I stared in horror at a massive smile peering back at me. No, even that description doesn’t do anything that I am feeling, anything that I am seeing, justice. The creature in front of me was not just a man’s face with a wide grin looking at me. It was nothing but a smile, multiple times my head, almost seeming to be made of light in the darkness. The white eyes were small beads the size of my fist, the smile was all gleaming and pointed teeth, and despite being two feet away from me, it was as if there was a flat wall of darkness between us with not an inch of light touching its real body. 

I didn’t react or hesitate, neither sensation came to me. In that moment, the only thought and thing in my brain, the only natural response, was to move. My body practically flinched away, my survival instinct shooting into overdrive, as claws moving faster than I could track swept through the air where my head used to be. 

I lay on the ground, staring at the creature, seeming so much like a painted image in the dark… and then it moved. It was a single tilt of it’s head but suddenly, even more than it’s claws in the dark nearly decapitating me, it was real. Real in a way that sent shivers up my spine. 

I wanted to shout ‘Run’ or ‘Monster’ but a strangled cry is all I managed to get out, as I rapidly got up and backpedaled, bringing my sword in front of me. 

A scream came nearby, along with a yelled ‘OH SHIT!’ but my eyes never left the monster. Even staring right at it, it seemed to come closer like the inevitably of death. It very clearly didn’t fucking teleport but all the same it was right in front of me not moments later. It was only my peripheral vision that shot the gleaming answer into my mind before I was turned into a shishkabob. The darkness, the wall of darkness that it hid in, had moved with it. The lights above shut down and it creeped closer, coming right at me. 

I raised my Katana, adrenaline surging through me, and felt my back slam against the beige colored wall. I felt dazed and confused but it only took a moment for me to realize what had happened. I’d raised my katana in both hands and it had struck it with it’s claws, knocking me away like a piece of trash. 

The moment taken to realize that was nearly a moment too much. 

I heard the distinctive and very loud sound of a gun going off, and what could only be a scream of pain and rage and annoyance. I glanced up, only to realize that Jessica hadn’t just started shooting, she hadn’t stopped. She was clearly panicking, unloading into the monster. The monster, the smiling creature and face, was still smiling. But it was backing away, retreating. That did not comfort me. Nothing should take a dozen gunshots to the very clear face and still be able to leave at a steady pace. 

I looked over to Rick, who looked a little dazed, clearly underestimating just how loud the gun was going to be. His own Katana was at hand and he was shaking his head, trying to clear the ringing in his ears. Despite it all, we were winning. The monster was leaving, even if Jessica wouldn’t stop until she had emptied her gun, which would happen sooner rather than later. 

The problem was what came afterwards. I was on the ground twice in the span of a few seconds, but as I watched the monster leave, I paid attention to the lights. 

The lights that began going off. 

The second Jessica stopped firing, as she ran out of bullets, I screamed as loud as I could. 

“RUN! More are coming!” 

I dashed for the fire exit and although I passed my dazed friends, I was glad they weren’t far behind. I threw open the door, as they ran in, and slammed it closed behind us. My friends tried to take a breather, thinking we were safe, but I kept running. 

“No! Come on! Keep Going!” 

The fire door had led to a fire exit. There were blue stairs in a narrow hallway going up and I took them three at a time, bounding up. I didn’t trust for a second those monsters couldn’t get through that door and everything inside me was telling me that now wasn’t the time to stay still. That we needed to run for our lives. The sound of what could only be banging on metal coming from down below and behind us only spurred me on. Soon, another fire exit door was in front of us and I slammed my body into it, coming out somewhere else. Jessica followed suit, running straight past me as I stopped and Rick skidded out as well, before turning around and closing the door behind us. Jessica seemed like she was going to run blindly forever, but turned around, clear panic like that of terrified rabbit looking back at us. Her pupils were dilated, shaking, her whole body seeming to scream terror and panic, and I doubted me or Rick looked that much better. I audibly heard Rick crashing to the ground and I followed suit soon after, quickly looking around. 

