The Elevator Anthology – Part III
The power cut hit just as Nadia pressed the button for the seventh floor. The lift jolted, lights flickering, then settled into a dim emergency glow that cast everything in shades of red. She’d been hoping to make it home before the blackouts started—London had been suffering them all week, the heatwave pushing the grid past breaking point—but her luck had run out.
Four others shared the space with her. Tim, the delivery driver from 12B, clutching a parcel and checking his phone with increasing irritation. Mrs Dyer from the ground floor, her dog carrier resting at her feet, the small terrier inside panting in the heat. And Ellie, the young mother from 9A, bouncing a fussy toddler on her hip.
“Just a power cut,” Tim muttered, jabbing the ground floor button. Nothing happened. He tried again. “Come on.”
The emergency light pulsed once, twice, then stabilized. The lift remained still.
“We’re stuck,” Mrs Dyer said quietly.
Nadia pressed the emergency call button. A burst of static, then nothing. She tried her phone—one bar of signal, then it died completely. Around her, the others checked theirs. All dead.
“Someone will come,” Ellie said, more to her toddler than anyone else. “They’ll get us out soon.”
The heat was building. Nadia could feel sweat trickling down her spine, her NHS uniform sticking to her skin after a twelve-hour shift. The toddler’s crying had shifted from fussy to distressed, a high keening that filled the small space.
“How long have we got?” Tim asked.
“Air?” Nadia said. “Hours. We’ll be fine.”
But she wasn’t sure she believed it.
Twenty minutes passed. Maybe thirty. Time stretched and compressed in the red-tinted darkness.
Tim had tried forcing the doors twice, getting his fingers into the crack between them, pulling until his arms shook. “There has to be a way out.”
“Leave it,” Nadia said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I can’t just sit here.” He wrenched at the doors again, and this time they opened—just an inch, maybe two.
Beyond was darkness. Not the darkness of a shaft with distant walls and cables, but absolute blackness. As if the lift had stopped in a void.
Tim froze, his hands still gripping the doors.
Something in that darkness moved.
A shifting, like fabric stirring in a breeze that shouldn’t exist. Tim felt it too; Nadia saw his whole body go rigid. Then whatever it was pressed closer to the gap—
Tim released the doors. They snapped shut with a pneumatic hiss.
Nobody spoke. The toddler had stopped crying.
“What was that?” Ellie whispered.
“Nothing,” Tim said, but his voice shook. “Just… the shaft. It’s dark, that’s all.”
The emergency light flickered. Just once, but in that brief moment of darkness, Nadia could have sworn the lift had rotated, showed her a different angle of the same four walls. Then the light returned, and everything looked normal.
Mrs Dyer was staring at her dog carrier, her face chalk-white.
“She’s not moving,” she said.
The carrier sat at her feet, the little terrier curled up inside, completely still. Too still.
“She’s just sleeping,” Ellie said.
“She doesn’t sleep like that.” Mrs Dyer bent down, her fingers fumbling with the latch. “Pippa? Pippa, come on now.”
The emergency light flickered again. Longer this time—two seconds, maybe three. When it came back, Mrs Dyer was kneeling on the floor, the carrier open in front of her.
Empty.
The latch was still locked.
“Where is she?” Mrs Dyer’s voice climbed. “Where’s my dog?”
“She must have—” Tim started, then stopped. There was nowhere for the dog to have gone. The carrier had been closed. The lift was sealed.
Above them, something scraped across the roof of the lift. Slow, deliberate. Like claws on metal.
Mrs Dyer looked up, her face pale. “What was that?”
The argument started over nothing—whose fault it was they were stuck, whether they should try the doors again, why the emergency services hadn’t come. Voices rising in the stifling heat, fear turning into anger because anger was easier to hold than terror.
“You saw something,” Mrs Dyer said, rounding on Tim. “When you opened those doors. What was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar!”
The floor indicator above the doors flickered to life. Instead of showing “7” where they’d stopped, it displayed a single word in block letters: LIAR
Tim stared at it, his face going white. “What the hell?”
The lift lurched beneath them—just an inch, but enough to make Nadia’s stomach drop. Metal groaned in the shaft above, stress and strain made audible.
“Say something,” Nadia said quietly.
“What?”
“Just talk. Say anything.”
Ellie spoke, her voice barely a whisper: “I want to go home.”
The display flickered: HOME
The lift shuddered again, settling with a creak that echoed in the confined space.
“It’s listening,” Nadia whispered. “It’s reacting to us.”
“That’s insane,” Tim said. But his eyes stayed on the display.
Tim was pacing, agitated. “We can’t just sit here. We have to do something—”
The lights went out completely.
