Speaker 1: People always imagine surveyors working in the mountains or along
beautiful stretches of coastline, standing nobly against the horizon with
a tripod and scope. The truth is most of the
time was standing alone in a field that doesn't deserve
anyone's attention, empty, sun bleached, littered with scrap metal, or
half dead hedgerows choking in plastic bags. Places waiting to
become something else. That morning was no different. A wide,
flat stretch of land on the outskirts of a dead
in town, the kind of site where the council had
already approved development before anyone bothered sending me to check
for sub service problems. You'd think if they were serious
about health and safety, they'd prioritize this step earlier. But
half my work comes down to ticking boxes after decisions
have been made. I barked my truck on the edge
of the field, grabbed my gear and hiked out into
the waist high grass with my boots soaking up yesterday's rain.
Usual checklist, boundary conformation, soil composition, utilities, elevation consistency. My
kit was standard, a total station for accuracy, a handheld
GNSS receiver and the ground penetrating radar to check beneath
the surface. Expensive tools treated better than my own health.
I logged everything methodically. That's how I worked. I followed process,
keep my paperwork tight, never cut corners, even when I
know it won't matter to anyone but me. The first
couple of hours passed like they always did, slow, methodical, solitary.
I made my passes, marking coordinates, noting anomalies. There are
a few small inconsistencies right off. My compass readings jittered
by a few degrees more than they should have, and
the genes s had a tendency to flicker, struggling to
keep a solid fix on satellite locks. That happens sometimes
near old landfill sites or when there's a high iron
content in the soil. Though the maps didn't show anything
to suggest it here, still it bothered me. I hate
noise in my data. It nags at me. Some surveyors
fluted through and write it off as margin of error.
I'm not wired like that. I don't like unresolved questions
sitting in my reports. I made another loop around the perimeter,
double checking points I had already marked. That's when I
noticed it. Something ahead near the center of the field,
something tall enough to break through them, a knot to
me of the grass, something that hadn't been there when
I walked this stretch an hour ago. At first glance,
it appeared to be utility infrastructure, possibly a temporary rig
for which paperwork had been forgotten. I moved closer, but
my chest tightened with a low creeping sense that this
wasn't right. It wasn't a cabinet or a drill rig,
or any kind of construction I'd seen before. It was
an elevator, free standing, about eight feet tall, twin doors,
a control panel fixed beside them with a single backlit
button glowing steady green. No markings, no company logos, no
rust or grime. It logged brand new, modern powered. I
walked a slow circle around it, half expecting to find scaffolding, generator,
or even loose cables snaking out of the grass. Nothing.
The thing was planted into the earth, rooted like a
permanent structure for the ground around it was undisturbed, no
tire tracks, no footprints except my own, no sign of
heavy equipment having moved through. If something had planted this year,
they'd done it without disturbing a single inch of soil,
and that was impossible. Things don't just appear fully installed
without a trace. That wasn't possible. I pulled out my phone,
flipped through the site reports again just to be sure.
Nothing listed, No pride development, no underground facilities, nothing built
or planned until this survey was complete. The last formal
record of this land showed farmland subdivided and sold off
decades ago, before elevators like this even existed. Still there
it was. I circled the elevator, slowly, taking it in
from every angle. Up close, it looked even stranger than
it had from a distance. The surface was brushed steel,
with the kind you'd expect to see in an old
office block or hospital, clean enough to show a dull
reflection of my boots in the lower panels, no signs
of age or weather damage, despite the rain that had
come the day before. The seams between the doors were
sharp and precise. The button panel beside it hummed with
quiet power, a single green light steady beside the down arrow.
There wasn't a scratch on it. It made no sense
modern elevator systems, quiet power, maintenance shafts, connection to something,
Yet here it was humming quietly in the middle of nowhere.
The more I thought about it, the more I convinced
myself there had to be a reason. Maybe someone had
started a legal development without permits. Maybe there was a
corporate project buried beneath me, one they'd gone to a
lot of trouble to hide. If so, my job wasn't
just to take soil samples and boundary readings anymore. Part
of surveying is reporting anomalies. Unauthorized construction had to be documented.
That thought settled the debate for me. Curiosity played its part, sure,
but this wasn't about curiosity anymore. This was about liability,
about making sure that people who came after me didn't
stumble into something dangerous because I hadn't done my due diligence.
