Posted by Than on December 29, 2000 at 14:10:06:
The Elevator (c) Thanatos 2000
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I paid my check.
The waitress smiled dutifully as I left a tip, as she had smiled a thousand times before, and I got up and walked away from another tasteless meal in a faceless hotel in a nameless city.
Oh, this place was Prague.
Fine. I could only tell that from what it said on the souvenirs on display in the revolving doors by the entrance.
Prague. It might as well have been Munich. Or Rome. Or Vienna. Or Washington. Or a myriad other fucking faceless hotel lobbies round the planet.
I decided that this is what Hell must look like. A hotel lobby, and at the desk, a smiling assistant to check you in: Good Day sir, and may I have your name? No, no reservation number is needed sir, I have your name right here. Will it be one millennium or two?
I smiled at my sense of humor and stepped into the elevator as the doors slid open.
The doors stayed open for a few moments after I pressed my floor number, and just as the doors started to slide shut, another man stepped hurried up and stepped swiftly inside.
I looked him over as he pressed the button for the parking garage, and took in his suit. Very expensive. Italian cut. Valentino? Fitted him perfectly anyway. Obviously made to measure. English shoes. New, too; hardly any crease in the polished leather. His hair was black and curled up round his collar. Tall, too. Over six feet, and his shoulders were broad and powerful. His aquiline face was staring down at something he held in his hands.
A faint and masculine scent filled the elevator.
As a male, it's difficult to be objective when faced with such a brutally attractive male. Part of you hates them for being younger, or richer, or better looking than you, but a part of you envies them. Envies them the women that their looks and money would attract. Envies them their clothes. Envies them their car, their apartment, their health club, their lifestyle. Envies them their life.
Envy...
The door slammed shut, and I felt a moment's indescribable fear. The hairs on the back of my neck, and the short hairs near my crown, were literally standing up, and I felt a shiver run down my back.
The stranger turned to look at me, and he smiled, showing a set of perfectly formed, even white teeth. His eyes were very dark brown, almost black. I felt a sudden surge of hate/envy at this impossibly good-looking male that was standing over me.
'Look, I've just bought this thing, and I can't make head nor tail of how it works. You got any ideas?'
He was holding a Sony personal DVD player, which he held out for me. The wires of the headphones dangled, and the battery door was half-hanging open.
I felt a bit better. He might be impossibly good-looking and super-rich, but he couldn't work a DVD player. Ha.
Something about him made me reluctant to touch it, but I reached out and took hold of the player.
'Uh, the battery door's not fully closed,' I ventured, wondering why he hadn't spotted this. 'See, it clicks in like this, and off you go. There, it's working.'
Some little green LEDs lit up, and I showed him the screen, which had cleared, and a scene was playing on it, and I made to hand it back.
Then I froze.
The scene on the DVD player was something I recognized.
It was my home, or the home in which I had been living these past few years.
My wife was by the bed, and she was collapsed by it, crying. Her shoulders shook. She was holding a photograph in her hands that she had removed from a picture frame. It was of the family, in happier times, when we had been together.
She clutched the photograph to her chest, her back heaving with sobs.
'Divorce is a terrible thing, isn't it,' the stranger's voice broke in on my thoughts.
'How the hell did you get this?' I demanded, 'who the fuck are you!'
The stranger grinned, and just nodded back to the screen.
I was shaking with anger and concern.
'How dare you film my family! Who sent you here! Was it my wife?'
He gazed up at the ceiling of the elevator, and it began to descend. He turned his head to one side, inspecting his reflection in the mirrored ceiling, and carried on speaking as he did so.
'You know, I've got to hand it to you. It was quite some thing you did, walking out on them like that. They were a lovely family, and you screwed them up royally. You and your goddam principles.' He laughed, and it was like red-hot coals being shaken in a brazier.
The elevator stopped at the next floor, on its way down to the parking garage. The stranger indicated the doors as they slid aside.
'Say, I've got someone I'd like you to meet.'
A man stepped in, and turned to the control panel. I sucked in my breath in shock.
It was me.
The stranger smiled.
'Yes, it's you. Looks confident, doesn't he? He's going to get a nasty shock in a minute.'
