PREVIEW: TAKE BACK THE DEEP ESTATE
Here's the Prologue to the sequel to Welcome to the Deep Estate
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
BUT FIRST, A SHAMELESS PLUG
If you haven’t already, now is the best time to crack open Welcome to the Deep Estate. It’s a solid 4/5 on Goodreads. Perfect if you want something light-hearted and funny. Better yet, listen to the audiobook narrated by Christopher Harbour, because OMG, you guys, it’s absolutely hilarious.
Prologue - All the Hepatituses
So we’re standing inside the Backrooms, a place that comfortably sits outside of reality. Time is a joke here. Space is fluid. And the concept of outside? Does not exist. Pick a direction. North, south, east, west, up, down, even the way out you’re positive was right behind you a second ago. It doesn’t matter. Guess what you’re going to find?
Rooms. Buco rooms.
More specifically, we’re standing outside a Backrooms blood bank.
Carrie, my adventure buddy and number one Number 2 pencil, handles navigation. She hovers nearby, scribbling down a prompt on her legal pad, drafting the blueprint for Liminal Space to manifest. The Backrooms take notes from humanity’s Collective Unconscious, and anyone stuck inside has an outsized influence on what shows up. Usually, that just means the feel around here settles somewhere between ‘fever-dream déjà vu’ and ‘oh shit I think something’s following me,’ because yes, that is also a problem inside the Backrooms. Thankfully, Carrie is pure imagination capped with a pink eraser, and we figured out how to direct that creativity into a completely game-changing Liminal Space hack.
We’re facing a large chalk circle drawn directly onto the wall with an anomalous piece of chalk. I clear my mind and press my palm against it. Carrie finishes the prompt describing our destination with the final line that makes the whole thing work: “There is a chalk circle on the wall.”
In an instant, my palm goes from feeling old wallpaper to feeling nothing but air. I open my eyes and see my wrist clipping cleanly through the wall, which is still… weird. There’s no visual cue. No sci-fi sparks. No magical ripple. It doesn’t glow or hum or do anything cinematic. It just looks like you’re calmly shoving your arm through a solid object. There isn’t even a tingle, and I will never get used to how aggressively low-key it is.
I step into the Backrooms blood bank and look around. “Huh… Okay, then.”
Carrie kept the initial prompt vague, just to see how the Backrooms would handle the baseline concept of a blood bank. Unsurprisingly, it took the idea literally and gave us a bank for blood. There are standing tables with deposit forms and syringes chained to the counters with those annoying “don’t steal our pens” tethers. It even threw in some dialysis ATMs.
It’s cute, but not the vibe I’m looking for. I step back out through the chalk circle with Carrie floating beside me, then sever the connection using a spray bottle and a rag. She taps my shoulder, and I turn around and sigh, already annoyed.
Three slimy, vibrating black horrors stand in the distance, their pearly white Cheshire grins frozen in place by the observer effect.
Smilers.
I unclip my tether and unfurl six feet of graphene wire. The doohickey used to keep me tethered to the Deep Estate before it snapped. Now, it’s a very nasty anti-Smiler weapon most of the Backrooms monsters have learned to avoid.
I blink, and in the split second they’re out of sight, all three jump forward about twenty feet. I scratch my head. “Okay. So either these guys didn’t get the memo, or they’re doing the macho warrior thing.”
I blink again. They jump closer.
“Yeah, definitely the macho warrior thing. And wow. What a team-up.”
From the armor—or complete lack of it—we’ve got a Zulu warrior, a Germanic berserker, and some guy who’s either Aztec or someone who took one hell of a wrong turn during Carnaval. There are a lot of slimy, ornate feathers, and frankly, too much confidence.
Whatever. I whip out the tether, snag Carnaval Guy by the neck, hit the vibrate button, and pull. His head pops off like a champagne cork launched by an oil slick.
I lash sideways, slicing the Zulu warrior clean at the knees, then spin around in a move that feels incredible but probably looks like a child aggressively twirling a ribbon. The graphene wire loops around the berserker’s torso, and I yank. He snaps in half.
I blink, and the three bodies collapse into a meaty, slimy mess.
I yawn and turn back to Carrie. “So. Where were we?”
