In the Red Light Backrooms

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I initially intended to submit this for this year's Halloween contest, but it grew a little longer than expected and I wasn't able to finish it in time. I do like to submit a new horror story around Halloween time (if only to show I'm still alive!), so I thought I'd submit it anyway. I hope you enjoy it.

Damien Kane and Chris Abbott noclipped out of reality on an otherwise unremarkable summer morning at precisely 11:01. The where from was a corner of De Walletjes, more infamously known as Amsterdam's main red-light district. Damien and Chris were there--and let's not beat about the bush--to get laid.

As for the where to...

The corridor of doors stretched off into the distance before turning to the left. Around that corner would be another long corridor of doors leading to another left turn. Sometimes it would turn to the right. Sometimes--more rarely--it would end in a T-junction. It never opened back out onto the street outside. If there was even an outside.

The corridor was narrow and claustrophobic, with a low ceiling. The floor was covered in thick linoleum--mushy and slightly tacky. The air carried the tang of stale sweat, cheap perfumes, and--beneath it all--a hint of something far less pleasant. It called to mind sordid and illicit pleasures. Illumination came from fluorescent tubes above the doors. They washed everything in a wan glow--sometimes red, sometimes pink.

If the lights dimmed, you ran.

If the lights flickered, you ran fast.

Each door had a large glass window. For most of them a red velvet curtain was pulled across to hide the room on the other side. For some that curtain was pulled back to reveal a feminine figure dressed only in lingerie. Always attractive. Always sexy. Never human.

Damien remembered the words of the Irishman.

"You have to pick a door, but it has to be the right door."

How do you know if it's the right door?

"Do you think I'd still be here if I knew that!"

Damien hadn't seen the Irishman in some time. Maybe he'd found the right door. More likely he'd walked through the wrong door and never returned.

Damien heard a wet snuffling phlegmy sound. Far off behind him... for now.

Time to move on.

* * * *

As to how Damien Kane and Chris Abbott had ended up there, well that was complicated and also incredibly petty and dumb. Essentially, sjwironman04 had called Damien an incel.

Damien had no idea who sjwironman04 was. They were just some rando idiot Damien was arguing with online. Damien did that a lot. He was an argumentative sort. Politics or pop culture, he had opinions and wasn't shy about sharing them. His real passions were tabletop games and similar nerdy pursuits, and he was very vocal in his disapproval of where some of them were going.

He should have been happy with sjwironman04 calling him an incel. It meant sjwironman04 had nothing left and had lost the argument. It was the modern version of Godwin's Law.

It still gnawed at Damien. Because, if he was brutally honest, he was technically an incel.

No, he didn't believe all the crazy stuff about all women being evil and succubi or whatever was posted on the main incel hangouts. He'd run into some of those randos online as well, and some of them were just as annoying as the woketards.

Incel was shorthand for involuntary celibate. That was Damien. He wasn't getting sex. Had never even had sex, in fact. And it was not by choice.

Chris was the same. Damien wasn't sure how that had come out. It was probably one of those nights they'd drunk too much and let out too much. Most young men didn't voluntarily confess they were still virgins. Not at twenty (Damien) and nineteen (Chris).

Damien had suspicions Chris actually did buy into some of that nonsense floating around online, that he was dangerously close to being the typical incel in both technicality and attitude.

"What's the point?" he'd told Damien. "Women are only interested in the top 5% of men. Anyone less than that isn't good enough. They ignore us and bitch about how bad men are when Chad McMuscles dumps them in the morning and moves onto the next easy lay."

Damien was a little concerned about his friend. Unlike Damien, whose 'nerd rages' were legendary when he blew his top, Chris let it bottle up and fester. That was going to suck him into some dark places if he didn't sort it out.

Damien liked to think this little weekend escapade was more for his friend. That did involve a certain portion of lying to himself, and he knew it.

Unlike Chris, Damien hadn't given up and checked out. He knew it was something that would happen eventually. Plenty of ugly, less-than-charming men managed to get married. There were also plenty of girls who were into geeky pursuits. They showed up regularly to The Drunken Ogre, the local game store Damien liked to hang out at. However, these girls, if you wanted to be diplomatic, were not exactly lookers.

