It was only a matter of time before I had my own experience.
You only get to chronicle things like this for so long before they decide to come and say hi.
Yesterday they rolled out the welcome wagon in spectacular fashion.
It all started with the laziness of the shift before me. I came in around six pm to start my shift and noticed a large white legal envelope at the reception desk. I asked Tyler, the guy who works the day shift, how long that had been sitting there? He shrugged and said they had brought it around noon. When I asked why he hadn't bothered to get it delivered, he said he had been busy. Given the indent in the chair, I doubted he had left the desk all day.
He said his goodbyes and headed home, and I sat down to start my own work for the night.
I promptly forgot about the envelope until midnight when I got the phone call that started all this.
The second I heard the oh-so-dosser tonnes of head nurse Finley from five east, I knew this wouldn't be a fun conversation.
"Do you have a legal envelope at your desk?"
"Yeah, dayshift left it up here and never delivered it."
"So when were you planning to deliver it?"
I could almost hear her biting the inside of her cheek as she talked to me.
"My apologies, ma'am. I am still waiting to receive a break. When someone comes to relieve me for a few minutes, I bring it up there to you.
"Those papers are critical, and I needed them at the start of my shift, not six hours later. Have someone bring them to me immediately, or I'll be drafting a complaint to your supervisor."
That got my attention. My supervisor, Helen, pretty well left the night shift alone. Dayshift, however, was almost constantly subjected to her micromanaging. If I gave her a reason to, I'm sure she'd be more than happy to add me to her list of things to do. I turned on my best Customer Service voice and assured the charge nurse that I would have her envelope there within the hour.
She hung up on me, and I looked up to see Carl wandering by about that time.
"Hey, Carl, do you have a minute to take this up to five East?"
"Sorry, man," Carl said, "I'm on a tight schedule tonight. I need to get up to three north before three o'clock to handle some kind of lock malfunction for them."
"Okay, well, could you stand here for five minutes while I do it? I'll be right up and down. It won't take me more than a couple of minutes."
That got Carl's attention. You could tell the poor guy had been running his legs off all night. Hospital security never seemed to stop after eight o'clock, and the thought of taking it easy for five to ten minutes appealed to him. He nodded, telling me to go ahead as he took a load off, and I grabbed the envelope and headed for the elevator.
The elevators in the lobby are brand new. They don't hitch, they don't shake, and they can generally be counted on to take you from the ground floor to the fifth floor without smelling like burning rubber bands, or threatening to drop you to your death. They were installed about five years ago with some budget money from the state, and they're a vast improvement over the ones they had before that, or so I've been told. They're well-maintained, too. All the lights work, the handrails are clean, and when you push the buttons, they light up, letting you know exactly where they will take you.
I walked past these and turned down a nearby corridor to find the staff elevators.
If you've never worked in a hospital, you might not be aware of this. The administration doesn't like it when staff use the guest elevators. It leads guests to ask them questions, questions that some of them are more than happy to answer whether they should or not. It also leads staff to push patients in Gurnee onto elevators, which sometimes frightens guests. This is, of course, gone over very carefully in our yearly training, so we all know not to use the nice new guest elevators.
The staff elevators are not as nice. The lights flicker, they smell like they're constantly about to break, and they are notorious for getting stuck between floors. According to maintenance, they hadn’t sized the elevator shaft right when they built the fourth and fifth floors. This leads to some problems sometimes, and Mark says that not a week goes by when he doesn't get at least one call to the switchboard about someone being stuck in the elevators. In fact, he had a hilarious story about a doctor who cried on the emergency phone for close to three hours while he was stuck inside one of those elevators. He said the poor guy was talking about things with claws, disembodied laughing, and weird noises coming from outside the elevator. Mark always laughed it off as weird, frightening paranoia, and until today, I had laughed right along with him.
The trip up in the elevators was uneventful. The wheels chugged, and the lights flickered a little when they passed between floor 3 and floor 4, but when they dinged drunkenly to let me out onto the fifth floor, only a minute and a half had passed. I walked around the corner to five north, and it seemed that luck was with me. The charge nurse was just stepping into the back to get a cup of coffee, and I handed the envelope to one of her subordinates as I asked if she would mind passing it off to her? She smiled and said she would, advising that I get moving before the old battle ax returned and found me here.
I climbed happily back into the staff elevator, thinking I had dodged a bullet. When I hit the big red one on the elevator, I thought nothing more exciting than a ride down was in my future, but I had no idea what was in store for me. When the elevator ground to a halt between floors three and four, I loosed a growling cry of rage. In frustration, I smashed at the buttons, but the box did little but click and grind as it stuck tight in the shaft.