I stepped up to the doors and rested my finger
on the call button. Again, I pressed it. I don't
really know what I expected to happen when I pressed
the button. Maybe nothing, maybe for the light to flicker
out and remind me that what I was looking at
couldn't possibly be real. What I didn't expect was for
the elevator to answer with a low hum and a
faint tremor beneath my boots. The machinery kicked into life
somewhere below. Cables tightened, gears turned, and the elevator rose
smooth into place. The doors opened without hesitation, revealing a clean,
empty car waiting for me. The interior smelled faintly metallic,
the sterile scent of something mechanical and unused. I stepped
forward just far enough to study the panel inside. The
floor selection was simple, ground level marked as G. Below that,
floors labeled minus one through minus seven. Only the first
basement level was lit. The button glowed steadily and palely,
inviting me down. For a moment, I stood there, weighing
it in my mind. This wasn't standard procedure. No one
would expect me to step into an elevator in the
middle of a field, and no one would question me
if I flagged it in the report and walked away.
But what if there was something down there, some illegal structure,
a liability hidden beneath the earth. Unauthorized builds aren't exactly
well known for their amazing structural integrity. If I left
it unchecked and something happened later, it would come back
on me. Part of this job is making sure the
ground is safe before others build on it. That responsibility
doesn't just stop because something feels wrong. One floor. That
was all I could take a quick look and confirm
it was an old maintenance space or something more recent.
Just one level to investigate standard due diligence. I stepped inside,
pressed the button for minus one, and felt the car
lurched gently as it began to sink into the earth.
The car shuttered as it reached it stop. The door
slid open, and for a moment I thought I stepped
into a time capsule. The floor stretched out ahead in grim,
flickering light, lined with sagging cubicle walls and peeling lanonium tiles.
Exposed concrete framed the ceiling, where aging fluorescents drips hummed
without pattern, casting intermittent shadows across the space. It felt abandoned,
not ruined, not collapsed, just left, as though everyone had
walked out at once and never returned. I moved forward cautiously.
The ear was thick with the smell of old coffee
and stale paper. My boots echoed against the floor, drawing
attention to the silence that pressed in from every side.
A small breakroom sat off to my left. His glass
panel smeared with grease and handprints so faded that they
looked fossilized. Inside chairs were pulled out as if waiting
for people to return. On one table sat a styrophooned cup,
half full. The coffee inside had grown a film of scum.
The cigarette burned in an astray nearby, smoke still lifting
in a lazy spiral. I stood there, trying to make
sense of what I was seeing. There was no power
to this place, no fee connected it to the surface grid,
and no generator. Noise hummed behind the walls. My scanner
confirmed it zero utilities, zero heat signatures, and yet here
it was lights on, smoke rising, something half drunk sitting
warm in a cup. I moved further in, examining a
row of desks. Paperwork littered them, yellowed with age, but
still legible. Maintenance logs, requisition orders for supplies, mundane office
debris from a company that didn't exist on any records
I'd been given. One memo caught my eye more than
the rest. It was stable to a corkboard in the
corner of the room. Strict protoll no unauthorized personnel permitted
below level three under any circumstances. Maintenance team reports must
be signed off on prior to departure. Another sign, more official,
more permanent, showed a cartoon worker in a hard hat
giving a thumbs up under bold red text always follow
maintenance protocols. Below level three, I felt the first twist
of unknease in my chest. This wasn't some abandoned structure
forgotten by paperwork. This was built, deliberately, organized, planned for
depths the surface had no record of I returned to
the elevator faster than I intended. My finger went straight
to the ground floor button. I pressed it, waited, pressed
it again, harder. The button remained dark beneath my thumb.
No response. I tried holding it down, willing the doors
to close. Nothing happened. I stepped back, hart climbing higher
in my throat. I wasn't stuck, not yet. Maybe the
elevator system was wired to operate sequentially. That would make
sense if this was an old security protocol restricting access
one level at a time until clearance was confirmed. The
only button lit now was for minus two. I'd checked
my phone for a dash of hope, but of course,
no signal. One floor at a time, no other path
forward that was the logic. I grabbed on to the
reasoning that kept me from losing my nerve. If I
wanted to get back to the surface, I'd have to
reach the bottom and hope the controls reset. That was
how these things worked, wasn't it. If it wasn't, pretending
made it easier to calm down. The doors closed without
my touch. The button for minus two glowed steadily, and
the elevator began to descend again. I braced myself. Whatever
was down there, i'd see it soon enough. When the
doors opened again, I thought for a moment that the
elevator had broken entirely. This couldn't be another floor beneath
the corporate basement. This couldn't be long underground at all.
