Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/z265m4/the_elevator_to_hell_part_1/
May 2024
You’re probably wondering what prompted me to write more about this, nearly a year and a half after I first told the story, and five and a half years after the elevator incident took place.
I’ll cut to the chase: yesterday I was at the library, and the usual librarian, Kirk, wasn’t there. A kind older woman named Jean was in his place. As I went to check out some books and return others, I asked her if Kirk was off today.
“No, he’s on medical leave. He had a heart attack,” she said, not looking up as she scanned the books.
“Oh, my god, I’m sorry,” I said. “I-”
“No, no, you’re fine,” she assured. “Kirk said he wants the regulars to be in the loop. He should be back here by the end of the month. He’s doing well, all things considered.”
“Good to hear. Tell him I said hi if you get a chance.”
“Will do. Oh, and, he wanted me to tell everyone to stay away from the JP Morgan branch downtown.”
My eyes went wide in shock. All of my nerves spiked at once.
She continued, “Don’t tell him I said this, but . . . I think he’s just being a little dramatic. It’s a tough time for him, you know. The way I hear it, he was having some kind of existential crisis or panic attack, which he says was caused by something about the elevator there, and that’s what triggered the heart attack.”
Totally dumbstruck, I didn’t know how to respond. “Huh. Well, best wishes to him. Have a good day now,” I stuttered as I turned around to leave. “You as well,” she called back.
I sat down in my car - the one I bought after the old one disappeared in that parking garage - and contemplated what I had just heard.
I thought that was over. I was never going to forget what happened that night, but five and a half years down the line with no further occurrences or even evidence that it happened, I felt like I had moved on. No such luck.
I HAD to talk to Kirk. I didn’t want to. But the thought of more people falling victim to that elevator was too much to bear.
I went back inside to talk to Jean. “Hey, I’d really like to visit Kirk, to see how he’s doing. Do you know which hospital he’s at?”
“He said he’s at the Piedmont. The real big one in Midtown.”
“Thank you so much,” I said.
This morning I drove down to the hospital, and asked to see Kirk Renner. “Room 241, up the elevator one level and to the left,” a lady at the front desk told me. I didn’t expect it to be that easy. “Where are the stairs?” I asked.
Kirk was laying on the bed in a gown, several tubes and instruments hooked up to him, but he was well awake and looked to be in okay shape. He was excited to see me.
I’d rehearsed what I would say dozens of times on the way to the hospital, but I still wondered if he would believe that I had a similar experience. Maybe he would be elated at the mere thought of someone believing him.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said nervously, staring at the wall.
He sighed. “Don’t apoligize. It’s not your fault. Life, just . . . gives you lemons sometimes.”
“True that.” A nurse entered the room with a tray of food and water, and set it on the table next to Kirk’s bed. “Would you like anything?” she asked me with a smile. “Just some water, please,” I replied.
She left. I took a deep breath. “So, Jean told me you were at the JP Morgan downtown when this happened?”
His demeanor changed. Muscles tightened, voice got lower and harder. “Yeah, I was. Why?”
“I, uh . . . had a weird experience there, a while back. When I worked for the law firm in that building.” Thinking about it hurt my brain.
That clearly shocked him. “Wait, seriously?”
“Yeah. In the elevator.”
That made his eyes even wider.
The nurse came back in to give me my water. We acted like everything was normal for a few seconds.
She left again. “You shitting me?” he asked skeptically.
“Not at all.”
“Describe it to me.”
I closed my eyes, as if I was trying to remember it, but without remembering it. “One evening after work. I rode the elevator down from my office on the 35th floor to the parking garage. The garage gave me a really bad feeling, like I was being watched. It was completely empty, my car wasn’t where I left it. The exit to the street didn’t exist, it was just another wall. I got back in the elevator, and the floors were way off. Negative 981, stuff like that.”
“Did the dial turn red?”
“Yes.”
“Did you end up back at the first floor after hitting one of those buttons?”
