Seventh Floor

The seventh floor shows you things. Impossible things. At first I thought the old-timers were crazy. Almost everyone that had been with the company for over 20 years refused to go to the seventh floor. They said the building didn't like it. I always figured it was some shared private joke among them; the kind of inside joke the secrets of which are revealed to anyone who reaches a certain tenure, as long as they also possess a countenance that makes them appear as individuals trustworthy of this most guarded punchline. But when I finally got the promotion I'd spent years chasing, they all stopped talking to me.

Management informed us weeks ago that renovation on the seventh floor was nearly done. Eventually the goal was to expand several departments and move them up to this new level. When they told me I would be taking over one such department, I was ecstatic. My new private office came fully equipped with the best view on the new floor; a bird's eye view of the whole city! I still remember the way the elders looked at me when management made the announcement. Some of them regarded me with pity; others, disgust; still others couldn't seem to find the courage to meet my eyes. Even after the meeting was over they'd walk past me with their gazes downcast, as though transfixed by a hypnotically intoxicating pattern in the carpet, beige swirls no doubt unveiling the secrets of the cosmos to them.

I ignored their stares and whispers. Who cared about what the olds thought? Senility was an unwinnable battle, a bout that all faced eventually when that most fickle of mistresses known as Mother Time saw fit to sink her temporal claws into one's flesh, her record of course being one as yet undefeated. The warnings of the wise ignored, I gathered my belongings and happily moved into the corner office on the seventh floor.

Yellow tape stretched out across vast expanses of open space. Erratically blinking fluorescent lights illuminated silver skeletons whose bones were made of metal studs surrounding debris-laden floors, makeshift tables borne of wooden horses and plywood littered with enough left-behind tools to make a contractor blush. The seventh floor was not a very welcoming environment just yet. I could see why it might give some an uncomfortable feeling, but to me this level was a shining beacon of opportunity.

The first week I spent on the seventh floor was uneventful. It was somewhat difficult to get work done with the sounds of construction going on next door, but that problem was solved with a simple set of noise-cancelling headphones. Of course, I also at all times felt the watchful gaze of that most elusive of beasts; the construction worker. Or that was what I thought at the time.

It's hard to say the first time I felt its presence. In the wakeful hours of the day, I attributed it to the construction workers that were my omnipresent neighbors. Late that first week, I felt the ethereal pressure of being watched at the back of my neck, as I often did. I brushed it off at first, before remembering that it was Friday; there were no construction crews on the floor that day.

I whirled around to face my stalker, but the hall remained as empty and desolate as ever. I chastised myself for falling prey to the cruel prank of bored seniors and endeavored to return to the new office that I had earned without incident. To my credit, nothing happened on that long walk back. Still, it seemed every shadow that flickered in time with the fluorescents as though lit by candlelight seemed to jump out at me, inky tendrils reaching outwards like someone pining for a lover, two people lost to time, souls trapped on opposite sides of the ethereal membrane that separated those of life and those of death.

In the weeks that followed that event, my mind began to fray with every passing moment spent in the unfinished hallways of a floor that seemed increasingly more hostile. Perhaps my conscious psyche had always been blocking out the abject terror that my subconscious felt, shoving it down like a shot of tequila that was intended to suppress unwanted memories of one's unpleasant past. Or perhaps I truly hadn't sensed the malice of the seventh floor until that first scare, and since then my mind had been awakened to the malevolent intent that pervaded every inch of the yet unfinished level.

Either way, whether metaphorical or metaphysical, my third eye had been opened. I began to see the visages of impossible faces in the undulating shadows, to hear the melancholic laments of strangers long deceased. I began to feel the presence.

That pressure at the back of my neck stopped feeling like eyes. Now I perceived it as the viselike grip of a creature not borne of this world, its icy fingers bearing me deeper and deeper into its bowels with a touch as cold as a glacier and every bit as strong as the concrete that built this corporate coffin. I was beginning to see what the elders were so afraid of.

On the last night of my life, I found myself striding into the building with the mendaciously uncaring air of one who was not so troubled as me. This was no doubt an attempt to trick myself into believing that I wasn't scared at all, in this case a truly herculean task. I had been asked to work late that night. I was told there was nothing that could be done about it; some report or other had to be filed, and it must be by morning, lest the wrath of the investors be visited upon all our heads. Angry stockholders, I soon learned, were the least of my worries.

