I work for a real estate company, which sounds boring, I know, but I have the least boring real estate job ever. The company I work for is based in the suburbs of a city that is known for having more abandoned buildings than usable ones. You’re probably thinking of the right one, but I don’t want to get too specific. Anyway, my company buys abandoned buildings from institutions that can own buildings, but not do much with them, like banks or the state. Then we evaluate them and resell, or gut and scrap them out. This is where I come in.
As a fairly active person - I hike, indoor rock climbing, ect - that lives in the city, I was always interested in urban exploration. I jumped at the chance to do it legally. I quit my desk job as a loan officer and went to work for the company I work for now. When we acquire new property we’re given an asset assessment sheet, basically a list of anything else that may have come with the property. My job is to enter the buildings and inventory everything inside. I also do some structural checks to see if it’s safe for other people to enter, take photos, basic stuff.
Let me tell you, it’s a lot more interesting than filling out paperwork all day. It pays pretty well too, since most people with the qualifications I have aren’t very interested in exploring rotten buildings where the roof might collapse on you, if you don’t fall through the floor first. That’s happened to me, by the way. Not a full on fall, but I’ve put my foot through a floor during an inspection.
I wanted to post about a weird thing that happened on an inspection last week. It’s kind of a whole thing, so let me start from the beginning.
The new building was pretty average compared to what we usually got. In a part of the city that was well to do in the 60s, but had fallen off over time. The kind of area set up like a downtown hub but no one really goes there. Some of the businesses were still open, but as little markets and dollar stores. The building I was here for had been a bakery in its heyday, with a small apartment on the second floor. From the basic knowledge I had from the file transferred over with the sale, the owner of the bakery had also owned the building and lived in the apartment, with her daughter and grandchildren, after inheriting all of it from her own parents. As the neighborhood went down, she’d paid less and less of her bills until the unpaid property taxes caused the city to repossess. They’d been completely unable to contact her for months, and when they sent the police out to change the locks they found the place abandoned. The apartment had been empty, the bakery closed. Sad story, but the same story that a lot of the houses in this neighborhood had.
The door opened easily enough. I had a crowbar in my car just in case, but I always tried the keys first. We didn’t usually do anything crazy like board over the doors and windows, unless there was vandalism, so the daylight shone through the molding white drapes on the windows and lit the place fairly well. The door was nearly flush with the right wall of the building, and along the bank of windows to my left was a small bar, the kind you might sit at with a muffin and coffee had there been any chairs. Against the back wall was a glass display case, the kind that also functions as a counter that staff stand behind. There was enough space between these two to suggest that this bakery had often had long lines, or possibly more seating. The wall beyond that had a faded mural. It was a picture of soft, green hills dotted with houses descending into a sparkling blue sea. Two doves held a banner, possibly telling the name of the bakery or even the location of the mural. I had no idea, because it was in Greek.
I set my backpack down, took out my phone and started photographing. The windows were all whole in their panes, as well as the glass making up the counter. The counter also still possessed most of the sliding pans that the sweets would have sat on. Though everything was covered in a solid layer of dust, it seemed to have been well taken care of while the bakery was active and thankfully not vandalized since. I made my way into the back room through the door behind the counter. It was actually quite small for a shop this size, because the ovens had been installed in the basement. The back room had probably been more of a storage area than anything, and was empty. The only thing remaining was the dumbwaiter. In the farthest corner of the room was a square hole in the floor, ringed by steel plates. A yellow striped guardrail surrounded it, coming to about knee height. The mechanism that moved the dumbwaiter was exposed, steel beams lining the wall over the hole. I photographed it, planting my feet under the guardrails and leaning in to give a clear picture of the rust starting to form. I pressed my weight onto my palm, leaned into the wall, and my body hovered briefly over the hole.
As I did this, I began to feel like someone was in the basement. I looked down, into the square, industrial, empty shaft of the dumbwaiter. I saw nothing, even when I pointed my phone’s flashlight downwards. I also didn’t see the ground of the basement.
With the main floor checked, I prepared to move to the basement. The store room had a back door, leading to a small landing. From the landing you could go up, to the apartment, or down, to the basement. There was also a door which led outside, to a small stretch of dead grass between buildings. The outside door had a barred window that cast a striped shadow back at me. I rattled the handle of the door, finding it locked.
I hadn’t shaken the feeling that someone was downstairs. There was no reason, no sound or movement that had caught my attention, but still it was there. A feeling of presence. The front door had also been locked, and had opened correctly, meaning that it probably hadn’t been messed with. The back door was locked, as well as whole. No windows had been broken. There was no way for someone to be down there, but I still had the strongest, down in my guts feeling that someone was in the basement.
