Right, enough theory. My brain felt like it had been stuffed with overly complex sociological diagrams and philosophical pretzels courtesy of The Collective Observers and Proteus. K.M. gave me the existential willies, The Cartographers induced non-Euclidean nausea, Proteus tried to convince me I was basically sentient pudding, and the Observers painted a picture of society as a barely functional panic room. Fascinating stuff, sure, but abstract. Impersonal. What I craved now was a story with a pulse, however faint or frantic. A voice. Someone else's footsteps echoing in the infinite corridors, captured on paper. The old genealogist's methodical work felt too… structured. I wanted raw, unfiltered experience. Time to rummage through the personal effects section of this cosmic Lost & Found.
The Z section – Bibliography, Library Science, Information Resources – seemed like the right place to hunt for misplaced memoirs or archived diaries. After navigating past shelves гроaning under the weight of treatises like "Advanced Cataloguing Techniques for Poltergeist-Infested Archives" and "Dewey Decimal vs. Reality Distortion: A Comparative Study," I found myself in a quieter corner, seemingly dedicated to "Unclassified Personal Papers." Bingo. It felt less like a library section and more like rifling through the universe's junk drawer.
And there it was. Not imposing like "The Geometry of Fear," nor pulsating like "The Mutable Self." Just… sad. A battered notebook, really, wedged between a pristine Frontroom Book on 18th-century French Monarchy (CT205 .M3 1952 - Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen – oh, the irony) and a thick binder labelled "Level 11 Civic Planning Minutes (Cycles 450-475)." This notebook looked like it had personally offended several large, angry entities and then maybe been used to level a wobbly table in Level 3. The cover was faded green canvas, stained with things I didn't want to identify, its corners chewed, the spine held together with what looked suspiciously like duct tape and desperation. Scrawled onto the cover in faded ink that seemed to bleed into the fabric was the simple title: Alistair Finch - My... Account. The Call Number taped neatly to the spine by some diligent Librarian read Z665 .J68 1999. "Fragments from the Yellow Static: The Journal of Alistair Finch" seemed a more fitting, Library-catalogue-approved title. Definitely a Backrooms Book. It pulsed with no weird energy, just a profound sense of mundane dread.
Back in my sanctuary – my chair, my perpetually serene pot plant, my personal slice of ordered reality – I opened Finch's journal. The pages were brittle, thin, covered in dense, spidery handwriting that frequently degenerated into near-illegible scrawls, interspersed with shaky, unsettling sketches. It smelled of mildew, anxiety, and stale air.
Entry Dated: ??? (Day 3? 4? The Hum Never Stops)
"Well, I'm here. Wherever 'here' is. Clipped right through the floor of the old Arkwright Mill during that urban exploration meet-up. Idiot. Absolute idiot. Thought it was subsidence. Now... this. Just yellow. Endless, humming, damp yellow. Smells like old carpets and ozone. Keep thinking I see movement in the periphery. Haven't slept. Can't sleep. The buzzing… it gets inside your skull. Found a stain on the wall that looks vaguely like Winston Churchill if he were melting. Called him Winston. He's not great company. Doesn't say much."
Ah, Level 0. Finch's initial entries were pure, unadulterated panic, a stark contrast to my own lore-informed, albeit terrified, noclip. He clearly had no idea where he was or what the 'rules' were. He spent pages describing the texture of the wallpaper, the specific frequency of the fluorescent hum (which he attempted to transcribe musically, resulting in a frantic series of jagged notes labelled "The Song of Madness"), and his growing fear of the silence between the hums. He didn't know about clipping out, about anomalous zones. He was just wandering, hoping for an exit, convinced he was losing his mind. Poor sod. His early sketches were mostly repetitions of the same three walls meeting at a corner, drawn with obsessive, shaky detail.
Entry Dated: Day...? Found Stairs. Going Down. Seems Logical.
"Stairs. Rusty metal stairs going down into darkness. A break from the yellow! Feels… wrong. Cold air rising. Smells worse down here. Like wet concrete and something else… metallic? Coppery? But it's different. Anything is better than more yellow. Used my phone flashlight till the battery died. Idiot. Should have saved it. Darkness isn't better. Heard something skittering. Stayed still for hours. Found a half-eaten bar of something called 'Nutri-Joy' – tasted like despair and cardboard. Ate it anyway. Felt sick. Pushed on."
