Between Floors

The text showed up at 11:47 p.m.

Ever wondered what happens after hours at Harper & Co?

Bring a flashlight.

I almost deleted it.

Unknown numbers sent weird messages all the time. Spam, scams, wrong numbers. Normally I never gave them a second thought. Then another text came in. Your husband's office still exists.

My thumb froze over the screen.

Three years earlier, my husband Daniel had walked into Harper & Co. at 8:13 on a Tuesday morning. And never walked back out. The police searched the building. Security reviewed every camera. Investigators interviewed everyone who worked there. Nothing made sense. One camera showed Daniel entering the elevator. After that, he was just... gone.

No body. No evidence. Nothing. Eventually the investigation died. People stopped talking about him. The company stopped returning my calls. Life kept moving.

Mine didn't.

Another message appeared.

Bring Lily.

Come before midnight.

I stared at it. Bring Lily. My daughter was asleep in her crib across the room. Fourteen months old. Too young to know who her father had been.

The message felt wrong.

It also felt impossible to ignore. I typed back. Who is this? The response came instantly. Floor 22. Office 2219. He's waiting.

Then the number stopped responding. No matter how many messages I sent back, I got no response. Nothing.

At 11:58 p.m., I found myself standing outside Harper & Co.

The tower rose above downtown like a giant black mirror. The higher floors disappeared into the clouds. During the day it looked like every other office building. At night it looked abandoned. Not empty. Abandoned. Like something had happened there and everyone had quietly agreed never to talk about it.

Lily slept against my shoulder, wrapped in a blanket. The revolving doors were moving. Slowly. Nobody was pushing them. I stood there for a moment before realizing I was making excuses.

It was either a prank or it wasn't.

The only way to find out was to go inside.

So I did.

The second I crossed the threshold, the city disappeared. Not literally. I could still see the street through the glass. But the sound vanished. Cars moved. Traffic lights changed. A bus rolled through an intersection.

None of it made noise.

The silence felt heavy. The lobby itself looked normal enough. Reception desk. Leather couches. Shiny marble floors. A big company logo on the wall. Then my flashlight landed on a calendar sitting beside reception.

October 14.

Daniel's last day. I approached it slowly. There wasn't any dust on the page. No fading. No yellowing.

It looked brand new despite being three years old.

Behind me, Lily shifted in her sleep. Then she pointed upward.

"Da-da."

I followed her hand.

One elevator stood open across the lobby.

Waiting. The elevator had no buttons. At least, none that made sense. The panel was covered in numbers. Some looked normal. Others weren't numbers at all. Just symbols.

The doors slid shut behind us.

The elevator started moving.

At first I thought we were going up.

Then I wasn't sure.

The strange thing was I couldn't feel movement. No acceleration. No shaking. Nothing. Just pressure building inside my ears. The floor indicator flashed.

The same number over and over. Then the doors opened. Floor 22. The sign on the wall said so. The floor itself looked impossible. I knew office buildings. Daniel had worked in one for years. No floor should have been this large. Rows of cubicles stretched into darkness in every direction. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed softly. Some worked.

Some didn't.

The parts they illuminated looked ordinary. The parts they didn't looked endless. The elevator closed behind me. I spun around. It was gone.

Not closed.

Gone.

Just another section of wall. I stared for several seconds before deciding I didn't want to know. The first thing I noticed was the smell. Coffee.

Fresh coffee.

Not stale. Not old.

Fresh.

Like people had been working here five minutes ago. The second thing I noticed was the computer screens. Some were off. Others glowed quietly. Spreadsheets. Emails. Reports.

One monitor displayed a digital clock.

8:14 a.m.

It didn't move. I checked again thirty seconds later.

Still 8:14.

I kept walking. The cubicles were numbered. I stopped. Three cubicles. Same number. Same desk. Same coffee mug. Same family photo. I looked from one to the next. They were identical.

Perfect copies.

As if someone had copied and pasted them into reality. A printer suddenly started making noise nearby. Paper slid from the tray. I approached carefully.

One sheet sat waiting. A single sentence was printed across the center.