I turned to the stairs, tamping down my unease. At the end of the day, the most important items in an inspection were the most expensive, and those ovens were the most expensive thing in the building. If I had to guess, they were probably a big part of the reason we bought the building, if not the reason. Despite my nagging idea that I should not go to the basement, there was no way that I could get out of it. The stairs leading to the basement were single wooden slats, suspended horizontally over an open space. The slightly dusty, cold smell of underground spaces wafted up towards me. Even with the daylight shining in through the window, I could only see the first few steps. Shining the light of my phone only illuminated one more. They seemed to fade into the solid darkness of the basement.
I didn’t like the look of the steps, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was because of the creeps this place had started to give me, or because I was actually seeing something unsafe that my subconscious was warning me about.
Before I went on one of my inspections I had to check in with my boss, and check in again when I left the building. I also had my phone with me at all times, to call the office or 911 if I needed help. Even with these precautions, I still didn’t want to fall through a set of rickety old stairs and break my leg. I returned to my backpack in the front room and took out a length of rope and a round 10 lb weight. It wasn’t the most hi-tech way to test the stairs, but it made me feel a lot more comfortable if I could huck a big piece of metal at a step and have it not break. I threaded the rope through the center of the weight, knotted it twice, and tied the other end to my belt. I’d lost a different weight doing this, and now my home set was lopsided.
I moved up to the first step, held the weight out at arms length, and dropped it. It hit the step with a crash, but the wood held. The second and third did as well. I moved along the stairs as I went, and even as I stood on the third stair the sound of the weight hitting the fourth was strangely muffled. Still, even with my phone tucked into my shirt pocket and casting a light outwards, I could barely see just in front of myself. The darkness was oppressive. Like it was alive. That might be an authorial license, but bear with me.
By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs the darkness was thick, the way smoke is. But there was no smell, and it didn’t dissipate the way that smoke does when you create airflow. I waved my hand in front of my face to waft the darkness away, but it didn’t do anything other than make my hand appear to slowly dissolve into a haze. The light from my phone only lit the area immediately in front of me. I stepped carefully into the basement.
A voice rasped in front of me. I jumped about halfway up the stairs. After I caught my breath, I realized that the sound had been a metallic creak, not a voice, as I had originally thought. I put my palm on the wall to my right and slowly stepped forward. My field of vision stayed consistent at about a foot in all directions, so my plan was to follow the wall in a circle around the room, and hopefully run into the ovens on the way. If I didn’t, then at least I would end up back at the stairs and be able to report that I had tried. My other hand was held out in front of me, and I wove it back and forth like a blind man’s cane, so that I wouldn’t walk into anything. This failed pretty significantly as I stubbed my toe on a metal plate hovering about an inch off the ground.
“Fuck,” I said, leaning forward to grab my foot. As I moved closer to the metal plate, I saw the yellow and black striped tape ringing the outside of the square plate, and realized that I had found the moving part of the dumbwaiter. It was secured to the wall with a series of steel pieces and wires that I didn’t want to stick my hand into, so instead of hugging the wall, I decided to stay low and let my phone flashlight illuminate the dumbwaiter to be my guide. This half of the dumbwaiter was also in the corner, which made me hope that the basement was similarly proportioned to the tiny back room. I was very tired of wading around in the darkness.
My searching left hand eventually hit the edge of a metal box. I could have shouted with joy, because I’d finally found the oven. I moved closer, letting the flashlight in my pocket illuminate the silver surface. The light barely reflected back at me, not affecting the omnipresent darkness at all. I felt my way around to the glass doors at the front of the oven, then down. I knelt on the floor to search for the serial number on the underside of the steel box. Cautiously, I made sure not to crawl under, or to place my limbs too close, wary of the metallic screech I’d heard at the bottom of the stairs. The idea of the oven falling and trapping me underneath made me feel a cold sweat on the back of my neck.
I feel like I need to take a moment to explain something. I’m not someone that is often afraid in situations like this. Like I said, I’m a physically fit man, and I do this professionally. I have had close scrapes: injuries, unstable buildings, squatters. I have scars from doing this job, and while I am always aware of potential danger, it is rare for me to feel truly afraid. So when I tell you how terrified I was to be in that basement, you need to understand the magnitude of that. And I was terrified. To my bones I was afraid, and every minute that I stayed was an act of intense willpower, and only because I wasn’t interested in losing my job.
I felt the raised letters of the serial number before I saw it. Using my other hand, I took my phone from my pocket and used it to snap a picture. Satisfied, I moved to the second oven. I reviewed the photos after they had been taken, and they were perfectly legible. Curiously I took a photo with my phone pointing into the empty fog of the basement. In my phone screen, there was nothing but swirling fog, until I snapped the picture. As the light briefly intensified with the camera flash I heard the metal noise again, from the far end of the basement. I pulled my phone close to my face and opened the picture.