Level 1. He didn't call it that, of course. He described the industrial gloom, the fog, the clanking pipes. His relief at escaping the yellow quickly turned to a different flavour of terror. He wrote about the sounds – dripping water, distant machinery, the echoing scrape that might be pipes settling or might be… something else. He mentioned seeing flickering lights in the distance but being too scared to approach them. One particularly harrowing entry detailed hiding in a cramped maintenance closet for what felt like days, listening to heavy, wet footsteps shuffling past outside. His sketch from this period showed a pair of glowing eyes peering from dense fog, labelled simply: "Not friendly." Finch seemed to operate purely on instinct and luck, a far cry from the calculated survival guides M.E.G. publishes.
Entry Dated: Pipe Dreams and Pipe Screams.
"Followed the pipes. Seemed purposeful. Found water dripping – drank it. Tasted like rust and pennies. Hope it doesn't kill me. Found… others. Two of them. Scared as me. We shared the last crumbs of my Cardboard-of-Despair bar. Safety in numbers? Felt good for about five minutes. Then we heard it. A scream. Not human. High-pitched, like metal tearing. We ran. Separated in the fog. Haven't seen them since. Maybe solitude is better. Less likely to scream and attract... It."
His brief brush with community, echoing the Observers' points about ephemeral bands. The fragility of trust, the instant regression to self-preservation. Finch wasn't building societies; he was just trying not to be the slowest runner. He described a growing paranoia, jumping at every sound, convinced the architecture itself was malevolent – a precursor to The Cartographers' findings, experienced firsthand without the dubious comfort of quantum calipers. He mentioned finding strange graffiti – symbols he didn't recognize, warnings like "IT SEES YOU" and "TURN BACK." He meticulously copied some symbols into his journal. One looked vaguely like the M.E.G. insignia, but distorted, crossed out. Another was a spiral pattern that made my eyes water just looking at the copy.
Entry Dated: The Problem with Doors.
"Found a series of wooden doors. Unlocked. Behind one? More pipes. Behind another? A brick wall. Behind the third… sunshine? Blue sky? Felt… wrong. Too bright. Smelled sickly sweet, like rotting flowers. Heard faint music, like an old-timey carnival. Peeked inside. Colourful tents, balloons, but… empty. No people. Just mannequins. Staring. Grinning too wide. Closed the door. Very quickly. Locked it from this side. Found another door later. Heavy steel. Stencilled 'ELECTRICAL'. Opened it. Wasn't electrical. Just… black. Solid black. Like falling into ink. Fell for maybe two seconds. Landed hard. Somewhere else."
Level 2... then maybe Level Fun? Or a similar anomalous zone. His description of the uncanny valley carnival matched some Fandom wiki entries I dimly recalled – a variant perhaps less overtly hostile initially than the Wikidot version, but deeply unsettling. Finch's luck seemed to consist of stumbling into different kinds of awful rather than escaping it. His writing style grew more fragmented here, sentences often trailing off, paranoia escalating. He became obsessed with patterns in the rust stains, convinced they held messages. His sketches became more abstract, full of swirling lines and hidden faces.
Entry Dated: Water, Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop Sane.
"Endless concrete pillars. Water up to my knees. Warm. Unsettlingly warm. And it moves. Currents pull you. Found others here. Floating on debris. One group had lashed together metal shelving into a raft. Looked organised. Waved at them. They just stared. Paddled away faster. Are they scared of me? Or is there something in the water they know about? Saw something long and dark swim beneath my feet. Didn't stick around to investigate. Found a dryer patch on a raised platform. Trying to dry my socks. Failure. My kingdom for dry socks."
Level 7? Maybe Level 3? The watery descriptions were vague enough to fit several. His isolation was clearly taking a toll. Proteus might call it shedding unnecessary anchors; Finch just sounded lonely and damp. He wrote about hallucinations – hearing voices whispering his name from the dripping water, seeing faces in the ripples. "Am I losing it?" he wrote. "Is this place leaching my sanity? Or is it just the wet socks?" A darkly humorous question I could certainly relate to, even from the dry comfort of the Library.
Entry Dated: The Library. At Last?