My expression became awkward in a second. Still… it wasn’t so bad it couldn’t wait. I looked at Jessica and slowly, she came back to her senses, and approached the rest of us. She sat down and looked like both life and stress were reliving her as one, as she simply laid back and crashed, staring at the ‘ceiling’. 

Minutes passed as our racing hearts began to slow from ‘imminent heart attack’ to only ‘probable heart attack.’ 

“That.” Rick said, and it was like all the emotions and weight of the world was condensed into one sentence. “Sucked.” 

No one laughed. Just nodded. It was a while later before more words came.

“It didn’t even die… what kind of monster takes so many bullets and doesn’t even die?” Jessica said. 

“And so many.” I said. “Even if we somehow beat it and killed it… we’d have been swarmed. I even saw other things starting to approach us in the dark.” 

“Well…” Rick said. “It is a creepypasta. You aren’t supposed to be able to kill the horror movie villians with a gun, you know?” 

“Rick, this isn’t… a…” Jessica started, only to frown. I did too and slowly began to nod. 

“Honestly… yeah, they might simply be immune to bullets if they’re following different rules…” 

“God damn it.” Jessica said. “So my gun is useless?” 

“Hey, it scared the damn thing off, otherwise I’d be dead twice over.” I said. 

“Matt, oh my god, it attacked you.” Jessica said, as if a haze in her mind had suddenly been broken. “Are you okay?!” 

I blinked, before actually thinking about it. Slowly, I began to move, and winced a little. 

“I’m pretty sure most of my back is bruised… and my wrists feel like they’re nearly broken. My arms feel numb too.” 

Now with the adrenaline dying down, I was starting to realize just how much force had to be put behind a strike to knock me into a wall like that. Enough that it was a miracle and a half I both still had functioning arms and that I hadn’t dropped or lost the sword at some point. I was also starting to realize just how much it fucking hurt. 

“Ah… fuck.” I stood, and it sucked. I tried to swing the blade and… 

“God, nope. My wrists and arms may not be broken but I’m not swinging anything around.” 

“Shit.” Rick said, clearly staring between our three weapons. My arms were out of commission and I wouldn’t be surprised if my wrists were fractured and sprained. Jessica’s gun was out of bullets and that left Rick the only one in a good state for fighting. 

“Jessica, you’ll have to take Matt’s sword from here on out.” Rick said. 

“I have no idea how to use a Katana.” 

“And Matt does?” Rick asked, confused. 

Jessica nodded, taking the sword from me. I was once more grateful for my friends. Without them, there was not a chance I could get out of here by myself. 

“By the way… where are we?” Rick of all people asked. 

But it was a very good question. We were no longer in the backrooms it seemed. At least not the normal kind, at the very least. Hell, I’d struggle to say we were in a room at all. There was a ‘path’ in front of us, wide enough for half a dozen people to walk side by side, and behind us, in the middle of that ‘path’ was the fire exit door. To the sides? Above us? Below us? Nothing. Just, space. But not black space. It was like the air was slightly dyed reddish purple, a miasma blowing around or in thin strands. 

We were less in a room and more a walkway going to infinity in another dimension. 

“I… I really have no idea…” 

The place was strange. Even stranger than the backrooms had been. But… this place also felt like… it wasn’t fully real even by most definitions of the term real. 

“I guess we just follow the path?” Jessica asked us and we shrugged and nodded. There wasn’t much else we could do, even though the path seemed never ending, stretching forever out into infinity before disappearing before our eyes. 

We began to walk. And walk. And walk. I was aware time was passing but it even more strange than it had been in the backrooms. Days… weeks…. Months… even years or more could have passed. It felt like we wandering not just too infinity but for eternity… Eventually I broke the silence. 

“Rick… if this place is the collective subconscious of Earth… some fucking how… where are we then? Are we still inside the, uh, dream plane?” 

“I… I think we might actually be in the Astral plane.” Rick finally said. 

“What?” Jessica asked. 

Rick seemed incredibly unsure for once. Which was almost a relief. I didn’t feel comfortable in this place at all, it was just too… the words escaped me. Even alien or strange didn’t really work here. It was something, just, other kinda. Rick not being absolutely sure reflected my own feelings greatly. 