WHERE IS MY DAD?

Tiny fingerprints covered the edges. Child fingerprints. Another sheet emerged.

WHERE IS MY DAD?

Then another. Then another.

The printer kept feeding paper into the tray.

The same question over and over. I grabbed Lily and left. The farther I went, the stranger things became. One section of the office looked modern. The next looked like it belonged in the 1990s. Then the 1980s. Rotary phones sat beside computers. Typewriters sat beside monitors. Entire decades were mixed together.

At one point I found a conference room completely filled with water. The water didn't spill out through the doorway, though. It just stayed inside the room, perfectly contained.

Office chairs drifted beneath the surface. At another point I found a hallway lined with doors. Every door had the number 2219 on it. Every single one. I opened one. Empty office. I opened another. Storage closet. Another. Bathroom. Another. A staircase descending into darkness.

I closed that one immediately.

By then, I wasn't even trying to understand what I was seeing. I just kept moving. Eventually I found a door that felt different. I don't know how else to describe it. A feeling. Like I'd finally reached the place I'd been looking for.

The plaque beside it read:

OFFICE 2219

I pushed it open. Daniel's office looked untouched. His jacket hung over the chair. His coffee mug sat beside his keyboard. Stacks of paperwork covered the desk.

For one awful second, I thought he might walk in at any moment and ask why I was going through his stuff. Then I saw the date on his monitor.

October 14.

8:14 a.m.

The same time.

The same frozen moment. An email draft filled the screen. Something Is Wrong with Floor 22. That was the subject line. No recipient. No body text. As I stared, letters began appearing one by one. Typing themselves. I backed away from the desk. The message continued.

Emily.

Then:

You shouldn't be here.

My pulse hammered in my ears. More words appeared.

Don't let Lily stay.

Then:

Run.

Elevator waiting music began blaring in distorted tunes from the overhead intercoms immediately after.

The office lights went out. Something stood in the hallway. At first, I thought it was a shadow. Then it moved.

Slowly. A tall shape detached itself from the darkness and stepped into view. The thing looked vaguely human.

Only vaguely.

Its limbs were too long. Its arms stretched almost to the floor, ending in black pointed shapes that looked like sharpened spikes. Its skin wasn't skin. It looked more like a hole. Like a piece of darkness cut out and forced into the shape of a person.

Worst of all was its face.

There wasn't one.

No eyes. No nose. No mouth. Just empty blackness. It stood completely still. Watching. Beside me, Lily smiled.

"Kitty."

The creature tilted its head.

I don't know why that scared me more than anything else. Maybe because it seemed to understand her. I grabbed Lily and left the office. The creature didn't chase us. That somehow made it worse. Every time I looked back, it was standing somewhere else. Far away. At the end of a hallway. Across an open area of cubicles. Inside a conference room. Behind a row of desks.

Always watching. Never running. Never hurrying. Just appearing.

Like it could step through the office without actually crossing the space between places. As I moved deeper into Floor 22, I began seeing people. At first, I thought they were workers. Then I realized none of them moved. They sat at desks. Answered phones that never rang. Typed on computers that weren't connected to anything. All frozen.

Like photographs.

One man turned his head as I passed. His eyes were empty. Just hollow sockets filled with nothing but void.

"Do you know what day it is?" he asked.

Before I could answer, he went still again. A woman stood beside a copier.

"I missed my train," she whispered.

Nobody else reacted. Nobody seemed alive. Nobody seemed dead either.

Then I saw him. I saw Daniel.

He stood beneath a flickering fluorescent light. For a second I genuinely forgot how to breathe.

"Daniel."

He looked exactly the same. The same hair. The same suit. The same tired smile. Then I noticed the floor beneath him. Black roots spread through the carpet around his feet. They disappeared into the floor itself. Connecting him to the building. He wasn't standing there.

He was attached.

"Emily."

His voice sounded distant. Like I was hearing it through a wall. Tears filled my eyes. I wanted to hug him. To scream at him. To ask where he'd been. Instead, I just stood there.

Daniel looked at Lily and smiled.

"I always wondered what she'd look like."

That hurt more than anything.