"Got lost in twisting service tunnels again. Found a vent. Crawled through. Expected more pipes, more gloom. Found… this. Bookshelves. Endless. Quiet. Warm light. Smells like old paper and dust. Saw figures in suits. Thought they were entities at first. Waited for them to attack. They just… nodded? One offered me water. Clean water! Tasted like almonds, weirdly, but good. Said this is 'The Library'. A safe place? Said I could stay. Read. Rest. Feels too good to be true. Where's the catch? Is one of these books going to eat me? Picked up a sheet of paper near the entrance. 'Library Rules'. Rule 1: Don't damage the books. Seems reasonable. Rule 7: Consequences at your own risk. Less comforting. Found this notebook again in my pack. Thought I'd lost it. Decided to keep writing. Maybe… maybe this is it? An ending? Or just a pause?"
Alistair Finch made it. He found Level ZH-653. His relief bleeds through the page, palpable even through the layers of fear and suspicion. His final entries describe timidly exploring the nearby shelves, his amazement at the sheer volume of books, his cautious interactions with the Librarians. He hadn't delved deep into the collection yet; he was still processing the transition from constant peril to quiet sanctuary. His last dated entry simply read:
Entry Dated: Cycle 1 (According to the Quiet Suit Man)
"Found a chair. Sat down. Haven't moved for hours. Just… breathing. It's quiet. Too quiet? No. Just quiet. Might read something tomorrow. Maybe something… normal. From home. If I can find it."
The journal ended there. Or rather, the writing ended. There were several blank pages, then the notebook just… stopped. What happened to Alistair Finch? Did he find his 'normal' book? Did he eventually leave the Library? Did he run afoul of Rule 7? Or did he just stop writing, content to lose himself in the endless aisles, another quiet reader in the grand silence? The abrupt ending was more unsettling than any lurking entity Finch described. It left a void.
I gently closed the battered journal. Reading Finch's raw, terrified account felt profoundly different from the academic detachment of the other books. It wasn't philosophy or geometry; it was wet socks, desperate hunger, the gut-wrenching fear of the unknown, the small, fragile hope of finding safety. It made the abstract dangers feel horribly concrete again. It made this place, the Library, feel even more precious.
Transition time. My stomach agreed. The routine felt necessary, grounding. I procured my usual ration – Almond Water (still lukewarm, still almondy, the taste now tinged with Finch's relief) and a protein bar that proclaimed itself 'Chocolate Flavour'. It tasted vaguely of cocoa powder that had once been shown a picture of chocolate, but hey, it was calories. I ate slowly, watching the unchanging light gleam on the endless spines, listening to the profound, comforting silence Finch had marvelled at. No humming fluorescence, no dripping water, no distant screams. Just peace.
Post-meal, the urge to tidy was strong. I took Finch's journal back to its slot in the Z section. Seeing "Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen" next to it felt even more absurd now. Poor Marie, worrying about cake while Finch was worrying about things with too many teeth hiding in foggy pipes. The sheer scale of realities rubbing shoulders here was dizzying. I straightened a few other volumes – "Introduction to Backrooms Linguistics: Why Grunts Sometimes Mean 'Run'" and a slim Frontroom Book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." More cosmic jokes from the Librarians' filing system, perhaps.
As I tidied, I saw the Bookworm Translation Agency folks huddled in their distant reading booth (#7082747513, according to the M.E.G. file). Intense discussion, probably arguing over the translation of some sanity-blasting hieroglyph. Their obsessive quest felt both admirable and terrifying after reading Finch's simple desire for survival. Did they start out like him, just looking for a safe corner?
Finch's journal left me thoughtful. His raw experience brought the dangers into sharp focus, but also the relief of sanctuary. What next? His account mentioned Level Fun and possibly Level 7, hinting at the Fandom universe interpretations. Maybe I should explore that divergence more directly? Find a book explicitly referencing the Fandom timeline, or perhaps one detailing specific entities unique to that lore stream? Or maybe, after Finch's harrowing journey, something lighter? A Backrooms travel guide, perhaps? Something like "A Wanderer's Guide to the Most Picturesque (and Least Fatal) Levels"? If such a thing even existed here... The possibilities, like the shelves, stretched endlessly onward.