by William Tenn
“You mean—those fellows—um, Toombs and Boole?”
“That’s right, sir. There are desks and chairs and filing cabinets going upstairs. There are men from the telephone and electric companies. They’re all going up to the thirteenth floor. Only, Mr. Jimm, there isn’t any thirteenth floor!”
A pause. Then: “Any of the other tenants in the building been complaining, Blake?”
“No, Mr. Jimm, but—”
“Have Toot and Boob committed any sort of nuisance?”
“No, not at all. It’s just that I—”
“It’s just that you have been paying precious little attention to business! Blake, I like you, but I feel it is my duty to warn you that you are getting off on the wrong foot. You’ve been resident agent at the McGowan for almost a week now and the only bit of important business involving the property had to be transacted by the home office. That’s not going to look good on your record, Blake, it’s not going to look good at all. Do you still have those big vacancies on the third, sixteenth, and nineteenth floors?”
“Yes, Mr. Jimm. I’ve been planning to—”
“Planning isn’t enough, Blake. Planning is only the first step. After that, there must be action! Action, Blake; A-C-T-I-O-N. Why don’t you try this little stunt: Letter the word action on a sign, letter it in bright red, and hang it opposite your desk where you’ll see it every time you look up. Then on the reverse side, list all the vacancies in your building. Every time you find yourself staring at that sign, ask yourself how many vacancies are still listed on the back. And then, Blake, take action!”
“Yes, sir,” Blake said, very weakly.
“Meanwhile, no more of this nonsense about law-abiding, rent-paying tenants. If they leave you alone, you leave them alone. That’s an order, Blake.”
“I understand that, Mr. Jimm.”
He sat for a long while looking at the cradled telephone. Then he rose and walked out to the lobby and into an elevator. There was a peculiar and unaccustomed jauntiness to him, a recklessness to his stride that could be worn only by a man deliberately disobeying a direct order from the reigning head of Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate.
Two hours later he crept back, his shoulders bent, his mouth loose with defeat.
Whenever Blake had been in an elevator full of telephone linemen and furniture movers on their way to the thirteenth floor, there had been no thirteenth floor. But as soon as, a little irritated, they had changed elevators, leaving him behind, so far as he could tell, they had gone right up to their destination. It was obvious. For him there was no thirteenth floor. There probably never would be.
He was still brooding on the injustice of it at five o’clock, when the scrubwomen who were coming on duty bounced their aged joints into his outer office to punch the time clock. “Which one of you,” he asked, coming at them suddenly with an inspiration, “which one of you takes care of the thirteenth floor?”
“I do”
He drew the woman in the bright green, fringed shawl after him into his private office. “When did you start cleaning the thirteenth floor, Mrs. Ritter?”
“Why, the day the new tenants moved in.”
“But before that…” He waited, watching her face anxiously.
She smiled, and several wrinkles changed their course. “Before that, Lord love you, there was no tenants. Not on the thirteenth.”
“So…” he prompted.
“So there was nothing to clean.”
Blake shrugged and gave up. The scrubwoman started to walk away. He put his hand on her shoulder and detained her. “What,” he asked, staring at her enviously, “is it like—the thirteenth floor?”
“Like the twelfth. And the tenth. Like any other floor.”
“And everyone,” he muttered to himself, “gets to go there. Everyone but me.”
He realized with annoyance that he’d spoken too loudly. And that the old woman was staring at him with her head cocked in sympathy. “Maybe that’s because,” she suggested softly, “you have no reason to be on the thirteenth floor.”
He was still standing there, absorbing the concept, when she and her colleagues bumped and clattered their way upstairs with mops, brooms, and metal pails.
There was a cough and the echo of a cough behind him. He turned. Mr. Tohu and Mr. Bohu bowed. Actually, they seemed to fold and unfold.
“For the lobby directory” said the tall man, giving Blake a white business card. “This is how we are to be listed.”
G. TOHU K. BOHU
Specialists in Intangibles
For the Trade
Blake struggled, licked his lips, fought his curiosity and lost. “What kind of intangibles?”
The tall man looked at the tiny man. The tiny man shrugged. “Soft ones,” he said.
They walked out.
Blake was positive he saw the tall man pick up the tiny man a moment before they stepped into the street. But he couldn’t see what he did with him. And then there was the tall man walking down the street all by himself.
From that day on, Sydney Blake had a hobby. Trying to work out a good reason for visiting the thirteenth floor. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t any good reason so long as the tenants created no nuisances and paid their rent regularly.
