The Elevator Game
(It Was What Believed in Them That Counted.)
Natalie had visited every floor and battered almost every door open, but she had found no one. As far as she could discern Matty and herself were the only people still within Gatehouse Apartments.
The young mother had carried Matty into the elevator and he had travelled with her from floor to floor. Each time the doors opened she had wedged them that way and explored the floor thoroughly. From the third floor and above this was easy as there weren’t many walls standing anymore. On the third floor, she had found a large hole that appeared to have been made recently, but that was the only indication of another person’s presence in the building. The only other anomaly was the western stairwell. The doors on all floors would not open to it, even those she had used earlier that day.
Natalie returned to her apartment, placed Matty on his bed and opened the diary. She had missed something important. She knew it but she didn’t understand it. The writer expressed the importance of things being in their rightful order. Blood was important, it stated, but blood was just the natural succession of one person to the next. It was all order, a combination that unlocked… something.
Despite her lying eyes, the idea had taken root that Gatehouse Apartments was not empty. The girl and her mother were still there somewhere. As were the old couple. As were Lucas and Ryan.
She wanted to do something, but instead, she read. A phrase jumped out at her, the words written small as if trying to hide on the page, “life is nothing but ceremony”, it said, “and a good life is nothing but its order done right.”
They had all taken the same route to the second floor, then the others took the same to the third while she returned to the ground floor. Was it that simple? A journey between the building’s longest points that led… elsewhere.
Natalie was tired, she had carried her boy every step of her search, and he was far too large. Matty hadn’t woke up, and she could not stir him. He was bound in sleep as surely as if he had been given some drug.
She thought he was with the girl, and as soon as the idea entered her mind, she knew it had to be true. Matty was enamoured with Charlotte Mellor so he would be with her.
Charlotte Mellor was dead, which meant…
Natalie pushed the thought away, her hand moving to her son’s chest. She could feel the boy’s heartbeat. He was still here, at least a part of him was, which meant he could still come back. Or she could go there and get him. She had a place to start and a working theory. A part of her said that it was an insane theory, but it was a theory, nevertheless. It began on the western stairwell of the second floor, the place she had abandoned the journey up. The elevator carried her there, and she hoped she had not broken the combination with its use. Matty was heavy and there was not a part of her that didn’t ache, but there was no way she would be without him now.
From the elevator, she opened the door to the western stairwell and the thirteen steps took Natalie to the next floor, thirteen steps in two groups of five separated by three. She counted them as she moved up them. She counted them because it was a nervous habit she had developed in her youth, and she counted them because that was the last thing she did before she abandoned the journey. Five steps, turn right, three more, turn right, and then the final five. To her left was the door to the next floor. She opened it.
This was the floor with the hole torn in the wall, she passed it and paused, took a step back towards it and looked inside. For a moment she stood and watched but saw nothing. The shadow movement she saw must have been nothing more than a trick of the light. She continued along the corridor to the eastern stairwell whose doors would not open. She took the handle, turned it, and the door opened without complaint.
Lucas marched in looking far more fearless than he felt. He could hear the disjointed sound of amplified fairground music. It stuttered and lapsed into silence only to flare up again momentarily too loud before the sound settled for a few minutes. It was an unnerving loop that would break down and die only to be resurrected moments later.
The girl Lucas carried had grown heavier over time, and now his shoulders ached, and he knew he would have to find somewhere safe for her before he reached his destination. He moved between the ticket booths and down the fairway. He pretended not to hear and see the things moving between the attractions, but he knew they heard and saw him.
It didn’t matter what someone believed in that counted, it was what believed in them.
And Lucas could feel the unwanted belief in his existence all around him.
He could see no sign of the man, but he knew he had to be somewhere ahead, he had been drawn to this destination since he arrived at Gatehouse Apartments. It might have begun long before that. Ahead of Lucas was a tent. It was as large as a circus Big Top and at its peak might have been as tall as a hundred feet, it tapered down to about twenty at its sides and over its entrance was a construction of metal tubing and cable on which large lights had been mounted.
None of them was lit, but there was light coming from inside the tent, it filtered through the thick canvas enough that the tent appeared to glow. Lucas walked under the lights and pulled the canvas curtain that served the tent for a door. The light inside was glaring, and Lucas narrowed his eyes as he stepped under the canvas.
