When The Elevator Stops Working And Those Cursed Stairwells Are Silent

The building I live in is old, in the old part of the town. The paint is peeling off the walls, inside and outside. On the outside, you can see the gray of the concrete filled into the cracks in the walls, like bulged veins on an arm. All the doors creak and most of the window frames are made of wood and they are rotting.

The apartment I live in is small, but we are just a family of three, and I have my own room. My bed is comfortable and I have my own desk. During the day, sunlight falls over it. My dad placed it in that way.

But I am hardly at home during the day, because of school. And during the night my room is dark. Darker than the rest of the house.

I like my room even though there is mold on the corners above the window and it seems like it is spreading. My father said he will take care of it and I am fine with that too.

I like my room. It is the vent that bothers me. The vent above my bed, just below the ceiling. I can hear everything on the other side of the wall against which my bed is put.

Then there is the stairwell. And the stairwell door, on the other side of the wall against which my bed is placed. On nights I read a good book, I do not go to sleep right away and I stay awake thinking, thinking about the plot of the story I just read.

Quite late at night when everyone should have fallen asleep, I hear the stairwell door open on the other side. I hear it through the vent. The door creaks as it opens, its hinges are rusted, and then I hear faint thuds and a squelching sound. I ignore all of them and try to not think about anything, hoping that sleep will come and take me away from these sounds.

I hated the stairwell anyway. There are no metal railings. The railings are made of solid concrete, so I cannot see around the corner. I love our elevator. They got a new one with the automatic doors, unlike the old one with the grills. I am clumsy and I was sure that I would lose one of my fingers when shutting or opening the grills on the old elevator. I like the new elevator, but I hate the stairs, because my cousin told me a horrible story.

10 years ago there was this family that lived with a toddler. The toddler hadn’t learned how to walk and would crawl on all fours. Someone left the stairwell door open and in those days they had metal railings with too much gap between them.

The baby fell through one of the gaps, when he had wandered off, wanting to explore.

The father heard a loud sound of something from the stairwell, and like all paranoid protective parents, he instinctively ran towards it. He was right, the sound was the baby hitting every railing on his fall down.

He went mad, my brother said. He left his house door open and thought it was all his fault maybe. And he threw himself down too.

People who were in the building that day said they heard a loud clanging of the railings and the sound was of the father hitting every railing on his fall down.

The story didn’t really bother me at the time because my cousin bullshits me a lot because I am really young and he thinks I get scared of stories like this. I, however, did ask my father about the story and asked if it was real. He said yes.

He said he knew the man and the man loved the child like nothing. He said if he had to guess what the father would have done if the child had just fallen he would have guessed the same. Then he concluded the talk with, “Eat your breakfast.”

The story didn’t bother me, but it served as an explanation, of why when the darkness falls, and I lay in my bed, not sleeping, I hear the stairwell door open on the other side of my wall.

Then the light thuds on the floor of a toddler
And the chortle
“Gooo goooo gaaaaaa!”, and the chortle again. The baby was still exploring, wanting to play.

Then a grunt follows of a person much larger and then a squeal of the baby being dragged across the floor outside. What caused those sickly crunches, I do not want to imagine.

Even this isn’t a problem. I always ignore it and cover myself with my blanket and wrap myself in a cocoon, head to toe. The cocoon feels dark, warm and safe inside.

Everything was fine until yesterday.
The elevator broke down.

I had just returned from school and was tired with my enormous bag on my back. I clicked on the button that hails the elevator, and it usually lights up when the elevator is working, but it didn’t light up. I waited for some time, wishing it to miraculously turn on, but it didn’t.

I waited for someone to come into the building so I would have a company to walk up. But no one came.

The bag on my back got heavier, so I walked up to the stairwell door on the ground floor and stared at it, then looked back, looking for someone to walk in. The stairwell door looked unused and ignored, like everything in the building, and it seemed all the creaking of all the doors was the building’s way of protesting, of lamentation.

I looked back at the main entrance again. No one came.

