Going Down

Going Down

  By Troy Aaron Ratliff

  Copyright 2011 Troy Aaron Ratliff

  Jacob stood before the brass panel of buttons on the ninth-floor hallway. The little round light illuminated his finger before he quickly pulled it back to balance the bottles in his arms, almost losing one to the floor. The bottle would have been cushioned against the carpet and probably wouldn’t have shattered, but he wasn’t up for taking that chance. With the deep sounds of clinking glass echoing down the corridor, mimicking the distant creaking of the elevator as it rose to his floor, he had to acknowledge he didn’t care for wine. I’ve never liked it, in fact.

  He looked around, hoping nobody saw him do the mock balancing act. The nine wine bottles—five pinots and four merlots—clinked again, and he thought about how stupid this was; he should have been smart about it and gotten a box or a bag or something to carry these things in.

  “You got the keys, right?” April called from the apartment several doors down the empty corridor, like a ghost’s voice lost in time.

  “Yeah!” Jacob yelled back, “But I could use a box or something for the next go-around!”

  He hoped she got the hint (or, at the very least, heard him). In any case, he wasn’t going to wait for her to come with something to help him now; he figured maybe she would have registered the irritation in his voice and have the rest of the wine waiting for him, bagged and ready for the next trip to the car. They were running late to the afterparty, and he was already at the elevator with the button pushed—he couldn’t go back now.

  Jacob’s affirmation of this came in the grumble of the tottering elevator car finally reaching his floor. The mystery mechanics of the elevator’s gears, pulleys, and cables drifted through its hollow shaft to his ears, ringing in squealing resilience. It was the kind of sound that birthed edgy chuckles and anxious looks between wary oncoming passengers, bonding them together for their short trip in an adhesive of apprehension.

  It still baffled Jacob how an apartment complex so new, with some sections still in the expansion stages no less, could have skimped on the sluggish, squeaking elevator in the north wing of the nine-story complex. In contrast to the development boasting so many other luxurious amenities, the elevator sounded like it was a hundred years old and hanging by a string. Adding insult to injury, Jacob thought for sure the elevator car would have stopped and opened up by now.

  God, these elevators are slow! Slow enough he had to readjust the bottles in his arms, balancing on one foot like a flamingo, using his lifted knee to push the bottles closer and tighter to his chest.

  As the car labored to a lethargic halt, sounding like it screeched against the walls of its square passage, a tremor of uncertainty passed through him, leaving room to question if he should attempt to ride down in this suspended coffin or take the stairs.

  Don’t be stupid, he thought, glancing down the empty hallway with irritation, a disturbingly fast-growing fear wrestling inside him. It’s a nine-story walk. I’ll take my chances, thank you.

  At last, the elevator stopped. Now it would only be a short eternity before the doors slid opened. He continued to wait as he tried to ignore the dull pain burning in his arms.

  He had locked his hands together to hold the bottles tighter to his chest when he spotted the same triangular sign he had been trying to ignore since he pushed the down button. The sign glared back at him as he read.

  FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION—UNDER CONSTUCTION:

  DOORS

  ELECTRICAL

  ELEVATORS

  That last seemed to be embossed on the sign, but he knew it was his eyes and his mind working him over.

  Suddenly, he heard heavy footsteps approaching from the adjacent stairwell. There was something unintelligible spoken that drifted up from the door of the stairwell, the echo of voices and words piled on top of each other, making a two-way conversation sound like a mob. The voices grew louder, as did the footfalls. The door to the stairwell flew open and two men, speaking Spanish and wearing worn, weathered construction garb, sprinted out. As they did, their tools jingled at their hips in a tone that was a close relation to the clinking of Jacob’s armful of wine bottles. Neither of the construction workers noticed him standing there—urgency drove their steps down the hall and out of Jacob’s sight, leaving him more surprised they were even working this late at night.

  “Muy peligroso,” he heard one say—very dangerous.

  From the sounds coming from down the hall, he could tell they had quickly reached the electrical room for the ninth floor, the door opening with a customary squeak of its own, as various tools were pulled from their belts.

  The elevator doors emitted a final shudder and its familiar ding. Forgetting the construction workers, his attention turned back to the job at hand, as well as his own urgency ticking away in the back of his mind. The wobbling doors slowly slid on their track, opening wide and empty at last.

  He stepped into the car, his fancy shoes clicking on the floor, the bottles continuously clinking against his chest. He pressed the button for the ground-level parking garage. Then, to his great relief, he leaned back against the elevator wall, readjusted the bottles, and wondered how long it would take to get to his car.

  This question evaporated when he heard the two men’s voices again, this time louder than before, and rushing back from down the hallway.