“Like… where we’re going is to the real world right? We essentially went through a ‘backdoor’ that a lot of people on Earth know. A way to ‘get outside reality’. There’s probably others… but we couldn’t really think of many. Which might mean those other ways might not even ‘appear’ for us dudes. Anyway uh, so… the collective subconscious is just a theory you know? It’s just the idea that there’s more to dreams and thought and they collect together. But… everything has a location right?” 

That was not a rhetorical question and me and Jessica nodded. 

“So I’ve been thinking… ‘where’ is the dream realm and ‘where’ is the real world? I think we’re crossing from one to other. Which would put us… inbetween. In the ‘space’ between.” 

I looked around at the very strange… dimension we had found ourselves in. 

“And you’re calling that place between, and the place the ‘dream realm’ and the real world is, the Astral Plane?” 

Rick nodded, still incredibly unsure. 

“Well, it doesn’t really matter does it? As long as we can get Matt out of here and back to this stupid Game Show.” 

Nods all around and we continued our journey. One forever or however long it took later and finally there came a change. But not a great one. We all watched, heavily on guard, as a… memory bubble floated on by. That was the only way I could think of it. There was a large orange like bubble, around the size of a large room, just moving next to the path. It showed a baby eating cake and clapping happily and… I knew the woman holding him. That was my mom so that would make that baby… 

“That’s me.” I said, causing Jessica and Rick to turn to look at me. “That’s me, as a baby. That’s my mom when she was younger.” 

“That’s… good?” Rick asked questioningly. 

“Maybe. Let’s just… keep going.” 

As it passed, I felt like I could remember that day, that happiness, with ultra clarity. Like I had returned to being baby in my mother’s arms, happily having cake. I even let out a happy little giggle and then looked away embarrassingly as my two friends glanced back at me. The humor in both their eyes, though, was great to see after I’d seen them so full of terror and horror. It lightened the mood a great deal exactly when it needed it the most. 

It was the first memory bubble… but not the last. 

The next one hit me so hard I nearly began to cry. It was early on, I couldn’t have been more than two, and I’d just been introduced to Rick. His mom and my mom worked together and we were going to be going to the same school soon, so she’d brought him over. At that age, it’s so easy to forget for adults how few people kids have met in their life. How impactful and solid those bonds were growing up, even till this day. Me and Rick were toddlers and we spent the majority of the day just playing with toys together. He left with a smile and I felt sad as he went. Sad and happy. It was such a pure emotion, child like, nothing attached to it beyond “I made a friend today.” 

Rick turned back to me and I actually saw a wide smile on his face meeting mine. 

We continued and more and more memories came to me. All of them weren’t exactly positive, just impactful. There was the time I’d accidentally burnt myself on one of my dad’s cigarettes, me first watching Rinyuasha and getting into anime. The embarrassing moment of straight up accidentally crapping my pants while out playing with my parents as a kid. 

All the emotions and sensations, the memories in almost full detail like I was reliving them, flew into my mind. I could have done without quite a few of them. It was a path of my memories. Rick said something after we’d just passed the first time I’d gone to a zoo at around six years old that had me snap to him. 

“You’re waking up.” 

“”What?”” Jessica and I both asked, bewildered. 

“It’s all your memories.” Rick said. “From beginning… to end. You’re waking up.” 

I had more thoughts and words to say on that, more surprise to be had, but it was absolutely destroyed by the next memory I saw. I was a very boring person. I knew that, I understood that. I was average, normal, as basic as they came. There weren’t a lot of extreme lows or highs in my life. But there were a few. 

And the next one took my breath away. I practically fell face first into the memory, the emotions coursing through me. Nervous, excitement, embarrassment, an odd sparkle in my tummy. 

“Um. You… want to play with us?” I asked a girl. 

“Sure!” The girl said. 

Jessica. The very first time I met Jessica, my second best friend in my life. Someone who I’d grow up with and would be there with me, who made me smile all the way through life, but would take me so long to realize why exactly I was smiling. 

I blinked and realized I wasn’t a kid inviting a girl to play kick ball with me. I was an adult, with a girlfriend, who was currently holding my hand and looking at me with a smile. One I returned. Even Rick didn’t say anything for once, not ruining the moment. 

