What Came out of the elevator

© 2002 Roger Pollock
All rights reserved.

I explained it to the police, but I know they don't believe me.

It was evident in the incredulous sideways look the officer gave his partner and the hint of patronization in his tone when he said, "Why don't we go over it again." They won't tell you outright they think you're crazy, not the real hard-boiled types, the big city cops, like that pair, and the fact it was me that called them only compounded the matter. So I explained again how it came to be I ended up with a punctured lung and a concussion and half my bones broken and lacerated and stitched up like Frankenstein in a hundred different places.

I got a letter from this lawyer telling me I inherited some money—not much, a couple grand—from some uncle on my mother's side whom I barely remember, like the kind of thing you only read about. So I had to go into Boston, you know, see the lawyer, sign some papers. The building was on a bystreet off Washington Street, not a particularly big building, maybe ten stories, yellow brick, with lots of ornate architecture around the cornices and windows, nothing extraordinary. There was a small, empty lobby except for a directory on the wall. My guy was on the fifth floor, and I took the elevator up. That's right, the elevator.

The place was weird, just ... weird. There was hallway after drab hallway, labyrinthine passages that went around in circles, poorly lit, along dusty old marble floors. There was door after brown door, most of them closed, but a few open, and I stopped and asked this secretary for directions to the lawyer I needed to see. As she spoke I noticed the details of the office seemed odd and out of synch—the decor was vintage 1930s, yet she worked on an old IBM Selectric typewriter, the kind with the big silver ball that rotates and types as if by some force of magic. I only noted dimly it was an unusual thing to see in this day and age, a typewriter. At the time it just seemed quaint. Only afterward would I reflect upon the absence of a single computer, fax, copy machine or other modern office accoutrement. And the woman didn't look well—her face was sallow, her eyes sunken, her cheeks hollow. Her directions were good, though, and I did my business with the lawyer—whose office—complete with computers—and secretary—who looked healthy—seemed quite normal and gave no cause for questions, and I walked away with a check in my pocket.

I quickly found myself disoriented. It should have been easy enough to find my way back, I thought, but things seemed somehow different. It had only been a few turns down a few corners to the lawyer's office ... Perhaps I'd gone left out of his door when I should have gone right. Like I said, the place was weird. I walked and walked ... and walked and walked ... hallways dead-ending at solid steel doors, closed, which gave way to yet more hallways and doors, and doors lining the hallways, closed, all of it under buzzing fluorescent lights, just one big rat maze. It all looked the same, yet none of it exactly like I'd passed it before. I came upon a janitor with a bucket, a stooped, wizened old fellow, running a mop through a puddle of muddy water. I engaged him, but he could only grumble in some language I didn't understand. I backtracked—hallways and doors and hallways and doors, but never passed the lawyer's office again. I tried doors at random. This one, locked. That one, locked. So, I went on. My car was parked half a mile away in a garage that charged by the hour, and the clock was ticking toward rush hour. I began to feel, well, a little panicked.

Finally, a door at the end of a hallway opened, blessedly, onto a lobby and the elevator. The door, via one of those automatic, spring-loaded closers, slammed shut behind me with a thud. I approached the elevator, pressed the button, and waited. The door I'd come through opened again and a girl with mousy brown hair and big, bug-eyed glasses came through. Thud, went the door again, like a rubber mallet on a coffin. She was maybe twenty-eight, and could have been pretty with a little attention, but the plain look seemed almost deliberate. So, we waited for the elevator, two strangers, in that awkward limbo, two sentient beings trying to mind their own business and pretend the other isn't there, concerned only to get on with their own affairs, and with little available diversion.

The lobby was maybe twenty-five foot square with two large windows opposite the elevator, covered with a decorative scrollwork of black, wrought iron grating. Strange, I thought, because it was the fifth floor; no burglar would scale to the fifth floor to bust in through a window, would he? I wondered if perhaps they were put there to keep you from getting out, but quickly laughed off the thought. Opposite the door I'd come through was another door into the lobby, an exact duplicate, brown, like all of them. The walls were blank, neutral-colored. There were two sofas against the walls and a chair, old, like from the Fifties, with steel legs and some kind of imitation leather cushions, Naugahyde, perhaps. There was a canister-type ashtray, clean and polished, inviting one and all to sit and smoke, enjoy. But who left ashtrays out anymore? I'm almost certain at this point it's outright illegal to smoke inside an office building in Boston.

