The Overnight

by Ramsey Campbell

  "You're below me somewhere. I'm at the top doors. I'll come down. Down the stairs, that is."

  The image of his clambering down the cable revives her uncertainty whether the weight of the lift and its burden is carrying it downwards. It's partly in the hope of learning there's light somewhere close that she pleads "Can you see where I am?"

  "I can't see a thing, to be honest. Ray's gone to operate on the fuses."

  They ought to be able to see before too long, then, and the lift should behave itself as well. She's giving Nigel the option of staying where he is as she calls "Will you be able to find your way?"

  "No question of it. I'm coming immediately." He becomes entangled in the last words before he recovers. "I'm coming now."

  She has shaken his confidence. That makes him seem more human but hardly lets her feel safe. A muffled clunk of metal somewhere above her is followed by black silence that exacerbates her fancy that the lift is crawling down the shaft no faster than a slug. She's alternately trying to breathe in calm and holding her breath while she attempts to catch the lift moving when Nigel calls "I'm on the stairs now, Agnes. I won't be long."

  "Don't be," she responds, because he sounds more distant instead of closer. Of course there's now a wall between them. She closes her eyes in case that lets her detect his progress, but it simply intensifies her impression that the lift isn't as arrested as it wants her to think. Lifts can't want, and what else would? She's reminding herself she's alone in the dark except for Nigel when an ill-defined thump above her makes her doubt it. "It's me. It's Nigel," he tries to reassure her. "I'm here."

  It dismays her to have to ask the question, which seems to strengthen the dark. "Where?"

  "Very close."

  He sounds by no means close enough. How can he be above her if he's at the door? There's surely nowhere lower for the lift to go. Or perhaps there is; she's no expert on lifts and how they work. If the shaft extends below the level of the ground floor, it would surely not make sense for it to reach far. Vague noises of activity overhead must indicate that Nigel is doing his best to open the doors to the shaft. She can't be certain whether the noises are sneaking away from her, but it's clear he isn't achieving much. Can she aid him? She finds the slit between the lift doors and claws at it but seems to be growing as feeble as some of her colleagues would like to think she is; this time it won't open wide enough to let her fingers through, only to admit a faint moist stagnant smell. A good deal of her effort is spent in craning sideways over the trolley to the gap. She's still wrenching at it as the edge of the trolley digs into her hip when Nigel calls "Hold on."

  She's thoughtless enough to straighten up gratefully before she realises he can have no idea what she's doing. "I've seen something I can do," he explains, "and then I'll be back."

  This has to be hopeful. She wants to believe it means he can see. She holds her breath in case that helps her gather what he's doing. In a few seconds she hears a clank that tells her he's opening the delivery doors. The light outside won't depend on the fuses in the shop. That being so, why has Nigel fallen silent? Why can't she hear him at the doors to the shaft? Obviously because he'll be ensuring the delivery doors won't close, she tells herself just as they shut with a resounding clank.

  She restrains herself from calling out at once, but she's on the point of doing so when a muffled thump puts an end to the silence. A pause is followed by another thump, and she understands that Nigel is trying to shoulder the delivery doors open, which means he has somehow managed to evict himself from the building. Either he's weakening or, even worse, his sounds are perceptibly receding to leave her deeper in the blackness.

  The one reason she has to be grateful is that her parents are unaware of her situation. They'll have gone to bed by now, and she hopes they're asleep. If she had used Woody's refusal to let her contact them as an excuse to leave she wouldn't be trapped now, but is she going to allow the realisation to trap her as well? She isn't paralysed, and she can still make herself heard. If it takes more than one person to open the doors onto the shaft, there are plenty on the sales floor.

  She struggles past the corner of the trolley and inches along the front of it. The edge of a shelf digs into the small of her back while the corners of book after book catch on her spine. With her hands flattened against a door on either side of her she feels as if she's pinned to the metal. She's keeping her breaths shallow to render herself as thin as she'll go; otherwise the metal chafes her breasts. She has to remind herself more than once that she isn't suffocating before the toe of her right shoe snags the crack between the doors. She thrusts all her fingers in and hauls the doors wide enough to stuff her foot into the gap.