But that was Damien's problem, though, and he knew it. He was picky.

He thought about the girls that regularly joined their D&D sessions. Brenda Boyle was a great laugh. Really friendly and funny. But also fat, really really fat. Then there was Polly Pollard. Furiously intent and intelligent. Almost always guaranteed to come up with a plan to get the party out of whatever scrape they were in. But with her hunched shoulders and long nose she looked like a bird pecking at seed whenever she nodded her head at the table.

He was picky. That was his problem. And he had no right to be. He knew he wasn't much of a looker himself, being short, chubby and cursed with an unmanageable mop of ginger hair. He knew, also, in the long run it was personality that mattered.

That was in the long run though. It meant for nothing if you just wanted to bang someone, and if you just wanted to bang someone, Damien felt they at least had to stir the loins. And these girls didn't stir his loins.

That was his fault though. His pickiness. His inability to settle for something at his natural level.

He was hoping this weekend would sort that out for him. Maybe once he'd paid for it and banged a couple of fit birds he'd get it out of his system. Get rid of that pickiness.

* * * *

As for what had given them the impetus to organise this dirty weekend in Amsterdam, well that was Mr Quinn. Not directly, of course, but it was his comments that had planted the seed.

Mr Quinn was what you'd get if Eddie from Stranger Things grew up to be a teacher. While you wouldn't guess it from his appearance now--an unassuming and nondescript looking middle-aged man with a balding pate--Mr Quinn was still a raging long-haired metalhead at heart. Damien had seen his record collection. It was massive, and it went heavier than just Metallica. Mr Quinn also ran some of their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, where he'd picked up a reputation for being a particularly sadistic and brutal DM. Many of Damien's characters had met their demise during Mr Quinn's campaigns. Those deaths had triggered a few of Damien's infamous 'nerd rages' which Mr Quinn--being as chill as his tastes in music was angry--took in good stride.

Mr Quinn had typically unconventional advice for incels.

"Hire a prostitute and get laid. That's what I'd tell them," he'd opined.

He wasn't talking about Damien and Chris. The news at the time was full of a tragedy down South. A nerdy incel had gone nuts and hacked an OnlyFans model to death with a katana. The usual talking heads were on the usual talking-head TV programs drumming up fear about the coming rise in incel 'terrorism'. That's how the gaming group had got to talking about incels and the difficulties some young men faced in having sex.

"Their hormones are telling them to get laid. Society is telling them a man's worth is determined by whether he can get laid. It's no wonder it twists them up and screws their head up.

"So, I'd tell them to swallow their pride, put a bit of money aside--it's not much--and pay a visit to one of the massage parlours outside of the city centre. Get it out of the way. Then they'll see it's not this enormous thing they have to obsess over and let define them. That's what I'd tell them."

Mr Quinn corrected.

"Well, that's what I'd like to tell them. I also like money and my job, and I don't think the college would approve too much of me handing out those lessons!"

Mr Quinn taught Maths at one of the sixth form colleges.

"So, is this advice you wished you'd have given to your younger self?" Damien had asked.

Mr Quinn hadn't answered that. His thin lips turned up a little at the corner. That was the smile he usually gave when he knew he had a beholder waiting beyond a particularly difficult door puzzle. Damien guessed Mr Quinn's younger self had figured that out on his lonesome. Must have worked though. Mr Quinn was happily married and well liked... even if he did relish slaughtering their player characters.

"What about relationships?" Chris had asked.

Mr Quinn had clicked his teeth. "That's harder. It takes work. No-one can really help with that. You have to figure it out on your own."

And so Damien and Chris had decided to swallow their pride, put a little money aside, and--as Mr Quinn had advised--get it out of the way.

There was the matter of where to get it out of the way. Escorts were too expensive, street hookers too dirty. Maybe one of the massage parlours outside of the city centre. Some of them seemed to have a good reputation when they'd looked them up online. It was the local aspect that concerned Chris. What if they walked in and it was Janet from the checkout tills earning a little extra on the side.

(Janet was such a slut Damien could totally see her doing that.)