I was going to have to call Mark so David could get me unstuck.
I picked up the emergency phone inside the little box at the bottom of the button pad and expected to hear it click as it rang in the control room. Instead, it just hung there silently in my hand. I hung it back up and picked it up again, expecting a delay in the line, but there was still silence. I figured I had disconnected the line when my elevator got stuck, and when I hung the phone up, I thought guiltily about how Carl would be a little late for his checks.
Without the ability to let anyone know, I could be stuck here for quite some time.
I paced around the elevator like a mouse stuck in a shoebox. I hated confined places. I wasn't claustrophobic, but I hated the feeling of being stuck. The little box felt like a coffin the longer I sat in it, and looking at my watch, didn't help matters. At some point, it had stopped, and I hadn't noticed. It informed me that only about four minutes had passed since I left my desk. That couldn't be right. I had been stuck in this elevator longer than that. I tried the phone again, but it was still dead, and I hung it up a little harder than I strictly needed to.
As I sat in the corner of the elevator, feeling the cold metal against my back, it sounded like something was tapping against the outside.
Well, of course, I could hear tapping, I told myself. The elevator was sitting in a shaft, probably trying to get itself to work again. If nothing else, it was ticking as it got comfortable in the slightly too-small chute. It sounded different than that. This sounded different than the ticking of an elevator getting comfortable and more like the tapping of fingers on glass. I tried to put it out of my mind, telling myself I was being silly, but as I leaned my head against the metal box, the tapping became harder and harder to ignore.
It was almost rhythmic. Two beats, then three beats, and two beats again on the outside of the metal box. It reminded me of someone just absent-mindedly tapping on their desk, maybe working out a beat in their head as they put words to it. It had no real rhythm, and the longer I listened to it, the less sure I was that it was normal elevator noise. Was somebody out there? They couldn't be, could they? That was why the elevators got stuck, after all. The space was too small.
I had been thinking too loudly about it and missed the point when the tapping had stopped.
I sat in a pregnant silence for a count of thirty, cocking my head as I listened and waited for the tapping to begin again.
When the elevator suddenly shook like it had been kicked by a horse, I felt like I might need new pants when this was all over.
I tried to get a hold of myself. It was just maintenance working on the elevator, after all. Someone had noticed that the elevator wasn't working, and they were trying to get it running again. I was sure David was in the motor room, trying to figure out how much pressure to put on the winch to get the cart to move without ripping it to shreds. He told me one night that it was basically all he could do. Just exert a little more force on the winch, and hope that he didn't pulp some poor staffer.
"OSHA would likely have a field day with it, but I'm just doing what management told me to do." He had said.
When it lurched again, I breathed a sigh of relief as it started to go down the shaft.
I grabbed the rails, however, as the feeling of gravity left the car. I was suddenly plummeting down like a comet. The buttons flashed, dinging a hellish chorus as I shook and clung to the walls. As I fell, I watched the numbers tick down until they were finally just spinning in place, indecipherable jargon that meant nothing.
When the screeching returned, I no longer had any illusions that it was just the box grinding against the walls.
The doors began to rock, and the lights overhead flashed like a funhouse ride. Something began to peel the doors open, its long black claws making the steel slabs groan in agony. As it slid open, I could see something huge push its head into the space. It had a face like a dragon, its eyes burning as it stared at me through the gap. Behind it, I could see that I was falling through a red and black hellscape. The skies cried fire as the ground came up to swallow me, but I didn't think smashing into the earth was the worst outcome in this case.
As it opened its mouth, I saw a fire kindling in its throat. The bloom of red began to grow, and I could feel the heat of it as it built in the small space. I covered my face with my arms, praying for any protection my frail body could grant me.
Then the cheery ding filled the car, and I was looking at the dim illumination from the staff hallway by night. A woman was stepping in, a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone in the other, and she stopped as she saw me. She looked confused, asking if I was okay, but as the doors began to close, I shot through them like a lunatic and went running from the elevator like the devil himself was chasing me.
Carl smiled and commented that I had only been gone about five minutes and must have made good time.
His face fell when he got a good look at me, and he turned white as I told him what had happened.
"Maybe David really did see something in the stairwell," he whispered, and all I could do was nod somberly.
I sat there for the rest of my shift, but I didn't get any work done.
I haven't slept well in three days, my nightmares plagued by the images I saw in that elevator.
I have stumbled onto the hospital's radar, and as little as I want to find out what it has in store for me, I will be back tomorrow night for more.
The money is nice, but what I really crave is the tales that come from the lips of the recently terrified.
Huh, there may be a book somewhere in these stories.
My suffering and their suffering should be worth something, after all.
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