On and on the memories went. So many, becoming so packed together now as I grew up and my memory grew stronger. It felt more like I walking through my past than anything else. It wasn’t terribly exciting, no one else but me would compare about the time my fourth grade teacher told us about puberty and I felt wronged because I thought we’d be watching a movie. Or the time I’d been given a golden star or my family got a dog… only for it to pass away only a few years later from a heart disease. 

That one hit me hard. 

When certain… memories began to pop up as I became a teen…

“Close your eyes! For the love of god, close your eyes!” 

Rick and Jessica chuckled but did so, and my dignity was salvaged. There were… quite a few early memories of that but we hurried past them. My face was beat red as a few of ‘those’ kept showing up every once in a while. 

But then came the end of high school… and the beginning of College. I hadn’t known what I wanted to do when I left college. I was a boring basic man who liked watching anime and just wanted money… I’d never really drawn a day in my life. I could see it now, the memory coming where, Rick suggested I draw since I watched it so much. I didn’t want to get into animation but… it started me down the path. 

I doodled and doodled and played around on the computer. They weren’t good, terrible really. But for my next few semesters while getting the college basics, I picked up Graphic Design… and fell in love with it. 

I had spent most of my time preparing or trying new things while I’d been in this dream realm, but I’d still made small, tiny things on the computer, just to relax a little. It’s not like time blinked by. Those moments when I was alone, lying in bed, not knowing what was real or fake… those had been hard. Art had been a way to relieve some of that pressure. 

The memories continued and they got… a little rough. There had been moments but I knew it was coming before it arrived. Depression, crying, sadness, bad memories… they hit us all. I’d shied away from thinking about them much… but this was different. This was horrible. My friends had seen a lot of things… a lot of strange things at that, that involved my interests, that I would only ever talk with Jessica and private and neither had so much as given me a glance about thank god… but well… this was different. 

Depression. Not for a day or a week, but for months and months. Feeling lost, confused, hopeless. Crying myself to sleep, begging for something to happen, something to make my life feel more meaningful. Those words struck a chord in me… because hadn’t that already happened? 

For the first time, I considered why I ended up on the Gods radar at all, in a horrible death game with my friends at stake. The slow creeping realization that it might have been an answer to a years old depression fueled plea made me bitter beyond compare. 

But even worse than that was watching Rick and Jessica stare at those memories that were being shown. I’d… never talked about it. Those feelings had lessened over time and gone away and I’d just hid it all from them. 

“Bro…” Rick said, turning to face me with pure sadness on his face. 

“Matt… why didn’t you tell us?” Jessica said. 

I scratched my face, a strange form of embarrassment washing over me. 

“What was I supposed to say? I feel bad? You would have asked why and I would have said that my life had no meaning. It wasn’t like… it wasn’t like it was that bad or all the time and… the feelings went away right? So it’s already okay and over and… all in the past.” 

“No Bro.” Rick said immediately. “I… you’re like a brother to me and your the one that always talks about sharing your emotions with people and not to bottle things up. You come to me with that shit next time. I don’t care if you have nothing to say, you share it with me.” 

“Matt, as your girlfriend, you better not hide stuff like that or I’ll get Rick to beat you up.” 

That pulled a laugh out from me and I realized it was the first time either of us had made solid what was between us. ‘Your girlfriend’ huh… 

The memories continued… and then something went wrong. The memories hit something and… broke. I could see it, now being more like a vast tunnel of memories surrounding the path. I walked into my room and- 

“Matt! What’s going on?!” 

“T-This was the moment! The moment where I met the Hostess of the Game Show! The Goddess Warix Viviana!”

The entire tunnel of memories seemed to be seething, flailing wildly, pulsating with an ominous red with cracks going through them. It was like someone had broken a TV screen. We kept walking, actually moving quickly now, hoping to get out of this portion of the memories. I felt a distinct sense of being watched for the time and unbidden, a small finger going ‘nuh uh uh’ wagging back and forth appeared in my head, before disappearing. 