No, go further. Go foreign.

And so Damien and Chris had come up with a plan to do Amsterdam for the weekend. It had the rep and was far enough away they could keep what they'd done to themselves.

They'd booked a KwikJet flight out of Manchester and an equally cheap hotel in Amsterdam city centre. Damien and Chris were raring to go as soon as they got into Amsterdam. Unfortunately, events conspired against that. Their flight was delayed six hours, which meant they'd arrived too late to do anything other than check into their hotel and crash for the night.

* * * *

The next morning...

"I thought it would be open 24 hours," Chris said.

The red light district was a mazy spiderweb of narrow alleys spread across three or four blocks and intersected by wide streets with canals running down the middle. As with most of the centre of Amsterdam, the buildings were high, narrow, and wedged together in continuous terraces. It made Damien think of a lot of tall skinny people squeezed together on an underground carriage.

These streets and alleys could easily be distinguished from the rest of Amsterdam by the preponderance of doors with large glass windows. Where a regular building would have a single front door there were three. Some were located at the tops of narrow flights of steps. Others were situated lower, at the feet of steps leading down from the main street. Many more were inset within the walls of the narrow alleys, forming a chaotic warren of red lights and red curtains hidden from the main streets.

All appeared to be closed--the curtains drawn, the fluorescent light tubes above the doors switched off.

"I'm sure I read that it was," Damien said.

He checked the time on his smartphone. It was just after 10.

They'd been a little too eager. After being denied last night by their flight being delayed, they'd breakfasted early and left the hotel in the hope of making up for lost time. Only to find the district hadn't properly opened up yet.

Which was blindingly obvious when Damien thought about. Who went looking for a hooker at 9 in the morning? They were too stupidly eager.

Aside from all the doors with red curtains, the streets looked kind of... normal. The other people they saw were regular everyday city folk going about their regular everyday business--here only because it was on the way to somewhere else.

It was not completely dead. A shifty looking immigrant on a street corner had tried to sell them drugs with a hissed "want to buy some charlie?"

Damien wasn't into drugs. He thought they were stupid. He didn't even know what 'charlie' was. Heroin? Cocaine? Either way, Damien wasn't interested and was relieved when the drug dealer stayed where he was and didn't follow them as they moved away.

What Damien was interested in, and what had already given him a raging boner in his pants, didn't seem to be available yet.

"It might technically be open 24 hours, but I guess there's no point standing in a window if you know barely any customers are going to be around," Damien said.

He looked at each of the doors they passed. There wasn't a single sign of life behind any of the red curtains.

"What do you want to do?" he asked Chris.

"We might as well look around for a bit, get the lay of the streets," Chris suggested.

That sounded good to Damien. "We'll do that, then go somewhere for lunch and some beers, then come back. There will be more tourists around and the place should be a bit more lively."

"But not too many beers," Chris said.

He curled a finger down to indicate the dreaded 'brewer's droop'.

"Now that. Will not be a problem," Damien said.

He was more concerned about the opposite. His cock and balls were thrumming as if they'd been hooked up to the mains. He was worried he might be unable to contain his excitement. And in a more literal sense. He was thinking he maybe should have snuck off for a sneaky wank in the bathroom that morning to take the edge off.

They explored the limits of the red light district, both inside and out. It was mostly outside, but at the end of a narrow dead-end alley they did find a door open beneath a 'Girls Inside' sign.

"It looks open," Chris said.

They both shrugged and walked inside. The door was open. Inside... not so much. It was pretty much the same as the narrow alleys, only with a ceiling above. The short entrance hall led to a loop of corridor that ran around a square block. There were three doors set in each wall, four in the furthest back corridor running parallel to the alleyway outside. As with the outside window doors, they showed no signs of life--curtains drawn, lights off. The only light was daylight spilling in from outside, so it was fairly dim at the furthest corner. Damien hoped they weren't stepping in anything nasty. They returned back to the corridor leading outside and stood awkwardly at the intersection.

Damien checked the time on his smartphone. It wasn't even 11. Too early for lunch and a pint. What should they do to kill the time?