  She's taking a few seconds' rest in preparation for heaving the aperture wider to call for help when the stagnant smell drifts in. It's rising from somewhere under the lift, and has grown so overwhelming that she can't doubt its source is approaching or being approached. She makes herself advance one hand through the unseen cleft in the blackness. She's hoping that despite all her impressions she's at the doors to the lobby, but her fingertips nudge slippery brick.

  She's afraid to reach up, yet she does. As far as her arm will stretch she feels only brick. Straining up on tiptoe, she works her fingers between the top of the lift and the wall of the shaft. Just enough of the bottom of the lobby doors is within range for her fingertips to blunt themselves against it. Then it withdraws farther than her fingers can extend, and they're dragged over brick.

  She mustn't panic. Doesn't every lift have an escape hatch in the roof? Even if she can't remember seeing one overhead, there has to be—has to. She'll be able to climb up to it on the trolley, but she would prefer not to while she's so alone. She takes a deep breath and almost spits it out again for tasting stale. Instead she uses it for the loudest shout she can summon up, having cupped her hands around her mouth and tilted her head back. "Can someone come? I'm in the lift. It's stuck."

  She's about to use up the rest of the breath when she's interrupted. She doesn't want to think it's any kind of a response; at first she isn't even sure that she's hearing the lift. "Lift opening," it says, or perhaps "Lift closing", though she could imagine that the thick slow deep voice has intoned "Still lower."

  The tape must be worn to a remnant, or the mechanism is running out of the last of its power, but she can't rid herself of the notion that the voice has reverted to its true nature—that its female version was a pretence. It also reminds her far too much of the voice or voices that answered the emergency phone, a thought that seems considerably worse than pointless in the dark. She plants her hands over her mouth and nose to exclude some of the smell while she takes another long breath. She raises her face to shout again, but all that emerges is a gasp. Something has swarmed over her shoe and closed around her ankle. It's too cold and slimy to be alive.

  For a moment she's able to gain some reassurance from understanding that it's water or mud. Then it finds her left foot as well and makes for that ankle, and she snatches her other foot out of the gap that's admitting the spillage. The doors meet with a thud that sounds not nearly snug enough as she labours back to the corner where at least she has room to manoeuvre. The edge of the top shelf of the trolley feels like an elongated bruise some inches lower than the incessant plucking of books at her spine, and her feet keep losing traction on the wet metal floor. As soon as her outstretched left hand locates the controls on the wall and identifies the Up button she begins to jab at it. Surely that can't be why she feels the doors betray a movement as if an intruder has wormed between them.

  She wrenches herself free of the trolley and straightens up as though her stance may bring her courage. For a few seconds she carries on bruising her finger against the button. It isn't halting the descent of the lift, which feels as if it's no longer just sinking but being dragged down. Though she's afraid to retreat from the controls and the doors, she has no alternative. She gropes her way behind the trolley and stands between the metal prongs of the pal
let truck. She's grasping both ends of the trolley in preparation for clambering towards the invisible hatch when a rush of a substance too solid for water and too liquid for earth drowns her feet and climbs her shins.

  She doesn't cry out. She needs her breath, not least to convince her that she isn't about to suffocate. She props one foot on the bottom shelf to lever herself out of the rising flood. Her foot slips off the inch of shelf that isn't occupied by books. The splash spatters her legs all the way up to the knees and almost makes her scream. She grabs handfuls of books off the shelf and hurls them aside into the blackness, where they clang dully against the walls. By the time she has cleared the other two shelves of most of their contents the viscous icy flood is halfway up her shins, and she hears books rebounding from the walls into it with splash after thick splash. She tramps on the bottom shelf and hauls herself up to the middle one. She has barely stepped on it when the trolley topples over.

