Anomaly: The Backrooms
I pinched my cheek as hard as I could, desperately praying that the nightmare I was trapped in was only a dream.
The complete absence of pain told me it was, thankfully, all in my head.
What was I supposed to do to wake up? Fall asleep again? Or die?
The moment my escapist thoughts—triggered as a last-ditch defense against an impossible reality—reached the subject of death, the illusion shattered. I returned to cold, clear awareness.
The cheek I’d yanked burned like it might tear open.
“Ah… shit… Haa… Fuck. Why the hell is this real?”
Do you know what happens when a person confronts a reality they cannot accept?
Surprisingly, you grow eerily calm—so calm it raises goosebumps—and anger doesn’t even surface. Even someone like me, who’d always considered himself quick-tempered.
Once denial faded and reality sank in, my mind began to race with ferocious clarity in order to survive. My IQ was 135. Left brain 135, right brain 135, combined for a total of 270. That was the weapon I had to wield.
I’d once read that a cockroach’s IQ spikes to 340 when it senses mortal danger. Right now, I seemed to be dumber than the cockroach.
No plan came to mind.
Of course it didn’t.
A 174-centimeter, 61-kilogram discharged soldier—perfectly average for South Korea—with no knowledge, no combat ability, and no organization behind him. What exactly was a man like that supposed to accomplish with nothing but his bare hands?
I frantically dredged up every post I’d seen on an internet forum about The Backrooms.
The Backrooms.
Normally, the term conjured images of endless stretches of decaying yellow wallpaper and damp, moldy carpet. But because I had fallen here after dozing off in a university classroom, the space around me was a grotesque fusion of school hallways and lecture rooms.
Setting aside the later additions that became popular online—levels, entities, and other detailed lore—the core of the The Backrooms creepypasta came down to two things: an infinite liminal space with no discernible exit, and the unknown presence that would eventually appear while you wandered and begin to hunt you.
How was I supposed to survive this place? The posts and videos I’d consumed had been vague about escape methods. I vaguely remembered a streamer I used to watch playing a game where you escaped by leaving one zone and crossing into another. Whether that logic would apply to this real version was anyone’s guess.
If this truly was the The Backrooms from those stories, then at the very least, the near-infinite space and the thing that would chase me were almost certainly real.
Therefore, to stay alive, I needed to conserve every ounce of stamina so I could run the moment something appeared. I had to keep moving.
I wanted to live. I refused to die in a place like this. I had endured those endless, boring school years, finally become an adult and tasted freedom. I had survived that miserable military service and returned to society.
I had only just obtained my freedom.
I would not accept a pathetic death—whether by starving while hiding in one spot or by being torn apart by whatever was hunting me.
The ominous, gut-wrenching thought that staying in one place might summon the entity, combined with the sinister flicker of the fluorescent lights, became unbearable. I slipped cautiously through the back door of the nearest classroom.
The room looked almost exactly like the ones at my university, yet it carried an indefinable, skin-crawling wrongness.
“Something’s off…”
In the perfect, almost ringing silence, I muttered to myself—something I never did—just to keep the emptiness from swallowing me whole.
The classroom was steeped in a subtle alienation that set my teeth on edge. I kept glancing behind me, convinced something would leap out from behind the blackboard or from the blind spot beneath the lectern.
As a returning student discharged less than six months ago, I couldn’t precisely identify what felt different. My instincts simply screamed that something was wrong and that it was dangerous.
I searched the room desperately for anything useful or any clue that might help me escape this situation. Sadly, there was nothing.
I rushed out and checked the other classrooms one after another. The result was the same.
In a space where I couldn’t even tell how much time had passed, with my stamina steadily eroding and my mind slowly being crushed, I finally gave up exploring. I staggered back into the hallway, lay down on the cold, gritty floor, and pressed my back against it.
My stomach had begun to cramp with hunger.
There was nothing to eat here.
It was while I stared blankly up at the flickering fluorescent lights in resignation that it happened.
I turned my head without thinking, and my gaze traveled to the far end of the corridor. Past the precarious boundary where light bled into darkness. In that terrifying gloom, something was quietly watching me.
