Descent into the old building

The night was damp with drizzle that smeared the neon signs into muddy halos. We slipped through a gap in the Riverside Municipal Building’s load-bearing memory, where stairwells once groaned with life and now only whispered. At the heart of the decay stood an elevator, its doors pitted like rusted teeth and its call button cracked with years of neglect. It seemed to inhale when we pressed the panel, the cabin lights sputtering to life as if a tired animal stirs from sleep. We climbed inside, five silhouettes curling into a space that hadn’t welcomed visitors in a decade, maybe more.

The cab lurched upward with a companionable groan, and the city outside shrank to a smear of rain and streetlamps. The floor indicator flickered, but the numbers didn’t match the floors we passed. The air grew colder, and a metallic sweetness settled on our tongues. Mirrors along the shaft reflected not just our faces but a hundred versions of us, each glance backward a step deeper into nostalgia or threat—like the elevator wished to inventory our lives before swallowing them whole.

Voices in the metal

A tremor rolled through the cabin, and a whisper rose from the heating ducts, low enough to feel in the bones:

The elevator does not climb to you; you descend into what you forgot about yourself.

The ride wore on, and the walls began to breathe with a faint, rhythmic sigh that wasn’t quite a sound and wasn’t quite a breath. We pressed our backs harder against the corners, as if gravity might slip away if we refused to acknowledge it. The doors between us and the outside world tightened, then opened onto a hallway that existed only in the spaces between floors—the kind of corridor that makes you doubt you’re awake, that makes your heartbeat sound like a metronome for a ritual too old to name.

Floor truths in a numbered maze

• Floor numbers flip backward, then evaporate from the display, leaving us with nothing but air and memory.
• Cold breath fogs at the corners where the walls meet the ceiling, forming silhouettes that resemble people we once knew.
• Mirrors along the shaft show faces that aren’t ours, or perhaps versions of us from another ascent.
• The floor indicator is stubbornly stuck on a symbol that isn’t a floor at all, a labyrinth carved into light.
• Every exit door opens onto a street that looks familiar, yet not the one we left behind.

When the ride becomes the trap

We reached a floor that never existed on any map—the air hummed with a pale blue glow, and the walls bore names of streets that never existed—names that felt like old gossip the city forgot to bury. Footsteps echoed beyond the metal, and a single streetlight flickered in a window that wasn’t there before. A voice inside the car, perhaps the elevator’s own, counted us in reverse until we could no longer trust our reflection to be our own.

When the doors finally opened to a corridor that stretched into infinity, we realized the ride wasn’t transporting us anywhere. It was training us to disappear in broad daylight, to melt into the city’s memory until there was nothing left but a rumor about a ride that forgot to bring people home.