In the Red Light Backrooms

Four fingers. They'd gone around the block and not found the corridor leading off to the exit.

"Maybe they're not right angles," Damien suggested. It sounded lame and he knew it.

They walked around a fifth corner.

Chris extended his thumb. He looked at Damien in baffled horror. Nothing needed to be said. They both knew how weird this was.

"Let's try backtracking," Damien said.

They turned and walked around the block clockwise. Five, six times. Nothing changed. It was always the same short corridor--five window doors with red lights above them, nothing on the other side, the corridor terminating in a bend to--now--the right.

All the lights above the doors were on now. They lit up the corridor with dim red light. Damien was less interested in that at this present moment. He was more concerned about this weird--impossible--endless loop they appeared to have found themselves trapped in.

Then, after the sixth turn, they both let out an audible sigh of relief. The corridor was the same, but this time ended in a T-junction rather than a right turn.

The exit!

Eagerly they strode--almost ran--to the end.

It was not the exit.

"Oh Jesus fuck," Chris said.

They stood at an intersection on a long corridor that stretched interminably into the distance in both directions. There were doors in both walls. The fluorescent tubes above the doors lit up the corridor with wan red light.

Damien looked to the left, then the right. His vision wavered. This was too much to process. He leant back against a wall. Or, more accurately, fell back against a wall. If it hadn't been there, he'd have kept going until he crashed to the floor.

"What is this? What is this? What is this?" Chris repeated over and over, as he stared one way then the other, his eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights.

Then, far off down the left corridor, the lights started going out. As the wave of darkness approached, Damien and Chris heard something within it. A wet, gurgling, phlegmy something. A something that sounded like it was labouring to breathe as it shuffled towards them. A large something.

The lights above the doors next to Damien and Chris started to dim and flicker. The wave of darkness and the unseen phlegmy thing within was only four doors away.

As one, Damien and Chris turned and ran in the opposite direction. Behind them they heard a loud phlegmy bellow and then heavy wet footfalls as the unseen something gave chase.

They didn't look back to see what it was. They put their heads down and ran faster. They ran headlong around corners, chose directions at random at intersections. There was no caring of where they were going, only the desire to put as much distance between them and their unseen pursuer as possible.

Thankfully, the sounds of wet laboured breathing started to recede. The darkness and flickering lights also fell back behind them. They kept running until--out of breath but certain the horror was no longer just behind them--they pulled up to a breathless halt. Or rather, Damien did. He stopped and doubled up. His stomach lurched and he only just managed to keep his breakfast down. That was more physical activity than he'd done in a long time.

Chris, who worked in the warehouse and was used to moving crates around all day, carried on for a few more paces before realising Damien was no longer with him. He glanced behind him, saw the red lights were shining above every door and--realising they'd lost their hideous pursuer--returned to Damien.

"Fuck," Damien said between wheezing gasps. "What the fuck was that?"

Chris said nothing. He continued to anxiously stare down the corridor behind them. The lights were still shining brightly.

"Where the fuck are we?" Damien said.

"We're in the backrooms," Chris opined. "We noclipped out of reality and now we're in some kind of backrooms."

"Don't be a spaz," Damien said. "That's just a creepypasta. People do not noclip out of reality."

"Then how else would you explain this?" Chris said.

Damien couldn't answer that.

The red curtain behind the door next to them was swished aside. A figure stood in the doorway. She was very sexy and wearing very little.

She also wasn't human.

As window girls go, she was everything Damien had imagined and more. She had a lovely heart-shaped face. Her sensual lips were puffed up in a supple and appealing pout. Her figure was as curvaceous as a lewd anime girl. Her skin was smooth and unblemished. She wasn't wearing anything more than lacy red lingerie, meaning Damien and Chris got to see a lot of that exposed skin.

She was also clearly some kind of she-devil. She had dainty little red horns at her temples. A whip-thin devil's tail coiled around her thigh like a snake. And her eyes...

Damien shuddered.

As sexy as she was, Damien couldn't ignore the fact her eyes were abyssal black pits. Damien couldn't look at them for too long. He was frightened if he did, those empty black orbs would suck some vital part--his soul?--right out of him.

