A/N: Welcome back, readers – new chapter, new level! As always, please read, review, and enjoy!

I do not own Marvel or the Backrooms.

Jessica didn't know how long it had been since Matt and that thing had fallen through the wall. All she knew was that she was hungry, and tired, and hungover, and couldn't keep going much longer.

Matt had been here. He'd been here, with her, ever so briefly. But for that brief time, she'd felt hope that maybe together, they could find a way out of this place. But that had vanished along with Matt and that creature when they fell through the wall. She didn't know how long she'd sat by the wall, hoping against hope that he'd come back out, before finally leaving. Now there was no way she'd be able to find her way back to the wall, even if she'd wanted to.

Could she have done something differently so he would still be here with her? Could she have reached out and grabbed him right before that thing did, pulled him away from it before it took him through the wall too?

The longer she wandered without finding anyone else, the slimmer and slimmer the chances seemed of her finding anyone. Maybe Matt had been it, the only other person she'd find here, and now he was gone.

And even more than that, she'd called him a friend.

She hadn't planned on saying that, hadn't thought about it, it had just come out. "Friend." She couldn't remember the last time she'd called someone that. It had been years, for sure. Probably not since she'd sent Trish off to the Raft.

Normally she didn't mind being alone. Her own company was the best kind, other than obviously a nice bottle of liquor. And few people had ever had any tolerance for her "bad-cop bitch attitude," as a suspected gang member had so eloquently put it moments before she punched him in the face.

That was both the first and last time Costa had put her on interrogation duty. In all fairness, she had warned him that was probably how the session was gonna go.

But all that had been back in New York City. Even when she was alone, she was never really alone. There was always activity going on somewhere within earshot. Car doors slamming, traffic speeding by, the whirring of police sirens, the odd Stark Industries jet crashing on Coney Island.

Here there was none of that, just the monotone, lifeless buzzing of those goddamn lights in the ceiling. But it wasn't even the silence that disquieted her, per se, so much as the memories that crawled from the recesses of her mind to fill that absence.

"Jessica…."

She blinked hard and shook her head. "No, not again."

"Get back here, Jessica…." The lights around her flickered and darkened, then started changing color, started turning….

"You're not here. You're dead. You've been dead for years."

"NOW, JESSICAAAA!"

"Shut up!" She spun around and swung her fist behind her.

There was no one there. All she did was punch a hole in a nearby wall. She pulled her fist back and shook off her hand, breathing heavily. The lighting had returned to normal too.

Except….

"You've gotta be shitting me," she groaned.

All the walls she'd seen so far in the maze had been straight, either parallel or perpendicular to each other. But branching off a hallway behind her now was another hall, extending at a diagonal. She couldn't see far down it, but the recess lights in its ceiling were far dimmer than in the rest of the maze.

There was just one problem. She had walked right past the spot where that hallway now was barely a minute before, and she knew for a fact that it hadn't been there then.

Which meant she was either imagining it, or this place was constantly changing its own structure. And given the vanishing portal that Matt and that creature had fallen through, sadly, she was leaning towards the latter explanation.

Of course, there was a fair chance it was a food-, sleep-, and alcohol-deprived hallucination. But if not, it was the first change in scenery she'd seen since she woke up in this place.

Jessica strode towards the corridor, not taking her eyes off it for a second. She didn't trust that this place wouldn't spontaneously rearrange itself again the moment she looked away.

As she neared the diagonal hall, she could see further down it. It slanted to her left for several yards before intersecting with another passageway and continuing straight. The lights in the ceiling here were much dimmer, yet still buzzed just as loudly as the ones everywhere else in the maze.

Figures.

When she reached the hallway, she warily waved her arm into it to make sure it was really there. If it hadn't been, she didn't exactly want to run headlong into a wall. But all her arm passed through was air. The hall was real. She exhaled and walked down it.

As soon as she entered the corridor, she noticed another change in her surroundings. The wallpaper adorning her surroundings, while the same sickening yellow color and pattern she'd seen everywhere else, was in far worse condition. Sections of it were peeling off the walls in some places and ridden with mold in many others. And the air…dear God, if the air back in the rest of the maze had been dank and musty, she didn't even know what to call this. She pulled her scarf up over her nose. It didn't block the odor much, but it was something.

When she reached the intersection, she looked in either direction. To the left was another diagonal passageway that looked like it led back to the hall she'd just been in. To the right the hall continued, now straight instead of angled. The three together formed a "Y" shape.

And at the end of the straight hall was something else she hadn't seen anywhere else in the maze: a door.

This had to be it. The way out. And when she got out, she was going to be having words (and, most likely, fists) with whoever had trapped her in here.

She sprinted down the hall towards the dark brown, wooden door, and grabbed for the rounded brass doorknob.

But just as her fingers were about to close around it, it vanished. She lost her balance and fell to the floor, landing on her hands and knees.

Alright, what the hell had just happened? One second the door was there, and then just as she was about to grab it, poof, it vanished. And was she imagining things, or had the hallway gotten even darker?

Jessica stood up, and as soon as she did, her jaw dropped. "Oh come on."

Not only had the door vanished, but so had the entire hall she'd been in. This new one was about half as wide, twice as tall, and only lit by sporadic lights in the ceiling, including one directly overhead, leaving large patches of darkness ahead of and behind her. Yet the deteriorating wallpaper, the rank stench of decay, and that infuriating buzzing were all still there.

"Wait a minute," she muttered. As soon as she'd tried to touch the door, she ended up here. And as soon as Matt and that creature had touched the wall, they'd vanished.

