The Backrooms of the Author's Mind

Okay, okay, here me out. I want you to picture yourself like you in the screening room of a 1960’s big picture show executive preview. The one who gets the final say on greenlighting the project. The velvet curtains part and there’s color, but not too much color because it’s old film. You’re silhouetted and you take off your hat and hand it to the silhouette next to you.

A projector starts up a short distance behind you. The spotlight grows bigger and bigger on the screen as the raw reel treads across in zig sag and then, just before something starts to come into picture the screen bubbles and oozes and catches on fire and the screen glows white and a speck of black… One little speck of black on a brilliant white space. You’re alone, no one else with you and that little black speck against the white screen.

Just a little bit of black that gets bigger and closer and louder in footsteps. It shapes into something you recognize, no, not recognize, but remember. This was the dark thing that hid just out of your sight and frightened you deep in the darkest of night and shadows. Here it stands directly in front of you and it grins a grotesque grin. Everything glowing in electric blacks and whites and blues. It holds out a long hairy shadow hand with long hairy shodow fingers, tips a hat, and with a voice like rusty nails embedded swiftly into the side of a children’s ice cream truck on a hot sunny day says,

“Welcome to the tour, my friend, the tour,

You have opened up the door, my friend.

The door to a world you’ve not yet explored.

Come, have a seat and I will give you a ride.

Inside.

Your mind.”

You aren’t on drugs, but also like… da fuq is going on, right? This demon fucker is staring at you wiggling his fingers and smiling like he thinks in hell you are going to grab his hand, but also, like… the fuq did the rest of the world go, am I just a silhouette now? Great, so really my only choices are an eternity of this dude grinning creepily at me forever or taking his hand and bearing the consequences. Drool slips down one jagged, broken, tooth, and the monster blinks and wiggles its fingers.

You take his hand.

Fu-cKing POOF!

You find yourself in a hallway. It’s kept the black, white, blue theme to it. Feels kind of film noir, but with a new age twist to it. You don’t hate it. You prefer green, but blue can be a good choice too.

“Ahem,” says a nice young man with a hint of an accent you can’t place, “we can start the tour if you’d like.”

He’s just some normal everyday dude, nothing special about him. He’s a little shorter than yourself.

“Where did the scary demon go?”

“Oh, what, Gary? He’s not a demon. We feel he’s welcoming from the transition from the real world to the subconscious because he’s like a human, but softer and cuddlier. We based the suit off some of your earliest memories, about, uh 7.3 seconds after your birth to be exact.”

“He’s terrifying.”

“No, Gary is a furry.”

“No, legitimately I was terrified.”

“I will let, uh, corporate know. On with the tour then, and welcome to the author’s subconscious. Please make sure that you stay on the prescribed pathway. It’s as incredibly easy to get lost as it is slippery here. It’s kind of a chutes and ladders meets M.C. Escher as directed by David Lynch situation we have in here. You want to make sure you take as many ladders as you can to get back to your greater conscious and get out of here. You take one wrong chute and you could end up in the deep subconscious… and no one knows what the hell goes on down there. No one has ever come back.”

“Where am I now?”

You’re fully conscious.

“I’m sorry, did you say that out loud?”

I’m talking through the author with my mind. Of course you understand this and it makes perfect sense. He walks to the end of a hallway and you see a dozen doors appear. You walk to the first door and reach to grasp the handle.

You look at him.

He looks at you. He lightly shakes his head and gently mouths, “no.”

You turn to the next door. It’s behind you. It’s a little closer to him.

You walk to the next door and reach to grasp the handle.

You look at him.

He looks at you. He lightly shakes his head and gently mouths, “no.”

You turn to the next door. It’s behind you. It’s a little closer to him.

You walk to the next door and reach to grasp the handle.

You look at him.

He looks at you. He gently nods his head and lightly mouths, “yes.”

You turn the knob.

Vertigo. Vertigo. Vertigo.

You’re on a blanket. Soft. Random noises you don’t comprehend.

You remember being about seven, maybe eight, and you kept going back to the family pie party’s leftovers for another slice of pumpkin pie. Each slice was more delicious than the next. You had no regrets and your mom knew exactly what was going on. She even started counting. To this day she will still remind you of that year you ate eleven pieces of pumpkin pie.

The memory snaps out of place and you are on a platform surrounded by blue ladders and red chutes and can’t remember if you should take one of the red ladders or one of the blue chutes.

You choose the obvious choice and take a blue ladder.