I stepped out into what looked like a house, a complete,
fully furnished suburban home, the kind built in the nineties,
with wood paneling and patterned wallpaper that hadn't aged well.
A lamp hung softly in the corner. Yellowed black lines
flitted pale light under carpet worn down to the threads.
Somewhere a clock to tigged steadily. The air smelt faintly
of burnt toast and old cleaning products. It was the
smell of someone's daily routine, long since abandoned, but somehow
still hanging on. I walked forward, drawn through a narrow
hallway into a living room that could have belonged to
any tired suburban family from thirty years ago. Framed photographs
line the mantle. I picked one up, turned it toward me.
My breath caught. It looked like an inane family portrait,
the posing of an idealistic nuclear family. But the more
I stared, the stranger it got. I wasn't sure if
it started normally. I was shifting so slowly it was imperceptible.
The faces held uncanny features, eyes slightly shifted smiles that
didn't hold an ounce of happiness. All of it culminated
in my gut, sinking each second I sturdied it. I
put it away, hoping it was a one off, and
looked through others, hoping one would hold a clue as
to where I was. But each had the same effect.
My stomach feeling acidic from the stress. Nothing bad happened,
but my body felt like it had a near death
experience simply from standing in one spot. I couldn't help
but move on. I checked my phone, no surface, no
time displayed on the lock screen. The battery igon remained
frozen at eighty two percent. For a moment, I stood
in the middle of that room and listened. Somewhere in
the house, water dripped slowly, a rhythmic patter that echoed
through unseen pipes. Beyond the windows. Nothing but raw concrete
pressed against the glass, No hint of anything existing beyond
the walls, just blank, gray, featureless and absolute. There were
no doors leading out, no stairs going up or down,
only hallways that curved around into the same rooms, again,
looping quietly, as if this space existed in fragments, repeating
themselves over and over. I found myself back where I started,
without realizing how I had gotten there. The elevator stood open,
waiting in soft interior light, the only thing breaking the dimness.
The ground floor buttons still remained dark. Only minus three
now glowed, as if daring me to press it. I hesitated.
Nothing here had threatened me, nothing had tried to keep me.
Yet the weight of something unseen pressed deeper into my chest.
This place wasn't dangerous, not yet, but it wasn't meant
to be found. I stepped back inside the doors, closed,
and I felt the drop begin again. The doors opened
onto a corridor tiled in an institutional pale blue, meant
to calm nerves, but rarely succeeding. The walls were clean
in places, peeling in others. The lights overhead buzzed inconsistently,
casting uneven strips of cold fluorescent across the floor. I
recognized the smell immediately, antiseptic, old metal, something faintly chemical
beneath it. All a hospital, or something built to resemble one.
I moved forward, slowly, stepping past the bandoned gurneys and
carts of surgical tools laid out in neat untouched. Rose
through a set of swinging doors, I found the operating theater.
A large observation window loomed above it, glass cracked in
several places below. The room held the chaos of an
interrupted procedure. A body rested on the table beneath a
circle of bright surgical lamps. Blood crossed the sheets beneath it,
though the edges glistened wet under the harsh light. Tubes
still fed clear liquid through hanging IV bags, the fluid
running with a slow, steady drip despite no one watching.
Metal trays held bone, saws, scalpels, and rib spreaders, all
laid out with the precision of professionals. I had no
intention of cleaning up after themselves. I approached the table.
The body was covered from the neck down, but even
under the sheet, I could see the wrongness of its shape,
too thin in some places, too bloated in others. Limbs,
bented angles that didn't match how bone should move. Beside
the table, a clipboard hung from a rail. I flipped
through the patient files without thinking, scanning lines of text.
My brain struggled to process different dates, different injuries, gunshot wounds,
blunt force trauma, surgical extraction, organ failure, brain death. Some
of them couldn't be possible. One listed dissection was still alive.
Another marked the procedure as completed, despite a date that
hadn't happened yet. Something shifted behind the far curtain. I froze.
The movement was slow, steady, A shadow pressed against the fabric,
a shape too tall to be human, too thin to
belong in this world. The curtain rippled as it moved
behind it, tracing a careful, deliberate path along the wall.
The surgical lamps flickered overhead, one by one. They blinked out,
plunging parts of the room into uneven darkness. Footsteps echoed
across the tile, soft at first, then louder, coming from
more than one direction. I couldn't see anything in the
corners of the room where the light had died, but
I could hear breath rasping from somewhere close, heavy and wet.