I swallowed. Well… I guess I know if the Gods can see inside the astral plane at least… 

We slowed down but… but the memories became so much more real. It was like I’d gone back in time completely. I was standing there, confused, bewildered, not knowing up from down. My friends and dog were in trouble. I was in trouble. I wasn’t where I was. So much information had been crammed into my mind and I freaked out and panicked and had a complete break down and- 

“Matt.” Rick said and I felt his hand on my shoulder. I felt another on my right. I was on the ground. I didn’t even realize I’d gotten there. “You’re going to be okay. We’re here for you.” 

“Don’t worry baby. Mama’s here.” Jessica said and my face blushed so red it probably turned into a tomato. Damn it. I was hoping she didn’t look at those memories we were passing too closely… 

Rick began to laugh… and then it died in his throat. The memories were moving now, even without us walking. They were passing us by, time moving on, and Rick had just seen it. He stiffened up and Jessica was no better, her hand on my shoulder becoming a death grip. The me in the memory was no better. I, right now, was no better but I’d seen them. Seen worse. Killed and fought worse.

“Matt… what the fuck is that thing.” Rick asked quietly. 

“A Zombie.” I said, forgetting how impactful the word was to those seeing them for the first time. I actually thought both my friends were about to pass out, the Terror overwhelming them, the wrongness clawing at their insides, they swayed and I did not blame them. Rick gathered himself first, growling. 

“No. That fucking thing is not a z- Is not that. It’s… Matt it is Wrong.” 

“I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.” Jessica began rapidly mumbling to herself and I could practically feel the hatred and raw unfiltered anger growing inside her. 

And then the past me killed it, crushing it’s head with a box, and the effect vanished. Rick practically fell over and Jessica was like a cat that was still wet after being dumped in lake, except the lake and water was made out of pure hatred and fear. 

“You’ve… been fighting that? My dude, bro, that thing is the wrongest thing I’ve had the displeasure of knowing existed. It’s like maggots crawling in my skin, no, like a mortician put maggots inside a woman’s body and then-” 

“It’s Wrong.” Jessica said instead, thank god. “It is… the exact opposite of what a human should be. I… I’ve never been religious in my life and yet…” 

“You’ve found heathens.” I said, knowingly. That was exactly how it felt. Something that goes against the most instinctive existential parts of you. That are an affront, an insult, and a horror all rolled up into one. It had become easy to ignore with the Mind Stat but I was once more reminded of just much I utterly hated and was terrified of these things. They weren’t just slow moving zombies, they were creatures that must not be. 

The chocolate rain that fell afterwards was a welcome relief to all three of us, as we shared a laugh. Me passing out in a dark gas station, not so much. Rick was brimming with excitement. He couldn’t wait to see me as a woman. He said so, repeatedly, and if I didn’t know Rick as well as I did, I would have been a teensy bit disturbed. But thank god I did know him and knew it was just humour to him. 

We watched me awake on my second day. We’d begun to sit and just let the memories roll past for now. This next part was going to be brutal. I watched as I, in the memories, cautiously went through the houses, looking for something. I… really couldn’t remember what I was doing, just trying to explore maybe? Find supplies possibly? 

“Bro, going into there is a bad idea.” 

“I know that now… but not then. Come on, I only ran into a zombie, I had no idea there were Black Skeletons and even worse things.” 

“Yeah but like… come on dude. That’s a total horror movie vibe.” 

I just shook my head. Everyone’s a critic. 

I walked in… and everyone froze at the sight of the torn apart zombie reflected in the black screen of the TV. And then everything happened all at once. Without a speed stat, the black skeleton seemed so much faster. It was like I blinked and me and the skeleton were already running down the road. I watched, wanting to get a second look at the town that day. The memories always came in an odd third person perspective that was going to be useful to observe things. I might even notice something I missed. 

But I’d truly forgotten how the Black Skeleton was. It has absolutely zero hesitation. It ran right after me and then- 

It dived for us. 

My eyes widened, and my arms moved, pushing Rick and Jessica out of the way. A horrible crash was heard as I turned around and there it was. 

A living nightmare. 

The Black Skeleton had literally jumped out of my memories to kill us.