  With a creak and a shudder, the doors slid together in a commotion that was far from reassuring. As the last few inches drew to a close, the two construction men ran to the elevator, open palms waving and shouting at the tops of their voices. The door closed with a dooming thud as they began to beat on the mouth of the elevator, their yelling cut down to a distressed muffle.

  Jacob didn’t understand what they wanted in their foreign tongue, and yet, from the pleading—and the frantic hammering—he began to worry. Before he could respond to the voices, not that they could have understood him (or he them) the elevator began its slow rattling descent.

  The shouting voices began to fade above him. Now everything was moving too fast. He wanted to know what they were saying, what they wanted, if they were telling him to take the stairs instead.

  The squealing gears grew to a pitch that was almost as frightening as the shouting, high and incessant. Jacob was blessed with a modicum of reassurance in the first chime of the eighth floor passing him by on the other side, the number eight illuminated in the row of numbers above the door.

  Then, just as he started to relax, the slow descent abruptly stopped in a jerking halt. With this, he dropped four of the nine wine bottles—three pinots and a merlot slipped from his arms. The bottles shattered in a magnificent and time-stopping explosion of alcohol, cork, and glass. Wine flooded the floor, spilling in a pool of bubbly maroon liquid that nearly covered the entire surface of the elevator car, while some squirted into his shoes and soaked his socks. Jagged shards of glass the size of his fist lay in curved and concave piles. The rest was sprinkled around his feet like confetti after New Years.

  Before he could do anything else, like grip tighter on the remaining bottles in his arms or scream some of the more coarser swear words in his vocabulary, the normal lighting from above drained to a mere flicker. In its place, a yellow emergency light bathed him in an ugly mustard hue, transforming the wine to a murky black.

  “What is this?” Jacob muttered under his breath.

  A deep groan of straining cables struggling to hold reverberated through the shaft in an otherworldly groan that made him feel more than uneasy. It made him scared to death.

  There was another jerk and a short, abrupt drop of maybe six feet. He cried out as he felt himself momentarily lift from the floor, causing the rest of the wine to spill from his arms, leaving only one int
act to roll across the wet, glittering floor like a pig in a mud puddle.

  He clung onto the elevator’s steely handlebars and felt his heart race. Blood throbbed in his temples as the cold winter wind of panic swept through his body. He balanced himself on weak knees, his shoes crunching on the smaller crumbs of glass. In the muddied blackness of the dim and jaundiced hazard lights, the larger shards of broken glass appeared considerably more sinister than he would have liked given his present circumstances. Because the jagged points of glass were aimed at the ceiling in a ferocious and evenly spread mixture on the floor, that arctic fear chilling his soul produced an image of a monster and its oddly formed, but eternally sharp, teeth.

  Before Jacob was able to do anything else, or imagine anything worse, the elevator gave way in a creak and an earth-shattering snap. Jacob plummeted to earth. Eight stories.

  He screamed the whole way down as his body began to lift again. This time it was, as if by some powerful and invisible hand, the g-forces and physics rapidly coming in to play their parts. A fleeting but forever iconic picture briefly came to mind of astronauts drifting through space stations. This thought skittered away faster than a celestial star storm when he heard how fast the wind was whistling past the falling elevator, causing another scream.

  Five. Ding!

  He realized with mounting horror that he was hovering about four feet in the air, momentum, gravity, and the rapidly accelerating velocity of his freefall suspending him in mid-air. Light was shooting through the crack in the door like a strobe, something he was expecting to see at the after party.

  Four. Ding!

  His black formal tie floated in front of his face as his upper body—

  Three. Ding!

  —fell forward and his legs gave out. Jacob flailed horizontally like Superman having a midflight fit.

  Two. Ding!

  He averted his eyes to his ultimate landing spot below his floating body where broken glass teeth awaited him. Calculating how bad it was going to be, Jacob folded his arms over his face the best he could against the gravitational force and the ephemeral moment he had left. All he could do with these two unstoppable powers was scream one final time.

  One. DING!

  I don’t even like wine!

  Ground floor.

  DING!

 

  ###

  Thank you.

  Always, that should come first. Thank you so very much for reading this short story of mine. It means the absolute world to me that you did. I spent a lot of time and effort in bringing this tiny story to the world, just as I do with all of my work. I wrote it about six years ago as of this writing, and is my second freebie to the world.

  I’m glad it turned up in your hands. That’s the best place it could be.

  Again, I want to thank you for reading Going Down, and please let me know what your thoughts are - whether good or bad, or concerning another one of my stories or just to drop by to say hello. In the end, it’s you, the reader, that will help make the story all the better.

  Love and Hugs from the West Coast,

  Troy Aaron Ratliff