When he first started, he was dreading the work ahead but was hoping he could easily sail through it.
Those thoughts had quickly vanished.
By now, two hours had passed since Hugh Simmons sat down to peruse a foot-high stack of paperwork. Part of him was wishing for anything—even a Hound attack on the Capital Office—which would let him stop this mind-numbing task, even for only a second. But, alas, nothing was coming.
When he had first started, he had decided to do his job to the best of his abilities—taking note of anything that might entail a new entity or an as-of-yet undiscovered entrance to another level. But, with the massive amount of papers he was sitting through, he had abandoned that. He just wanted to be done. All the transcripts he’d read—stories of people running from Smilers, wandering through Level 0, weird markings on a wall in this level—it was all a blur. Hugh had even stopped recording the names of those who were interviewed in an attempt to get through this faster.
And the pile was only half gone.
Sighing, he picked up the next transcript and started again.
The Abandoned Office was starting to live up to its name.
Hugh’s half-formed daydream was shattered by a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he said, hoping against hope it was someone to relieve him. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
“Wow, you’ve gotten a lot done,” said Ivan, taking in the stacks of papers spread out in front of the visibly tired Hugh. “You might be happy to know that you’ll be getting a break soon. Lunch is in about an hour.”
“Very funny, Ivan,” Hugh said with a straight face. “You know we don’t have a communal lunch.”
“Actually . . . ,” said Ivan in a suspenseful, amused tone. “A couple of people recently returned from an expedition to check on how the Level 9 outpost is going. As you’d expect, it’s been hard. They’re almost out of supplies, and are barely staying afloat on entity meat alone.”
“I feel bad for them, Ivan, but this doesn’t seem important enough to interrupt me.”
“Well, one of the settlers gave one of our men something he’d written—a sort of cookbook for the Backrooms. They killed a couple of Wretches in Level 9 and were planning on making some “Grilled Insanity Steaks” from the cookbook. They’re about an hour out.”
”Neat. I’ll come down then. Be nice to have a break.”
“Yeah. See you then.”
With that, Ivan left the room.
Sighing, Hugh turned back to the mountain of paper on the desk. At least he now had a much nearer goal. Still, an hour felt like an eternity away. If only there was something else which he could distract himself with…
And then he saw it.
It was about five pages into a transcript of an interview with a person named John Xione.
INTERVIEWER: Did you notice anything . . . strange while you were in Level 29?
WANDERER: Yes. A yellow—no, beige creature. It didn’t . . . seem to belong there.
The interviewer didn’t seem to consider this creature very important. After asking the obligatory follow-up questions, he just moved on and never brought it up again.
A beige entity in Level 29. Hugh didn’t know much about the entities of the Backrooms beyond those which every wanderer inevitably encountered—Dullers, Hounds, and the likes—but he had never heard of a beige one.
He didn’t even think it made much sense. Most creatures here were highly aggressive and would leap at any change they got to devour a human. But to do that, especially with humans’ wariness and intelligence, you needed some sort of natural camouflage, or if not, at least a color that doesn't stand out against its background. While creatures like Deathmoths would be perfectly at home in the dark hallways of most of the Backrooms, this beige entity would stick out like a sore thumb.
However, compared to disembodied floating mouths this seemed normal.
He grabbed a pencil and wrote out a short note to whoever was in charge of maintaining the Database these days, asking if they knew of such a creature. While this did provide the distraction Hugh had hoped for, he was genuinely interested in finding out the answer to this mystery.
Climbing a flight of stairs, he went to the fax machine, put in the paper, punched in the number 4005, and watched as the message went through.
Hopefully, somebody could figure this out.
Almost an hour had passed, and the remaining pile of paperwork had been cut in half.
Hugh glanced at his watch, anxiously awaiting the time when he could take a break from all this. The message he’d received from the Records Department was still sitting on the desk, next to the transcript that had inspired it.
Hugh,
I regret to inform you that we did not find any records of beige-colored entities. A computer search of the Database resulted in no files found that matched your description.
It is possible that if the wanderer who was being interviewed was telling the truth, the entity has not yet been documented. If so, we would like you to turn over all transcripts in your possession relating to this entity.
Thomas Birch
M.E.G. Records Dept.
Hugh sighed. Along with the seemingly infinite pile of paperwork he had to go through, now he had the added burden of finding more about the entity. Why couldn’t they just do this themselves?
Glancing at his watch again, he realized it was time, and began the walk to lunch.
Several floors below Simmons, a worker in the Records Department was about to head upstairs as well. Unfortunately, her boss had told her to keep working, as what he was doing shouldn’t take that long anyway.
Anna Houston’s eyes glanced along the labels of the folders stored in the filing cabinet. She was looking for the file of an unknown entity. Several new photos had been taken of these strange creatures, and as the new person, it fell to her to put them in. She was just going to grab it so she could work on it and then join the rest of the department at lunch.
However, as she tried to pull it out, her hand accidentally grabbed the file for Entity #67 instead of Entity #68. She realized her mistake when she opened it up—this was not what she was looking for. She was about to close it when she remembered something.
Wasn’t someone looking earlier for a beige-colored entity?
Ten seconds later, having gotten what she was looking for, Anna began climbing the stairs.
But instead of just one file, she was carrying two.
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A Multipart Story |
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