Short Stories | The Elevator to Nowhere

I remember the day I first made the connection with perfect clarity: I was on one of the elevators with a brunette from another company on a floor above mine. The elevator stopped, the door opened and the brunette started to step off. She paused, gasped then got back in, laughing. Nobody was waiting to get on… the elevator just stopped there for whatever reason.

“You remember an old kid’s show called Land of the Lost?” I asked.

She thought a moment, “Oh yeah!”

“Do you remember the episode where Holly gets in one of the pylons and it goes crazy and takes her to all these random places? She just stays in the pylon and the door opens and shows some different weird landscape…”

She thought again, “Yes!”

“I think of that every time these elevators do that…”

I work on the third of about twelve floors, all accessible from six different elevators. These elevators lead from the lobby to the office levels. You can walk north in the lobby and eventually hit another set of four elevators that go to the parking areas. I find this setup offensively inefficient, especially for chain-smoking. It took a while to sink into my thick skull, but there is a shortcut. I discovered that at certain times of the day my chances of getting the service elevator are pretty good and if I can’t get it on the third floor, I can always get it from the lobby. The service elevator goes down beneath the lobby to the B level parking garage. Don’t worry if you’re completely confused by my description of the property. I’ve worked there over two years and I still haven’t gotten my head around the layout. I think it extends into hyperspace.

So I can mainline my ass straight from the third floor to my car on B by using the service elevator, thus avoiding annoying physical exertion and abuse of precious time that could be used for smoking. This system usually works pretty well. Unfortunately, the elevators don’t. I’d even heard stories of coworkers getting trapped in the set of four elevators to the parking areas.

Today, I went out for a smoke and hit the down button. After a short wait, I heard the tone behind me… I didn’t get the service elevator. Oh well, I’d catch it on the first floor. I went on down and hit the down button in the lobby and the service elevator immediately opened. I got in, hit the down button and the door closed. That’s when all hell broke loose. The elevator went up.

“Great,” I thought. I’d seen it happen before. I’d get on the elevator after pressing the down button, but it would go up a floor or two to collect someone above me before going down. I guess it covers for the other five elevators when they’re slacking off smoking or something.

But it didn’t go up one floor… or two… or three. It went up to ten, then eleven. “What is this stupid thing doing?”

Twelve, thirteen… “thirteen? How many floors does this building have?”

fourteen, fifteen… there was shaking and noise.

It occurred to me that I was very high up now. I could rationalize the third floor—if the elevator cable suddenly broke, a miracle could intervene and save me from a third floor fall, but now… I was a goner. That thing would drop, faster and faster until I reached critical mass and the elements that composed my very self would vaporize in a mushroom cloud of bone and tissue on impact. I hit buttons on the control panel randomly in panic. My legs started feeling weak.

Sixteen.

The elevator stopped, leaving me standing there with nothing but my rapid pulse. I waited for the door to open, but I didn’t want to look. I didn’t even know that the building had a sixteenth floor. I expected the door to open and reveal something sinister. Maybe a secret lab filled with expressionless government scientists working on something I—as a mere mortal lacking the psychological profile of a lump of lead—didn’t want to see.

Whatever. At that point, all I wanted was to get off of that elevator. I pushed the open button… and the elevator lurched into motion… down.

I leaned against the wall. More shaking and sounds of scraping metal. I watched the numbers decrement slowly… nine, eight… Maybe the elevator would just dump me back on three. Nervous seconds drifted by and my life had just completed flashing before my eyes, “What the hell is the point of existence anyway?”

Four, three, two, one and, finally, B.

I pushed the open button repeatedly and, after a short pause, the doors slid open. Then jammed, six inches apart.

“For the love of God…”

I pushed close. The doors balked. Open… nothing.

Finally, I grabbed one door in each hand and pulled them apart with a sharp crack of metal.

I made my way to my car, shaking, and had a couple of cigarettes. I decided not to take the service elevator back upstairs. I walked toward the other end of the parking garage. Halfway there, a figure appeared—it was the brunette from upstairs. I waved at her and smiled.

“You don’t like going down there either?”

“What?” I had no idea what she was talking about. I was still contemplating the meaning of my existence.

“The smoking area on C… I hate going down there.”

“Oh yeah. It’s nasty. I think they do some sort of weird government research there.”

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