Seventeen Floors Down

I did not turn on the flashlight.

My thumb slid off the icon. I closed my hand around the phone, and the little cone of potential light went out of my life like a candle in a draft, and the dark settled back over my face. I felt, rather than saw, my daughter's shoulders unlock. Her breath left her in a long soft rush, and she let go of my sleeve, and caught my hand in both of hers, and for a moment held it against her chest.

I could feel her heart through the thin cotton of her coat. It was running like a rabbit's.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I don't know that I'm right."

"You are."

"June, you can't know that."

She didn't answer. She only gave my hand a small hard squeeze, and I let her lead me, because the alternative was to stand in the doorway of my own home arguing with my child about an unknowable thing while the dark listened.

I eased the apartment door shut behind us. I did it by inches, holding the knob turned so the latch wouldn't snap, and when the door met the frame I let the knob return in a slow silent half-turn. I didn't lock it. I couldn't have: the keys were on the hook inside, where they hung every night, and it didn't matter anyway. The thing I was protecting wasn't a lock. It was a promise that the world behind that door would still be mine if I came back for it.

Then I turned and followed my daughter down the black corridor, with my left shoulder against the wall.

…

The hallway had a texture I had never noticed before.

The carpet, thin and worn, gave under my slippers with a soft, gritty, unpleasant crunch that I could feel through the soles. The wall under my fingertips was cool painted drywall, the paint peeling at the baseboard in a way that I'd complained about for three years in emails to management. Every few feet my hand brushed a doorframe, and each doorframe was a small shock. Seventeen-oh-three. Seventeen-oh-two. Seventeen-oh-one. I realized that I was counting them, the way June did.

I passed 1705.

I did not slow. I will say that for myself, because it cost me more than anything I've done before or since. The mat that said Welcome Friends was under my slippers. The paper pumpkin that Isabel Hernandez had colored touched my hair as I went by and swung back on its string, and I felt the tiny dry whisper of it on my ear. I did not knock. I did not call. I put my hand over my mouth and kept walking, and a small cold part of me, a part I had never met, stood off to one side and recorded the moment in flat black letters. You left them.

I would carry it. I knew that I would. I told myself that I would come back. I told myself that I would call the police the moment we reached a signal, and that every hour they were safe they owed to my silence. I told myself so many things in the space of twelve feet that by the end of it I had built a whole structure of reasons. And at the bottom of it, like a stone at the bottom of a river, was the fact that I was walking away from an old man and two little children, and my feet had not once stopped moving.

"Mom." June's whisper came from just ahead. "Here."

The fire door.

I felt it before I saw it, a rush of cold on my face, strong enough to stir my hair. In all the years I'd lived on seventeen, that door had been shut. It was a heavy gray steel door, with a spring hinge and a push bar, and under city fire code it had to be kept closed at all times. I'd been told so by a building manager with a mustache on the one occasion that I'd propped it open with a doorstop to carry in a couch. It was open now. Not wide. A hand's width, the same sliver I'd seen glittering in the dark, and the air that poured through it was stale, damp, and many degrees colder than the hall, the breath of a deep concrete shaft.

June stopped at the gap.

I thought she would step through. Instead she held up a hand, flat, and I stopped. She reached into her coat pocket, and I heard the faint clink of change. She drew something out and held it up in the dark, and I made it out by feel and by the faint shape of her wrist: a coin, a quarter, pinched between a finger and a thumb.

She lifted her arm, leaned toward the gap, and dropped it.

The coin fell through the crack, and I heard it hit the landing on the other side, a bright thin tink of metal on concrete, so loud in that silence that I flinched and my whole body went rigid. It rang once, and then it rolled. I could hear it going away, a small rising whirr as it spun around the corner of the stairs, a lap, then another. It slowed. It wobbled. It clattered flat.

And nothing happened.

No shout. No step. No change in the air. There was no sudden stillness of someone who had been moving and had stopped to listen. I stood with every muscle clenched, waiting for a head to turn in the dark, a foot to scrape. A second went by. Two. Five. The coin lay on the floor somewhere below and the stairwell went on being a stairwell, cold and empty and indifferent.

June let out a breath.

"Nobody's on this landing," she said. She sounded very old. "Or the next one up. It's the quickest test I know. If somebody's close, they move when they hear it. Even if they don't mean to."

"Where did you learn that?"

She looked at me. I could not read her face, but I felt the weight of the look, as one feels a hand on a shoulder.

"A long time ago," she said, and stepped through the door.

…

The stairwell was darker than the hall.

I hadn't thought that was possible. The corridor had been a tunnel, but there had been a faint residual gray in it, the ghost of a light somewhere, the eye's own invention. The stairwell was black. It was a black with weight, with a smell: wet concrete and old paint and the iron sourness of a handrail that had been touched by ten thousand hands. I stepped through the door and my slipper came down on cold cement, and the dark closed over my head like water.