I watched in horror as the figure of me punched the button for the parking garage, and the doors slid shut. The figure seemed oblivious to us standing there.
'Going down,' said the stranger, gleefully. 'Oh, and now here's the sad bit.'
He mimicked a sad look, and reached out and touched the figure of me, once, in the chest.
The figure of me blanched, and clutched at his left arm in pain and surprise.
'Yes, it's a heart attack. Big one. Kind of young to have one, but with the family history and everything, and the stress of the job and the divorce, it's plausible.' The stranger turned to look at me, and his eyes had gone deathly cold, and he wasn't smiling any more. 'It's not a nice way to go, especially when you're alone.'
'Stop it!' I said, the panic rising in my voice. The figure of me had sunk to its knees, and fell awkwardly, sideways, across the floor of the elevator. His mouth was open, and his lips had gone dark and blue. He was struggling, trying to reach inside his jacket pocket. Then he pulled out a cellphone, but a fresh pain convulsed him, and the phone fell from his nerveless fingers.
His face was contorted in agony now; his eyes screwed shut against the pain in his chest. I couldn't bear to watch my own pain, but I was rooted to the spot, watching myself suffer a heart attack on the floor of the elevator.
The figure of me fell onto his back now, eyes staring up at the ceiling.
'You're dying now,' said the stranger coldly. 'Blood pressure's going through the floor. Maybe if someone got to you in the next few minutes you'd be saved, but let's face it, nobody's going to find you down here.'
The figure on the floor twitched once.
'Your heart's stopped now, and your brain's starving of oxygen. But you're still faintly conscious, and you're living out your life before you die. Oh dear, oh dear, I don't think you're enjoying it.'
The figure on the floor had an expression of utter despair on his face. In the last few moments, it seemed as if he had realized the utter folly of his life, and his face was frozen in this terrible look as his eyes glazed over.
'I think that moment would have stretched forever,' the stranger commented. 'You know, I'm really glad I don't have to go through that. It must really suck. You know, dying alone, far from help, wishing your family were near, blah blah blah. I see it so many times, but I'll never get used to it.'
'Stop it! Stop it! Bring him back! Bring me back!' I shrieked, and I sprang to the figure's side and grabbed the body, but it was inert.
'Uh uh. Gone now. Just a few minutes more. Bit of a formality thing this, but you know we have our rules too.' The stranger reached inside his jacket and drew out a packet of cigarettes, and casually withdrew one, and lit up. He offered the packet to me. I stared back.
'Okay, suit yourself. Me, I love these things. Course, they can't hurt me. Fucks you people up something bad. It's amazing how dumb you people can be sometimes.' he drew deeply on his cigarette, and slowly exhaled, and the smoke swirled around us.
We waited, my panic rising, and then something seemed to happen to the body. I had thought it had already stopped moving, but something seemed to happen to it, something left it, and it became very still, hard, almost remote.
'Well,' the stranger dropped the butt onto the floor, and screwed it out under the sole of his shoe. 'That's it. You're dead.'
I stared at my body on the floor in disbelief.
'Awww, yes, it's a shame, isn't it. All that life to live and everything. You could have married again, and repaired things with your kids, and maybe died happy in your own bed, with them round you.'
He shook his head in mock pity.
'Well, life's a bitch sometimes. You might as well get over it. And while you do, we're going on a little ride.' He reached out and pressed a button on the control panel, and the elevator gave a lurch.
The figure on the floor vanished, and the elevator walls became transparent. We were suspended, as if in glass, in the elevator shaft, and around us, control cables swayed gently as we hung there.
The stranger grinned evilly at me.
Then the elevator quite literally dropped through the floor.
I grabbed onto the handrails as the elevator car fell crazily downwards.
'Whooh-hooh! We're going home!' yelled the stranger, and he threw off his jacket and undid his necktie as we accelerated into darkness.
'Nooooh!' I cried, 'Stop it! Stop!'
'What are you afraid of!' he yelled, above the rising noise of wind, 'you're already dead! And we're falling through solid rock! You've nowhere to fall!'
We were falling through solid rock, and it was dark.