I didn't wait to see what would see step through
the curtain. I backed toward the elevator, my hands shaking
as I reached for the button. The doors opened faster
than I expected. I stepped inside and slammed my palm
against the panel. Only minus four was lit. Now the
doors closed before the footsteps could reach me, and I
felt the car sink lower into the earth. Out of
habit I reviewed what had just happened. Each floor before
had been empty, unsettling, but empty. I had grown complacent
that this strange structure were just glimpses into a maddened mind,
that nothing would manifest. But I was proven wrong, and
I feared what the rest of the floors held. When
the doors open again, the smell hit me first, stagnant
water mixed with mildew, and something acred beneath it all.
The light overhead flickered weakly, revealing tiled floors. There were
lost beneath a layer of black water, which rippled with slow,
unnatural motion. I wanted to just stay in the elevator
car and wait for the next button to light up,
But no matter how long I stood there, frozen by
mental exhaustion, none of the buttons lit up. I was
forced to move forward. I stepped out and felt the
chill soak through my boots. The water reached my calves,
thick and oily enough to leave a sheen on my skin.
I stood in what once had been a shopping mall.
Store fronts lined the wide corridor. The neon signs burned
out or replaced with names that made my head ache
to read. Clothing displays featured rows of shirts and jackets
I recognized from my own closet, but the cuts were
off and the collars bled together where the seams met.
Every logo looked almost correct, but shifted when I tried
to focus on their details. Mannekins filled the stores and hallways,
half submerged, their blank faces aimed toward the water's surface.
Some bobbled gently, as if breathing. Beneath the black depths,
though it could have just been the ebb and flow
of the water. Others leaned against the glass walls, hands
breast flat, as if trying to force their way out.
I moved carefully between them, watching their stillness for any
sign of change. One blinked as I passed, Another turned
its head just enough for me to catch the movement
from the corner of my eye. The light above hummed louder,
casting the water in a dull, sickly glow. As I
glanced down, my reflection stared back, not just stared, moved.
It looked like a second version of me, beneath the water,
watching with calm indifference. When I stepped forward, it stayed
still until it shifted fast through the water, no longer
overlapping with my reflection, and off white blur moving through
the water. Another mannikin the water never settled from when
it moved. Something was happening. The water began to rise.
I could feel the pull against my legs, dragging me
down inch by inch shelves and sign It shifted with
groaning protests, soaked toward some unseen drain beneath the floor,
beneath the noise Something moved faster, now circling me, unseen
but close enough to disturb the Mannikins. As it passed,
they bobbed in its wake, heads dipping below the surface.
One by one, I turned toward the elevator, forcing myself
through the thickened current. The water clawed on my legs.
Every step felt heavier than the last. The Mannikin that
it blinked now floated face down in front of me,
blocking my path. I shoved past it without looking back.
The elevator waited, doors open, light spilling under the water's
black surface. I pushed forward with everything I had left.
Something brushed against my ankle. I didn't look down. I
threw myself into the elevator just as the water surged higher,
slapping against the threshold with enough force to splash across
the floor. My hand hid the panel and blind desperation,
fingers smearing wet across the buttons until one responded beneath
my palm. I didn't even see which one it was
until the doors grown shut, ceiling the dark water outside
with a hollow, metallic thud. Something heavy struck the doors
from the other side, not fists, not hands, something deeper,
something slower. The whole car trembled beneath the impact. I
pressed my back into the corner as the water drained
from the elevator car chest heaving, soaked through and shivering.
My eyes found the panel on instinct minus six was lit,
now steady and silent, waiting to take me further down.
I felt my stomach twist. For a few seconds. I
thought about the situation I was in. Each time moving
on threw me into more peril, but staying was a
death sentence. It felt like a choice of a fast
death or a death of a thousand cuts. Each descent
was closer to whatever weighted at the bottom, but there
wasn't a choice. The ground floor wasn't coming back. This
elevator only moved in one direction. The elevator opened into darkness,
not the kind of shadow that comes from a power outage,
but real, endless black, stretching high above the canopy of
silent trees. It wasn't a room. It wasn't even an
illusion of a room. It was a forest. There was cold,
damp with pine and rot, Dirt crunched under foot, damp
leaves clung to my boots, A full forest planted beneath
the earth, no walls, no horizon, no stars. I stepped out, slowly,
flashlights sweeping across tangled branches and leaning trunks. The beam
felt thinner than before, weaker. The darkness swallowed everything beyond
a few steps ahead. I knew this place, not exactly,
not the details, but the shape of it, but where
the trees leaned in too close, but where the trails
led nowhere or looped. I dreamed this place as a kid,
over and over again, always this forest, always this sky,
pitch black with no stars. Something had pulled it from
the back of my mind. I made it real. Somewhere
far off, I heard something move, not a loud crash,
just the soft drag of something tall, rushing through the undergrowth.
