The Rules for the Lift at Barrow Court
My dad did eleven years as caretaker at Barrow Court, that grey fifteen-storey block off the ring road in Nuneaton before they redid the cladding. He wasn't a man who told stories, so when he gave me the rules the week before he retired, I wrote them down thinking I'd frame them as a joke on the wall of my flat. I never did frame them. I still don't fully believe him, but he wasn't a liar. He also wasn't right in the head about some things, my mum would say, and leave it at that, folding the tea towel over the oven rail like the subject was closed.
Here's what he gave me, near enough word for word.
The lift has buttons for ground and one through fourteen. Don't ever press and hold thirteen and fourteen together, not even by accident, not even to see.
If you're in the lift alone and it stops without you pressing anything, don't get out straight away. Count to ten. Most times it starts moving again on its own.
If it doesn't start moving, and the doors open on a floor with no number lit above the frame, that's fine. Stay in the lift. Don't put a foot past the doors, not even to look at what's out there.
Don't talk to anyone standing on that floor even if they talk to you first. They'll sound like people you know. My dad said his sister called his name once from out there, and she'd been dead nine years by then. He still didn't answer. Rule three came first.
If someone else gets in the lift with you while it's stopped on that floor, don't ask how long they've been waiting. Don't ask what floor they want. Just let the doors close.
Sometimes there'll already be someone in the lift when the doors open on your floor at the very start, before any of this happens, and they'll get out at G with you like it's nothing. You'll think you imagined the whole business. You didn't. That one's the worst, if I'm honest, because you don't get any warning at all.
Keep count of how many times it's happened to you. He said after four times you stop being able to tell which floor is the real fourteenth any more. Not just in the lift. In the stairwell too, on the landing outside your own flat.
After seven times, don't take the lift at all. Take the stairs, all fifteen floors, doesn't matter your knees.
If you forget and take the lift anyway, and it stops on the floor with no number, and you're already at your count, don't count to ten. Just get out. It's easier that way. He wouldn't say easier for who.
If you get out, leave the door of your own flat open a crack that night. Not unlocked and swinging. Just the crack. He wouldn't tell me why, said I'd know when I needed to know, and that's the last full one he gave me before mum called him through for his tea. He never finished the list. I think there might have been an eleventh. I never asked again, and now I wish I had, though I couldn't tell you what I think it would have said.
I asked him straight out once, near the end, what was on that floor. He looked at me the way you'd look at someone asking what's behind your own eyes. Said he'd stopped counting at six, out of caution, and that had been eleven years back by then. He also told me, in the same breath, that his sister had always been rubbish at calling his name right, that she used to get the stress on the wrong syllable even when she was alive, and that whoever had called it from that floor had got it exactly right. He seemed to think this mattered more than anything else he'd said all evening.
He's in a home in Bedworth now. Some Tuesdays he doesn't remember the block. He doesn't remember me either, most weeks, though he'll sometimes ask if I've been keeping count. There's a strip of medical tape holding his door open a crack every night. None of the staff will say who put it there, and when I asked the girl on the desk, she just said it wasn't hers to explain, and went back to her paperwork like I hadn't spoken.