Carrie alters the prompt for attempt number two.
This time, a gush of blood splashes out of the wall, washing away the chalk, completely breaking the circle. I stare at the pooling mess by my feet, then glance at Carrie and take a guess. “I think the Backrooms heard ‘blood bank’ and just tried to make a bank made out of blood.”
Carrie shrugs, spins in midair, and uses the chalk attached to her body to draw a fresh circle. She tweaks the prompt a few more times, and eventually, the Backrooms starts to get the idea. It begins playing with the concept of a blood bank, generating a series of doctor’s office biomes filled with hanging blood bags and beige linoleum floors. There’s also a lot of those “Thanks for donating!” inspirational posters you usually see at blood drives, and it’s extremely clear that the Backrooms has no idea what the blood is actually for. Children are having blood balloon fights, and old women are doing blood aerobics at the local YMCA.
Nope. None of this will do.
Carrie tries again. This time, when I press my hand against the wall, I focus my thoughts and pour my intentions into it. This is the big day. It needs to be epic. As epic as my feelings for one particular person in my life. I picture the dimples that show a split second before she smiles. The way she looks up at me when she’s close, arms looped around my neck.
My hand slides through the wall.
Well, looking at Edie’s face, it’s safe to say we nailed it. Those dimples appear, then comes the smile.
“Liminal space does not disappoint,” Edie says, staring up at the ten stories of brushed steel towering in front of us. I grin, watching the century-old pseudo-vampire lick her lips in anticipation.
An engineer’s take on a circulatory system frames the vault door. Translucent arteries, filled with blood, branch off at perfect right angles into veins and capillaries that web the walls surrounding us. All of it pulses with a deep red glow, throbbing to a heartbeat I feel in my chest.
“That’s because it’s synced to your heart,” Edie says, with that crooked “you’re dumb, but it’s kind of cute” smirk of hers.
“Oh,” I mutter. “Yeah, that tracks.”
That’s also one of the weird things about her. I can tell whenever she’s thirsty because she becomes hyper-aware of my heartbeat. It makes me feel like I’m in one of those old cartoons where the starving character starts hallucinating that everyone else is a giant drumstick.
We cross the bridge toward the massive vault door, Carrie hovering anxiously between us. She pokes me in the back, and I pull out her legal pad. She scribbles out, “I’m worried this might be the double doors to the Balltic Sea.”
I remember how the ocean-sized ball pit introduced itself by pummeling me in the face and slow my step. “Okay, that’s… an annoyingly valid concern.” I glance at her with a raised eyebrow. “I’m just surprised you’re not using the most obvious reference.”
She turns toward me, clearly not getting it. Carrie, who spent “Bob” knows how long jotting down the coke-fueled notes of the most influential master of horror in modern history. The pencil that claims that during a 1974 stay at the Stanley Hotel, just before the winter closure, she said, and I quote: “This place is kind of creepy, you should totally use it in your next book.”
I give her a hint. “Dude, the elevator scene in The Shining. You know, with all the blood.”
She smacks her eraser on the legal pad and writes, “Oh. Duh.”
I stop walking and turn to Edie. “There’s a very good chance a Backrooms quantity of blood is just waiting to come spilling out of that safe, and we’re standing on a walkway with no railings over a pit that I’m going to assume is bottomless, because we all know how much the Backrooms loves bottomless pits.”
Edie keeps walking, a dangerous glint in her eye. “I’m willing to take that risk just to see this mother crack open.”
Well, she does have a point. It would be pretty ’nanners. “Fine, but if this turns into an epic escape sequence, I’m going to say ‘I told you so,’ and it’s going to sound really bitchy.”
Edie reaches for the vault’s wheel and gives it a spin. Through the clear glass in the vault’s shell, we watch the impossible clockwork engage with dizzying precision; wheels nested inside wheels, from small cogs spinning in a blur to gears the size of a semi-truck buried deeper into the wall, rotating with glacial inevitability. All of it moving in perfect synchronization.
The entire bridge trembles as titanium cylinders thicker than redwood trunks slide back from their housings. The final tumbler drops into place with a boom that’ll echo forever into the void below. With a dramatic flourish, a hammer swings down and pierces the glass heart in the center, and all the blood drains out of the pipes into a funnel with a prolonged gurgle.