I didn't call out, didn't even whisper. I just moved forward,
one step at a time, toward a trail barely wide
enough for me to pass. Branches clawed at my arms
and face. No wind, no birds, just that steady, distant shifting,
always behind the trees, always out of sight. I found
signs of others. A half buried compass with a case
and cracked open, a metal clipboard snapped in half, the
surveyors pole leaning against the tree, snapped at the base
across the water bottle, still sealed, still full. Whatever had
been here before me had lasted long. The path narrowed,
the trees got thicker. My flashlight caught movement just beyond reach,
something thin, impossibly tall, watching, never closer, never retreating, always
in the corner of my eye. Then it moved, no sound,
no warning. It blurred through the trees, straight toward me.
I ran, Branches whipped to my face, roots snagged my ankles.
I didn't care. I sprinted through the black, lungs, burning flashlights,
swinging wildly. Then something touched me, just for a second.
Cold fingers brushed the back of my neck. I dropped
the flashlight, dove forward, and rolled into a clearing. No trees,
no walls, just a pair of metal elevator doors, standing
upright in the dirt, with no shaft, no structure to
hold them. They opened. I didn't think, I didn't look back.
I ran through them and hid the panel. As the
doors began to close, I saw it again, a figure,
impossibly tall, almost human, but stretched wrong, watching from the
tree line. Then the door sealed and the button for
minus seven lit up. I leaned back trying to catch
my breath. My neck still burned where it had touched me.
Not a cut, not a bruise, but something had left
a part of itself there, and I was taking it
with me to the final floor. The descent to minus
seven felt longer than the others. The elevator grown through
the shaft each passing second, stretching my nerves tighter. I
closed my eyes, trying to control my breathing. It wasn't working.
My heart hammered against my ribs like it wanted out,
like it already knew I wasn't making it back to
the surface. I couldn't shake the thought that I had
already passed the point where people stop escaping places like this.
Whatever rules I thought I understood when I stepped into
the elevator didn't matter anymore. Each floor hadn't just been
stranger than the last, they'd been an escalating threat. By
the time the doors opened again, I was prepared to
see hell it's waiting. What greeted me instead was silence.
Silence wrapped in dust and concrete. I didn't step far
from the elevator at first. My instinct told me to
turn around, press whatever button would bring me back up
and never come down again. I hadn't trusted this place
from the start, but now it felt worse than a mistake.
It felt final. I turned back and pressed the ground
level button. Nothing happened. I hit it again, this time harder.
I jugged every button on the panel, one after the other.
If I couldn't get back to the surface, I felt
the other floors would be safer than this one, any
of them. Gee stayed dark. The numbers below minus one
gave no reaction at all. Only min seven gloats, steady
and silent. I waited, hoping the doors might shut on
the roan, that the car might pull me out of
here without asking permission. The doors stayed open. The lights
inside the car flickered once, then dimmed. I stepped back,
breathing hard. My throat felt tight, as if the air
down here had thickened the longer I stood in it.
I knew, without needing to say it out loud, that
this elevator wasn't going to take me anywhere, not anymore,
not until it wanted to. If I wanted to leave,
I wasn't going back the way I came. The thought
crawled under my skin and settled in the pit of
my stomach. My only way forward meant stepping deeper into
the floor that would surely kill me. Into whatever waited,
I stepped out into a vast cavern of unfinished construction.
Poured concrete stretched in every direction, cracked and splintered where
support beam stood half embedded into the ceiling. Scaffolding loomed
in twisted sections, Some bolted upright, others collapsed in tangled heaps.
Tower lights stood in clusters, but none of them worked.
Pale bulbs hung dead and cold. The only illumination came
from the elevator itself and a few scattered work lamps
running on a circuit. I couldn't see. My boots crunched
across grit and broken tile. Tools lay abandoned across the floor.
No brands, no markings, just shapes worn smooth from use
a sledgehammer, bowl cutters, coils of wire. None of it
belonged to any company I'd ever heard of. Blueprints littered
a drafting table near the center of the space, pinned
beneath rusted clamps. I glanced down and felt my stomach turn.
