Authors: S. L. Grey
He points to the left. There’s an archway built into the brick and beyond it a brightly lit area tiled in white. I would have run right past it. He pulls me along, and our wet feet
immediately start sliding on the slick tiled floor. Dan slips and now it’s my turn to grab his elbow and pull him up. We skid along as we both try and get a grip on the floor, like a scene in
a stupid slapstick comedy. The corridor curves to the right and then both of us stop dead as if we’ve hit an invisible brick wall.
‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Dan says.
It looks so unbelievably, reassuringly, banally
normal
.
In front of us is a grey metal lift door, the kind you see in low-end strip malls. There are two buttons either side of it, pointing up and down, and a row of back-lit numbers, ranging from 0 to
10 along the top of it. I look around for a stairwell door, but the rest of the wall is blank.
Looks like it’s the lift or nothing.
My phone beeps, making both of us jump.
‘Impossible,’ Dan says. ‘The battery must be soaked through.’
I scrabble in my pocket, hands fumbling and shaking, and pull out the last remains of the sodden envelope, my lighter, a tampon that’s blown up to the size of a swollen thumb (which Dan
looks away from in embarrassment), and finally grab my phone. The digital clock on the screen reads: <00:36>. There’s no message, but both of us watch as the numbers count backwards:
<00.32>, <00.31>, <00.30>.
‘What the hell do you think happens at zero?’ Dan says.
‘I really don’t want to know,’ I say.
From the end of the corridor there’s the sound of an enormous slap, as if a bloody side of beef has been splatted from a great height onto a metal table.
In unison we both press the buttons. The number 10 glows red, then 9, 8, 7…
I look around the area for some sort of weapon, but there’s nothing – just plain walls and porcelain tiles. I fumble in my pockets again, trying to locate the knife, but I
can’t seem to find it. Fuck! What if I lost it in the water?
We smell it before we hear it, that same rotten-meat, engineoil stench, followed by a low inhuman howl.
‘Come on!’ Dan screams at the door, lashing out at it with his foot.
<00.05>, <00.04>.
Ping!
The door hisses open and we throw ourselves inside.
‘Press the close button!’ I scream.
Dan whacks the control panel with his fist, and the door slides shut with infuriating slowness. There’s a brief pause and then something slams into the door. The entire lift rocks, and I
throw myself over to Dan’s side and whack my palm on the buttons, hitting them at random.
With a screech of grinding machinery the lift begins to move, shuddering and creaking. We cling to the greasy metal rail stuck onto the side of the walls.
‘Are we going up or down?’ Dan says, his voice sounding remarkably normal, although his eyes are glassy with shock.
‘I don’t know.’ I don’t. The motion is disorienting; one second I’m certain we’re travelling upwards, the next I’m convinced we’re headed
downwards.
‘Fuck. That was close,’ I say.
Dan starts to shake violently, and it’s only when I run my hand over my face that I realise that I’m shaking too. I tell myself it’s just the cold water.
The lift’s gears screech again, and it judders and seems to slow down.
My phone beeps again and both of us jump. It’s another message. I click it open.
Oh fuck.
Dan’s staring straight at me. I look down. ‘What?’
‘Nothing. Can’t understand it. Just gibberish.’ I press delete, praying that it disappears off the screen.
Dan opens his mouth to insist, and then his phone vibrates and beeps.
‘Shit,’ he says, reading the message. He passes it to me.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I say.
Then the lights go out and the lift drops sickeningly two or three floors before slamming to a rocking halt.
‘Oh fuck,’ Dan says, in the dark. ‘What now?’
There’s the sound of gears screaming again, and then, bizarrely, piped music starts wafting out of the roof.
chapter 10
DANIEL
The only lights are the lift’s buttons, three rows of ten. 1 to 25, B for basement, G for ground, door open, door close and the emergency bell. I know it’s a waste
of my time to try that one, even as I thumb it. Dead. Of course.
Nothing to show which level we’re on.
Rhoda is pacing around the lift, oddly keeping time with the muzak piping out from somewhere. ‘I’ve got to get out of here, Dan, I’m serious. I’m going to suffocate. Give
me a foot up.’
‘Where?’
‘
Do it!
’ she hisses.
