After the scream - 900 million universes left
The fall seemed to have been terrible. The man had crashed to the ground with a force that his well-padded belly had failed to cushion. He had fallen headfirst onto his broken arm but hadn't uttered a single cry of pain.
In fact, he hadn't felt anything at all.
He got up without a scratch.
His first instinct was to search for his camera, which had been flung several meters away. Once he had it, he fiddled with it for a few long seconds before breathing a sigh of relief.
The impact had damaged some parts of the device, but nothing was broken.
The man finally snapped out of his daze to see Jason watching him curiously.
In a place where death could lurk around every corner, the man had ignored his surroundings to retrieve his camera and ensure it still worked properly.
The man undoubtedly belonged to a tiny category of people Jason had encountered:
After being saved from certain death, they neither became extra cautious nor sought to exploit his presence to pick fights with everyone they had always hated. Instead, they remained themselves.
It wasn't that they were unaware of the danger, but their brains functioned oddly. They seemed to forget their situation in favor of what mattered most to them.
And Jason respected their devotion.
He respected the man's dedication to bringing back images to document the victims of these places.
To save time and catch up with Arden, who hadn't waited for them, he grabbed the man's uninjured arm and teleported them a few hundred meters away.
The man, who had just witnessed another paranormal event, was focused on the change in scenery.
The dull yellow had given way to a sickly green that heightened the sense of decay in the place. The carpet had taken on a darker hue, and the ceiling lamps flickered with an incessant clicking sound.
The setting was certainly more somber than usual, but there was a detail that disrupted the usual monotony of the place.
There was a door at the far end of the room. A door from which a dissonant and shrill voice was coming.
A scream.
"Is anyone here?"
It was a male voice calling for help, a cry of despair, a blood-curdling scream.
But before the man could rush to the door to try and help, Jason held him back by the shoulder.
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"That's not human," was his only explanation.
Jason's blood wasn't warm like the man's; it was cold, rational, and he already knew from his senses what was lurking behind the door.
The man gave him a questioning look, but Jason offered no further explanation. Unless they teleported, which Arden wasn't doing for some unknown reason, they had to go through that door to reach the Monarch.
In fact, Arden, without slowing down or speeding up, had already approached the door, opened it, and gone inside. Jason and the man followed him, entering a new setting.
They seemed to have arrived in a tunnel. The carpet had given way to a hard, rough floor, and the walls on either side had receded to make room for small houses.
The scene might have been reassuring if the white light on the ceiling hadn't taken on a blood-red hue, if the houses weren't plunged into impenetrable darkness, and if the place wasn't filled with the echoes of that desperate scream.
This scream was interspersed with painful sobs and incomprehensible words.
The man could now pinpoint its origin. It came from the only illuminated house, a sort of dilapidated, eerie-looking bungalow.
That's where Arden and Jason were heading.
The man began to break into a cold sweat, but he followed them anyway, camera on his shoulder.
Once inside, the first room was empty, its light blue wallpapered walls echoing with the screams of suffering that were now growing louder and louder.
They continued forward. They went through a long, narrow hallway to find themselves in a new room.
It was strewn with dirty and used clothes. In one of the corners, there was a backpack, a mattress, shoes, and an opening that seemed to lead to what was behind the wall.
The screams were close.
The three men moved forward to see what was on the other side of the thin partition.
They were standing in front of a room about a hundred meters long.
It had the characteristic appearance of the Backrooms: monochromatic dull yellow walls, faded yellow carpet on the floor, the buzzing of the ceiling lights, but something was standing motionless at the other end of the room.
The man used his camera to zoom in, and after a few seconds for the image to stabilize, he saw it.
"That's not a person…" he whispered in a trembling voice.
It was a creature.
It looked like the one they had encountered a little earlier: a metallic, sharp, nightmarish body.
Yet the man had never been so terrified in his life: the call for help that had echoed in the place since their arrival was coming from its gaping, hideous mouth.
This thing had lured them here, and they couldn't have been the first.
There was something unnatural about hearing it mimic a human cry of despair, a visceral fear that the man couldn't hide.
In any case, he wasn't the only one disturbed by the creature in front of them.
Arden seemed annoyed by the screams.
With a fluid motion, he drew his katana.
In a heartbeat, the creature lay silent on the floor, its body cut in two, and the wall at the back of the room had shattered into pieces.
Arden sheathed his katana.
Then he continued on his way. The wall at the back of the room concealed a new section of the Backrooms: a white part from floor to ceiling with clear water rising to knee level. But as the man thought they had arrived in a new labyrinth, Arden stood still in front of a wall.
To the man, it seemed like all the others, but Jason knew they had arrived.
Arden gently pushed on the wall.
In absolute silence, it gave way under his hand, revealing a wooden door that Arden opened.
The door's opening was accompanied by a dull, creaking sound, as if it hadn't been opened in a very long time.
Behind the door was an office with a bay window offering a view of the sparkling stars of the universe.
The office was disorganized. Papers, letters, and paintings were scattered on the floor, sometimes whole, but often in pieces. The scene was only lit by the starlight, so much so that it took the man several seconds to notice that someone was sitting in a chair, watching.
It was an old man with a pale complexion, gray hair, and an uncertain mental state. The man could see his reflection in the bay window: an intense gaze but with red eyes and jet-black circles.
He finally spoke in a hoarse voice:
"You've finally arrived."