The instant I met that black shape, hunger became a forgotten memory. I shot upright and sprinted down the hallway at what would have been a personal record if anyone had timed it. My heart hammered wildly. A faint heat bloomed in my skull. Adrenaline flooded my veins until I felt capable of anything.
But the surge was short-lived. Soon my strength drained away, the fiery momentum crashing to nothing. My breath rasped at the back of my throat and I was forced to stop. My stomach felt like it was being ripped apart. My lungs screamed for air as though they might explode.
I couldn’t run anymore.
I bolted into the nearest classroom and crammed myself under the lectern. Covering my mouth with both hands to muffle my ragged breathing, I clenched my eyes shut.
This is a dream. It has to be a dream. There’s no way a place like this exists in reality. Or maybe I was actually the star of The Truman Show? Was this all a hidden-camera prank?
If I opened that door right now, the black figure would pop like a balloon, the lights would flare on, and people would shout “It was a hidden camera!” accompanied by ridiculous background music. Then I could laugh like I’d been in on it the whole time and say it had really scared me.
But this wasn’t Japan. Could they really pull off a prank of this scale on an ordinary person? And if it wasn’t a prank?
What would happen if that thing caught me? Would I die? For real? At only twenty-three? How would it kill me? Painlessly? Would it tear me apart while I was still alive? Or devour me alive?
Stop thinking. Stop. Please, just stop thinking.
I was frantically trying to steady my breathing and suppress the wild spiral of my imagination when it happened.
A sound ripped through the empty hallway’s silence—an unpleasant scraping that slammed into my eardrums.
Screeeech. Scree-screech. Screeeeee. Squeak.
The noise of something dragging across old flooring grew louder, then abruptly stopped. Next came the spine-chilling metallic grind of a doorknob turning.
Click… creeeeeeeak… THUD!
The wooden door slammed against the concrete wall with a heavy crash. Then, after a moment, measured footsteps began to approach the lectern where I hid.
Step. Step.
I couldn’t stay hidden any longer. Even if I ended up torn apart by a monster or starved to death in this bizarre place, I refused to die cowering in silence.
Step. Step.
When it got close enough, I would shove it with everything I had. Whatever it was, a sudden 60-kilogram impact should at least make it flinch. My breathing had recovered somewhat; the moment it hesitated, I would run again. Until I physically couldn’t.
The instant I heard fingers curl around the edge of the lectern, I kicked out like a cornered animal and hurled myself at the silhouette.
“Kyaa! Ow—aaaah!!!”
Whatever it was, it was smaller and lighter than I’d expected. It staggered backward under my weight and let out a very human scream.
I had charged with all my strength while picturing some enormous, grotesque monster, so I couldn’t control the momentum. We tumbled to the floor in a tangled heap.
“………”
At that speed, hitting bare floor should have broken something, yet a strangely soft cushion had absorbed the impact. I was unharmed.
“……”
When I regained my senses and looked down, it wasn’t some monstrous entity beneath me. It was a woman, pinned under my weight, staring up at me.
“…Hey. If you’ve come to your senses, could you get off me? It’s starting to hurt.”
I knew her.
Her name was Do Ga-bin. Twenty-three years old. Her unusual given name and surname had made her memorable among our Korean Language and Literature classmates. Though if I was honest, it was probably her appearance rather than her name that had burned her into everyone’s memory.
She was beautiful enough that you wondered why she wasn’t an idol or an actress. She kept to herself outside of department gatherings, much like me, which only made her stand out more.
Our department had few male students. After my discharge, I’d felt lost during the first weeks of the semester with no familiar faces. For some reason she had taken a two-year leave of absence and ended up in the same year as me. After agonizing over it, I had asked her about an assignment and that was how we’d become acquainted.
Which was why, seeing her in this dark, ominous place that didn’t suit her at all—with tears glistening at the corners of her eyes from the pain as she looked at me—
the crushing isolation of being trapped alone in this bizarre space, the extreme terror of being hunted, and the razor-wire tension of possibly dying at any second…
All of it melted away like snow. A wave of relief crashed over me. The utter exhaustion that swept through my body made me collapse right there on the floor.