The basement was revealed to be a small, brick room, with discoloration around the walls where shelves must have sat. The floor was unpolished concrete. The stairs were suspended by wooden planks, and under them crouched a monster.
I froze, feeling disbelief and horror creeping from the pit of my stomach up to my eyes. In the photo, the creature leaned out from a nest of newspaper and fabrics under the stairs. It looked like a bronzed skeleton, except that the skull had no eye holes. It rested on four arms, the other two wound up through the slats of the stairs, as if waiting for unwary feet.
I tried to swallow and felt my throat click dryly. My vision narrowed to the screen of my phone, while my mind raced.
I needed to get out of this basement. The stairs were now a non-option, as I imagined those long fingered bronze hands snatching at my ankles. There were no windows. That left only the dumbwaiter. I assumed that the metallic noise I had been hearing was the sound of the creature moving, as if it was rusted over. It had been silent since I had taken the picture, and I prayed that it still thought I was unaware of its presence. I knew, somehow, that the creature was responsible for the darkness. It was only through some quirk of technology that I had seen it at all, and I could only hope that it was unaware of this and would continue to lie in wait for me.
Taking a moment to steady myself, I turned back towards the ovens and the dumbwaiter. I moved agonizingly slowly. I didn’t want the creature to know how afraid I was, it might pounce if it thought I was trying to escape. I stepped onto the metal plate of the dumbwaiter and bounced, as if testing the weight. I wrapped my hands around the largest of the steel shafts holding the plate to the wall and slowly applied pressure to it. There was no way the dumbwaiter was going to work normally, the electricity had been cut off for months, if not years.
The shaft was dirty with sooty, black grease, but seemed like it would hold my weight. However, it was quite awkward to grip, and I knew that if I rushed or got careless I was going to fall. I tried not to imagine myself falling, and being trapped in this tiny, dark room with that horrible creature and a broken leg. I took a deep breath, in through my mouth, out through my nose. Even without being able to completely see the walls, I knew that the distance that I needed to climb was only ten or twelve feet, and I had put in far more than that on the climbing wall at the gym. Breathe in, breathe out. The steel shaft was bolted into the wall and the solid steel plate that it was made to move had to weigh at least as much as I did, it could hold me. Breathe in, breathe out. I didn’t have any other options.
Grabbing the shaft as firmly as I could, I swung my leg up to brace myself against the wall, letting the tension of my body support me. Once I felt secure, I brought my other leg off the ground, to rest even higher on the wall. I was bent nearly at the waist, with my knees in my armpits and I could already feel the pressure in my shoulders, neck and ankles. It was bearable. Slowly, carefully, I released one hand and moved it up the steel shaft, beginning my walk up the wall. I took a deep breath, and another step. It was uncomfortable, but doable.
I heard a metallic screech behind me. I nearly stumbled, catastrophically, but kept my grip at the last minute. After a deep breath, I continued. The screeches continued behind me, in smaller squeaks and crunches, chittering along like some ancient machine coming to life. The noises came slowly, but like any machine, it would be faster soon. I continued my walk up the wall, my lower back screaming, torn between the adrenaline demanding that I run and the diminishing reason left in my mind telling me that a fall would be fatal. The rusted shrieking had begun to even out into a steady whirring, clicking along like an old typewriter. It sounded closer already.
I felt a yank around my waist.
My fingers slipped where they gripped the shaft, sliding back through the grease. My heart jumped into my throat and I had to freeze for a moment, my startled lizard brain stopping completely for a moment as it expected my impending doom. When a second pull did not come I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. The weight I used to test the stairs was still tied to my belt, and it must have caught under the plate of the dumbwaiter. I braced myself and tried to lift my hips, testing my theory, and it held true. I was painfully stuck a few feet from the exit.
The clicking behind me crept closer, whirring louder and faster. A dreadful dragging sound accompanied the clicking now. I tried desperately to shut the thought of what that might mean out of my mind.
I dragged myself forward, bending my knees until they popped, and jammed my fingertips deep into the thin crack between the shaft and the brick wall. Gritting my teeth, I took my other hand off the shaft. The machine sounds were closer now, that horrible dragging sound nearly underneath me. My left hand fumbled at the knot of rope but between my growing panic and the grease on my fingers I couldn’t find the end. Click, click, click, drag. I shifted my focus to the belt itself, tugging the tongue free and working at the fastener. Click, click, drag. The tongue of the belt came free and dangled uselessly to my side, the knot slipping along the length. Click, drag. My joints screaming, my fingers in agony, I grabbed the shaft again and yanked myself up, praying that the knot would fall the rest of the way off on its own and not send me back down into the darkness.