Something nagged at me about the lobby. Something wasn't entirely right. I couldn't say what. I chewed on it.

"This place is weird," I said out loud, craving distraction from the silence. I looked at the girl.

She drew a long breath through her nostrils, and something in her expression gave me the impression she didn't want to talk to me, but she said, "I know what you mean."

"Do you work here?"

"Well, it's my second day. The temp agency assigned me here. It's supposed to be a secretarial position, but...." She cast a glance back at the door. "There's nobody here."

"What do you mean?"

She sighed, "Well, the name of the business on the door is right. Yesterday I walked around and walked around—this place is like a maze—"

"I know!"

"And I finally found it, but there was nobody in the office. There was just a Post It note on the computer screen that said 'Be Back In Five Minutes.' I was supposed to report to a Mr. Bono, but...." She looked at the door again, shook her head. She really could have been quite pretty, like I said, and there was a keen, alert intelligence in her eyes. I wondered why she was working as a secretary. "He never showed up. Not yesterday. Not today. After an hour I called the agency and they said to just wait for him. I called again at noon and they said to keep waiting, that maybe it was him that left the note. So I sat there and waited until five, and left. And I came back today, and again, nobody. The agency said again to stay. I know they want their money, but there's nobody here to sign my time card."

I looked at her, dumbstruck. "Wow," I said. "Weird."

"Where's the elevator?" she asked, stepping forward and tapping the button impatiently. "I just want to get out of here. I'm not coming back tomorrow. If the agency doesn't like it they can fire me. This place gives me the creeps."

From the opposite door came the muffled sound of voices raised in argument, and the door flung opened with a sudden, violent jerk. A bolt of surprise shot through me, and the mousy girl's head snapped, startled, toward the door.

A man and a woman entered the lobby, faces pinched, spitting venom at one another. Thud, went the door behind them. Noticing us, they abruptly clipped their words. Awkward silence. They approached and waited for the elevator, sullen, arms folded, a forty-something pair .He wore a tan trench coat and, underneath, a sport coat and a golf shirt, wool slacks and loafers. Her hair was neatly coiffed and she wore a business suit, a long wool winter coat slung over her arm. Some cloying perfume radiated off her. I imagined them cruising in an expensive sport-sedan and residing in some posh suburb in Metro West.

Thus far the girl and I must have waited more than ten minutes, and the clock just ticked interminably on. The button with the black "DOWN" arrow glowed dumbly orange like a luminous, idiot eye. I stepped forward and tapped it—and stepped back. Tick, tick, tick. I tapped it some more.

"Don't do that!" said the man. Considerably irritated, he glowered at me. "You're gonna break it."

I cocked an eyebrow at him, wanted to tell him to shove it and mind his own business, but just folded my arms on my chest and waited.

And waited. And waited.

"Come on," grumbled the man, stepping forward himself now and tapping the button. "I have another appointment."

I cocked my eye at him again, balefully. Privately, I mocked, You're gonna break it.

He stepped back.

"I bet you do," said the woman.

He grit his teeth.

"Dinner appointment?" she goaded. "I hope it's nowhere too expensive. You're not going to be able to afford it."

"That's enough," he replied.

We waited. Another five minutes passed.

"What's the matter with this thing!" The man blustered, poking violently at the button. "Come on! Come on!"

"You're gonna break it," I said, raising my voice. "Just be patient, would you!"

"Leave it alone!" his wife shouted.

"Shut up!" he shouted back, and, firing a look at me, "And you mind your business!"

"Okay," said the girl. "I'm taking the stairs." She turned to the door through which we'd come and twisted the large stainless steel knob. It turned only imperceptibly in either direction. Click, click, click. She pulled it, paused, and pulled it again, forcefully. "It's locked."

"What?" I said. I tried it, jerked it—the same result.

The woman, having watched us curiously, tried the other door. "This one's locked, too."

"You're out of your mind," said the man.

"Oh!" she replied, inspired again to rage. "For fifteen years! I must have been out of my mind!"