"You can come home," I said.

The look he gave me answered the question before he spoke.

"No."

He explained what happened as quickly as he could. The building had found something during construction. Not a place. A gap. Something between places. An empty space reality wasn't supposed to have.

Floor 22 wasn't an actual floor.

It only pretended to be. People wandered into it. Then the floor kept them. Over time they became part of it. Memories. Echoes. Ghosts.

Whatever word fit best.

"I got trapped," Daniel said. "Everyone here did."

Around us, office lights flickered on. Thousands of workers appeared.

All sitting at desks. All trapped in the same frozen moment.

8:14 a.m.

October 14.

Forever.

Then Daniel looked past me. The smile vanished.

"The Keeper's here."

I didn't need to ask what he meant. The creature stood behind us. Closer than it had ever been. Its featureless head leaned sideways. Examining Lily, ragged and raspy breaths rattling out of its face even though I could see no mouth.

For the first time, light touched part of its face. Something moved beneath the darkness. Not one face. Hundreds. Eyes. Noses. Mouths.

Fragments of people trapped inside it.

The thing wasn't a monster. Not exactly.

It was a collection. A walking archive of everyone Floor 22 had taken. Lily reached toward it.

"Kitty."

The creature didn't move. Daniel did. He stepped in front of us. The roots around his legs pulled tight. Like chains.

"Go."

"Daniel..."

"Go."

The creature took a step forward. Then another. The entire office began shaking. The lights exploded overhead. Cubicles toppled. Computer monitors cracked. The endless floor twisted around us. Hallways folded into themselves. Conference rooms stretched impossibly far. Reality was coming apart.

I ran.

Daniel stayed behind.

The last time I saw him, he was standing between us and the creature. The floor itself seemed to be pulling him backward. Still, he smiled. Same smile. Same Daniel.

"Tell her I stayed."

Then the darkness swallowed him. I found the elevator by pure luck.

The doors were open. Beyond them wasn't an elevator car.

Just darkness. Pure darkness. The creature appeared again. Right in front of our eyes, it stepped out of the elevator, moaning now as if it were in mourning.

I thought it would attack. Instead it simply stood there. Lily waved.

"Hi, Kitty."

The creature tilted its head. For a brief moment, I thought I saw hundreds of faces looking back at us from inside its darkness. Then I stepped through the doorway. Everything vanished. I woke in the lobby. Morning sunlight filled the building.

People walked outside. The sounds of traffic returned. A security guard stood over me looking concerned. Lily sat beside me, completely unharmed. Nobody believed my story. Not even close.

Eventually I stopped telling it. Life moved on. At least, as much as it could.

Three months later, a package arrived. No return address. Inside was Daniel's music box. The one he'd treasured since childhood. The keepsake I'd gone looking for.

A folded note rested underneath. I recognized the handwriting instantly. Two sentences.

Some places are hallways.

Don't come looking for me.

I cried after reading it. Not because I lost him. I'd lost him years earlier. This was different. At least now I knew where he was. Or what was left of him. A year passed. Then another. Eventually I convinced myself the nightmares were fading.

Then one night I was putting Lily to bed. She was almost three by then. I tucked her blanket around her and kissed her forehead.

"Goodnight, sweetheart."

She pointed toward the closet. I followed her finger, just like that night all those years ago. The door stood open a few inches. Nothing strange about that. I walked over to close it.

Halfway there, Lily smiled.

The same smile she'd worn on Floor 22.

My stomach dropped.

"Kitty came back."

I froze.

The closet looked normal. Mostly. Except it felt deeper than it should have. Much deeper. Like there was more darkness inside than the dimensions of the apartment allowed. I stared for several seconds. Nothing moved.

Nothing made a sound.

Finally I laughed nervously and shut the door. When I turned around, Lily was already settling into bed. Half asleep.

"Daddy says the hallway isn't finished yet."

Every muscle in my body locked up.

"What?"

Her eyes were closed. She yawned.

"Daddy says not to worry."

A soft metallic ding echoed somewhere in the apartment. The sound of an elevator arriving.

We didn't have an elevator.