The elevator stops, but nothing happens.
The button labeled G with a star next to it is lit up, a ring of mellow light around stainless steel. You press it again, just in case, and your sweaty finger leaves a smudge of moisture which lingers and then slowly vanishes, the same way your breath does on airplane windows, the ones that fly over fractured deltas and empty bays on days so cold that frost grows on the triple-layered plexiglass like some kind of arctic mold.
You wait for the doors to open, and when they don’t you try to force them, cramming your fingers into the gap and pulling with all your strength. They separate just enough to let a thread of light in before your right hand loses its grip and your nails bend back the wrong way, sending a dull shockwave of pain through your fingers. You let out a cry and shake off your throbbing hand. Your fingertips are red and marked with divots from the edge of the door, and your nails are creased with white across the middle.
You pound on the door with your other hand — the one that doesn’t feel like it’s been run over by a cement truck — and you call out.
Hello? Can anybody hear me? I’m stuck!
Through the crack in the door you can see movement, dark shapes passing in front of the light, but there is no response.
Your eyes turn back to the buttons on the wall. You’ve never seen so many. The rows run all the way up to the ceiling and all the way down the floor. There must be hundreds of stories — you can’t tell how many for sure because the paint on many of the numbers is faded, and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling make it hard to make out the top rows at all.
You take a breath to steady yourself. If you can’t get off here, maybe you can get off a floor down and take the stairs back up. You gently press the button that says -1 and breathe a sigh of relief when it lights up and you feel the floor shift underneath you. The machine still works. As you descend, the sliver of light in between the doors goes gradually dark from the bottom up. You see the last flicker of shapes passing in front of it and then there is nothing but the rattle of the car against the guide rail and the flutter of air through the empty shaft.
The elevator stops again, and this time there is a bright ding from somewhere above your head and the doors open, jerkily and as if unsure of themselves, on a hallway that is long and dark and empty. The ceiling tiles are the kind you might find in an office building, white and porous with shiny plastic borders. The walls are parking-garage gray, pure unpainted and unyielding concrete. In the distance, there is the dull glow of light: an exit, probably, or perhaps an entrance to the stairwell. You step out before the doors can change their minds and close on you and begin walking, briskly, before the dark can steal your courage.
You hear the elevator depart behind you and your heart sinks a little. If there is no exit, if there is no stairwell, you will have to come back and wait for it. And what if it doesn’t come? What if comes and there is someone else inside, someone who wants to get out on your floor, but the doors won’t open again, and the both of you are trapped, on the inside and one on the outside?
You push these thoughts away because they are not helpful, and before you know it you are nearing the end of the hallway and the concrete around you grows lighter and you no longer feel it pressing against you like before.
At the end of the hallway there is a wooden door with a small glass window at the top and a stainless steel handle just like the buttons in the elevator. The door is ajar, letting a slice of light past the frame and a square of it through the window. It’s not the white light of the elevator’s blinding fluorescent ceiling, nor is it the yellow light of a common bulb. It’s certainly not natural light. It’s a green light, the kind of thing that belongs to fluorescent jellyfish or glowing mushrooms tucked away in forgotten caves.
You’re about to step through, but something makes you stop and listen first. There are sounds coming from behind the door, and the closer you listen the more distinctly you can hear them: The hiss a cockroach, the scrape of scales across stone, the tapping of hundreds of spindly legs.
You back away from the sounds, your skin crawling with a primal unease, and once you’re far enough away you turn around and run, back down the corridor, back through the darkness, and when you find the elevator you press, with shaking fingers, the button next to the arrow that points up, and even though it lights up after the first time, you continue pressing until the elevator arrives and doors open.
Inside, you slump back against the wall. Your heart beats twice as fast and half as efficiently as it should, and your temples throb to each erratic beat, and under the bright lights trailing darkness starts to creep in from the corners of your eyes. You take deep breaths and fight to stay in control.
When the doors close and you can breathe again, you wipe your sweaty hands on your shirt and press the ground floor button again. It lights up, and a few moments later you feel the ground shift beneath you again and you are going back up. It was just a glitch, before, you tell yourself. This time the doors will open and you will walk out, and there will be people and windows and sunlight on the tiled floor, and you will walk through these brass doors, across the lobby, and out into the fresh air.
The elevator stops, but nothing happens.
Then, the familiar ding rings out, and the doors open. There is a woman standing there. She is wearing business attire, nails painted and hair up in a neat bun. She steps in, and you step forward — but the doors close again before you can reach them. You turn to the woman with the bun, as if she should be able to explain it, but she is looking at the endless row of buttons, not at you. She looks tired, underneath the makeup, you think dully.
“Going up?” She asks.
You open your mouth to protest that you want to go out, not up, but she gives you an impatient look and you can’t find the right words anyway.
“Going up,” you sigh.
Thanks for reading Death’s Elevator! If you need a palette cleanser after that and want to try something on the lighter side you can jump into my Adventure Story series, which is a loving parody of the fantasy genre. Episode 1 is available below in both text and audio format!
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Second Person POV. I love the risk you took. It worked.
Excellent use of 2nd POV. I'm usually not a fan but you made it work well. The story is great.