The music, at least, was quieter in here, but there were other sounds to replace it. Muted cheers and the sound of applause rippled through the tent. Lucas walked along the wide canopy to the tent’s main area. As he neared it he heard the sounds more clearly. Someone spoke loudly to an assembled crowd eager for every word. There would be speech, then a momentary pause before a roar of applause followed.
He shifted the girl in his arms, his muscles were burning with the exertion of carrying her. He would need to find somewhere to put her so they both could rest, but the canopy of canvas under which they walked offered nowhere she would not be immediately seen.
Another canvas doorway was a few steps ahead. A light moved between the heavy sheets that served as the door. It had the uneven quality of natural light, it danced and shifted like a flame. The sounds were far louder as if he had walked closer to their source rather than just a few steps. Then he heard another sound, this one quieter but far nearer, it was a whisper, an exchange of whispers between two very close people.
Lucas dropped the girl’s legs, keeping one arm tightly around her waist so she would not fall, and then pulled the canvas aside to slip through quietly.
The sound was a roar, and the light dazzled even through the rising rows of seats that surrounded the central performance area. To his left and right the seats rose far too high to be practical. They were rows of seats constructed in wedges with their thinnest end towards the stage. Under them was a latticework of wooden supports through which the light filtered.
“Lucas?” The voice was quiet and familiar, but Lucas still almost cried out in fear.
It was the boy, Matty Fisher. He looked up at Lucas from where he was under the raised seating. Lucas moved to him, placing the girl as carefully as he could between him and the girl hiding beside him. Lucas looked at her, and every other strange thing he had seen that day shrank in his mind to nothing. His life collapsed around him, and time ceased to be.
Charlotte Mellor was as lovely as he remembered her. She had not lost the intelligent curiosity that had always dominated her gaze. She was never any less of an adult than their mother. She had always appeared so old to his childhood eyes because of it.
“Hello Lucas,” she said as a smile spread across her face that could only be described as beautiful.
“Hello Charlotte,” he replied.
He was at the bottom of the deepest well, and the world had been drawn to a pinprick of light above him. All that remained was himself and his sister.
Ryan saw and heard everything from a distance. It was on a cinema screen with a hundred-speaker surround, but every attempt to make it all real made it less so. He watched with the growing disbelief that a viewer feels when watching the final season of a show that didn’t know how to wrap up its plot.
The further the experienced evolved the more distance developed. Drunkenness grew into disassociation and the distance between his consciousness and what it viewed grew. Ryan watched his actions from over his shoulder, his own Jiminy Cricket, and then he was close enough to touch his shoulder with an outstretched hand. But then the distance extended, and the contact broke.
Ryan drifted, disconnected, as he saw himself change. He watched the fight between himself and the man. He called out to Penny, but she could not hear him. Then he saw the tall thing growing closer, and he knew what the shadow monster wanted, he could feel its cold fingers clutching at him.
He shouted at the shadow mass, and it shrieked in response. He wasn’t thinking about the words and wasn’t trying to speak, but the words came anyway. His body had slipped away from him, becoming a character he watched rather than performed. If he were the lead, then those he spoke to were merely extras not even deserving of an actual face, where the figures were was an absence, a pocket of nothing in which a person should be.
The character that Ryan had become was essentially talking to himself.
He was now in a large room, time skipping around him as it would in a dream, and with figures seated around him. He spoke in front of them but not to them. He heard the smooth ploy of a politician in his words or a performer mid-act. Then the scene faded again, what had been a tent was now a clearing where the tent had been. He was still standing in its centre, and people were standing around him in a circle, but the people had changed. They were standing now, and Ryan thought he saw that they were wearing something that fell to the grass, obscuring their shapes.
Above the stars blinked and flickered as they moved in a smooth arc. The moon pops in and out of view as if shot by a poor stop-motion cameraman. It was always a full moon, but as it moved across the sky and the grass underfoot changed Ryan knew they were being transported through the seasons.
Then the scene changed again, and there was blood. It was brief, far too quick for Ryan to see where the streak of crimson had originated. There was a blade in his hand, one he recognised. It had been the same blade he had carried into the apartment block.
It was the same he had raised to Natalie’s face.
Natalie, what had he done to Natalie?
But before he could find a response to that question everything changed again. The figure that had replaced him was older now. It was bent at the waist and hunched over the concrete that had replaced the grass. It was a bare slab of grey that reached across the clearing to the partially paved road that had been cut through the wood.
