The Curse That Calls You Back
It had taken a full day to travel from the generator room they first entered upon ascending to the 3rd Floor all the way to the grand chapel with its massive pillars.
So even if personnel were dispatched from other grand chapels, it would take at least a day to pursue Minel.
Minel allowed himself to ease his mind a little. Not enough to drop his guard entirely, but he no longer needed to move quite as urgently as he had thought.
His gaze followed the gray corridor stretching far into the distance. And just as far, his mind began to tangle itself in every kind of question.
The first thought was the sheer size of the Backrooms. There were said to be ten grand chapels, each able to hold roughly ten thousand of the hundred and twenty thousand worshippers. If those chapels were evenly distributed across the entire 3rd Floor to oversee the local ones, then the 3rd Floor might well be larger than the whole of South Korea.
Already on the 2nd Floor they had walked four hundred and fifty kilometers in a straight line without ever seeing an end—that was the Backrooms. Moreover, Balan’s talk of “my 1st Floor,” or Urare’s casual mention of “the 3rd Floors,” suggested that each floor existed in multiples, like parallel worlds. All of them together might be larger than Earth itself. And if the ten thousand floors spoken of in the Sacred Bone’s explanation truly existed, they would dwarf the planet entirely.
Until now he had deliberately ignored the talk of ten thousand floors. But this path that never ended no matter how far he walked might itself be only one corridor of a prison larger than the universe.
And that applied not only to space.
Thousands of years. That was how long it had taken to create the puppet Isil. The mismatched-eyed grand chaplain had spoken of it like a warning; the cloaked grand chaplain had murmured it as something beyond all doubt. At first Minel had taken it for religious hyperbole, but after everything he had experienced it no longer sounded like a joke.
If space had already exceeded human scale, why should time be any different? Like an ancient poem, a single day might pass like a thousand years—or the reverse.
Balan had said it. He had left and returned three times. What had he felt out in the real world that made him turn his steps back here? Why return to this hellish space? Simple madness? Or was there something that existed only in the Backrooms, drawing him back like a magnet?
Urare’s words rose as well. Those who enter the Backrooms ultimately live out their lives in the Backrooms. Both of them had spoken in the same hollow tone, as if escape were mere illusion—and as if he too would come to know it in time.
A curse: once you enter, you can never leave. Even if you leave, you will someday be called back. If there were no invisible chains forcing a person to tread this hell again and again, who in their right mind would return?
Perhaps. Just perhaps.
Was he already dead? In that massacre where the grand chaplains’ heads had burst like balloons, had his breath already stopped once? Had the Shocker’s foreleg struck him, its sharp teeth chewed him until upper and lower body were severed? Had he wandered the endless offices until, finding neither food nor water, he collapsed between desks and was now dreaming his final dream?
Or rather—had he simply died suddenly on the hard bed in that room?
Then what were these footsteps now? Was a ghost walking through hell? A fleeting spring dream, or Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream? Buying an escape ticket might be nothing more than briefly waking from the dream. In the end sleep would return, and the dream would resume. Trapped forever in a repeating curse like a regression novel, with no way out.
Isil’s lightning and machinery. The mysteries Urare had shown, too profound to fully reveal. The endless worship of the fanatics, and the tragic explosions that worship had wrought. All of it turned like gears toward one vast system. Someone’s laboratory, perhaps? A god’s plaything?
The metal corridor stretched endlessly. The floor trembled faintly like an old bridge, and the warning lights set at intervals along the walls flickered on and off in time with a heartbeat. With each flash the scratches on the walls rose into view, then sank back beneath the surface when the lights died. Steam rose amid the scents of dust and oil, and static electricity brushed past his toes like a cat rubbing against him. The wiring stretched horizontally like blood vessels carrying blood. From afar the pipes wailed like a wronged animal with a crumpled mouth.
Minel did not stop walking. Nor did his thoughts.
A curse? Those who set foot here ultimately live here. They can never leave. If there is an exit, why does everyone return? And having returned, why leave again?
His head felt ready to explode. Was the mystery Urare spoke of exploding, turning him into a ghost? His thoughts began to grind and stall. They filled his head to overflowing. They spilled onto the floor. What had overflowed was hard to scoop back up.
His saliva dried. His throat stiffened. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and peeled free. He tried to hold it in, but words crawled out on his tongue and fell to the floor.
Curse. The curse of no escape. Then why keep moving? Where was he going? He needed to use fewer words.
Fragments of broken sentences glittered on the floor. Each fragment became a shard of memory. The smell of lightning. Isil’s face. Urare’s shadow. Balan’s phone. The mismatched eye’s cry. The cloak’s silence. Gunshots. Choirs.
His vision swayed. The corridor flipped; the ceiling sank beneath his feet. Front? Back? Up? Down? Distinctions shattered. Sentences bit and tore at each other with their teeth; words scattered like torn scraps of paper.
His fingers trembled. His knees buckled. He sank to the floor. The sentence in his throat snapped. His breathing tore into dissonance.
“Minel!”
A scream that seemed to rip his ears tore through the fog of Wildness. Someone seized Minel’s arm. Cold yet warm. Hina’s hand.
“Please, snap out of it!”
Her voice was like water poured over a cracked mirror. Thanks to it, Minel managed for a moment to hold onto his shattered self. But he was still flailing.
“H-here… here? W-where…”
The words still failed to complete, slipping from his tongue again to spill onto the floor. In that moment another touch wrapped around his shoulder. Young and small, yet full of tenacious strength. Chori’s hand.