'Care to look around?' he asked, as our speed stabilized. We were plunging down, falling towards the center of the earth, and he flicked his lighter. The flickering light showed up the green rock sleeting past outside.
'Olivine,' he said confidently, 'this is the mantle. Isn't geology fascinating?'
Then the rock walls were ripped away, and we fell into blackness.
And in the blackness, far below us, deep in the underworld, bright streaks of light grew, and slipped past us, fleeting upwards into the unseen sky.
I realized we were falling incredibly quickly. They came from a source far below us and spread out wide as we fell past them, giving an impression of incredible speed.
They changed as we fell, and became bright whorls of light, and complex patterns, fleeting past in the darkness.
The stranger grew silent as we left the lights behind us, and we fell past gigantic, delicate structures, like huge spinal columns arching upwards, a delicate tracery of arches holding up the sky.
The structures moved past us slowly, and I realized that they must have been vast, a cathedral of arches hidden in the Underworld.
'It's beautiful, isn't it,' he commented, as we fell slowly through the delicate arches and cobweb-like struts, 'I'd never have the imagination to design something like this.'
Then the graceful arches became more closely packed, and the shapes more convoluted, and I saw that they were faces, gigantic faces twisted into expressions of pain and despair, and their sightless eyes watched us as we fell. I shivered, and the stranger looked at me incuriously as I stared in fear at the gigantic faces passing by the elevator.
'You know, I've studied a lot of religion,' he mused, 'it's been a lifelong fascination of mine, so to speak. You all have these crazy ideas, that somehow you can escape this place, by being good enough, or pure enough, or whatever. Well, it's all bullshit. There's only me, you see. Lots of people know the truth of course, people who've been here in dreams, or who've been over the edge and come back again, but they're too scared to tell, even to themselves.'
The faces were fading high above us now, and an orange glow was glowing. I looked down, and a terrible vista was growing below our feet.
Tiny spots of red light were scattered below us, and as we fell closer, they slowly grew. And grew, until they became vast seas of flaming lava below us, pierced by rocky islands. Great banks of drifting smoke and steam rose up to greet us, and as we grew closer, I could see that the rivers of magma were moving, flowing from lake to interconnected lake, or erupting in great jets of molten rock into the inky sky.
I realized that the elevator must have been slowing for some time, because I could discern figures on the rocky outcrop below us, and the scale they lent to the scene showed that we were slowing to a halt at last.
'Ah, we're nearly home. And here's the welcoming committee.'
The outcrop rose around us until we were only a few meters above it. Silhouetted against the blood-red light, a crowd of people stood, waiting for me. There were tall people, short ones, deformed ones, and all of them held crude farming implements; hoes, sickles, curved knives.
'I'm going to leave you in the company of these gentlemen now,' the stranger said, quietly. 'I could lie to you and say it won't hurt. But I'd be lying, and I can't lie here. It's going to be nasty, and you'll never die, but you'll suffer for ever.'
The elevator stopped, and there was a quiet ting from the hidden bell, and the doors opened.
'It's time to go, friend.'
I saw the faces looking at me, and in a sudden rush of red fire behind me they were illuminated in their full horror. Their clothes were rags, and all of them had been torn to pieces and crudely put back together by uncaring hands. None of them had any eyes; but they all looked unerringly at me, and started to shuffle forward.
I hadn't moved, but somehow I was in front of the elevator, and behind me, the doors slid shut again.
The crowd of eyeless things surged forward, reaching for me, hungering for me.
I turned and tried to grab for the elevator car, but it was already moving, and it was higher than I could reach already, and they dragged me back, dragged me back and down, and they moaned with inhuman voices from tongueless mouths as they took me, and the blunt and broken tools rose and fell, rose and fell against the blood-red horizon.
The stranger looked down at me as he ascended into the black sky, and great jets of molten lava exploded behind him, silhouetting his figure against the fire.
He just looked at me.
And no matter how loudly I screamed, no matter how much I begged, he just stared back at me as he dwindled into the sky, and he lit another cigarette and exhaled smoke lazily from his nostrils as the monsters tore my soul apart.
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thanatos_r@hotmail.com