The designs weren't possible. Stairwells that curved into themselves, doors
without hinges, rooms connected in ways geometry shouldn't allow. One
diagram showed a space labeled habitation unit, but though no
entrance is drawn, no exits either. Another detail called the
observation Chamber Stage three, with dozens of small circles crowded
the corners, each labeled as a camera. The space itself
consisted of a single chair bolted to the center. I
flipped through more pages. The plans grew worse. One room
bore no markings except the titles, scrawled in handwriting that
looked rush your replacement. Another blueprint detailed a pit described
only as depth unknown, but showed bones layered through the
black beneath it, spreading outward in impossible spirals. My throat tightened.
I understood now I had been moving towards something by design,
not a mistake, not an accident, a process. This wasn't
a ruin or a forgotten place. This was construction in progress, tailored, evolving,
unfinished only because whoever built it had yet decided how
to finish me, or whoever this place was designed for.
I moved carefully, even half built. This place wasn't safe.
Gaps in the floor dropped into black voids that seemed
to have no end, rebarred, jutted from concrete at angles
sharp enough to impale. Scaffolding leaned at unstable slants. One
wrong step and I would vanish into the dark beneath
more than once I thought I heard movement above me,
something scraping across the girders. I refused to look up.
The sense of being watched grew heavier with every step.
Lights flickered when none should have worked, illuminating paths I
hadn't seen before, then vanishing the second I turned away,
The labyrinth rearranged itself, I was sure of it always
ended where they shouldn't. Walls appeared where gaps had been
moments earlier. Through it all, I kept moving, I had to.
Standing still felt worse than any danger I could see.
I found a service elevator tucked into a corner where
no structure should have allowed space for it, smaller than
the other older manual controls, behind a grater door that
groaned as I pulled it open. One button labeled two
surface in worn metal letters. For a moment, I hesitated, relief,
wared with dread. I understood where this place had been
built to become if it had been finished, there wouldn't
have been a door waiting for me at all. There
would have been a pit, a chair, a box with
my name on it. And I couldn't help but wonder
if this tiny glimpse of hope was another test to fail.
But I had no other choice. I pulled the lever.
The elevator shuddered into motion, rising with agonizing slowness. The
construction site fell away beneath me. I didn't feel safe,
I felt lucky. Luck was thin protection, but for now
it would have to be enough. When the surface elevator
doors opened, I stepped out into silence. The air felt
colder than it had when I arrived. The wind moved
through the grass with a soft rustle, empty of any
sound but nature and my breathing. No buildings, no elevator
shaft rising from the dirt, just the field, empty and ordinary,
stretching out under a sky too great to tell time by.
I stood there for a long time, unable to move.
My boots sank slightly into the soft earth, and I
let them. I let everything go, slack, my hand, my thoughts,
my fear. It was drained out of me in waves,
leaving behind a numbness that felt worse in its own way.
The gear I had carried down was gone. The clipboard
I clutched through every descent hung limp at my side.
My paperwork was still blank. I could not write down
what had happened, because I did not know how to
explain it, even to myself. For a moment, I believed
I had imagined it all, that some exhaustion or sickness
had cracked open a space in my mind and let
this happen inside it. That I had never gone down,
never found those rooms waiting beneath me, that I would
walk back to the truck and drive home and forget.
Then I heard it ding. The sound cut through the silence,
clean and sharp. I turned toward the elevator, had been
expecting to see nothing. A mechanical groan followed. Cable was
pulling tork beneath the soil that showed no sign of disturbance.
The car I had just emerged from was slowly descending
back down. The sound of weight moving downward pulled deeper
into something unseen. For a heartbeat, I told myself it
was automatic, a fail safe, returning the car to its
resting point. But another thought crawled into my chest and
rooted there. What if something had called it back down?
And if so, was it coming back up? I didn't
wait to find out. The spell broke, and my legs
moved before my mind caught up. I walked fast, then faster,
pushing through the grass until I saw my truck waiting
untouched at the edge of the field. I climbed inside,
slammed the door shut, and gripped the wheel until my
knuckles burned white. The clipboard lay in the passenger seat,
paperwork blank. It would stay that way. I could not
explain this, not to my boss, not to myself, not
to anyone out in the field. The wind kept blowing.
I sat behind the glass, staring at the empty place
where the elevator had been, waiting for the sound of
it returning to pull me under all over again. And
after a breath, I left