"Get out of the way," he muttered and tried the door. He jerked the knob violently enough to shake it in its frame then slapped a hand against it with a resounding boom. "Now what are we supposed to do?"

I exchanged a glance with the girl. Her eyes shined with anxiety. "Wait," I said. "I guess."

So we did. Another ten minutes.

"Does anybody have a cell phone?" I asked, suddenly hot with excitement.

"Yes!" said the man, hurriedly producing one. "Good thinking. Who are we going to call?"

"The police?" suggested the girl.

"The police?" he asked.

"It is an emergency," said his wife. "I suppose. We are sort of trapped here."

He tried the phone, speaking aloud the numbers as he plugged them in—911—then cursed. "It reads, 'service not available'. What the hell does that mean?"

"We're in a bad cell or something," I said. "It's the walls of the building, maybe."

He tried it near the windows, but with the same result. We were all deflated.

We waited. The light streaming through the windows began to grow dim and oblique with February twilight, and the elevator button glowed on, unchanged. We sat, and the furniture wheezed with Naugahyde flatulence, the girl and I on one sofa, the woman on the other, the man in the chair. He produced a crumpled pack of menthol cigarettes and lit one with an expensive-looking silver lighter.

"I wish you wouldn't smoke in here," said the girl.

"Well," he replied with a snarling grin, "there isn't a lot you can do about it, now, is there, missy?"

"Watch it," I said.

He raised his eyebrows at me.

"Does she mind your smoking?" asked his wife.

"Never mind about her," he said. "Where the hell did you find this guy, anyway?"

"He came very highly recommended as a divorce lawyer," she replied with a self-satisfied smile. "Patty from the club told me about him. He settled her second split for two million plus alimony."

"Prick," he said, and the blood seemed to drain from his face. "Well, we'll see." Then, "Poor Harry."

And we waited. At one point the man made a big show of banging on both doors and shouting for help at the top of his voice. The noise was abominable, and the girl shuddered next to me, and finally, under much protest from us all, he ceased, but continued to restlessly pace the room and fumble with his phone. I told him if he kept it up he'd kill the battery, but he just fumed at me like the miserable bombast that he was.

"Here," he said, motioning me to stand. "Let's try breaking one of the damn doors down, the both of us."

Reluctantly, I joined him. "The jamb is solid steel," I said. "The door's steel, too, man. There's no way."

"Yeah, yeah," he said impatiently. "Maybe it'll give. What, do you want to sit here all night? Better to do something than nothing."

I shrugged. Together we attacked the door to the right of the elevator. We administered repeated bruising blows with our shoulders, but we didn't make a dent. I gave it all I had. If we'd been on the other side of the door it might have made a difference, but from this side we just banging the door into the solid steel frame. Hollering in frustration, the man gave the door an ungainly karate-like kick then stood panting. A lock of hair had sprung loose and hung on his forehead.

My watch read after six o'clock. An hour had passed, and we'd waited straight through quitting time, and not another soul had come through the lobby, no rush of humanity streaming from the offices. I realized what had been nagging at me.

"You know," I said. "I don't think this is the same lobby I came through before."

"What are you going on about?" asked the man, sitting down.

"I don't think it's the same lobby. The one I came through had no furniture, and it was smaller, and there were no doors."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"I think you're right," said the girl, her brow knitting.

"Well," I said. "Something isn't right, and we're facing the very real possibility we're going to be marooned here 'till Monday morning. Think about it; not a single other person has come through, and we've been here right through the rush hour."

"No, no," said the man, agitated again, getting up. "I have an appointment." He pounded on the door again, shouting.

"Frank!" his wife shouted. "Please!"

"Listen," he said turning to the mousy girl and myself. "Who the hell are you people? Do you work here?"

"Just here to see a lawyer," I said. "Like you."

The girl told her story again, briefly.

"Well, that's great," he said, trying to sound dismissive, yet unable to hide the touch of uneasy reaction to what she said. He pounded on the elevator doors and attempted to fit his fingers between them, as if to pry them open.

"What are you going to do?" I asked. "Jump down the shaft? Ride the cable?"

"Shut up," he said. "And where the hell are the stairs? They always put the stairs right by the elevator."