I am not a religious man, but I felt a conversion coming on as I thrust my upper body into the foggy but clearing air above me, my mind a blank and wordless prayer that my belt would give. I felt the side of my belt slip off, and the pressure around my waist suddenly released. I heard myself make a sound like a screamed peal of laughter, and shot myself forward. In my desperate hyperextension my fingers touched the metal plate on the floor of the storage room. I grabbed onto the lip of the hole and dragged myself up until my other hand could reach the guardrail. The clicking sound was now joined with the tapping of metal on metal, like the sound of a rat digging itself out of a wall. I hung suspended, one hand gripped tight to the guardrail, the other on the metal plate, the tips of my fingers scraped raw from the brick walls. From underneath I felt the dumbwaiter and the apparatus supporting it shake, something impossibly heavy settling its weight onto the metal plate beneath me. The strut I had climbed out on made a popping noise, pulling away from the wall.
I shook my head quickly to clear it. Breathe in, breathe out. No time to panic. I swung my lower body up, my abused back muscles screaming. My toes made contact with the floor of the storage room, the side of the open dumbwaiter hole, and skidded off, pain fluttering up my leg. The strut popped again, pulling further from the wall. That horrible typewriter clicking was louder than ever, directly underneath me.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
I swung my body up one last time, my heel connecting with the side of the plate. I pulled my other leg up and swung it onto the floor, my body briefly suspended over the dumbwaiter hole the way you float in the ocean, head back, chest and hips up, helpless. I used the last of the strength in my arms to press my body along the floor, sliding feet first into safety. When just my head hovered over the hole I sat up and lunged across the tiny back room, rolling into the far wall.
I watched as the strut I climbed popped and creaked away from the wall, curving forward into the open hole of the dumbwaiter shaft. More metallic noises rose from below, faster, more aggressive. Angry. A wisp of darkness, like smoke, rose into the back room, defiant against the midafternoon light streaming in through the barred window. The strut curved further, collapsing back into itself under the weight, or the strength, of the monster, and disappeared into the basement.
My breath caught, I scrambled to my feet and ran out of the front door of the bakery. I didn’t slow down or stop to look as I grabbed my backpack, closed the door behind me and got in my car. In a blind panic I even drove, coming back to myself a few blocks away when my shredded fingers began to bleed down the steering wheel. I stopped, feeling my pulse in my hands, my face, my chest, and made a sound I have never made before, and couldn’t make again if I tried, like letting all of my terror go in one breath.
When I calmed down I drove back to my office.
Keisha, my supervisor, was in the lobby when I pulled up.
“Why didn’t you check in?” She demanded. Then I watched her eyes widen as she took in my filthy, bleeding hands, my belt hanging off of my waist, and whatever expression I was making at the time. The angry boss act dropped immediately and she ushered me back into our shared office. “What happened?”
I told her everything. It came out as she quietly examined my hands, cleaning and bandaging my scrapes with our first aid kit. They were mostly fine, except for a nasty cut at the base of my right thumb, where I must have gotten myself as I released my belt. I think that by the end I was crying, but I’m not sure. All I felt as I spoke was this tired emptiness. At one point Keisha took my phone and opened the camera roll, calmly looking at the picture of the monster under the stairs.
“Ok,” she said. “Here’s what’s happening.”
She turned the phone towards me so I could watch as she deleted the photo.
“I am going to file your report on this. You were able to get into the basement. You could not confirm any of the inventory. After you were in the basement the stairs collapsed, and you had to climb out. You injured yourself while climbing. You’re going to take the next week off. The building will be marked unsafe for entry and demo’d. We are not going to talk about this again.” She held my gaze. “Understand?”
“I understand,” I said, after a long pause.
Keisha sighed. “Good. Now go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow, you should see a doctor.”
And that’s what I did.
I’m okay. I have scrapes and bruises and muscle strains, but I’m fine. But I needed to get this all off my chest. I can’t talk about it to Keisha, and without the picture I don’t think anyone else would believe me. I don’t even really care if you guys believe me. Because I’m scared. It’s almost the end of my time off, and I know I’ll have to go back out there.
The thing is, I didn’t lock the door. I ran out so fast that I closed it behind me, but I never locked it. And whatever that thing is, it was too heavy to climb the dumbwaiter shaft, but the stairs were fine. They never even creaked as I walked down them. It might be able to get up the stairs.
And the bakery was so taken care of. No one in the neighborhood had bothered it, no graffiti, no one had forced the doors. It seemed lucky at the time, but maybe they knew that it was spoken for. Protected. And if that was the case, there wouldn’t be a reason to lock the doors.
Unless you wanted to keep something in.