“Minel oppa!”
Her voice was laced with tears but firm. Her eyes wavered, yet held a resolve never to let go. Minel’s gaze met Chori’s. The corridor that had been overlapping and blurry suddenly aligned into a straight line.
“…”
Breath returned. His chest rose and fell once more. Hina’s hand, Chori’s hand. Two streams of light pulled Minel up from the abyss of madness. The fragments of sentences scattered and stopped. The words no longer overflowed.
Minel squeezed his eyes shut, then slowly opened them. Before him stood the two of them.
“Thank you.”
A word so unfamiliar. But one filled with equal sincerity. Hina looked at him with an expression that was neither smile nor tears. Chori still gripped his shoulder, her fingertips trembling.
Once he had a hold of the thread, his mind came roaring back. Now it was his turn to reassure them.
“People died right in front of me. Too many.”
“…”
“…”
“So I guess the Wildness rose up.”
At his words Hina and Chori both sighed in relief. Hina released Minel’s arm and asked,
“Are you really okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Want to rest at home instead of going up?”
“No. The dissociation symptoms are over.”
“D-dissociation symptoms—do you mean schizophrenia?”
Minel, having had a personality disorder himself, had taken a keen interest in psychiatry. That was why he immediately recognized that paranoia had struck before, and schizophrenia this time.
“Looks like Wildness induces mental illness.”
Hina knew Minel was not someone easily swayed by Wildness. Even after using the arcade machines several times more than she had, he hadn’t wavered at all. For even someone like him to have his mind collapse under Wildness meant… how horrific must the scene he witnessed have been?
Suddenly Hina’s eyes fell on the grand chaplain’s cloak Minel was wearing. Blood stained it in places, and from the direction of the stains it was easy to tell it wasn’t from just one or two people.
“Take off the cloak. Let’s throw that away.”
Minel removed the cloak as Hina said. Then he closed his eyes, shook his head a few times, pulled water from his inventory, and gulped it down. He poured some over his head and face as well to clear his mind, then said quietly,
“Let’s head up right away.”
“To the 4th Floor?”
“Are you sure you don’t need to rest?”
They looked at Minel with worried eyes, but his will was firm.
“Otherwise the followers won’t be able to catch up.”
Hina and Chori looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, then nodded as if in silent agreement. They stood before the emergency stairs leading to the 4th Floor. As Hina had said, no Combatants were in sight. The stairway entrance was as silent as a ruin, and on the concrete walls matted with dust only a faint fluorescent light flickered, barely alive.
Minel pricked up his ears and ran his fingertips once along the railing. Nothing but the smell of metal and old oil—no human presence.
“Good.”
He whispered low and took the lead. Hina and Chori hesitated a moment but soon followed. The three shadows stretched long and overlapping on the stair wall, as if other beings were climbing with them.
As they ascended, the iron stairs creaked with an ominous resonance. Each footstep echoed, sounding as if something were following from behind. Hina climbed with sweaty palms, Chori holding her breath, both staring only at Minel’s heels.
At last, the end of the stairs. The gray wall opened to reveal a small doorway. Above it a green light burned clearly. Minel’s eyes narrowed.
An emergency exit light. Beneath the figure of a running person, “2F” was clearly written.
“2nd Floor?”
At his voice the two girls looked up at once. Minel continued immediately.
“Look at the exit light. Isn’t that the 2nd Floor?”
Hina tilted her head, then spoke as if she couldn’t believe it.
“What do you mean? It says 4F.”
Minel’s eyes wavered for a moment. He stared at the light once more. There the characters “2F” were definitely stamped. But there was no falsehood in Hina’s voice. He slowly turned to Chori.
“Chori?”
Chori looked back and forth between Minel and Hina, hesitating for a long while. Her pupils trembled, then she carefully opened her mouth.
“It looks like 4F to me too.”
A brief silence. The space itself whispered different truths. Whose words were right? By majority it would be the 4th Floor, but the ability to see the truth on the emergency stairs depended solely on Mystery. Hina and Chori had experienced no Mystery on the 3rd Floor. Minel, on the other hand, had seen the puppet Isil and fallen into great danger.
“We can’t go up.”
Minel’s voice was low but firm.
“Then where do we go?”
“The stairs end here.”
He answered with action instead of words. Passing Hina and Chori, he went back down. They harbored questions for a moment but soon followed him. They arrived at the 3rd Floor entrance, but Minel paid it no mind and continued past it further down.
A space like shadows stretching below. Between the extinguished lights, darkness gaped deep. Hina shuddered at the eerie feeling, but did not oppose Minel’s decision. Chori too felt fear welling up, but stuck close behind Minel and began descending the stairs.
The three sets of footsteps continued down, further down. The lower they went, the more strangely heavy the air became, and the darkness swallowed the light even more.
And when they finally reached the bottom end, a door and emergency exit light identical to the one above blinked, emitting green light. Clearly written beneath the human figure: 4F.
Minel nodded once and reached a hand toward that door.
“How does it look?”
From behind, Chori answered.
“2nd Floor. Were you trying to go back to the 2nd Floor?”
“No.”
Minel opened the door without hesitation, and soon the scene within swallowed all the darkness of the stairs and revealed itself brightly. It was not the 2nd Floor that Chori knew so well.
“…”
“…”
“…”
A high blue sky. A wide and green meadow. Quaint little houses. The 4th Floor was a cozy place one could never imagine as the Backrooms.