You remember playing hopscotch alone on a windy day. The wind whipped at your back as you hopped up and down. Then, suddenly, you ran as fast as you could just to feel how fast you could run; and the clouds were gray and the wind taunted you so you ran faster and the faster you ran the faster the wind blew. You can feel the muscles in your legs ache from the effort of controlling the wind.

The memory snaps out of place and you are on a platform surrounded by blue ladders and red chutes and can’t remember if you should take one of the red ladders or one of the blue chutes.

Or, was that from a paragraph or two ago? Am I repeating myself again?

There’s a purple plank, neither up nor down, you know you’re playing a game.

Halfway across the purple plank cracks, the purple plank crumbles, and the purple plank plummets and….

…this is when you remember that time you and your friends were digging around in that creepy empty field kitty corner from your house. You were playing some kind of intricate spy game when you came across a box of magazines. You’d never heard of a Lesb…

The memory snaps out of place and you are on a platform surrounded by blue ladders and red chutes and can’t remember if you should take one of the red ladders or one of the blue chutes.

You choose a blue chute and you’re only halfway down when the blue turns to red and you’re sliding upside down either up the wrong way or down the wrong side.

Green joins the room. Green chutes and green ladders. Blue chutes and red ladders. An orange door.

Avoid red it means trauma. You remember the trauma. Enough of the trauma.

You remember the time you cut a worm in half. It was just a mistake, you were just a young kid. You were gardening and saw the dead worm cleaved right in half. You mourned and you cried and then GOD DAMNED ZOMBIE WORMS. The worm wasn’t dead. You screamed off your damned head.

The memory snaps out of place and there is no more gray. The chutes are all rainbow and so are the ladders.

Somewhere above, to the side, or below? You hear a hello.

“Hello, I’m Karen. I’m from the same tour. Everyone is trying to find their way out of here and back to the greater conscious. Can you maybe, keep it down a little? It sounded like you were celebrating with all your hollering, but you appear to be going the wrong way. Find your way back to me.”

She waves a hand from a dark gray platform at an impossible angle to your left shoulder.

“Here I am.”

You do seem to be getting closer to the subconscious. The basement. The trash chute.

You find a gray ladder. Gray must go up or maybe below.

You remember that time you hit a cat with your car. It was an accident, barren farmland roads, the cat came out of a dry canal bush so fast. You stopped to help, but it was too late. You were devastated. You cried for a week. You had to change your route to work. You still think about it over twenty years later.

You find a gray chute. It is getting grayer. You are nearing Karen.

You remember visiting your dad at his job, there is a jail cell in the basement. It’s a police station. You forgot your dad was a cop. He takes you to the basement to see the jail cell. It’s really cool and you can see the toilet in the corner where prisoners have to go in the open and the rickety sink. It’s very dark and you turn around to see that you are alone, behind iron bars, and the lights go out. They stay out for an eternity. Exactly one full eternity until you hear your dad snickering from around the corner.

Karen has been joined by several people and they wave and encourage you, but with each gray option you choose you find yourself in more terror and more fear until you are bound on a single platform that feels like the center of the universe and you stay there.

You stay there.

It’s safe.

It’s quiet.

You’re tired and you take a nap.

You wake up and you take another nap.

Just a short one so that you don’t miss your late nap.

Naps are nice.

But you get tired of not making a choice, but you are also tired of the limited choices you’ve been given.

Chutes and ladders and doors and windows.

Backroom dungeons.

You run. You jump. You push against the platform and you are airborn because these rules stink.

You close your eyes and you float in slow motion.

Careful because this area is particularly slippery. On the left you have the pools of permanent migraine, you fall into those bad boys and you will feel pain from the top of your head to your torso for an eternity, honey.

On this other side we have a cocktail bar of assorted social dysfunction. Survivable, but you can’t leave without saying goodbye to every guest.

The gift shop is straight ahead. Don’t forget to donate.

Things go completely black.

Music begins to play. It’s instrumental.

“THE END” appears in big bold letters.

Credits begin to scroll.

"The Backrooms of the Author's Mind"

"Wake up"

By Amos Glade

You turn to look at yourself and you smile and you give yourself a big thumbs up and say, "I'm greenlighting it. I want one in every dream."

Then you wake up.

*****

~~

*****

Author's note and request: I wanted this to seem like a trip through my mind on hallucinogenics that take you into one of those creepy backroom games. Touching on the memories that shaped us.

I let my mind just be weird. I'm good at that.

I also kind of liked thinking of my memories and my dreams. I think back to my childhood and sometimes I can't tell which is which. Did I dream this or did it really happen?

Of course I took this wildly dreamy, I wonder what people might think if I wrote down some more seriously thought out memories of my small town sheltered life?