Hydraulics hiss as the vault door detaches from the wall and rolls sideways on tracks. I brace for the blood tsunami, but it doesn’t come. The air is hot and humid, smelling like copper. Lights snap on, and the black beyond illuminates into an unbroken curtain of blood raining down directly into a drain. After a few seconds, the curtain parts and reduces to a patter, then a dribble. Cascading rings of light follow, illuminating a circular, elevated swimming pool that makes a 1.5-million-gallon SeaWorld tank look quaint in comparison. It’s filled to the brim with blood, sitting so perfectly still it seems solid. Then a single ripple from somewhere in its depths sends concentric circles expanding to the edge.
Edie approaches a solitary gold spigot. She turns the handle and cups her hands beneath it. Deep red liquid spills into her palms. She brings it to her lips and takes a delicate sip, then turns to face me with rivulets of blood running down her chin. “It’s fresh,” she says with wide eyes. “And warm—like straight-out-of-the-neck warm. I don’t know how, but it is.”
I notice an analog flipboard counter mounted next to a small waterfall, continuously adding new blood to the pool. The number reads 118,798,432,187 and climbing. “I don’t know where I heard this,” I say slowly, “but if you added up every human that ever lived, you’d get something like a hundred and twenty billion.”
Carrie zips over the pool, measuring the diameter with pencil-point precision. She comes back and bobs, her graphite nib scratching calculations in the air before committing them to the pad. Cubic meters converted to liters converted to pints equals… 118.7 billion pints. I stare at the numbers, my mind reeling. “Edie… this pool has exactly one pint of blood from every single human being that has ever lived.”
She turns with an unnervingly bright smile. “Don’t judge me.”
Before I know it, she’s stripping off her clothes and climbing the ladder to a diving board I hadn’t noticed. She leaps off and executes a perfect swan dive into humanity’s collective vital fluids. I take a big step back as a hundred gallons of blood seep over the edge and slap the ground in front of me. Edie surfaces, painted a uniform red, and lets out a gasp that melts into a sultry moan and giggle. She shouts, “Come in!”
“No, I’m good.”
She does a lazy backstroke, gargling, then squirting blood into the air with her mouth. “It’s like swimming in humanity!”
“Yeah, you’re really not selling it.”
She comes to the edge of the pool and croons, “Come on, John.” And there it is, the Look. The Look with a capital L. The staring contest with a vampire who doesn’t need to blink, loaded with a challenge I’m too head-over-heels to ignore. I strip down and dive in. It’s just as gross as you think—warm and thick and kind of hard to swim in. I emerge, gasping.
“You actually did it!” Edie cackles and swims up. She wraps her legs around me, and pulls me close—oh no. No, no, no. Not going there. Stuff is definitely rubbing up against things, and there’s nothing between us, unless you count the 165 billion pints of Dobbs-damn blood. I’m hoping it’s not a literal pint from each human. I don’t know how the hell the Backrooms would source that, but if they did… Man, Gandhi is in here, MLK, Stalin, Mom, Dad, and every single Ebola, AIDS, and syphilis victim.
Edie coos, “What do you think?”
I’m thinking about Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson as I struggle to keep treading through the blood with her added weight. “Pretty sure I now have all the hepatitises, A through Z.”
She kisses me, and I fight the urge to turn away. She’s got blood mouth. It’s so much worse than coffee breath, but I don’t want to ruin the moment.
I pull back and smile because this—this right here—is the part where I finally say the words I’ve wanted to tell her for so damn long. And Edie knows it’s coming. She can feel my heart hammering, practically tapping out my thoughts in rapid Morse code. It comes out soft and stupidly sincere. “Edie, I love—”
She shifts her weight, and I dip under. Liquid pennies fill my mouth, and I reflexively swallow and gag. My legs kick harder, burning to surface. “Edie, I’m kind of struggling here.”
She presses down on my shoulders, submerging me again, and then she holds me there.
Wait… is she?
I try to pull away, but she keeps me in place with that absolute vampire grip of hers.
Yeah. She’s trying to drown me.
Okay, then.