"Does Amsterdam have a castle? Anything like that?" Chris asked.

"We can give the shops a look," Damien said. "They might have a good games store."

They were about to leave when Damien caught something in the corner of his eye. Was that a slight bit of movement with one of the curtains? Someone preparing to draw it back? It wasn't far off 11. While still early, that seemed plausible as a potential opening time. He turned back to the dim corridor of doors and Chris followed him. They didn't have anything better to do.

Damien paused at the last door on the right, just before where the corridor took a bend to the left. He thought he'd seen movement behind this door. If he had, the occupants still weren't ready yet. The door was the same as the others--a big glass window with a thick red curtain behind it.

"Should we knock?" Chris suggested.

The prospect excited and terrified Damien in equal measure. He held up his hand, balled it to knock... paused.

"Best not," he said. "If the curtain is across it means they're unavailable or... busy."

He let his hand fall back to his side.

"Pussy," Chris teased.

"You knock," Damien said.

Chris was equally reluctant. "Nah," he said.

"We don't know whose room it is," Damien said. "It could be a fat African. Or a tranny."

Chris pulled a face. "Yeah. Not into that."

"We don't want to give them the impression we're too keen," Damien said.

"Yeah. Let's wait until they show themselves first," Chris said.

They didn't know how long that would be, so they followed the corridor around the loop. It was pretty dark around the corner in the back corridor. They fumbled their way past four doors and then three doors on the third side of the 'square'. Turning around the final bend they saw daylight spilling on the intersection.

They would have walked to the intersection, turned right, and exited, but a light came on above one of the doors behind them. They didn't know which one, as it was around the bend and out of sight. Red light spilled onto the bend in a contrast to the white light of daylight ahead.

Damien and Chris walked to the intersection, but instead of turning right towards the exit, they went left, back onto the loop. They started on another circuit. The three doors along the right wall still showed no signs of activity. However, a light had turned on above the door facing them at the far end. The light was pinkish-red and bathed the corner in an illicit glow.

Damien and Chris walked up to it. The curtain was still pulled across. Nothing stirred within. Suddenly, lights binked on, to their left, above the fourth and fifth doors down the back corridor. Even with the lights on, the corridor was still dim, but at least there was enough light Damien was no longer worried about tripping over and falling flat on his face.

He felt a thrill of excitement. He saw the same reflected in Chris's face.

"About to open up?" Chris said.

"I think so," Damien replied.

They didn't want to look too eager. Or give the girl a fright when she pulled back the curtain and saw a pair of nerds gawping at her. They sauntered down the corridor and around the bend at the end. Lights were coming on here as well -- above the third and fifth doors.

Damien's brow furrowed. Something didn't seem right here.

Just butterflies in his stomach, he reasoned. He was having problems reining his excitement in.

He was going to do it. He was finally going to get laid.

They walked to the end and turned left. Lights were on above all five doors in the righthand wall. The corridor turned left at the end.

The butterflies in Damien's stomach were joined by something else--a cold knot of wrongness.

"Huh, shouldn't the way out be on the right?"

Chris vocalised exactly what was causing Damien unease.

"We must have got our bearings twisted," Damien said.

Because they were too horny and excited to pay proper attention.

"It'll be around the corner."

It wasn't. They walked to the end and turned the corner. They looked down another short corridor with five doors on the right and ending in a turn to the left.

Damien shared a glance with Chris. They walked--at a quicker pace this time--to the end and turned left. They saw another short corridor with five doors on the right and terminating in another left turn.

"Did we take a wrong turn somewhere?" Chris asked.

"How?" Damien replied.

It was just a simple loop around a square block. There was one corridor leading in and then a bunch of left turns until you got back to it. Had someone closed the outside door and they'd walked right by the turn off in the gloom?

They checked on the right to make sure. It was a wall with a door in it--definitely no hallway to an exit there. Chris looked at Damien and held up a balled-up hand. Damien nodded.

They walked to the end and turned left. No hidden turn to the right here. Chris extended an index finger.

They walked to the end and turned left. Chris extended a ring finger. Another left turn and he extended his third finger. A fourth and all his fingers were extended.