He poked, and poked and poked the button, and finally, from somewhere in the bowels of the place, there came a shudder, then a crash, then a whir of some machinery echoing up the elevator shaft. Above the elevator doors was a read-out panel—"B" (for basement) through the 10th floor—which lit up to indicate on which floor the elevator currently was. Thus far it had been dim, but now "B" ignited with that same orange glow then 1 then 2, and so on as the elevator began to ascend.

"Hey!" he said triumphantly. "I did it!"

"Thank God," said his wife, taking her coat and approaching.

And we all waited eagerly in front of the elevator. But the sounds coming up that shaft were monstrous, a screeching, banging, groaning clangor, like the sound of a steel foundry at peak production time. I was torn between wanting to get out and not wanting to get on any elevator that sounded like that. The elevator I'd ridden up prior sounded nothing like it. No elevator I'd even been on sounded like it, like a swinging death trap. I weighed the prospects of remaining trapped in that lobby or, worse, being trapped in that elevator, or worst of all, free falling to my death if the elevator cable snapped. We looked at one another worriedly, eyes searching faces.

"Well, I'm going," said the man.

With a resounding boom the elevator reached the fifth floor, and every nerve cringed as the doors slid open with the grating shriek of dragging metal—like the doors of some long undisturbed tomb. They settled with a dull ka-thunk! in their pockets. A malodorous air wafted out, metallic, like a machinist's recycled cutting oil mingled with something foul and rich, like soil. From the fixture on the ceiling a watery light shone down. The faux wood paneling of the walls and the plastic tiles of the floor were faded and grimy and smudged.

I said, "This is definitely not the elevator I came up in."

"My God," said the woman.

We hesitated. There was something stuck to the floor, a piece of paper, with a ragged snatch of duct tape, and something written on it. We all leaned forward, ever so imperceptibly, into the elevator, keeping our feet square on the lobby side of the threshold. It was the sort of paper they gave you in grade school, cheap pulp from a writing tablet, with faded blue dotted lines to keep your cursive on track. It, too, was smudged with big, meaty fingerprints. Scrawled upon it, in ink, or grease, or God knew what, in large, crude, uneven printing was the command: SEND DOWN THE WOMEN.

Beside me, the girl swallowed quite audibly.

"What the hell is this, now?" said the man, Frank. Fearfully, we all looked to one another. "Is this some kind of a joke?"

"I don't like it," said his wife.

"I don't think it's a joke," said the girl. "Not at all."

We looked uneasily at the scrawled words on the paper, their very form seeming to reflect the sinister nature of their ham-handed writer.

I said, "I wonder if there's a camera hidden somewhere." Clustered by the yawning elevator our eyes scanned the room. "They can be hidden just about anywhere now, they come so small." But the room yielded nothing—at least nothing we could see. I even searched the canister of the ashtray and the Naugahyde cushions. "Somebody's playing some kind of sick game with us, here."

"He must have control of the elevator," said the girl hollowly. "Somehow."

He....

"Ridiculous," said Frank. "Come on, folks. Let's get a hold of ourselves, now. I don't know what this is, but I've got an appointment, and I'm taking this elevator out of here. Come on, Miriam." He took his wife's arm and pulled her toward the elevator.

"No," she protested, shrugging from his grasp. "I'm not getting into that thing. And don't put your hands on me, please. You forfeited that privilege, I think."

"Suit yourself." He strode confidently on board and turned to face us, jaw set and determined. "Nothing in this world or the next or even this...." He looked about warily. "This place ... is going to threaten Frank Moran." He regarded his wife. "My lawyer will be in touch with that little prick of yours. I wish he could have been here today." Arm outstretched, he leaned forward to press the button on the interior control panel, but, with an unexpected jolt the doors began to screech closed—by themselves—and before they had time to shut upon him he looked back at us with a curious frown, and was swallowed up.

His wife regarded us and said, "He can be such a horse's ass. I'm sorry."

We waited, watching the status panel, and the elevator made its way slowly down. 3, 2, 1, "B". There was a thundering crash and rattle, then a pause, then, very faintly, a ruckus and a man yelling: Frank. A shiver raced through me. Quiet.