‘Fine.’ I offer her my cupped hands to who-knows-where she wants to climb. She scrabbles at the ceiling. She’s jerking around, almost falling off the platform I’m making
for her, punching at the ceiling. For the second time today, I notice just how light she is. She shouldn’t be this light. It’s like if she relaxed all those tight sinews she’d
break into pieces.
I don’t want to think too much about that now, so I try and break the ice. ‘Jesus, Rhoda, you’re quite hardcore for an academic’s daughter.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘I can’t believe you’re, like, wealthy and shit. I could have sworn you were—’
‘What? What? Some blacks have money, you know, Daniel.’
‘Jeez. You don’t have to tell me… I wasn’t—’ She’s got this fuck ing unsettling way of turning everything I say around.
She’s still squirming and wriggling in my grip. Her filthy gritty shoes are hurting my hands; sewer water is dripping off the hem of her trousers. I’m scared I’m about to drop
her. ‘Hurry up, Rhoda. What are you trying to do?’
‘I’m just tryna…’ comes the muffled response.
‘It’s pointless. You’ll come out onto the top of a lift in a shaft that’s fuck knows how deep. Just as dark, just as airless.’
‘Shut up!’
‘If this lift shaft is anything like that bottomless pit we climbed down… And it has a bottom. A bottom we can smash on like melons from the fucking tower of Pisa.’ Now
I’m just babbling, and I should just shut up, but I can’t. The fucking panpipes are driving me insane.
‘I said shut the fuck up,’ she bellows as she jumps out of my braced hands. I shake them out. Rhoda punches the wall again. She’s breathing too fast, and it dawns on me that
her panic is for real.
‘Hey, Rhoda,’ I say, intent on calming her down. ‘Listen to the music. I know this tune.’
The panpipe muzak piping out of the roof was designed to be calming, and to my surprise it’s working. On me, if not Rhoda.
‘It reminds me of a holiday we took to Durban when we visited my cousin,’ I continue talking her down. ‘He was three months older than me, had much cooler toys, much cooler
stuff. He put on this soppy CD and showed me a poem a girl at school had written for him. She’d copied the lyrics word for word.’
Rhoda’s breathing is starting to slow. ‘God, I’m going to puke,’ she says, but at least she’s starting to calm down to normal. If you can call her usual condition
normal. It hasn’t escaped me that she’s probably about to start going into some sort of drug withdrawal now that her stash has been washed down the sewer. ‘Lionel motherfucking
Richie. They’re cruel bastards. We know that much.’
‘I was fucking jealous of my cousin,’ I continue, trying to keep it boring. ‘Girlfriends writing him poems. He became a rabbi. Never married. Wonder how much his
Lionel-Richie-toting primary-school sweetheart had to do with that.’
She manages a smile. ‘Yeah. Probably had a lot to do with it. “Hello”,’ she croons half-heartedly, strangling the words as if she hates them. ‘“Is it me
you’re looking for? Cos I wonder what you are and I wonder blah blah blah”.’ She peters out.
Okay. She’s back. Thank God. ‘Just carry on thinking of open spaces, okay. Listen to the music. Imagine you’re in the desert, on the open sea, in a meadow. Anything fresh and
clean. Okay?’ She doesn’t ask how I know so much about claustrophobia.
‘Yeah, okay. Thanks, Dr Phil. I got it now. Breathe and think about fairies and unicorns,’ she says. ‘It would be easier if we weren’t
stuck in a fucking falling
lift
! What the fuck do we do, Dan?’
‘Well, we know the name of the song… What do we do with it?’ I ask, more to myself than her. ‘The message said “name that tune”. Who do we tell? How?’
If there’s one thing I know a lot about, it’s games. And I know this is too easy. This is Level One. And I know Rhoda isn’t ready to hear that just yet.
‘I guess we just text the name back.’ Rhoda pulls out her phone.
‘No, wait. I don’t think so. Nobody’s going to design a game based on cellphones. The coverage and the relay time are just too unreliable. Maybe in the future. The control has
to be something internal.’
She looks at me like I’m talking in Vulcan. ‘What are you on about? That sounds fucking complicated. We need to keep things simple, all right?’
‘Rhoda, listen. This is a game. It runs on its own internal logic. I doubt these fucks are sitting around waiting for us to SMS anyway. They just set the game in motion and they’re
probably sitting at home listening to Britney Spears and jerking off.’