Had the same thing happened to her now? Had that door actually been another disguised portal?

She shook her head. "Goddamn magic." People should just leave shit like that alone, as far as she was concerned. Messing around with it was just asking for trouble. Trouble that was, in this case, coming at her expense, which made it even worse.

But….

If she and Matt had both passed through a portal to leave the first area they were in, maybe he had ended up here too. Maybe she could find him. A stray flicker of hope sparked inside her.

She looked down the hall in both directions. Both paths looked the same, neither more inviting or foreboding than the other – a mostly dark passage with small oases of light shed by the few functional recess lights in the ceiling.

She dug around in her pocket and pulled out her phone. She doubted she'd be able to get any reception here either, but her phone's flashlight should still work. And she didn't trust the patches of darkness to not be hiding secret traps or pitfalls just waiting for some unsuspecting wanderer to stumble into them. She turned on the flashlight and pointed her phone ahead of her.

Unfortunately, the device's battery was currently at 29% - she'd wasted a lot of charge trying to get a signal back in the well-lit area. And if she ended up stuck here as long as she was in that first maze, there was no way her phone's battery would last that long.

All the more reason to hope she found Matt in here. Navigating in the dark wouldn't be a problem for him.

She started walking forwards. The hall was barely wide enough for her to walk down it straight; any narrower and she'd have to be inching down it sideways.

The hallway headed straight for about fifty yards before turning to the left. As she approached the illuminated corner, she turned off the flashlight and warily peeked down the new hall. If Matt had ended up here, then so, most likely, had that other creature. And she didn't exactly favor the thought of running into that thing again.

But the hallway was empty, at least as far as she could see. It stretched away from her in a straight line until even the sporadic operational ceiling lights became too distant for her to see.

How far did this place extend?

As she started walking down the hall, she heard a distant howl. But not like the wailing of the creature she and Matt had fought. No, this sounded more like a wolf, but…not, at the same time. Like so much else about this place, it was as thought it was trying to imitate something familiar, but was just…wrong, somehow.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose and she quickened her pace. The sound had come from behind her, and the more distance she could put between herself and it, the better.

The further Jessica walked down the hall, the more it seemed like the walls were closing in on her. They weren't, of course, but knowing that didn't help. She'd never been particularly claustrophobic, but this place seemed like it was doing everything it could to change that.

Like it's doing everything it can…are you listening to yourself? Don't be ridiculous. You're thinking about this place like it's alive. And it's not.

It's not. It's just a place, and places aren't alive.

Another howl sliced through the air. It was still far away, but definitely closer than the first one. Which meant either this creature happened to be following her, by chance…or it knew she was here, and it was hunting her. Not just hunting her, but announcing it was hunting her. Unlike that thing in the well-lit maze, it didn't care if its prey knew it was being followed.

She dared to take a look behind her, and her heart skipped a beat.

Staring at her from a patch of darkness not twenty feet away was a face.

All she could discern of it were a pair of blank white eyes and a grin, but it was definitely a face. Only she hesitated to call that grotesque expression a grin. The thing's mouth was filled with long, sharp, interlocking fangs, and each end of the impossibly wide smile was drawn up to the edges of its lifeless eyes.

But as soon as she shone her light towards it, it hissed…despite never moving its mouth. And then it moved to her right and passed straight through the wall.

What the hell was that?

Jessica continued staring at the spot where the face had been long after it had vanished. Had there been another portal in the wall there that she'd walked right past, that would've taken her somewhere else? Without Matt, she had no way of knowing where they were. And if there was some other way of detecting them, her PI skills hadn't noticed it yet.

But that face…God, that face. She'd seen some messed-up shit in her time, but something about that thing had chilled her like nothing else ever had.

Get a grip, Jessica. Treat this like a case, just some new mystery to solve. Start with what you know.

When she first saw the face, it was hanging back in the last patch of darkness she'd passed through, just outside the glow of the recess light behind her. And as soon as she turned her phone towards it, it hissed and fled. Which meant they didn't like light.

She checked her phone's battery again. 21%.

Either she'd been walking down these darkened halls for longer than she thought she had, or her phone's battery was depleting much faster than it should've been. And given that this place seemed to be treating every law of physics like they were targets lined up in a shooting gallery, either explanation seemed entirely probable at this point. Either way, it wouldn't be long before she only had the intermittent recess lights to illuminate her surroundings.

She needed to get out of here, and fast. Did she dare head over to the wall that face had vanished through and see if the portal in it was still open? If it was, that thing would probably be waiting on the other side, but maybe she would end up somewhere better lit. Where she could see what exactly she was up against.

But as she went to walk back towards the place where that face had been, she noticed a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision. She turned to the right to see the face float through the wall, inches away from her.

A/N: Ha, cliffhanger!

For the uninitiated, the level Jessica noclips into in this chapter is Level 0.7 a.k.a. "Claustrophobia" or "The Dark Lobby," home to all sorts of lovely Entities like Smilers (the new friend Jessica made at the end of the chapter), Clumps, and Hounds. As per the Backrooms Fandom Wiki there's also another Entity called a Howler that lives in this level, but I'm not planning on featuring them in this fanfic because of how functionally similar they are to the Kane Pixels bacteria from Level 0.

Anyway, I'll get going now. I've got other WIPs to work on, burgers to make for dinner, and (hopefully) fireworks to watch as long as tonight's not a washout where I live *fingers crossed*

Thanks for reading, and don't fall into the Backrooms :)