Graham Masterton - Death Mask

Jimmy was skinny and slight, two months shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, with curly black hair, a very pale face, and a beaky nose. Devon said he reminded her of a heron. He didn’t mind, because Devon was just as skinny as he was, if not skinnier, and even though she was pretty, she had a beaky nose, too.

This morning Jimmy was wearing his Cincinnati Reds cap (peak sideways) and a white T-shirt with “2007 Cornhole Champions” printed on the back in red, as well as baggy red shorts and big silver Nike TN8 running shoes.

The elevator shuddered to a stop, and he opened his eyes. He was just about to step out when he realized that he had reached only as far as the seventeenth floor. The corridor in front of him was blue carpeted, unlit, and strewn with crumpled-up paper. The corporate signboard on the opposite wall had nothing on it but empty screw holes.

Jimmy stuck his head out of the elevator to see if there was anybody there. But the corridor was empty, and the entire floor was silent, except for a faint tapping sound, like a faucet dripping. Tap — pause — tap . Then — tap .

He pushed the button for the twenty-third floor. The elevator doors started to close, but then they jolted open again with a loud bang, which made Jimmy jump. He could hear a harsh squealing noise from the elevator’s winding mechanism, and the entire car started to shudder violently, as if the gears were jammed. He could smell overheated oil, and scorched dust, too.

He stepped quickly out of the elevator car and into the corridor. He had seen too many movies in which elevators dropped all the way down to the basement, full of screaming people, and he had heard that when they hit the bottom, their shinbones came bursting right out of their knees.

Almost immediately, though, the elevator doors closed behind him. He pushed the button again, but they refused to open. He jabbed and jabbed, but then he heard a smooth whining sound, and the indicator showed that the elevator was continuing its upward journey without him.

“Shit,” he said. He jabbed the button a few more times, but the elevator didn’t respond. He waited until it went all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor, but even when he called it again, it stayed there.

“Shit, man. This is total shit.”

He had no choice: he would have to take the stairs. He just hoped the doors hadn’t been locked to keep out squatters.

He walked along the corridor toward the main office area. The floor was divided into nearly a hundred cubicles with built-in desks. In some cubicles, graphs and sales charts and Post-it notes were still stuck to the walls. Some of them even had family photographs. Smiling boyfriends, children sitting in wading pools, dogs.

Jimmy negotiated his way between the cubicles, his satchel slapping against his thigh. He held one hand up in front of his face, because the early-morning sun was shining on the buildings on the opposite side of Race Street and dazzling him. He began to cough, as he always did when he was stressed.

He reached the double doors that led to the staircase. He pulled the handles, but as he had feared, they were locked.

“Shit.” He peered through the wired-glass windows and he could actually see the staircase.

He rattled the doors violently. He tried barging them with his shoulder, and then he kicked them as hard as he could. But they were solid oak, with strong locks, and he knew that he didn’t have a chance of breaking them open.

He took out his cell phone. No signal. Double shit. But maybe this was a dead zone, here by the staircase. He crossed over to the window. He looked down, and he could see the early-morning traffic and the sidewalks crowded with hurrying office workers. They looked tiny and insignificant, but at least they weren’t trapped in here on the seventeenth floor, like a fly in a jelly jar. He tried his cell phone again, but there was still no reception.

He circled slowly around the office, but wherever he went he still couldn’t pick up a signal. He even went into one of the cubicles and picked up the phone from the desk, but of course that was dead. Dead like the withered potted plant that stood beside it, abandoned and unwatered.

He would have to go back to the elevator. Maybe he could bang on the doors, and Mr. Kraussman would hear him.

But when he was only halfway across the office, he heard a quick, rattling noise somewhere off to his left. He stopped and listened, and then he heard it again. Trrrrrrrttt! like a giant cicada, flexing its tymbal. He was very short of breath now, and he couldn’t stop himself from coughing again.

Trrrrrrrttt! Now the rattle was off to his right. He turned around, and around, but there was nobody there — nobody that he could see, anyhow.

Trrrrrrrtttt! Trrrrrrrttt! Trrrtt-trrrtt-trrrtt!

Jimmy turned around again, and then he said, “Jesus!”

Only twenty feet away from him, a man was standing in one of the cubicles, so that he was visible only from the chest upward. He was tall and heavily built, but because of the sunlight that shone through the windows behind him, Jimmy couldn’t see his face.

“Hey,” Jimmy wheezed. “You scared the shit out of me, dude.”

The man stayed where he was and said nothing.

Jimmy pointed back along the corridor. “Stupid elevator’s stuck. I keep pushing the button, but it won’t come back down. And the doors to the stairs are locked.”

Still the man said nothing; and still he didn’t move.

“Like — how did you get here, dude?” Jimmy asked him. “Is there another way out? Another staircase or something?”

Silence.

“Come on, dude, I really need to get out of here! I have all of this work to finish. That’s the whole reason I came in so early!”

Jimmy coughed once, and then again, and then he went into a spasm and had to rummage inside his satchel for his inhaler. He took two deep squirts of albuterol, and then he closed his eyes and counted to five. But when he opened them again, the man had disappeared. He looked around, his eyes still watering, trying to suppress any more coughs.

“Excuse me? Excuse me, sir? Are you still here?”

A pause, and then trrrrrrtttt! on the opposite side of the office.

“Excuse me, sir, I seriously need to find a way out of here! I could lose my job if I don’t get up to my office!”

Trrrrrrrtttt!

It was no use. The man was either some kind of nutjob or else he was deaf and dumb, or maybe he was one of those street people who refused to talk to anyone but their own kind. Jimmy started to walk back along the corridor, glancing behind him now and again to make sure that the man wasn’t following him. Maybe the elevator was working now — or even if it wasn’t, maybe he could make enough noise to attract Mr. Kraussman’s attention.

He reached the elevator. The indicator was still pointing at the twenty-fifth floor. He pressed the button and held his finger there.

Please, God, come down and get me out of here .

At first nothing happened. He took his finger off the button, and then he pressed it again. There was a moment’s pause, and then he heard the elevator mechanism whining, and the indicator crept down to the twenty-fourth floor.

Jimmy coughed and took another puff from his inhaler. The indicator came down to the twenty-third floor, and then the twenty-second.

“Leaving so soon?” said a thick voice close behind him.

Jimmy jerked sideways, almost losing his balance. The man was standing less than five feet away from him. He was even bulkier than he had appeared when he was standing in the cubicle, and much more threatening. It was the way he was standing, tilted slightly forward as if he were straining at a leash, his head lowered between his shoulders, his arms crossed over his chest.