Month in, month out, the tenants paid their rent regularly. And they created no nuisances. Window washers went up to wash windows. Painters, plasterers, and carpenters went up to decorate the offices on the thirteenth floor. Delivery boys staggered up under huge loads of stationery. Even what were obviously customers went up to the thirteenth floor, a group of people curiously lacking characteristics in common: they ranged from poor backwoods folk in their brogans to flashily dressed bookmakers; an occasional group of dark-suited, well-tailored gentlemen discussing interest rates and new bond issues in low well-bred voices would ask the elevator operator for Tohu Bohu. Many, many people went to the thirteenth floor.
Everyone, Sydney Blake began to think, but Sydney Blake. He’d tried sneaking up on the thirteenth floor by way of the stairs. He had always arrived on the fourteenth floor or the twelfth completely winded. Once or twice, he’d tried stowing away on the elevator with G. Tohu and K. Bohu themselves. But the car had not been able to find their floor while he was in the elevator. And they had both turned around and smiled at the spot where he was trying to stay hidden in the crowd so that he had gone out, red-faced, at the earliest floor he could.
Once he’d even tried—vainly—to disguise himself as a building inspector in search of a fire hazard…
Nothing worked. He just had no business on the thirteenth floor.
He thought about the problem day and night. His belly lost its slight plumpness, his nails their manicure, his very trousers their crease.
And nobody else showed the slightest interest in the tenants of the thirteenth floor.
Well, there was the day that Miss Kerstenberg looked up from her typewriter. “Is that how they spell their names?” she asked. “T-O-H-U and B-O-H-U? Funny.”
“What’s funny?” He pounced on her.
“Those names come from the Hebrew. I know because,” she blushed well below the neckline of her dress, “I teach in a Hebrew School Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. And my family is very religious so I had a real orthodox education. I think religion is a good thing, especially for a girl—”
“What about those names?” He was almost dancing around her.
“Well, in the Hebrew Bible, before God created the Earth, the Earth was tohu oobohu. The oo means and. And tohu and bohu—gee, it’s hard to translate.”
“Try,” he implored her. “Try.”
“Oh, for example, the usual English translation of tohu oobohu is without form and void. But bohu really means empty in a lot of—”
“Foreigners,” he chortled. “I knew they were foreigners. And up to no good. With names like that.”
“I don’t agree with you, Mr. Blake,” she said very stiffly. “I don’t agree with you at all about t
hose names being no good. Not when they come from the Hebrew.” And she never showed him any friendliness again.
Two weeks later, Blake got a message from the home office of Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate, that almost shoved his reason off the corner of the slippery throne it still occupied. Tohu Bohu had given notice. They were quitting the premises at the end of the month.
For a day or so, he walked around talking to himself. The elevator operators reported hearing him say things like: “They’re the most complete foreigners there could be—they don’t even belong in the physical universe!” The scrubwomen shivered in their locker room as they told each other of the mad, mad light in his eyes as he’d muttered, with enormous gestures: “Of course—thirteenth floor. Where else do you think they could stay, the nonexistent so-and-so’s? Hah!” And once when Miss Kerstenberg had caught him glaring at the water cooler and saying, They’re trying to turn the clock back a couple of billion years and start all over, I bet. Filthy fifth columnists!” she thought tremulously of notifying the F.B.I., but decided against it. After all, she reasoned, once the police start snooping around a place, you never can tell who they’ll send to jail.
And, besides, after a little while, Sydney Blake straightened out. He began shaving every morning once more and the darkness left his nails. But he was definitely not the crisp young realtor of yore. There was a strange, skirling air of triumph about him almost all the time.
Came the last day of the month. All morning, load after load of furniture had been carried downstairs and trucked away. As the last few packages came down, Sydney Blake, a fresh flower in his buttonhole, walked up to the elevator nearest his office and stepped inside.
“Thirteenth floor, if you please,” he said clearly and resonantly.
The door slid shut. The elevator rose. It stopped on the thirteenth floor.
“Well, Mr. Blake,” said the tall man. “This is a surprise. And what can we do for you?”
“How do you do, Mr. Tohu?” Blake said to him. “Or is it Bohu?” He turned to his tiny companion. “And you, Mr. Bohu—or, as the case may be, Tohu—I hope you are well? Good.”
He walked around the empty, airy offices for a little while and just looked. Even the partitions had been taken down. The three of them were alone, on the thirteenth floor.
“You have some business with us?” the tall man inquired.
“Of course he has business with us,” the tiny man told him crossly. “He has to have some sort of business with us. Only I wish he’d hurry up and get it over, whatever it is.”
Blake bowed. “Paragraph ten, Section three of your lease:…the tenant further agrees that such notice being duly given to the landlord, an authorized representative of the landlord, such as the resident agent if there is one on the property, shall have the privilege of examining the premises before they are vacated by the tenant for the purpose of making certain that they have been left in good order and condition by the tenant…”
“So that’s your business,” said the tall man thoughtfully.