The woman turned to us with wide, shining eyes. "Dear lord. What in the world was that?"

The girl and I could only stare at her mutely. Nothing happened for several minutes. We waited. I pressed the "DOWN" button, and once again it gleamed forth its idiot orange light. Nothing. We waited some more. Nothing.

"We've got to get out of here," said the girl.

The lobby had begun long since to feel claustrophobic. Now the sensation was acute. It was dark beyond the windows. Two fluorescent fixtures hummed weakly overhead, and a heat vent ceaselessly guttered out hot air to the point of stifling. An hour passed. We sat, vapid, worried, staring off into nowhere. The girl rested her chin in her hand.

I extended a hand to her. "By the way," I said. "I'm Danny Felica. Nice to meet you."

She shook, her hand, small and rather bony. "Evelyn Dowdry. Pleased to meet you, too, though I wish it could be under other circumstances. Any other circumstances."

"I'm Miriam Moran," said the woman, and after some time, the memory of the ruckus we'd heard at the bottom of the elevator shaft still circling all of us like a specter, "I hope my husband's all right. We had fifteen fairly good years, and even though we're separated ... well...." Her cheeks looked hollow, her eyes large and liquid and sunken. She looked suddenly unraveled, with tendrils of hair straying from their former comeliness.

"I'm sure he's just fine," Evelyn assured her, but the uncertainty in her own words was evident, perhaps even to herself.

After a moment of close and oppressive silence Miriam said haltingly—and a little embarrassed, "I ... I really have to go to the bathroom."

Evelyn laughed. "You and me both."

And me, too. I felt, in fact, like I was going to bust. The length of our internment uncertain, I feared we'd have to resort to urinating in the ashtray, which I knew would quickly start to reek in that hot little lobby worse than any T station in Boston. And I was starving—and thirsty. That is, I thought, reflecting morbidly on our situation, if amid all of it we have the opportunity to urinate again.

"Shit," I said miserably.

And suddenly that boom and clangor again in the guts of the place; the elevator was moving. Apprehensively we approached, the women's faces blanching sickly, and mine, too, I bet. 2,3,4 ... It sounded as if the car was virtually bouncing off the walls of the shaft—boom, boom. Finally coming to a crashing stop, the doors grated open with an iron scream. Miriam Moran's voice rang out a horrified shriek. Wildly, Evelyn clutched at me.

There on the floor in the center of the elevator sat Frank Morgan's severed head.

Blood listlessly pooled around the tattered stump of a neck. Mouth agape, eyes locked open, its expression attested that whatever his living eyes had looked on last may have been enough to shock him to death.

"Oh!" cried Miriam. "Oh, Frank!" She clawed her cheeks. Suddenly the crotch of her business suit darkened as her bladder let go. She crumpled to the floor.

The note remained duct taped to the floor. Each word had been violently underlined, however, and the sentence punctuated with a savage exclamation point. SEND DOWN THE WOMEN! The faux-paneling of the walls ran with gore, like slaughterhouse walls.

Miriam screamed and screamed and screamed. For more than an hour the scene remained that way, the elevator gaping open on the grisly site. My guts in a twist, fearing I, too, would be swallowed up, I leaned in at one point and tried the control panel, anything, to shut the doors, but of course, nothing happened. Evelyn, wide eyed and panicked, panted and groaned and pounded on the doors screaming. No way out. NO WAY. No breaking those doors down.

Miriam's screams trailed off to plaintive sobs, and we helped her to the sofa where she balled up, pointing herself away from the elevator, trembling. I took her coat and threw it as best I could over Frank's head, but missed covering it completely. One half of the mouth and one leering eye were still visible, and thus it remained; I wasn't stepping in there to fix it.

It felt as if my whole being, body, mind and soul, had been somehow rendered discorporate. I felt like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle floating weightlessly, unfamiliar to myself. I couldn't think, couldn't get a hold on my tumbling thoughts.

"How can this be happening?" Evelyn wondered aloud.

"There's a camera," I replied absently.

"There is no camera!" she insisted. "You looked!"

"Well, what is it, then?"

"I don't know." Her eyes went dreamy. "This building, everything, it's all ... uncanny, supernatural somehow."

