Episode 2: Doors With No Numbers

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: The owners of the Hargrove Building hired Ines Calder to find out why its elevator recognizes a sixty-first floor that no permit admits exists, after a night guard rode up to it and never came back down. She took the retainer, rode up with her team, the goat included, and followed the sound of a clicking radio out into the hallway just as the elevator doors closed behind them.

Ines rapped twice on the door frame and the floor held her, and she was already three steps down the hall before she looked back to see if the others had followed. Hatch had a boot wedged in the closing doors, and the doors did not care. They shoved against her ankle until she pulled it free, and the car dropped away with a sound like a held breath let go.

“That’s one way to lose an elevator,” Hatch said.

“We didn’t need it,” Ines said, and kept walking toward the clicks.

The hallway ran longer than the building’s footprint should have allowed, and Dov, counting under his breath, gave up somewhere past twenty. None of the doors had numbers, brass plates, or the little paper slots some buildings used for a name card. Every few feet another door stood exactly like the last one, and Leland tried three handles before finding one that turned.

The room behind it had a bed that had been slept in, a stack of paperbacks with cracked spines, and a kitchen counter with two mugs on it. One mug was empty. The other sat next to a radio with its channel light still on, two short clicks and a pause coming out of it steady as a pulse, and when Dov touched the side of the mug it was warm.

“Someone left in a hurry,” Dov said.

“Or someone’s still here,” said Leland, and nobody answered that.

Buttress would not cross the threshold, and stood in the hallway with his bell silent, watching the door the way he watched a floor he did not trust. Ines picked up the radio and turned it over, looking for a maker’s mark or a serial number, and found the panel smooth and blank where one should have been. She thought about the panel in the elevator, sixty floors and then a sixty-one where the brass had been bare.

Hatch went to the window and pulled the blind an inch. Outside was not the city. It was a courtyard, four stories down, lit by lamps that did not match anything on the block Ines remembered walking in on.

“I’d like everyone to notice we don’t have an elevator,” Hatch said.

“I noticed an hour ago,” Ines said, though her watch read four minutes since the doors had closed.

The radio clicked twice more and went quiet, and from somewhere down the long hallway another radio answered it, clicks coming back the other way, two short and a pause, moving closer.

The Vote

What does the team do next?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 3 gets written from whatever wins.

Stay together: The team moves as one group toward the answering clicks.

Split up: Half the team follows the clicks while the rest search the nearby rooms.

Barricade the room: They lock the door and wait to see who is knocking back.

Send Buttress ahead: He is the only one who has not been wrong about a floor yet.