by M.C. Edwards
settling around the bottom of the letters.
George entered the lusciously appointed lobby. A cavernous space absorbed her; alive with people shrouded in habitual morning routines, teeming in a seemingly infinite number of paths. Littered amongst the rabble were beautiful artefacts from throughout the world, all incarcerated in decorative glass cabinets. It was in one of those display cabinets that George briefly caught her reflection and flinched. A combination of the warm Queensland morning and all that running had caused her makeup to run and streak. “Grrrr…It looks like I have just staggered home from a dirty night of clubbing,” George mumbled, raising eyebrows from passers by. Frantically, she searched the lobby for a restroom. In the far eastern corner she spied her salvation. George trotted through the crowd, past the elevators and into the bathroom.
A much, much more refreshed and collected woman emerged. She slipped straight into the nearest elevator, which sat empty, its doors open wide as if awaiting her arrival. Finally her luck was changing for the better. “About time too!” she thought.
Unfortunately, George had failed to notice a small black sign elegantly framed in gold. It sat but a few meters out from her private elevator.
“Service in progress.
Please use other Elevators”
As the doors glided closed George scanned the buttons. The numbers glowed in the soft, mood lighting of the lift, as the dulcet tones of elevator music hummed in George’s ears. There were ten basement levels below the building and fifty odd floors above ground. The first twenty levels were labeled with the departments housed on them, while the next twenty had more obscure descriptions. From what George could gather, they were inhabited by board rooms and big wigs. The remaining floors were accessible only with key card permission and had no labelling at all.
George located the training department on the nineteenth floor and pressed the button. Nothing. She pressed the button again. Still no response. George sighed and mashed the ‘Open Doors’ button and the ‘Emergency Call’ button repeatedly as her frustration grew. Once again her efforts were met with absolutely no response. “Ok don’t panic. Be patient. I’m sure help will be along anytime now,” she silently assured herself.
That patience lasted for around two minutes. “Hello!” screamed George as she bashed on the tightly clamped doors. Unfortunately the loud bangs were all but impossible to hear from the outside of the shaft, lost amongst the noises of a busy Monday. Scrambling through her handbag George found her mobile and began trying to dial anyone she could think of. Alas the signal was all but nonexistent inside the elevator car and any calls she did manage to connect were nothing more than two people repeatedly shouting, “Can you hear me?” at each other. Defeated, George sent a confusing text message to her best friend and slumped onto the floor in the corner of the elevator car where she sat for what seemed like forever.
The power continued to run in the lift, so the lights shone; though it proved to be a mixed blessing. The power also allowed the music to chime ceaselessly and it soon evolved from a gentle hum to a screech with all the melodic pleasure of Chinese water torture. Before long, George found herself pining to be sitting in a pitch black and silent elevator car.
“Ok relax. This is not my fault,” George told herself in silence, once again talking her blood down from its boil. “They will understand. Won’t they? It’s not the end of the world. Is it? Stay positive.”
“Always try to find the silver lining,” a counsellor had once told her.
“Find the silver lining.” George looked around, but struggled to find even the tiniest skerrick of anything positive about her current situation.
“Oh, at least I am stuck on the ground floor,” she mumbled out loud, desperate to hear something other than the music.
“I could think of nothing worse than being stuck in a malfunctioning elevator hundreds of meters up.” Although it was nothing really, that one small thought did make George feel better. In her current mental state it was probably for the best that the existence of the ten basement levels below had escaped her reasoning.
Upon finishing her thought the elevator car suddenly whirred to life and began steadily climbing. “Why do I even bother opening my mouth,” George groaned. She hastily leapt to her feet and began randomly poking at buttons again. Still the elevator seemed to be running on its own agenda. It climbed on to the nineteenth floor, where her only chance to salvage the job lay, and it continued. It moved on through the corporate floors and up into the restricted levels without any sign of hesitation. Finally at the very pinnacle of the building George came to rest and the elevator doors heaved opened.
