The Backrooms aren’t simply large. They’re impossible.

Transcript

Host:

Tonight, on the midnight drive, we continue our journey into the back rooms.

After descending an impossible staircase, hidden deep within the woods, three friends
find themselves trapped inside a place that should not exist.

An endless maze of yellow hallways, buzzing fluorescent lights, damp carpet, no windows,
no sky, no exits.

What begins as a search for a way home slowly becomes something else as the scale of the
place reveals itself.

Because every hallway leads to another hallway, every turn leads to another turn, and every
attempt to map the space only creates more questions.

Tonight, Joe, Samantha, and yours truly venture deeper into the endless office corridors,
searching for answers while confronting a far more unsettling question.

What if this place never ends?
I wish I could tell you we found something new immediately.

Something dramatic, something that explained where we were.

A door, a sign, a window, anything.

But that’s not how the back rooms worked, at least not for us.

The first thing we discovered was repetition.

Not normal repetition, not the kind you experience walking through a hotel or an office building.

Something worse.

The same wallpaper, the same lights, the same stained carpet, the same corners, again and
again and again and again.

Every time we thought we’d found a new section, we’d round a corner and feel that strange
uncertainty.

Had we been here already?
The answer was almost always, maybe.

That’s what made it difficult.

Nothing looked unique enough to remember.

After a while, every room began feeling like a copy of every other room.

Joe hated that, absolutely hated it.

Joe wanted patterns, measurements, logic, something tangible, something he could use.

So he started making maps.

At first, it seemed reasonable.

One of the notebooks in his backpack became dedicated entirely to intersections.

Hallways, turns, dead ends, lengths, distance, everything.

Any time we’d reach a corner, he would stop, make notes, draw lines, add symbols.

Then we’d continue on.

The first map looked very promising.

The second looked more complicated.

The third looked impossible.

And the fourth made Joe visibly uncomfortable.

Because the geometry wasn’t working.

I don’t mean it was confusing, I mean it wasn’t working.

At one point, we turned right four times, four consecutive right turns.

Theoretically, that should have created a loop.

It should have brought us back to where we started.

It did not.

The hallway simply continued.

Joe checked his notebook three separate times.

No.

What?
No.

You keep saying that.

Because no.

He pointed at the map.

This should connect.

Samantha looked at it.

Then looked at the hallway.

Then looked back at Joe.

Maybe the map is wrong.

The map isn’t wrong.

Then the hallway is.

Joe opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then sighed.

Because neither explanation was comforting.

Either he’d made a mistake or the hallway itself was impossible.

Neither option felt particularly wonderful.

So we kept walking.

The buzzing overhead never stopped.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s difficult to describe how much sound can occupy
your thoughts when it never changes.

A constant electrical hum.

Not loud enough to dominate the room.

Not quiet enough to ignore.

It’s just always there.

Like the back rooms had their own heartbeat.

At some point, I realized none of us were talking much anymore.

The excitement of all of this was gone.

The confusion remained.

But the excitement had definitely vanished.

Because the situation had slowly stopped feeling strange and started feeling real.

That’s an important distinction to make in times like this.

When something impossible first happens, part of your brain assumes it will resolve
itself.

That somebody will explain it.

That you’ll wake up.

That you’ll laugh about it later.

By now, that assumption was fading.

The hallways were not going away.

The lights were not going away.

The carpet was not going away.

We were all still very much here.

And every hour that passed made that fact harder to ignore.

Eventually, Samantha stopped near an intersection.

Not because she had seen something.

Because she had heard something.

Or she thought she had.

Wait!
Joe froze immediately.

What?
Did you hear that?
The three of us stood perfectly still, listening.

The lights buzzed.

The carpet sat silently beneath our feet.

The air remained motionless.

Nothing.

Joe shook his head.

I didn’t hear anything.

Samantha frowned.

Neither did I.

For a moment, then I did think I heard it too.

A sound.

Very distant.

Almost too distant to identify.

Like something scraping against carpet or footsteps or maybe neither.

The sound vanished before I could decide.

Okay.

Joe pointed.

Nobody say footsteps.

I wasn’t going to.

Good.

Because I didn’t hear footsteps.

Good.

Samantha looked at both of us.

You heard something.

We heard a sound.

Which means it means we heard a sound.

Joe’s response came quickly.

Too quickly.

Because none of us wanted to finish the sentence.

A sound implied a source.

A source implied something else.

And none of us were ready for that conversation yet.

So we walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.

The hallways stretched endlessly onward.

Sometimes narrow, sometimes wider.

Occasionally, opening into larger rooms, but always returning to the same yellow maze.

The same wallpaper.

The same lights.

The same smell.

At some point, I checked my phone again.

Still, no signal.

Still, almost a full battery.

I stopped finding that comforting.

A dead phone made sense.

An unchanged phone did not.

The battery remains at 96%.

The time, 12 o’clock.

The date, January 1st, 2026.

Even when we were in the woods, like that wasn’t accurate.

It was the middle of May.

It’s the middle of May, 2026.

The longer we stayed, the more normal, impossible things became.

And that realization bothered me more than any hallway.

Because adaptation is automatic.

People adapt.

People adapt to noise.

People adapt to stress.

People adapt to routine.

People adapt to circumstances, good and bad.

That’s how we survive.

But standing in the back rooms, I found myself wondering something I didn’t particularly
enjoy wondering about.