“It had to be something like that,” said the tiny man. “Well, young fellow, you will please be quick about it.”
Sydney Blake strolled about leisurely. Though he felt a prodigious excitement, he had to admit that there was no apparent difference between the thirteenth and any other floor. Except—Yes, except—
He ran to a window and looked down. He counted. Twelve floors. He looked up and counted. Twelve floors. And with the floor he was on, that made twenty-five. Yet the McGowan was a twenty-four-story building. Where did that extra floor come from? And how did the building look from the outside at this precise moment when his head was sticking out of a window on the thirteenth floor?
He walked back in, staring shrewdly at G. Tohu and K. Bohu. They would know.
They were standing near the elevator door that was open. An operator, almost as impatient as the two men in black, said, “Down? Down?”
“Well, Mr. Blake,” said the tall man. “Are the premises in good condition, or are they not?”
“Oh, they’re in good condition, all right,” Blake told him. “But that’s not the point.”
“Well, we don’t care what the point is,” said the tiny man to the tall man. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Quite,” said the tall man. He bent down and picked up his companion. He folded him once backward and once forward. Then he rolled him up tightly and shoved him in his right-hand overcoat pocket. He stepped backward into the elevator. “Coming, Mr. Blake?”
“No, thank you,” Blake said. “I’ve spent far too much time trying to get up here to leave it this fast.”
“Suit yourself,” said the tall man. “Down,” he told the elevator operator.
When he was all alone on the thirteenth floor, Sydney Blake expanded his chest. It had taken so long! He walked over to the door of the staircase that he’d tried to find so many times, and pulled on it. It was stuck. Funny. He bent down and peered at it closely. It wasn’t locked. Just stuck. Have to get the repairman up to take care of it.
Never could tell. Might have an extra floor to rent in the old McGowan from now on. Ought to be kept up.
How did the building look from the outside? He found himself near another window and tried to look out. Something stopped him. The window was open, yet he couldn’t push his head past the sill. He went back to the window he’d looked out of originally. Same difficulty.
And suddenly he understood.
He ran to the elevator and jabbed his fist against the button. He held it there while his breathing went faster and faster. Through the diamond-shaped windows on the doors, he could see elevators rising and elevators descending. But they wouldn’t stop on the thirteenth floor.
Because there no longer was a thirteenth floor. Never had been one, in fact. Who ever heard of a thirteenth floor in the McGowan Building?…
Afterword
I had a duodenal ulcer and suffered horribly from it from the age of twenty-nine to the age of fifty-eight, when I finally had a partial gastroectomy—just a few years before it was discovered that ulcers were microbial in nature and could be treated by antibiotics. But I still look at this story or that by me and remember the amount of pain-time involved.
The week in which I wrote “The Tenants” was one of the worst. I typed the piece with one hand, massaging my abdomen with the other, while chugging down chalky tablespoonsful of a reasonably popular antacid of the time.
When I brought it to Horace Gold as a submission to his fantasy magazine, Beyond, he immediately commented on the white blobs on almost every page (this being before the age of the computer and printer: retyping a long manuscript then, if you didn’t have the money to hire someone, was a murderous chore).
“What is it,” he asked holding a page up to the light, “Maalox or Amphojel? I use Maalox, and this looks very much like it.”
Then he disappeared into his bedroom to read the story. He came out a few minutes later, grimacing, and called to Sam Merwin, his associate editor. “I want you to take a look at this,” he said.
I immediately felt a lot better. I had known Sam Merwin since he had been an editor at Thrilling Wonder Stories; I had great respect for his literary judgment (he had bought a lot of Ray Bradbury over the protests of his publisher) and he had always liked everything I wrote. But Sam read “The Tenants” and shrugged. “What is it supposed to be,” he asked, “something funny? Something eerie? What?”
“That’s how I feel,” Horace said. “What exactly were you trying to do?”
“Oh,” I said, picking up the story and heading for the door. “Nothing much. No thirteenth floor in a lot of buildings. I’ve always been curious about what’s on that floor.”
“Well, it’s meaningless to me,” I heard Horace say as I closed the door, and I heard Sam Merwin mutter agreement.
I sent the piece to Anthony Boucher of The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction, who, up to then, had not seen anything of mine he wanted to buy. By r
eturn mail I got a check with a bonus rate and a long letter burbling with praise over the story. “But don’t use Maalox,” it ended. “Stick to plain bicarbonate of soda.”
I called him and thanked him. Then I told him of Horace’s reaction, and Sam Merwin’s.
“Some people are color-blind,” he said. “And some are tone-deaf. You know that. Well, some have absolutely no sense of the thirteenth floor. You just have to feel sorry for them.”
Written 1953 / Published 1954
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