She hadn’t realised how hot and stuffy the elevator car had become until the fresh air from outside swirled in. She breathed the sweet chill deep as it beckoned her forth from the moving prison. Cautiously George looked out of the elevator doors and into a palatial penthouse. It was a level of luxury which George had never seen before, the kind of thing reserved for movie stars and royalty. “I should not be here,” she whispered, poking her head further out the door. The elevator doors began to move again, and before she even had a chance to think, George instinctively leapt out. There was no way she wanted to be stuck in that tiny, dangling death trap again.
Once out though, George immediately regretted her instincts. Up until now she had merely failed to show up for her first day of work. Now, in an instant, she had managed to escalate it to trespassing in what appeared to be her new boss’ home. “How the hell did I manage this?” George thought. Her heart leapt into her throat with each nervous beat. She turned and quickly hit the elevator call button again and again. Still it misbehaved.
She crept awkwardly through the large entrance room, each step echoing through the space. Marble floors shone, reflecting the light pouring down through the massive glass skylight above. Small blue tiles inlaid into the floor caught that light and made it dance. They glimmered a geometric design woven of ancient, flowing characters spiralling in a circular pattern.
The artefacts and artworks which dressed this massive space defied belief and made the ones in the lobby downstairs resemble trinkets from Nanna’s mantle in comparison. There were stairs running up to the next floor on each side of the room. The stairs were linked by a long balcony which regally overlooked the first floor lobby on one side and on the other opened through imposing, glass doors onto a rooftop garden. Under the balcony were many ornate arched doorways which led into the other decadently appointed rooms on the first level. Overall the dwelling was spectacular, as if someone had raised an ancient palace to the top of a skyscraper. “Hello!” George called shakily, “Is anyone here? The elevator isn’t working.” No answer came.
George set about exploring the penthouse in search of a stairwell or something which would allow her to escape and maybe even salvage the disaster of a morning. Most of the rooms were nothing really of interest to her. The first she ventured into was a bar. It was lined with shelves and stocked to the brim with every kind of booze you could imagine. Its walls were scattered with an eclectic mix of mantiques and assorted memorabilia. Running off that was a library, filled with hundreds of hardcovers, paperbacks and even leather bound tomes. Through the library lay an office. It was large and luxurious like everything in the building, but with nothing out of the ordinary, other than a speckled blue stain beneath one of the leather chairs. “Enough!” George realised her curiosity was getting the better of her. “I am trying to get out, not critiquing his taste.”
George returned to the main hall and continued along, glancing into doorways as she passed. The remainder of rooms seemed to consist of a large media room and a disturbing amount of bedrooms, each decked out like the set of a different cheesy porno; clearly the work of a man with far too much money for his own good. George moved quickly past those rooms. In the final space she poked her head into however, there was something which caught George’s eye.
Against the far wall of the dimly lit room, there were some pieces of medic
al equipment and an I.V. rack with two empty blood bags dangling from it. Beside the medical equipment sat a long wooden bench. It was old and solid with a thick, red grain snaking through the timber. Into its sides were carved a series of symbols which would have been at home on some dusty, ancient tome. On top of the bench lay a long, low shape loosely veiled in back cloth. Curiosity stirred again. George took another glance around and crept in to investigate. She already held strong suspicions about what was under that black cloth, but on some level George refused to give heed to those suspicions, not until she had actually seen it.
She stood over the black shroud, her eyes running the length of it. A brass medallion sat atop the shape, encrusted with a number of crudely cut stones; a mixture of black gems and beads which resembled dollops of crystallised honey. The chunk of jewellery was not something George considered beautiful, but it was certainly interesting in a raw kind of way. Cautiously George leant closer; she licked her lips nervously and lifted the corner of the black sheet to steal a peek.
She stumbled away in fright, flicking the corner of the sheet back. “Fuck me!” she shrieked, immediately covering her mouth to push the words