If we stayed long enough, what else would start to feel normal?
The endless hallways?
The buzzing?
The impossible geometry?
The absence of windows?
The absence of sky?
I looked at Samantha, then Joe.

Neither of them looked frightened anymore.

Not exactly, just tired.

And somehow, that felt worse.

Because fear suggests a person still expects things to change.

Exhaustion suggests they’re beginning to adapt.

You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

But honestly, I don’t know how much longer we walked after that.

An hour?
Maybe two?
Maybe more.

The difficult thing about telling this story is that time eventually stopped feeling measurable.

Not immediately.

That came later.

But the first cracks were already forming.

Without sunlight, without shadows, without any indication that the world outside still
existed, our sense of time began slipping.

Subtly at first.

The way all important changes happen.

You know, so gradually that you don’t notice them until they’ve already happened.

We continued moving.

Mostly because movement felt productive.

Stopping meant thinking.

Thinking meant questions.

And none of us were enjoying the answers that we were finding to our questions.

Joe eventually suggested another experiment.

Of course he did.

What if we only turn left?
Samantha looked at him.

What?
What if we only turn left?
Why?
Because.

Excellent reason.

I’m serious.

Joe pulled out the notebook again.

If the geometry is weird, we need consistency.

Samantha groaned.

You sound like an engineer.

I work in accounting.

Close enough.

Joe ignored her.

We pick a rule.

We follow the rule.

We see what happens.

Now honestly, it wasn’t a bad idea.

Not because it made sense.

Nothing made sense anymore.

But because having a plan felt comforting somehow.

Even a bad one.

So we committed.

Every intersection.

Left.

Every choice.

Left.

Every branch.

Left.

And for a while, it felt, dare I say, it felt like progress.

The scenery began changing slightly.

Just enough to notice.

The hallways became larger.

The rooms became wider.

The ceiling seemed higher.

The buzzing light stretched farther apart.

For the first time since arriving, the environment felt different.

We even got a smile out of Joe.

A genuine smile.

See?
Samantha rolled her eyes.

You don’t know if this means anything.

It means something.

No.

It absolutely means something.

The smile lasted maybe ten minutes.

Then we reached an intersection.

And found one of Joe’s maps.

Not the notebook.

A map.

One of the loose sheets he’d torn out earlier.

Lying on the carpet, directly in front of us, the paper was unmistakable.

Folded the same way.

Marked with the same pen.

The same coffee stain in the corner.

Joe picked it up slowly.

Nobody spoke.

Because nobody needed to.

We all knew what it meant.

Or rather, we all knew what it should mean.

We’d returned to a location we’d already visited.

The problem was, we hadn’t.

At least not according to the map.

Joe stared at the paper.

Then looked behind us.

Then ahead.

Then back at the paper.

No.

There it was again.

That word.

No.

Not anger.

Not denial.

Just a refusal to accept what reality was presenting to us.

No.

Joe checked the notebook.

Checked it again.

Checked it a third time.

The turns don’t work.

Nobody answered.

The turns don’t work.

Still, nobody answered.

Because we knew.

The map wasn’t helping anymore.

The rules weren’t helping anymore.

The back rooms weren’t behaving like a place.

They were behaving like an idea.

A maze designed by somebody who understood hallways.

But not geography.

That thought stayed with me.

And the longer we walked, the harder it became to shake.

At some point, Samantha stopped near a wall.

Not because she was tired, but because she’d noticed something.

A stain.

Tiny.

Barely visible.

High up on the wallpaper.

What is that?
Joe walked over.

I followed.

The stain was not dirt.

It was not water damage.

It looked intentional.

Three short lines scratched into the wallpaper.

Like somebody had marked the wall with a key or a nail or a coin.

Three vertical lines.

Nothing else.

We stared at them.

A strange silence settling over the group.

Because for the first time, we had evidence.

Not evidence of where we were, but evidence that somebody else might have been here.

Joe touched the marks lightly.

They’re old.

How old?
I don’t know.

The scratches looked faded, almost absorbed into the wallpaper itself.

As though they’d been there for years, or decades, or maybe an hour.

Who knew anymore?
Samantha took a step back, and I saw something change in her expression.

It wasn’t fear.

It was something heavier than fear.

What?
She looked at me.

And at the scratches.

And back at the endless hallways.

If somebody else was here, nobody finished the thought.

Nobody wanted to.

Because there were only two possibilities.

Either they got out, or they didn’t.

And standing there in the yellow glow of those endless lights.

Neither possibility felt very comforting.

We left the scratches behind, kept walking, kept turning left, kept pretending that movement
meant progress.

The buzzing followed, the wallpaper followed, the carpet followed.

At some point, I realized I was struggling to remember the forest.

Not forgetting it, just having difficulty picturing it clearly.

The trees felt distant, like something I’d seen in a photograph years ago.

I could remember the staircase perfectly, the marble, the fog, the counting.

But the woods themselves, they already felt strangely far away.

That realization hit me harder than I expected.

Because we’d only been here, well, I don’t know how long we’d been here.

And for the first time since entering the back rooms, I found myself wondering something
I desperately did not want to think about.

Not how do we get out?
Not where are we?
Not even what is this place?
Something worse.

I found myself wondering, how long does it take before this place starts feeling more
familiar than home?
And that question stayed with me.

Long after the hallways disappeared into the distance.

Long after the lights continued their endless hum.

Long after we walked around the next corner, in the next, in the next.

Still searching for something that looked different.

Anything that looked different.