"Is that a... succubus?" Chris asked.

Damien knew he meant fantasy-game-world succubus. There was another common usage of the word that was popular in online incel spaces, but that just meant regular woman. What was standing behind the glass was definitely not a regular woman. She looked like a fantasy-RPG succubus. You wouldn't see a picture like that in a D&D Monster Manual, especially not a modern-day Monster Manual, but you could use your imagination. And Damien had, many times in the past.

The succubus tapped the glass with a long red fingernail and beckoned them. She struck a sexy pose and blew them a kiss.

"If she's a succubus, does that mean we're in hell?" Chris asked.

Damien didn't answer that. He didn't really want to contemplate it.

"Maybe the plane crashed," Chris suggested. "While we were sleeping."

"It didn't crash. I was awake the whole time," Damien said. He'd been far too excited to sleep.

"Would we know? Maybe you only think that to avoid dealing with it."

"I don't feel dead. Do you?"

Chris shook his head.

"We could be, in which case there isn't anything we can do about it anyway. Or we're alive and sucked into some kind of weird phenomenon. We can do something about that. I think we should assume we're still alive and focus on trying to get out of here."

Chris nodded in agreement.

The curtain behind the next door flicked across. This succubus was blonde. Totally gorgeous but also totally not human. She was wearing skimpy white negligee. She waved and smiled brightly at them.

If they'd been out there on the streets, Damien would have been in there in a flash. If he only listened to his second head below his waist, he'd be in there. Like the other girl, she was as wrong as she was beautiful. Too hot. Hot enough to burn your dick off hot.

Damien and Chris moved on. Other curtains swished back, each revealing a girl as lovely as the last. All she-devils. None remotely human. They did have totally gorgeous bodies, though, and Damien and Chris couldn't resist ogling them as they walked down the corridor.

"What happens if you fuck a succubus?" Chris asked. "Does she kill you?"

"Under 5e rules they drain 5d10+5 HP with a kiss. Yeah, if you bone one, you're... boned."

A succubus with lovely red lips kissed her door and left a lipstick impression on the glass. She eagerly beckoned to them.

"That's just a dumb fantasy game," Damien continued. "Who knows what these will do."

"So it might be okay," Chris said.

"It might," Damien said. "Or she might suck out all your life until you end up looking like a wrinkled prune. Want to take that chance?"

Chris looked like he was thinking about it. Damien understood. He had a boner in his pants that stubbornly refused to go down.

The light above the door dimmed and started to flicker. The succubus pulled a face and pulled her curtain across. Damien looked to his left and saw the far end of the corridor was shrouded in darkness. It was a darkness that was growing and moving towards them.

Damien and Chris didn't need to say anything. They hurried down the corridor in the opposite direction. They didn't need to run this time. They strode at a brisk enough pace until they reached a brightly lit section where the lights did not dim or flicker.

* * * *

The corridors were not monotonous. There seemed to be different regions, and in each of the regions the succubi behind the doors had different themes. They passed through a region where the lights were bright, the walls freshly cleaned and the air suffused with airy perfume. The succubi behind the doors seemed equally airy--bright and bubbly cheerleader types or exotic fairy princesses.

In another region the lights were dimmer and redder, the walls dirty and the air thick with a choking odour of cheap perfume. The girls behind the glass doors had a feral punk look to them--skanks, but sexy skanks that looked like they would demolish you in bed with ease.

In another the succubi proudly showed off ten-inch cocks ballooned out in erection. They stroked them while smirking suggestively through the glass windows. Damien and Chris did not linger long there.

It took a couple of hours of wandering the corridors before they encountered someone else. Or rather, the remains of someone else.

They turned right at the end of the corridor and came upon a gruesome sight. A corpse was slumped down against the wall and sitting in a pool of blood, long dried. It was a man of indeterminate age. His face was gaunt, his cheeks sunken and hollow. He'd opened up his wrists with a switchblade, but not before daubing a message in his own blood across the wall behind him.

DON'T LET THEM STEAL YOUR SOUL

Damien gagged at first. His stomach flipped. He placed a hand over his mouth and struggled to keep his breakfast down.