  She staggers blindly into the depths of the lift until her back slams against the upturned handle of the pallet truck. A knee-high wave follows her, carrying books—pulpy lumps of sodden meaninglessness that nuzzle her legs as if for companionship until she kicks them away. She twists around, wringing pain from her spine, and grabs the handle. It's too short and certainly too unstable for her to use it to climb. Then she hears the trolley collide with the wall of the lift, where it scrapes up and down.

  If the trolley floats, can't she ride it up towards the hatch? She has no other course, since she can't swim, even if it were possible to do so in the sludge that has risen above her knees. She flounders through it and the blackness while her splayed fingers ward off a mass of waterlogged books. Her knuckles bump into a more solid obstruction: the bottom of the trolley, which is floating on its side. She launches herself at it in something pitifully like triumph, and her right hand closes over an object perched on top.

  It has a face, but not for long. Before her hand can recoil from the lumpy features or distinguish more than that one indolently blinking eye is at least twice the size of the other, the face sinks into the cold gelatinous bulge of a head. She doesn't know what sound she's making as she struggles backwards; she only knows that she's desperate to shrink as far from the trolley and its horrid contents as the cage of the lift will allow.

  Swollen books crowd around her and behind her, hindering her progress as they encircle her upper thighs. The trolley blunders against her waist, and she heaves it away with all her strength. It crashes into the doors with an impact that makes the lift shudder. Perhaps that isn't all it achieves, because in a very few seconds the eager flood is counting her ribs. She's holding her arms clear of being engulfed, if only because she has no idea what else to do with them, when the trolley nudges her chest. She scarcely has time to start to pray that it's no longer inhabited before the remnant of a face moulds itself to hers.

  It's as featureless as the underside of a slug except for a grin so wide and loose it's worse than idiotic. She claws at the quivering neckless head and peels it away from her, only for limbs to slither around the back of her neck and clasp themselves together. How can they be impossible to dislodge when they have so little in the way of bones and muscle that her fingers poke into them—when the limbs don't even seem to be certain of their own shape? They draw the head and whatever it may now have for a face closer and closer to her, so that she's almost glad the blackness filling first her mouth and nose and then her eyes and brain is more solid than any dark.

  Angus

  "Okay, why don't you bring a smile to my face. Tell me something's fixed."

  "I expect the fuses will be soon. Ray's gone down."

  "Seems like he's been long enough, or can't I tell time any more?"

  "It does feel like a while. Maybe that's because it's so late."

  "He could have fallen asleep on the job, are you saying?"

  "No, but he has to find his way down and do everything in the dark. Do you think we should keep a torch up here in future?"

  "Kind of primitive. Oh, that's what you call a flashlight. I thought Nigel got you some light."

  "It's only in here. It doesn't go downstairs."

  "Anyway, what's with the silence? No need to let Angus do all the talking."

  "The thing is, Nigel isn't here."

  "The hell you say. We've been deserted, huh? How come he crept off?"

  "Anyes is stuck in the lift and he's gone to see, well, he won't be doing that, but he's seeing if he can let her out. I don't think he has yet."

  "Who?"

  "Nigel. You just asked about him."

  "I know what I asked. I've still got the brains I brought over here. Now I'm asking what you called the girl you say is in the elevator."

  "Anyes. You must have heard her called that. That's what she likes."

  "And you try to do what everybody likes, right, Angus? You don't think it could screw up our work here."

  "I don't see how getting on with people could."

  "There's being so anxious to please people you're scared to risk doing anything better than any of them, maybe, right? You need to know that won't help the team. Anyway, that's not what I was saying."

  "Shouldn't have said it, then."

  "Say again? I didn't catch that. I meant her name could be the problem."

  "I don't see how."

  "So think about it. You Brits go for pronouncing stuff different from it's spelled, don't you? Maybe that's why we've had shelving out of order. Another word like that ain't going to help."

  "At least we don't say ain't like some of you, what do you call them, you wetbacks."