"There's no such thing!" I shouted, not really believing it. "It's some sicko, just some fucking sicko!" Then, rage and terror revoltingly married in an uncontrollable trembling ejaculation, I shouted into the elevator, to whoever was down there, "Fuck you, assshole!"

Miriam clutched her ears and moaned.

My mind turning and turning upon the halls and the doors, and the secretary and her typewriter and the grumbling janitor with a language like the incantation of some voodoo mumbo jumbo, I looked at Evelyn, and could argue no further.

"If we don't find a way out of here," she said, "we're all going to die."

With a freezing shudder I knew somehow she was right. I examined the grating on the windows. They were fastened with six large Phillips head screws up the sides and four across the top and bottom. Scaled with rust, it had been a long, long time since they'd last been turned. I carried a Swiss army knife with me, but among all its accoutrements was no Phillips head. There was a flat-headed blade, though, that fit into one groove of the Phillip's cross. Methodically, I began to work on them. I noticed the sound of something dragging across the floor. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Evelyn dragging the ashtray into the far corner, apparently doing what I'd been thinking.

"Don't turn around a minute," she said. "I really have to go. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," I told her. "I'm next."

My back turned I heard the powerful stream of urine hit the bottom of the empty can with a hollow metallic echo. I followed suit, replacing the lid and leaving it in the corner. I felt somehow revived.

Returning to the screws, I got one out, then two. They must have been three inches long. Twist, twist, twist, until my wrist ached and my fingers blistered. The view out the window was of a narrow alley. Directly across was another old, brick building with dark, mute windows, which, the more I looked at them, became somehow diabolical and saturnine.

"What are we going to do?" asked Evelyn. "Jump?"

"Or face the other alternative," I told her.

If I craned my neck just right and squinted, I believed I could see down the whole length of the building. Beyond the alley was Washington Street. Perhaps if we could get the grate bent back enough we could break the glass and scream for help. Even on the weekend there would be people. Perhaps somebody would hear. Perhaps somebody would come.

Then the lights went out. Miriam screamed. The elevator, still lit, bloodied, looked, with Frank Moran's head propped up and his "Tell Tale Heart" eye leering out, unreal, like someone's Halloween display. Crash, screech—the elevator doors rolled closed. Boom, boom—it went down. 3, 2, 1 ... the orange lights winked in the darkness. Off on what bloody business it went I didn't know, but I think we were all grateful to have it, and its cargo, out of sight.

I worked the screws, and the night drew on, the silence itself enough to cause illicit screaming. Miriam began to sing softly at one point, some love song from the '70s, over and over. I was pretty certain she'd lost her mind.

2 a.m. Frustrated, having stripped two screws, I stopped for a moment. We all sat, scared but exhausted, drowsing vacantly in the thin blue light. At some point, I dozed off. When I was conscious again the weak winter light of dawn was slanting in through the windows. Next to me, Eveyln slept.

Shaking her a little too violently, I woke her. She looked at me with sparkling, pleading eyes, and then we clutched each other. We hadn't heard a sound, not a single rattle, no crash, nothing, we swore to one another, and I now swear to God. But Miriam was gone. Vanished. The elevator had slid silently up while we slept—silently somehow—and someone had taken Miriam away, and without a single scream.

"How the hell is he doing it?" I wondered aloud.

He ... again he ... How it had come to simply 'he' and not 'they' I don't know and can't say now, but something about it just rang true. The potential of a 'he' hung ominously in my mind, as well.

"Those screws," Evelyn said. "Are you getting anywhere?"

I'd gotten three free on one side and two on the other and two on the bottom. I had tried each one first to see how easily they'd yield, and the those that turned the easiest I removed first, going back to the more difficult ones next. There were two in the top corner, stripped, which I'd never get out. I continued, proceeding very slowly, locking the blade in the screw and turning with as much torque as I could muster.

The day passed and we made small talk as light-heartedly as possible to distract our minds, though a palpable current of terror hung between us. The lobby reeked with it. I wondered what might next come riding up in the elevator. Miriam Moran's dismembered head? A hacked, naked limb? I wondered what monstrous implements he might have hanging in his butchery down there, what tools of his torture chamber. My mind conjured images of improbably huge cleavers and knives and chains and racks and pinching devices. I wondered to what extent his imagination could construct the bloody scenes of an inquisitor. I worked the screws and worked screws and night fell and my fingers were raw and bleeding and stinging.