Chris also gasped in horror, but recovered quick enough to retrieve the knife and check the body.

"What are you doing?" Damien asked in a loud whisper.

"Seeing if he's got anything useful," Chris replied. "He's not going to need it now."

That was true, Damien had to concede.

Chris found a wallet and ID.

"Zachary Thompson," he said. "American, I think."

Chris didn't find anything else of use on the body.

"We should keep hold of this and let the authorities know after we get out. So they can find and contact his family," Damien said.

"If we get out," Chris said, pocketing the knife and ID.

"When," Damien corrected. "We're going to find a way out."

Chris nodded. "But if it comes to that." He pointed to the body. "Or that." He thumbed at a door behind him. "I'm choosing a door."

Damien looked at the message on the wall. Evidently Zachary Thompson thought differently. Maybe he was one of those hardcore Christian types. The US had plenty of them. Damien thought about the succubus in the Monster Manual. Yeah, it was made-up rules for a made-up fantasy game, but a lot of the monsters had basis in myth.

He glanced at the doors.

Did they steal souls? Was this... he looked down at Zachary Thompson's dishevelled corpse... really better?

Zachary Thompson must have been a religious nutter. Scared of the man in the clouds. Scared of losing something he didn't even know existed. Damien wasn't going to do that.

Because he was going to find a way out of here.

* * * *

They ran into a second person about an hour later. This one was very much alive. So alive, in fact, he ran into them rather than the other way around.

They walked past a T-junction. A man joined their corridor from another branch and--noticing them before they noticed him--started running to catch up. Damien and Chris heard his footfalls first and seeing that they looked about to bolt, the man held up his hands and called out.

"Don't run. Friendly. Friendly. Don't run."

Given he was the first living human being they'd seen since noclipping into the corridors, Damien and Chris let him catch up. He reached them and doubled up to get his breath back.

"Feck. I was beginning to think I'd never see another human being again."

The man was scruffy and dishevelled, and spoke with a strong Irish accent.

"Hey, I don't suppose you've got any gargle?" the man asked.

Damien and Chris looked at him blankly.

"Booze," he said. "No? Weed? Ciggies?"

Damien and Chris shook their heads.

"Ah feck," the Irishman said. "It's been so long."

"How long have you been here?" Damien asked.

"No fecking clue," the Irishman replied. "Time is weird here. My watch stopped."

Damien's smartphone was the same. It still showed the time as 11:01. There was no outside signal of course. Damien had tried ringing out multiple times.

"Where are we?" Chris asked.

The Irishman just shrugged.

"Nowhere good," he said.

"We got stuck here this morning," Damien said. "Anything you can tell us would be really helpful."

The Irishman looked them over. Damien would be the first to admit he wasn't a good judge of character, but in this case it didn't matter as the Irishman was much worse at hiding his. Behind that jovial attitude was a man who didn't do anything unless he could put a price tag on it. Even though he could clearly see Damien and Chris had nothing and price tags were fairly useless here, he still ran the calculations behind his eyes out of habit.

"And especially about the thing in the darkness," Chris added.

"Oh that," the Irishman said. "I don't know. Never stayed around long enough to get a good look. A thing like that, I reckon if you're close enough to see what it is, it's already too late for you. I know it affects the lights. If you see them dim or start flickering, run in the other direction as fast as you can. And if you come across any stairs. Don't go down. The corridors are darker there and the devils don't stay in their rooms. Poor Wallis. They weren't his angels."

"Wallis?" Damien asked.

"A fella I bumped into a while back," the Irishman elaborated. "Cartographer by profession. He said he'd tried to map the place out, but it wouldn't work. The corridors keep shifting. Wallis speculated they might be infinite.

"Had some funny ideas, did Allen Wallis, God bless his soul," the Irishman continued. "A God-fearing man. He reckoned this was some kind of purgatory. The hussies here are divils placed to tempt you off the righteous path."

Behind him a voluptuous succubus pouted suggestively and jiggled her large breasts.

"They're just the same as the divils above, only they're looking to drain your soul rather than your wallet. But Wallis had faith in Him Up There. He reckoned a kind and benevolent God wouldn't leave good souls down here without any way out. He reckoned behind one of these doors is an angel, sent down by Him Up There to pull righteous souls out... just so long as they didn't fall to the divils' temptations first."