I put out my left hand and found the railing.

It was steel, rough with flaking enamel, wet in a way that I didn't want to think about. It ran down along the wall in a diagonal I could feel but not see, and I gripped it as a person grips a rope in a flooded cave. June had my other hand. She was a half-step below me already, and I could tell by the pressure of her fingers that she was in motion, that she was going down.

"Seventeen floors," I said, very softly.

"Sixteen flights. Don't count them. Don't count the steps. Just follow me."

"June, I can't see my own feet."

"I know. You don't have to. I've got you."

We went down.

I have walked those stairs in daylight. I know their dimensions. Eight steps to a half-landing, turn, eight steps to the next floor. There are two flights per floor, painted in a ghastly institutional green, with numbers stenciled on the landings in white: 17, 16, 15, in big block figures that stare at you as you go. I had walked them on days when the elevator broke, carrying groceries, a laundry basket, a sleeping child. I'd thought I knew them.

In the dark, I didn't know them at all. The steps were uneven. The landings were shorter, or longer, than I remembered. At the first turn, my left foot came down on the edge of the stair, and my slipper slid, and I would have gone down headfirst except that June's hand clamped on my wrist and yanked me back like a leash.

"Careful," she breathed.

"I'm sorry. It's the—" I tried to wriggle my foot. "The thin one. It's not on right."

The slippers had been a mistake from the beginning. The fluffy one on my left foot was fine, a thick warm sock of a thing. But the right one, the old flat canvas house shoe I'd had since college, had no back and no grip. At every step it slapped against my heel and tried to slide off my foot. I could feel it flapping, inching toward the toe. I curled my toes in an effort to hold it, and my arch cramped, and I swallowed a hiss.

June stopped on the landing. She knelt. I felt her small hands on my ankle, quick and sure, working the flat shoe back onto my heel, pressing it down, tucking the loose edge under my instep. She did it the way you dress a child who is fidgeting. Then she patted the top of my foot, a tiny, absurd gesture, and stood.

"Better?"

"Better." I tried to laugh. It came out as a breath. "God, June. When did you get so good at this?"

She didn't answer.

We went on. Sixteen. Fifteen. The numbers rose out of the dark, white as bone, and slid by. I found that if I stopped trying to see, and let my body do what June's hand told it to, I could keep up. A turn here. A short run of steps. A longer one. She never hesitated. She moved through that black shaft like someone walking through her own house at night, knowing every creak. At each landing she touched the wall with her free hand, lightly, just before the turn, and I realized that she was not feeling for the corner. She was checking that it was where it should be. She had walked this a hundred times, and not in the daylight.

And somewhere between fifteen and fourteen, it began.

I don't know how to describe it except as a pressure on the back of my neck. It was exactly the sensation you have at the top of a flight of stairs when someone stands at the bottom looking up. But the stairs were above us, and the sensation came from behind. I could feel it. A presence in the shaft. Not a sound, nothing so crude. A weight in the air, a warmth where there should have been none, an attention.

I wanted to turn around.

Every nerve in my body screamed at me to look over my shoulder, to put my back to the wall, to hold the railing in both hands and face whatever was following us down the dark. I knew, I knew, that there was someone there. I could feel his breath on my neck, the heat of his body behind my shoulder blade.

"Don't," said June.

I hadn't spoken. I hadn't moved. But she'd felt me hesitate through her fingers.

"Don't turn around. There's nobody there. There's never anybody there." Her voice was fine as a thread. "It's just the dark. It does that. It makes you think somebody's behind you. If you look back, you'll slow down."

"How do you know?"

"Because I turned around," she said, "and I lost three seconds."

We went down. Thirteen. The numbers glowed, and passed, and the cold grew as we went deeper, the stale breath of the lower floors rising to meet us like water in a well. My legs began to burn. I had been on my feet for nearly half an hour in the dark and I'd had six hours of sleep in three days, and my whole right side ached where the stupid shoe rubbed my heel. June's hand was a small, hot, damp fist in mine, and I held on.

And then she stopped.

It was so sudden that I ran into her. I put out a hand and found her shoulder, the hard thin line of it under the quilted coat, and felt her go absolutely still. I held my breath. We stood on the landing between the twelfth and eleventh floors with the numbers behind us and nothing before us but the black.

I listened.

From below, from somewhere far down in the throat of the building, there came a sound.

It was a bright, flat, metallic clink, the unmistakable sound of something hard striking a steel handrail. It came again, faintly, and then again, slow and regular, the sound of a ring or a key or the barrel of a flashlight being run along the railing as someone climbed. It rose up the shaft toward us, bouncing off the concrete, a little louder with each repetition.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

Somebody was coming up.