"We've got to sleep in shifts," I said taking a seat beside her. "And keep watch. You sleep first. You look like you need it." In the darkness her face was pale and witchy, framed by her wiry hair, and, glasses off, her eyes looked lost way down in their dark sockets. "Okay," she said. "Okay."

She leaned against me and I held her. I felt completely washed out. Hunger had given way to a dull sense of constant discomfort in my midsection. Soon her breathing became rhythmic. My chin rested on her head, and the aroma of her hair was like flowers. I thought of rolling fields in springtime covered in wildflowers, and, God forgive me, I couldn't keep my burning eyes open. They closed and fluttered open again and again, the lobby appearing blearier each time. Thoughts and voices and visions swirled together in my consciousness the way they do in those few psychedelic seconds prior to sleep, and the last thing I thought was how nice it might be to make love to the girl lying against me, but it was the last time I ever saw her.

In the morning she was gone. I sat blinking dumbly on the edge of the sofa, utterly alone, the whole long day ahead of me.

By dusk I had nearly all the screws out of the grate except two in one corner and two in the corner diagonally opposite, so when I shook the grate the two free corners snapped slightly off the wall. I kept working.

Boom, came the sound from somewhere deep in the bowels of the place. Boom. The elevator started to climb. Stricken, I clutched the grate and watched the numbers, head thrown over my shoulder. Where the sense came from I don't know, but I was certain, somehow, that this was it. He was coming. He was in there. And I had to get out.

Like a crazed gorilla in a cage, I shook wildly at the grate. I shook and shook with as much strength as I could summon, and the bottom corner of the grate broke free with a shower of dust and a ripping scream as the screws wrenched from the studs. I yanked at it, and it bent enough to let a body slip by. The window beyond was a large wooden double-hung. I tried to push it open, but it wouldn't budge. I didn't have time enough to determine how it was fastened or how to unlock it.

The elevator doors shrieked open.

What followed is unclear in my memory, a panic-stricken jumble; but what came out of the elevator I cannot classify as exactly human—a long-snouted thing in a slick rubber suit, galloping into the lobby on its knuckles and slashing out blindly with a glinting blade. I don't think I screamed. I don't think I could have.

The glass shattered with one extreme blow of my fist, and I scrabbled my way out, ragged shards cutting into me. And then I was falling ass over teakettle—and from behind me rose a long animal howl of frustration. The bottom of the alley approached with lightning speed, and I do recall, distinctly, the terrific impact. Then nothing.

They don't know who discovered me and called 911, or how long after the fall—a wandering bum, probably, someone just in the right place at the right time. They called 911, but they didn't stick around to take credit. They said it's a miracle I survived the fall, that less than one percent would have, that it all depends on how you hit the ground. Punctured and badly lacerated, they tell me it's a miracle, too, that I didn't bleed to death. I spent several hours in surgery, then several days in a coma due to head trauma, from which, if you wake quickly, they said, your chances of positive recovery are good.

All of the memories were slow to come, resolving back into focus like some Hollywood camera trick, but complete with emotion. By the calendar I jumped out the window last Thursday. I followed up with the cop I talked to, the one who wouldn't come right out and say he didn't believe me, and he told me over the phone he ran the names I gave him, and they checked out, but there have been no reports of them as missing persons, and, he said, there probably wouldn't be; there is no law in America against a consenting adult being a missing person if they so choose. I told him to call their families, but he said no—no way—not with my story. And that was that.

And I've told the hospital staff repeatedly I want to be moved. I'm on the 9th floor and only one door down from the elevator. I've told them I want to be moved as far away from it as possible. They said they'd see what could be done, but won't give me a definite answer. I can hear its doors rolling open, can hear the idiot "ding!" when it reaches the 9th floor. They sent a psychologist in yesterday to talk to me, and I told him, too, that when I'm released, I'm not riding down in that thing. Broken leg or not—I don't care if I have to crawl—when I get out of here, I'm taking the stairs.

Back to top of page