  "I keep not being able to hear you, Angus. Remember there's a door. Okay, I'm glad we took time out for a chat, but I guess that's enough of a break. Here's your chance."

  "How do you mean? For what?"

  "Hey, what were we talking about?"

  "I'm not sure. I'd say not much."

  "The door. Try the door."

  Angus rattles the handle and leans on it and shoves at the door but might as well be attempting to budge a section of the wall. "It's still stuck."

  "We don't have time to kid around. That's not the kind of smile I need. See if you can't figure a way to let me out that involves your head. I guess Ray and Nigel won't mind if they come back and find you've saved them any more clowning around." Just loud enough to be heard, Woody adds "Sometimes I want to give up on these limeys."

  Angus lifts his foot for a kick. He doesn't mean to move the door, but Woody won't know. The noise might revive his commentary, however, of which Angus has already had more than enough. If he manages to free Woody, at least then Angus should be able to get away from him. The trouble is that even now there's silence, he's unable to think.

  He assumes Nigel is busy trying to release Agnes. While he and Woody were shouting at each other he could hear them doing much the same, after which the delivery doors clanked twice, presumably having swung shut in between. Now Nigel will have propped them open to let in the light from the staff car park. Perhaps Agnes can see it, because she called out not so loudly as she had been calling, which made her sound more remote, and then went quiet. Surely Angus can put her out of his mind while he considers his task. He steps back in case seeing Woody's door at a distance shows him how to proceed.

  He can't unscrew the hinges. Nigel couldn't find a screwdriver, and besides, the hinges are shut between the frame and the edge of the door. Suppose the trouble is with the lock? In a film nothing would be easier than to spring it with a credit card, but Angus suspects that if he tried, the card would bend or become trapped in the mechanism or simply snap in half. Is there anything else up here that he can use to probe the lock? He peers around the room that looks steeped in glowing fog, the dim illumination from the greyish screens that are blackened with blurred icons, until Woody's magnified voice aggravates his inability to think.

  "Someone will be with you any minute, Agnes, if they aren't already. You'll forgive me saying your name that way, but I guess I co
uld claim this is American territory, and we don't pronounce it like that. I should let you guys down there know Nigel is having to let Agnes out of the elevator, and Ray's getting ready to switch the power back on for us, are you, Ray?"

  There's no response. No doubt Ray knows his voice won't reach Woody. The resumption of silence allows Angus to notice the drawers under the L-shaped shelf that holds the computers. If anyone objects to his search he can tell them Woody wanted him to try whatever might help. He's tired of feeling dull and useless, and worse than tired of being alone with Woody's voice through the door. He crosses the overcast room and pulls out Connie's drawer.

  It contains half a pack of tissues in carefully parted cellophane, a ballpoint with its end pushed up the neck of a plastic cat's head stained grey by the light, a birthday card swarming with a basketful of kittens and lying on an unused envelope, an assortment of scattered paper-clips. He's wondering if any of the latter could be turned into a picklock when Woody's voice returns to the door. "Still thinking out there, Angus?"

  "Thought," Angus mutters as he grasps that the dark strip at the back of the drawer is not a shadow but a twelve-inch metal ruler. "Thought," he calls on his way to inserting the ruler in the slit beside the lock.

  The angle of the light, such as it is, has prevented him from recognising that the frame overlaps the outside of the door by a fraction of an inch. He jams the ruler between them and uses both hands to dig it in until it grinds against the bolt of the lock. As he struggles to work the ruler around the end of the bolt, Woody remarks "You're quiet again, Angus. Stuck?"

  The word Angus mumbles rhymes with that, because now the ruler won't move in any direction, even when he leans on it so hard it feels close to cutting his hot moist prickly hands. Can he break the doorframe away from the lock? He hauls the ruler sideways, which produces a faint reluctant creak. The thin line of shadow between door and frame is undergoing some change, but none that appears to make sense. How can it be shrinking or growing more vague? "Wait a minute," Angus blurts.