‘You don’t know—’
‘You may have lived twenty lives on the streets and know all sorts of shit about all sorts of shit. But I’ve lived twenty thousand lives in front of consoles. I know games. This is
just a game.’
‘In games players don’t really die, though.’
‘To play a game well you have to feel like you’re going to die. You get into the zone and nothing outside matters. This is just a game without a manual. I’ve played hundreds of
pirated games before. We have to figure it out, that’s all.’
‘We’ve got no time, for fuck’s sake, Dan. What the hell do you—’
‘Let me think.’ And I block out her noise, just like I’ve blocked out my mother’s nagging so often in the past.
The only control panel here is the lift’s buttons. That must be the input device. If we have to input a word, we need an alphabet. So it’s either one to nine like a cellphone,
or… the buttons – it has to be the buttons. Thirty buttons, twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Which four do we leave out? Door open, door close, alarm – gone. One left. Space
bar? Which one?
The song’s nearly finished, arsehole! my mind screams at me. But the dominant part of me stays calm. I’m in the zone. I’m breathing deeply. You stay calm, you breathe deeply,
your time remaining stretches out. You panic, it’s over. You go blank. Not today. Breathe.
Probably B, but I wouldn’t know. Is it a simple substitution cipher? Ground=A, 1=B, 2=C. Or 1=A, 2=B, 3=C. That’s very easy. Too easy. But maybe that’s part of the trick. Maybe
the input is not supposed to be the hard part; the guessing game is.
How many chances do you think we have, dumbfuck? We can’t start again in
this
game
. Shut the fuck up. Make a choice. Trust your intuition. You know how you get that feeling
when you’re really in the sweet spot, you can almost foresee the future, you’re so in synch with the machine. Listen to the best voice. Trust yourself. I know her soft and sexy voice;
she sounds like an angel.
Okay. 1=A. Here we go.
8 – 5 – 12 – 12 – 15.
A lurch and my stomach’s in my throat. Instinctively I push myself into the corner of the lift, my knees bent like I’m sitting on an invisible chair, my arms pushing against the two
walls as hard as they can. I’ve seen it on TV somewhere. They showed what happens when you’re in a falling lift. First your legs shatter, then you bounce up and smash your skull against
the ceiling. So what you want to do is become a shock absorber, keep your legs flexible to buffer the force, then hold on so you don’t bounce.
‘Brace!’ I scream at Rhoda. ‘Brace like me!’ She squeezes into her corner as we plummet. We’re going so fast, I’m feeling light; any faster we’ll be in
zero-G.
The lift slows, then jerks to a halt.
‘Fuck! Nice going, gameboy. Let’s do it my way now, okay?’ She thumbs at her phone.
‘No!’ But it’s too late. She’s hit
plummeting.
‘Is that good or bad?’ I ask, but my gut tells me down is bad. I see the endless tunnel again. If we are anywhere in the middle of a shaft that deep, we have plenty of space still to
fall.
Now Rhoda’s working on prising the doors open. Even if she manages to open the door, I’m sure we’d see nothing but blank concrete. I just watch her. I’m so tired.
The closing bars of the music snap us out of our fugues. ‘Christ, Dan. It’s ending. I don’t think we’ll get another chance.’
My angel whispers in my ear.
It’s a fucking QWERTY keyboard.
Which end does it start? Do we exclude caps lock or colons on the middle row? No time. The last words are sung; the final notes are kicking in. And what the hell was the order of the
letters?
Breathe
, my angel tells me.
You know how to touch-type. You’ve IMed for years. Write me a message. Say hello. Don’t think. Trust yourself.
I’m in the sweet spot. I can’t hear the music any more. It’s just me, the perfume of my angel, her feathers drifting in the white air.
12 – 2 – 21 – 21 – 20
‘You cut that a bit fine,’ Rhoda’s saying when I open my eyes. But she’s smiling thinly. We’re going up. Slowly.
The Lionel Richie song dies; the lift stops. Another panpipe rendition comes on.
‘Here it goes again,’ I say. ‘I knew that wasn’t all.’ I don’t recognise the tune. Jazzy easy listening, but without any particular harmony standing out.
Rhoda’s checking her phone. Nothing. Nothing on mine either. ‘Bastards, what the fu—’ She pauses. ‘I know this,’ she says. But instead of looking pleased, her
face pales and glistens with a fresh sheen of sweat.
‘What’s the matter?’