom's, so beautiful and unlike any other feature of mine. I'm not exactly sure when I started to value my brother above life itself. Of course, I didn't know I did until he was gone, but I know I did long before that.

Maybe it was when the Earthquake hit and literally rocked our world.

No, that was too recent.

The flood, then? The time that Dad lost his job?

No, not those either.

I'm fooling myself. I know exactly when it was. And I know exactly why it happened the way it did. I'm just very good at imagining things away.

I get up, ready to keep moving. I leave the photograph behind, though, on the chair. If it's true that other people find their way here, well... I think they will appreciate seeing another human just as much as I would. Even if it is only in an old, grainy picture.

I keep walking, telling myself my path is not aimless. That it's somehow calculated. That I somehow know what I'm doing. And I continue on like that, slowly growing used to the bizarre twists and turns. They're strange, for sure, and unsettling at best. But they've done me no harm.

They've done me no harm.

They've done me no harm.

They've done me no harm.

I chant it over and over again in my head. I have a half-smiling moment, wondering if those will be the words I'll scribble in blood on the walls one day when I go insane.

I'm mulling over that happy thought when something changes. It's not the landscape.

It's the music of these grimy, godforsaken halls. Starting out as a brittle little cry and expanding until it breaks through the dampening of the carpet and echoes through the rooms and corridors. It's a broken roar, like the shriek of a train grinding against the tracks, like a knife being sharpened to cut me to my very core.

Everything inside of me collapses. I'm flattened against the wall in an instant, having no idea which way to run to escape it, nor whether it's something that needs to be escaped-

No. I know the answer to that question. There's nothing human about that noise, it's nothing something with a soul could achieve. The absolute terror in my chest tells me that even if it was a friend, I could never bring myself to approach it.

So instead, I cower against the walls, wondering if I'll see it, if I'll die, if I'll ever get out of this place, if I'm even here at all.

And through the horror of the cry and my own rising panic, the ringtone hits like a punch in the gut.

My phone is still dialling. But somewhere else here, somewhere dreadfully close by, somewhere close enough to be swallowed by that horrible, inhuman scream, my brother's phone is ringing.