So I pushed open the door and started walking up the stairs, one flight at a time. Every corner I turned, my heart beat a tad it faster. The stairwell smelled of spit and tobacco and gutkha. It also smelled of something really bad, like someone urinated there, and it pooled in the corner, rotting. The bulbs were dimming in and out of brightness.

On the second floor, I paused and looked up the gap between the stairs. There was no movement except for the dim of the bulbs. There was just a lot of silence. I like to sing when I am afraid and I was afraid. But no song came into my head. My canvas shoes thudded on the steps due to the weight of my bag and I was on the 4th floor already. So far so good. Wrong.

I heard a stairwell door open a floor below me. I paused and strained my ears. No sound of footsteps, but a faint playful query.
“Gooooo! Gaaaaaa?”
And the chortle.

I don’t remember when I started running, but I ran. Whenever I saw a wall, I turned right, and whenever I saw a stairwell door with my floor number not on it, I turned right.The stitch on my side pained and I gasped for breath. That’s when a stairwell door above me opened. The lights above me dimmed and I thanked god.

I ran up, wanting to see the person’s face, an earthly person. A familiar person, even Mr. Deshmukh, who hated me. Anyone not belonging to this foreign place.

As I turned the corner I stopped. On the top of the flight of stairs in front of me was a baby. The baby.

At least it looked like a baby from the size of it.

The teeth were missing except for one which was connected to the upper jaw with just a strand of bloody flesh. It hung from the gums like a chandelier in an earthquake. The gums were raw and bloody. And I could see that because its mouth was open with amusement. The eyes would have shown amusement too, but there was too much red where the white of the eyes should have been. The head was hairless  and bruised, caked with blood and had a deep dent like the one I saw on a beaten up old car on a highway once. It was on all fours and the arms were bent at odd angles, and I could hear the broken bones grind inside those arms when it moved.

“Gooooo!”

It started towards me with a fresh sound of a crunch of bones and I winced. It tried to come down the first stair.

I turned and ran. Downstairs. As fast a possible. I didn’t even feel the backpack. If it “gooed” behind me, I didn’t hear it.

A flight down I heard the door a floor below me open. It was the baby again I heard it.

It wanted to play.

“Gooooo?”
“Gaaaaa!”
And a chortle.

I again turned and ran, and opened the first stairwell door I saw. Then I banged my fists on the first door I saw.
As I banged my hands sore, the stairwell door behind me started to open, but the door in front of me opened first, and I ran headlong into the man in front of me.

I was taken home by the good man and he complained to my mother, “The amount of books they give these children these days. Tch tch. No wonder they get tired.  I will call the elevator company, it really needs to get fixed.”

I changed and I ate and I almost asked my parents if I could sleep in their room.

I should have. Because I went to bed early and I couldn’t sleep.

Late at night I heard the stairwell door open on my floor.
“Goooo!”
“Gaaaa!”
It wanted to play. With me. Did it know where I lived?

I strained my ears, against the pillow. That’s when a tap on the vent startled me.

How did it get up there? It knew where I lived.

I wanted to run, but instead I made a cocoon. I shouldn’t have.

Some seconds later the vent door fell on my bed and I curled into a ball, pulling my legs up.

I felt a bigger thud on my bed right after, right where my legs were three minutes ago. I stared into the darkness of the inside of my blanket cocoon.

“Gooo?”

It climbed down the bed I think because I could hear it moving and I could hear it breathe. It was a rasp, its breath like a wooden saw was cutting through the dry bark of a tree. Then there was a gurgling too. Like blood in its throat? I do not know.

I felt a pat on my blanket from the other side.

“Gooo?”

I curled into a tighter ball.

“Gaaaa!” This time it was louder.

It wanted to play.

“Gaaaaaaaaaaa!”, it screeched.

That’s when I realized the baby shouldn’t have screamed. I heard grunts and heavy thuds from the other side of the wall.

His father was here, for the baby.

The baby screeched again, like a hog. My ears hurt, and I curled up even tighter.

The grunts from outside got louder, and the only thing I could see was the darkness inside the blanket. I heard loud banging on the door to our apartment.

The father had come and wanted his baby. He wouldn’t let anything happen to his baby again, would he?

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