in the wood.’
She flushed. Breathless femininity was not going well. ‘It sounds paranoid out loud … and really we’re no less capable without phones.’
‘Except we can’t call for help.’ The prospect had Suit more smug than dismayed. She made one last effort to rally.
‘I mean in our own resources.’
‘You never know,’ Jim wheezed. ‘Maybe catching a few of us away from the herd would be too delicious for fate to miss.’
‘Predetermination can kiss my …’ With a gasp of depressurisation the doors scrolled reluctantly apart.’
‘Hell,’ Suit finished in disgust.’
The elevator’s light flickered over a solid and forbidding cinderblock wall, with GATE slashed across it in faded yellow paint. Their friend the omnipresent tagger had made his way here, too.
The lady disbelievingly laid one manicured hand on the wall but its density left no room for doubt. Further, the blocks seemed to radiate a dim antiquity that left her feeling grey. Grey, like windowless offices and Christmas alone.
‘It’s cold!’ She jerkily tried to rub pink life back into the fingers. ‘What were our chances of getting stuck right between floors?’
‘Probably …’ Suit started but Jim sneezed again, explosively, losing his grip on the door and what splattered the cinderblock was a lavish sacrificial red.
The lady wailed like an air raid, flailing away so that although Suit yelled, ‘Oh, oh Jesus!’ it was up to him to catch Jim as the lad buckled. The doors slid back together, complicitly hiding the mess as though things were just dandy folks. Fine, but for Jim’s dripping nostrils and chin.
‘Shit! Oh Shit!’ Their maiden held forth hysterically as Suit lowered Jim to the floor. ‘What’s wrong with him!’
‘Just a cold really …’ Jim bubbled, his eyes like swollen cherries.
‘Oh Christ he’s like ice! Will you shut it and get over here to help please?’
With a high horrified whine the lady pressed further into the corner and then an unmistakable reek spilled into the air. Six glasses of lunchtime sauvignon blanc as strained through the human uric system.
With hands over her face she began to cry, humiliated heaves falling thin and hollow in the reeking air.
‘Oh jeeze.’
She couldn’t even stand to look at them through her fingers.
Breathing through his mouth Suit set to mopping Jim’s face with his tie, in motions surprisingly competent and gentle. And after a few minutes of not being the sole tragedy the lady’s sobs hiccupped, then slowed.
When she finally spoke, although tremulous her voice was brittle with assumed dignity. ‘Would you please turn around? My stockings are wet. I’d like to take them off.’
Suit kept up the good work, and while Jim couldn’t twist away entirely he put his face to the wall and stared fixedly at GATE.
There was an inelegant splat of underthings and then she coughed. ‘Stinks. Sorry.’
‘You wouldn’t have pissed yourself if you could help it,’ Suit dismissed her brusquely and added his tie to the pile. ‘Just call this laundry corner.’
She knelt into Jim’s field of view although notably not too close, mouth an ill-humoured line. ‘Just what the hell’s happening?’
‘Don’t feel so bad now.’ The courier spat, a gory Rorschach, and tried to smile at her. His gums were a nightmare. ‘Just a cold. Didn’t mean to scare anybody.’
‘Balls to that!’ Suit stood. ‘He needs a hospital, like now. There’s a way up top – come help me here.’
Lacking strength of arm the lady made a step of her bare knee – even so the ceiling hatch was almost beyond them. Finally, wobbling between her support and the wall Suit managed to pop the access, letting in a burst of arctic air from the shaft.
It felt old, full of machinery, and whipped the lady’s ordered hair about her narrow triangle of a face. On the floor Jim shivered and groaned, trying his best to roll up like a pill bug. ‘You sure you ought to be going up there?’
‘Well we certainly don’t have all day to dick around in here.’
Suit had found purchase somewhere and was slowly levering his way up into the dark by brute determination when the lady went crashing back against the wall, her eyes bugging from her head an a way that put the right horrors up Jim.
Breath whistling he uncurled as far as he could but their confined little world had gone all red and curdled. He just couldn’t see.
‘Where did he go? Is he up there?’
‘I DIDN’T SEE!’ she shrieked, spit flying and blanched fingertips clawing right in her mouth. Her bare legs pinwheeled and squeaked against the floor. ‘I DIDN’T SEE ANYTHING, DON’T ASK MEEEE!’