Normally the elevator worked perfectly. Unfortunately for me, that was not what fate held in store. On the first, second and third floors all was normal. On the fourth floor, the lights began flickering, their maniacal morse code a pattern I recognized from the fluorescents of my destination floor. On the fifth floor, the doors began to open and close rapidly, like the proverbial gnashing of teeth that Christians were so found of preaching from their pulpits. This chorus of steel and the lightshow from hell were joined in their cacophony on the sixth floor, shrill screams splitting the air like nails on a chalkboard. When the elevator arrived on the seventh floor, the gnashing and the shrieking and the flickering all ceased their maudlin symphony simultaneously, and the doors slid open smoothly with a punctuating ding.

I swallowed Chinese takeout for the second time that evening, and slowly eased my way out of the elevator and onto the seventh floor.

The lights were all off. There were no construction workers. No moonlight shone through the bay windows, and no sounds echoed from the empty rooms. The only light came from the open elevator, and even those beams seemed unable to cut deeper than a few feet in the chilling gloom. When the doors slowly closed shut behind me, I whirled to catch them but was too slow. The shiny chrome doors slid shut, taking all the remaining light with them. A heavy darkness fell over me, and I felt the presence return its hand to my neck.

This time there was no pretense of free will. The hand guided, and I followed. There was nothing else I could do. My hands hung limply at my sides, feet numb as they shuffled over the swirling carpet, neck burning from the touch of a being who radiated pure malice. I understood then what it was. The elders never seemed to know, or at least not to say, what it was that wandered the halls up here. I always imagined it was the specter of some long-forgotten CEO that had finally taken the Big Leap from one of the bay windows, perhaps one of my windows in fact, lest he fall prey to the much worse fates of bankruptcy and lawsuits.

But it wasn't some ill-fated executive. This presence reeked of moldy paper and stale coffee turned sour from decades spent sitting at the same desk. Its touch invoked visions of a valuable life forever lost in cubicle labyrinths that were impossible to escape. Its moist breath covered my skin with putrid droplets of spackled spit, my hair and suit ruined by the foul exhalations of a concrete behemoth that ate people every single day; a monster whom, every so often, wouldn't spit them back out again. The presence was the very building itself.

This monster was not an eldritch horror from beyond the cosmos. No, it was much worse than that. It was a beast of our own creation, a Frankensteinian abomination built not of flesh, but of the negative energies of hundreds and thousands of workers who came into this building and sacrificed pieces of themselves to an unforgiving god of green and plastic, a god we created for ourselves and defiled ourselves for time and time again. Well, here was our god. The blasphemous god we created was a vile thing, a twisted and corrupted deity that drained every ounce of spirit left in our broken bodies to feed its unending hunger.

These horrific revelations felt like they stretched across aeons, though I'm sure it was only a few short moments. When I came out of my reverie, I found myself standing on the edge of a perfectly square chasm. It was a hole in the floor, likely one where the now-absent construction workers had been replacing some wires or piping or something else that no longer mattered. What did matter was the thick line of conduit wrapped around my neck.

The frigid hand still tickling my flesh, I felt the presence one last time. The drywall around me seemed to bend and groan, canting inwards with a sick keening. Somehow I knew, in the deep dark of my subconscious, that the building was smiling at me. That was the last thought I had before I jumped.

I'm sure the workers that found me the next morning were traumatized. I know I would've been. Still, the company afforded them an entire day off work while the police and paramedics arrived to escort my corpse off the premises. Lucky bastards.

Ever since that night, I've been working overtime, filling out various reports and paperwork, though I can't say I can ever remember what they were for. Or what language they were written in. Sometimes I try to reach out to my old colleagues. I try to warn them, as the old-timers had warned me. Stay away from the seventh floor, I shriek. Stay away from this building entirely! They never listen. The elders seem to be the only ones that can hear me, and even then only sometimes. I try to touch their necks, just gently, just to let them know that I'm here. They can't seem to feel me either. Maybe if I squeeze just a little tighter.

Next week they're giving my corner office to someone else. Maybe he'll listen.