Girders appeared as if by magic, a network of steel connecting them. Then there was a feeling of nausea and he found himself higher, then a moment later he was higher still.
Beneath him the apartment block found its walls, pipes winding through them, cables snaking through rough holes cut through the cement.
There was another wave of nausea, and they were higher still, then it happened again, and they were standing on a rooftop. The lights of a city blinking around them as the smog it created muted the starlight from above.
The mansion was already there, but now it began to grow. Another floor was added, then another wing. Lights flickered and blemishes gathered around it, flooding between its ornate walls. The movement could only be people, but to Ryan, they were no more real than those around him.
The circle of people grew. What had been more than a dozen non-people was thirty now. Around them the city grew, the roads extending into the darkness, the lights strung over them flickering on. There was a sound, it pulsed between his ears like the heartbeat of a sick man, it wheezed and popped, but it was still regular and very, very loud. A moment later a light appeared in time with it, a slow strobe, equally weak, but growing in intensity.
Thunder roared, and time froze. The sudden change in temporal inertia drives Ryan further away from his body. He fought forward, but his feet were no longer connected to the ground beneath him.
He was on a rooftop, near its edge while his body and the people around it created a circle at its centre. He could feel the wind cutting through his form, it tugged at him, pulling at the essence of his being, and Ryan feared it could tear him apart if it grew much stronger.
The coven chanted and drew its sigils. Sound blared and light crept from cracks that hovered in the very air between them. Each moment the crack widened, and in the sickly light from within Ryan could see things he wished he could forget.
There was a rush of foul-smelling air, it pushed him back further, closer to the edge of the roof. He looked down and the wall descended into darkness, the ground far below no more than a child’s play set. The puffball trees dotted the felt grass, and Ryan could believe it was no more than an illusion. The heat followed, it was searing and drew the breath from his lungs if he still had lungs. Then the sliver of light snapped shut and the howl of discontent came from the assembled worshippers that raised goosebumps across Ryan’s spectral arms.
The man who had once been him tore off his robes, and Ryan realised it was him no longer. The man was tall and broad-shouldered. His face was framed by sideburns that instantly told Ryan when the scene happened.
Then there was cold darkness as complete and frigid as the grave. It pressed against Ryan, forcing the life out of him. A light flickered in the darkness, a candle flame, then another, until a sea of them was lit, and Ryan knew the scene had changed once more.
This was familiar. He had seen something similar once before. The large high domed ceilings were supported by columns cut from the cavern stone. The walls were lined with carvings and paintings of people Ryan could not name, and in the centre of the room were the figures wearing their familiar black cloaks.
Ryan felt the blade slice his flesh and he screamed a silent scream. He was stalking through dimly lit corridors. Then he was the one being stalked. He was an old man, then an old woman. He was their son holding a curved dagger that felt far too comfortable in his palm. Then he was a young woman wearing the remnants of a torn dress, kicks thundering against a door she desperately kept closed.
It was a cavalcade of blood and flesh, an avalanche of slashing blades. He swung the knife and felt it pierce his flesh, then withdrew it and it ripped free. He hacked and was hacked, and his screams of pain and rage became one.
Matty watched as Lucas and Charlie grew closer, his hands moving to her face as if he were uncertain that she was real. The expressions on their faces were of pure amazed joy. It was the face of a child receiving his fondest wish, and all Matty wanted to do, was to sit and watch. But the world would not let him. A wave washed over them, and though Charlie and Lucas were oblivious, Matty felt the earth pulled out from beneath him. If he had been standing it would have pushed him to the ground. As he was sitting it pushed him down on his face.
The earth beneath him moved and he clung on for dear life. It was like he was riding a bull that wanted to fling him from its back. The tent blinked out of existence and the stars streaked in thin trails. The moon blinked as it travelled overhead, and through it, all the earth beneath him rumbled like a giant unfed stomach.
Matty could see the figures hunched in their sinister circle, in its centre lights flashed. They were feeble at first, but they steadily grew to fitful flashes that lit the congregated like flashbulbs of sickly blue. With each burst of light, he saw something else, another figure pushed away from the group. It hung in the air. It looked like a paused free fall. But with each burst of light, it was forced away from the circle and deeper into the darkness where Matty and his companions huddled.