In the darkness, Nadia heard breathing. Close. Too close. Not from any of them. A wet, rattling sound that came from everywhere and nowhere.
She tried to call out but her voice caught in her throat. The breathing grew louder, closer, and she felt the air move as something passed between them in the dark—
The lights flickered back on.
Mrs Dyer was gone.
The dog carrier sat on the floor, empty, its door hanging open. The latch was still locked.
“No,” Ellie breathed. “No, no, no—”
“Where did she go?” Tim shouted. “Where the fuck did she go?”
Four of them had entered the lift. Now only three remained. Nobody had seen what happened.
Time became meaningless. They sat in silence broken only by the toddler’s occasional whimper and the creak of the lift around them. Tim paced the narrow space like a caged animal.
“This isn’t happening,” he kept saying. “This can’t be happening.”
The floor indicator came alive, flashing numbers: 7… 6… 5…
“We’re moving,” Nadia said.
But they weren’t. The lift hadn’t shifted. The display continued its countdown.
4… 3… 2…
“Make it stop,” Ellie whispered, clutching her daughter tighter. “Please make it stop.”
1…
Ground.
For a moment, Nadia felt a surge of hope. But the numbers kept changing.
Basement. B1. B2.
“That’s not possible,” Tim said. “This building doesn’t have basements.”
B3. B4.
The lights were flickering faster, stuttering like a dying heartbeat. In the brief moments of darkness, Nadia heard it again—that breathing, that presence in the spaces between their reality.
“Don’t open your eyes,” Ellie said suddenly. “When it goes dark again, don’t look.”
“How do you know?” Nadia asked.
“I’ve lived here five years. People disappear sometimes. The lift takes them.” She broke off, shaking her head. “I thought they were just stories. The building’s always been hungry.”
B5.
The speaker above them crackled to life. “Emergency response,” a voice said, distorted and wrong. “Stay calm. We are opening the doors.”
Tim scrambled to his feet. “Finally, thank—”
The doors slid open.
Beyond was nothing. Not even the blackness of an empty shaft—just an absence so complete it hurt to look at. A void that devoured light.
Tim approached cautiously, peering into the darkness. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
The blackness moved.
It didn’t reach out slowly or creep forward. It lunged—a tendril of darkness that wrapped around Tim’s ankle with impossible speed. He had time for one startled gasp before it yanked him backwards off his feet.
The others watched in horror, frozen, as the darkness pulled him through the doors. He clawed at the lift floor, his fingers scrabbling for purchase, his mouth open in a silent scream—
And then he was gone. Swallowed by that absolute black.
The doors slid shut.
The floor indicator showed: B6.
Only Nadia and Ellie remained, the toddler quiet now, unnaturally so, staring at nothing with wide, glassy eyes.
“During the blackouts—” Ellie was shaking violently, clutching her daughter. “That’s when it happens. My neighbour, three months ago—they said she moved out but all her things, everything was still there—”
“You knew?” Nadia’s voice cracked. “You knew something was wrong with this building and you didn’t say anything?”
“I thought they were just stories! The lift takes people, the building’s always been hungry—I thought it was just—” She broke off, tears streaming down her face. “I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.”
The lights flickered again. Nadia grabbed Ellie’s arm. “Don’t look. Keep your eyes shut.”
Darkness swallowed them.
The breathing was right there, inches away. Nadia felt something brush against her cheek, cold and wrong, textured like old leather or dried scales. She kept her eyes squeezed shut, every muscle rigid, not breathing, not moving—
The lights returned.
Nadia was alone.
Ellie and the baby were gone. Just gone, as if they’d never been there. The lift was empty except for Nadia, standing in the centre of that red-lit metal box, somewhere far below the world she knew.
The display showed: B10.
The breathing came again, all around her.
She closed her eyes and waited.
Morning light streamed through the lift shaft when the maintenance crew finally got the doors open. The power had come back on an hour ago, and someone in the building had reported the lift stuck between floors six and seven.
“Bloody heatwave,” one of them muttered, forcing the doors apart. “Plays hell with the electrics.”
The lift was empty. Clean. Nothing to suggest anyone had been inside for hours.
Except for one detail the younger maintenance worker noticed: a small dog carrier sitting in the corner, its door hanging open. The latch was still locked.
“That’s weird,” he said, peering inside. Empty. “Why would someone leave this?”
His colleague shrugged. “Everything’s weird in this building. You’ll get used to it.”
They moved the carrier aside, reset the system. The lift hummed to life, the floor indicator cycling through its numbers before settling on a cheerful “G”.
From the speaker came the automated voice, pleasant and professional:
“Going up.”
The doors opened onto the empty ground floor lobby, ready for the morning’s first passengers.
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