The Elevator That Waits

Every building has one elevator that takes a little too long to arrive, and if you've ever wondered why, the honest answer is that it isn't the elevator that's slow. It's waiting for someone else to decide whether they're getting on with you.

Marcus worked the night shift at Halden Tower, cleaning offices between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., and he had long since stopped pressing the button for elevator four. Not because it was broken — building maintenance swore, every time he complained, that it tested perfectly fine — but because of what happened, without fail, at seven minutes past midnight, whenever he was foolish enough to be riding inside it.

The doors would open on the fourteenth floor. A floor Halden Tower did not have. The building's directory went straight from thirteen to fifteen, a superstition of the original architect that nobody had ever bothered to correct even after the building changed hands three times.

At seven minutes past midnight, the doors opened on it anyway.

Nothing ever stepped in. That was, somehow, worse than if something had. Just an empty hallway, lit the same flat white as every other floor, stretching back further than the building's actual dimensions should have allowed, and a silence so complete that Marcus swore, every single time, he could hear his own pulse in his ears like a second person breathing beside him.

The doors stayed open for exactly eleven seconds — he'd timed it, more than once, out of the particular stubbornness that made him a bad employee for accepting the transfer request the first three times it was offered — and then closed, and the elevator continued upward as though nothing at all had happened.

Marcus takes the stairs now. All fourteen flights, every night, rather than find out what happens on the twelfth time he doesn't look away fast enough.