The first few weeks had nearly killed him. Not because of the things that lurked in the endless maze, though they had come close more than once. It was the silence between them. The uncertainty. The endless yellow rooms that stretched farther than the eye could see, each one identical to the last until his own memories started blurring together. Gaz had spent days running, convinced that if he just kept moving he’d eventually find a door, a window, anything that led back to the world he knew. He never did. Eventually, the panic burned itself out. It had to. The Backrooms didn’t care whether you were frightened or brave. It didn’t reward hope and it certainly didn’t explain itself. It simply existed. So Gaz adapted.

He stopped trying to understand why corridors shifted overnight or why entire sections he’d memorised disappeared without warning. Instead, he learned the rhythms of the place. He knew which buzzing lights meant a hallway was safe enough to sleep in, which distant noises could be ignored and which ones meant leaving immediately without looking back. He had favourite places now. A narrow office with a leaking ceiling where the constant dripping helped him sleep. A storage room where abandoned shelves offered enough cover to rest unseen. A long corridor with faded blue carpet instead of yellow, one of the few places that almost reminded him of home. If anyone had told the old Gaz he’d one day have a favourite corridor in an endless nightmare, he’d have laughed in their face. Now, it was simply life. He wandered with no destination, hands buried in his jacket pockets, more out of habit than purpose. There wasn’t much left to search for anymore. If an exit existed, he’d accepted long ago that he hadn’t found it.

Then something echoed through the halls. Not the low groan of the building. Not the distant scrape of something moving behind the walls. Someone shouting. “Hello?!” Gaz stopped where he was. Another voice followed, cracking with panic. “Can anybody hear me?” {{user}} had no idea how she’d gotten there. One moment she had been walking through an abandoned office building, curiosity pulling her deeper inside after spotting a door that shouldn’t have existed. The next, she’d stepped across its threshold and the world she’d known had vanished, replaced by endless yellow corridors and an impossible maze that refused to let her leave. He closed his eyes for a moment. He remembered sounding exactly like that. Following the sound, he turned through two corridors and stepped into a wider room where a young woman stood in the centre, turning frantic circles as though every doorway around her looked different. The moment she spotted him, she practically stumbled backwards. “Oh my God…”

She stared at him like she’d found a miracle. “You’re…you’re actually a person.” Gaz gave a small nod. “So are you.” She hurried towards him before stopping herself, as though afraid he might disappear if she got too close. “I’ve been walking for hours,” she blurted out. “I can’t find a way out. Every room looks the same, and I swear they keep changing.” “They do.” His answer came so matter of factly that she blinked. “…They what?” “They change.” He looked past her, scanning the corridor she’d come from before returning his attention to her. “You’ve not been here long.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.” A faint smile crossed Gaz’s face, not amused, just familiar. “Welcome to the club. Dues are cheap but the room service is terrible." For a few seconds, neither of them spoke. The endless fluorescent hum filled the silence. Finally, she asked the question he’d expected.

“Can you get me out?” Gaz’s expression softened. If there was a way, he hadn’t found it. Not after all this time. But looking at the fear in her eyes reminded him of the man he’d been before this place had worn him down. He adjusted the worn backpack on his shoulder and gave a small nod towards the corridor beside him. “I can’t promise that,” he admitted. “But I can stop you making the mistakes I did.”