“Yes. Everything went back to normal after that.”
Kirk rubbed his face with his palm. He chuckled a little. “What the hell, man,” he vented. “I tried to Google this, and the only result was a Reddit post from 2022.” He opened the post in question. “This yours?”
u/doggo816. “Yep, that’s me. I didn’t think anyone would believe me if I told them to their face.”
“And I wouldn’t blame them one bit,” he said. “I sure as hell wouldn’t have believed you, before Friday.”
There was silence for a moment.
“We should sit on this for a few days. Think about it. Come visit me next week, once I’m out of the hospital. Jean can tell you my address.”
“Okay. We’ll plan on that. Get some sleep tonight,” I told him.
“Same to you.”
I went to Kirk’s house the next week. He lived in a middle-class neighborhood, not bad but not remarkable. We sat down in his living room.
“I probably read your post 100 times,” he began. “And thinking about your experience and mine, there’s one line that I don’t believe to be true.”
That definitely got my attention. “Which one?”
“When the elevator doors opened and everything seemed normal again. This was no floor -981. It was floor 1.”
“You . . . think that was floor -981?” I had a lot of questions.
“Yes. And it was floor 1.”
“What do you mean?”
He paused.
“Have you ever seen Stranger Things?”
That caught me off guard. “Uh, yeah, I have,” I answered, laughing a little bit.
“I think it’s like the upside down. A different dimension.”
Who knows. Maybe he was right. Nothing could be ruled out. “Why do you think so?”
He stared at the floor. “I don’t know if you felt this way, but during that whole ordeal, everything just felt so wrong. And not just because things were out of place. It felt so sinister and mean. Like there was someone, or something, that wanted me dead. That wanted all of us dead.”
Thinking about it, I definitely agreed. “So, what, or who, do you think this thing is?”
“No idea.”
That evening, I went to the bank downtown. I hadn’t been there since the incident. I didn’t tell Kirk I was going there. I wanted to go alone, to truly remember what it felt like, and to find answers.
As you might have guessed, I parked on the street. The exterior of the building was unchanged: copper-brown with large square windows. It wasn’t much different from the buildings around it, and it certainly didn’t look like it was harboring an evil dimension inside of it.
Merely going inside didn’t scare me. I walked around the first floor and took a lap around the outside. The elevator was still there, same as it always was. I didn’t go in it. Gail was no longer the parking attendant, replaced by a younger man. I walked down the long first floor hallway toward the bathrooms. They were upscale, quiet, and very clean. About what you would expect from a large bank.
I did my business and washed my hands, looking in the mirror, contemplating whether I could go another day without shaving. Then, something appeared on the wall behind me, above the urinals.
The automatic sink shut off. I stared at the mirror, unwilling to turn around.
I realized it was writing. It looked like black permanent marker. But no person or marker was there. The writing just appeared from nowhere.
It was very neat, almost like it was typed and printed out.
Whoever was writing was agonizingly slow.
DON’T ASK QUESTIONS, it read.
That sounded bad.
I threw the door open and bolted out of the bathroom. I sprinted back to the lobby, then slowed to a speedwalk when I was confident no one was following me.
I got back to my car. Once again, everything was normal. And honestly, that was the most frustrating part: whatever it was would never show itself. It would just pull some hallucinatory nonsense, and then disappear.
That night, perhaps unsurprisingly, I had a dream. Also perhaps unsurprisingly, I was in the elevator. I looked up at the dial. It was red, and the numbers were familiar in all the wrong ways: -977, -978, -979, -980, -981.
The needle reached -981. The elevator stopped, the ding sounded, the doors opened.
I was at the very bottom of the parking garage. It was dark except for a lone dim light. Straight ahead were two blank dark green doors.
There were sounds coming from the other side of the doors. Screaming, pounding, banging. Every so often a flash of what looked like lightning was visible through the crack at the bottom.
I walked slowly towards these doors. As I reached them, I woke up, sweating and scared.