‘Hey. Hey lady, stop.’ Jim hitched himself painfully into the dimness of her chosen corner and tried to administer comforting pats, except that what he raised seemed to be a mushy ball at the end of his wrist. No fingers. It thudded impotently off her shoulder and probably wasn’t very reassuring. ‘Stop freaking out. It’s gonna be ok.’
There was a muted thumping from outside the elevator as though some heaviness was banging along the exterior. A rattling at the doors and the lady gagged, trying literally to shove herself through the wall.
‘What’s that?’ Jim croaked, peering. Warm pink fluid ran down his cheeks. ‘Is that him?’
‘ … I didn’t, don’t let it in, I didn’t see …’
The doors juddered open, forced by two chapped hands and a squarish man stood blinking in the opening. He had the no-nonsense build of a tradesman, a fellow driving the pragmatic middle of life’s highway with reigns firmly in hand.
‘Hey!’ The tradie yelled down the gap into the elevator shaft below, squatting a little. ‘Hey, reckon you’ve had vandals in here!’
‘That’s awesome. Gimme some more showstoppers.’ The grumbling reply came from much further down, several floors, jostled by echoes up the shaft but partaking in the same sane heartiness. ‘The magnet isn’t reaching. I’m going t’ have to get down in the bottom of the shaft.’
Tradie scratched his sparse hair, sighed. ‘You want me to come down?’
A thin torch beam lanced accusingly up through the gap at him, swirling motes disturbed by all the shouting. ‘You stay right where you are like your feet are nailed down! We wouldn’t even be here if some Einstein hadn’t figured on dropping his keys down the shaft, and that elevator’s one fucking tetchy bitch. If she comes down on my skull I’ll be right back to haunt you!’
‘Fine, fine.’
Tradie’s eye wandered idly about the elevator interior. Really, when it came to mess the kids who got into these buildings were worse than vermin. He chuckled deep in his throat: damn pity you couldn’t bait for them in the same way.
The elevator stank of old piss, and a tangle of rubbish had been dumped for the next schmo to have to clean. God even knew what that pink foam was; slowly eating its way down into the floor with the faintest of crackling noises. A flattened box and what looked like shreds of lycra were melted in. That’d be a solvent job for sure.
He tried to smudge the word GATE away but some little bugger had scratched it into the wall with something sharp. Even the ceiling hatch was sprung, a solid block of night above his head. Serve the mongrels right if they’d poked the wrong whoosit and sent themselves on the long fall.
Tradie was just hooking a chair in from the lobby so he could reach up when a horrifying squeal rang up the shaft. ‘What was that?’ he yelled, chewing his lip fit to abandon post. It was the sort of shrillness that put a fellow in mind of rural abattoirs: rows of bled carcasses, old straw and cold steel. Thank goodness he couldn’t claim much more imagination than that.
‘Hey! Hey, there’s some lady down here!’
‘What, in the elevator well?’ Digging in his ear didn’t make the news more credible. ‘She drunk? Or homeless?’ Probably both. Lucky not to have been squashed flat as a tack, give the cleaners some major overtime to deal with.
‘I don’t bl
oody well know, do I? There’s – something wrong with her, I don’t know. Look, I’m getting her out. Give me twenty to clear the shaft and then I want your fat ass on the horn to the fuzz, the paras, the works, got it?’
‘Hey – did you ..?’
‘I’ve got your damned keys!’ The voice cracked; any man’s reasonable limits would be pushed. ‘Just be ready on that phone!’
Something else listened to the excited voices booming up and down the shaft. A thing mashed and spread across the top of the elevator like wet jam, as though smashed from an incredible height.
Impossible that anything like that could still live. Still struggle. Nothing was connected to anything anymore.
But a peeled iris glistened. Fingers quivered and scratched at broadsheet cuffs in a paroxysm of frustration.
There was no real breath behind it so unsurprisingly the man in the elevator failed to hear Suit croaking for help. Instead Tradie hopped up on his chair almost as an afterthought, and he popped the ceiling hatch closed.
The Elevator Story
A well heeled lady almost misses an elevator, but she will desperately wish that she had.
At 2,803 words The Elevator Story is part of a suite of short science fiction, fantasy and horror stories by BP Gregory, each its own little maelstrom of human suffering and longing. You can enjoy The Elevator Story alone or as part of Cacophony: Collected Short Stories Volume One which is available in print.
If you’ve enjoyed this, please read on for special bonus short story Lunchbox.
Lunchbox
A short story
by BP