The Floor That Wasn’t There

No one at the old Greymont Apartments used Lift 13—not if they could help it. The brass numbers on the doors were scratched, the button flickered as though dying, and the doors often shuddered before opening, like something inside needed time to hide. Tenants whispered that the lift had been sealed for years and only recently put back into service after renovations. Yet the building had no thirteenth floor at all. Floors jumped from 12 to 14, as most older buildings did. So no one understood why Lift 13 existed in the first place.

But on a storm-heavy Thursday evening, 22-year-old Elise Caldwell pressed the trembling button anyway.

All the other lifts were out. Maintenance signs hung from steel cables. The lobby lights flickered in the booming thunder. She was late—again—and her boss had warned there wouldn’t be a “next time.” So she stepped forward when Lift 13 opened on its own, spilling a stale, chilled draft onto her skin.

Inside, the walls were mirrored but warped. Her reflection stretched a little too tall, her face a little too long, as if the glass couldn’t remember what a human was supposed to look like. She pressed 19, her floor, and the doors groaned shut.

The lift rose smoothly for two seconds.

Then it jerked.

The lights dimmed until only the emergency glow remained—thin, red, and pulsing. The numbers above the door ticked upward: 2…3…4…5…then stalled. A faint scratching echoed from within the walls, like fingernails sliding along metal.

“Hello?” Elise whispered before she realized how stupid it was to speak to an elevator.

The lift suddenly lurched upward again.

6…7…8.

Then the panel blinked and the number changed to 13.

Elise stared. There was no thirteenth floor.

“Probably a glitch,” she whispered, though her pulse hammered. The lift stopped with a soft hiss. The doors slid open to a hallway bathed in dim yellow light, smelling faintly of mildew and something coppery.

Her phone buzzed with a notification—no service. The screen clock flickered, glitching between 8:02 p.m. and 3:13 a.m.

She leaned forward slightly. “Hello? Is anyone here?” Her voice sounded small, muffled, swallowed by the quiet.

The hallway looked almost identical to the other floors, but everything was…wrong. The wallpaper peeled in long curls. Apartment doors hung crooked or splintered. Far down the hall, something shambled slowly into a shadowed corner, too distorted to make out clearly.

The lift doors behind her began to close. She spun and shoved her hand between them, and they grudgingly reopened with a metallic groan. She darted inside and slapped the CLOSE DOOR button.

As the doors slid shut, she heard footsteps—uneven, dragging.

Something was coming.

The lift didn’t move. The doors trembled, as though something pressed against the other side.

“…Elise…” a voice rasped.

Her breath caught. No one had spoken her name.

The lights flickered violently. The mirrored walls warped her reflection again—now her reflection smiled though she did not.

The voice whispered again, closer: “…we’ve been waiting…”

Elise jabbed the buttons—19, 12, anywhere—but each one blinked red in denial.

Then the doors slowly began to open.

“No,” she whispered, backing away until she hit the mirror. “No, no, no—”

Outside the lift was no longer the hallway. It was a vertical shaft opening into darkness. The floor beyond the threshold simply…didn’t exist. Just empty void, humming faintly.

A figure stood at the edge of the void, silhouetted. Its limbs were wrong—too long, too thin—and its head tilted like a broken doll. Another figure appeared behind it. Then another. Their bodies twitched in jerks, like old film strips skipping frames.

Elise tried to scream, but her throat locked.

One of the figures stepped forward. Its face was a stretched, rotting version of her own, eyes sunken, mouth torn into a grin far too wide.

“Come home,” it croaked.

The lift doors snapped shut before the figure could reach her. The entire elevator dropped—fast.

Elise was weightless, screaming as the numbers blurred downward. The mirrors around her reflected not her own face but dozens of those stretched versions, all smiling.

Just when she thought the lift would crash, it halted with a painful jolt.

The doors opened to the lobby. Warm lights, soft music, and the night guard looking up from his desk.

He blinked at her. “Miss? You look like you saw a ghost.”

Elise stumbled out, gasping. When she turned back, Lift 13’s doors were wide open.

Inside, the lift was empty—except for the mirrored walls.

And in the glass, her reflection still smiled.