"That's the way out?" Damien was sceptical.

"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!"

Yeah, that was a pretty dumb thing to ask, Damien thought.

"It's just a theory anyway. Didn't help Wallis none. The divils downstairs got him. A kind and benevolent Him Up There ain't got no influence down there."

The Irishman paled and crossed himself. He refused to elaborate further.

They noticed the lights at the end of the corridor had started to dim. Time to move on.

The Irishman walked with them for a while. He seemed friendly enough, but mostly babbled nonsense.

"I told them. I said Amsterdam was the waste disposal capital of Europe. Never figured it would be like this though. Always thought it would be the canals."

Damien suspected he was a druggie or drunk. He also seemed weirdly out of... time. The things he talked about was stuff Damien barely remembered as a kid--TV shows and movies that were ten years old or more. That could be the drugs though. Drugs fried your brain.

The Irishman was with them, and then he wasn't.

They walked around a corner and he was gone. He'd been just in front of them, barely a couple of paces. A corridor stretched out in front of Damien and Chris, just the same as the others. There was no place the Irishman could have run to or hidden himself. He'd simply vanished into thin air. It was as if he'd turned into a different corridor than them.

His disappearance shook Damien and Chris. Not because of any concern for him but through the realisation the same thing might happen to either of them at any time, leaving them both lost and alone in the maze of endless corridors.

They wandered on. The red lights shone. The succubi behind the doors flaunted their bodies.

* * * *

"Do you think he's right?" Damien asked after a while. "About finding an angel?"

Chris looked thoughtfully down at the floor.

"I think it's cope," he said.

"Yeah, me too. It's cope."

The Irishman hadn't exactly sounded lucid with his theories of 'angels and divils' and 'Him Up There'. And neither were Damien and Chris religious enough to put much stock in hell, or purgatory. Even if the girls behind the glass windows looked like she-devils.

"You know, we're going to have to go through a door at some point," Chris said. "It's that or we keep walking until we collapse."

They'd already seen that outcome. They'd passed another body. It was lying facedown in the centre of the corridor. There had been strange mould growing both around and on the body. Damien and Chris had gingerly picked their way past it.

"Yeah. Not here though," Damien said.

The succubi here were scary. They were dressed in black leather and looked like extras from a Hellraiser movie. Proper scary demon types. 'Pain is pleasure' demons.

Damien and Chris moved on. They started to pay more attention to the girls behind the glass windows. They were looking for the 'right' one. They could have been walking the streets outside. It would have likely been just as difficult to pick one out of so many. The girls looked so hot and sexy it raised the baseline. Any one of them would have been fine--more than fine, if considered on her own or against the usual crowd at The Drunken Ogre. Here, where there were so many and all equally gorgeous, the choice became difficult. There was always the fear they might be missing out on an even better one a little further along.

If it had been outside. Inside, here in the corridors, they knew they were just delaying the inevitable.

It was in one of the brighter corridors where Chris made his choice. This was one of the 'nice' regions. The walls, floor and ceiling were spotlessly clean. The air felt fresh, the perfume... delicate. It seemed... classy. If such a term could be used to describe the corridors of demonic window brothels.

The girls here also seemed the most 'human'. Their horns were short and perky, and sometimes hidden altogether by manes of silky hair. They were big, blonde and busty--party girls that went on to be successful OnlyFans girls milking millions from legions of simps. Not Damien's specific type, but he certainly wouldn't say no. He wouldn't have thought they were Chris's type either, but his friend slowed down and stopped completely as one caught his eye.

She was fucking gorgeous, to be fair. She looked like every big blonde stripper rolled into a tall, busty package. She looked like she was from a bygone age where porn stars still looked like women rather than Frankenstein experiments in plastic surgery. She had a body that seemed like it should only be possible with plastic surgery, yet was also clearly natural. A white lacy bra covered her large round breasts. Lacy white stockings covered her lovely long legs. Sheer lace gloves covered her hands and arms up to her elbows. Lace panties and white suspenders completed the ensemble.