Author: R. J. Erbacher

The up-arrow light dinged off and the doors slid open as I stepped onto the elevator at my office building, early for work, as usual. There was one person in the car standing in the exact center. That was strange because this was the lowest floor and he made no move to get off. Wherever he had come from before, he was going back up that way. I did a double take, and he appeared familiar to me, as if I had seen him very recently. I choose to ignore that mental earworm and head for my office. I pressed the button for my floor, and I stepped past the gentleman and against the back wall, facing the closing doors. And we went up.

As we quickly ascended, I remembered the weird ordinance that stipulates you can’t talk to someone in an elevator. There is probably no one who has ever been ticketed for breaking that rule. That’s when I realized how I knew the stranger; I had spoken to him. In a dream last night. He had his back to me, like he did now, and then turned and said, ‘you are not going all the way up.’ I don’t think we were on an elevator in the dream, despite the related statement.

Just then the elevator bucked and abruptly stopped. After a second, followed by a disturbingly grinding sound from overhead, the car dropped a short distance. I grabbed the flat bar against the wall, barely keeping my feet. I don’t think the stranger moved or even flinched. Except he turned to me, exactly like the dream.

The elevator imploded. The ceiling caved in and a chunky, black grease-stained, apparatus crashed through the roof, took out the stranger standing in the middle and punched through the floor, taking with it three-quarters of the rubber coated surface. The car plummeted further and I had no idea how far because the lights had been ripped away by whatever pierced the lift. Seconds later it halted, tilting at an angle and I was dangling over the precipice of what was left of the floor, staring down into a dark cavity. My death grip on the handle was the only thing preventing me from descending into the abyss. A yellow emergency light in the corner, which was barely hanging on by a wire, blinked on providing a sparse amount of illumination as it swung about.

I was standing on twelve inches of what was left of the base of the car. The crater in the center was a black hole that yawned beyond the crest below my shoes. A foul breeze wafted up from the depths, with a stench of decay. How far down it went I couldn’t say, most likely all the way to hell. I dared to squint up, and the ceiling looked as if a giant bullet had been shot through it, shredded metal fringes dangling down. My breath had caught in my throat for the space of the minute since the episode happened, before I remembered to inhale. And scream.

It took over two hours for a fireman to attach a harness to me and cradled my trembling body down to safety. I sat there in the lobby, wrapped in a foil blanket, sipping a bottle of water, explaining to several officials what I could remember. Eventually a policeman spoke to me.

“Are you sure about the man in the middle of the elevator?”

“Yes, why?”

“When they checked the bottom of the shaft, they only found the broken mechanism. No sign of a body.”

“He had to be there. It was the only reason I wasn’t… standing… in the center…”