What's Tha--? *crash!* *boom!*

Carlisle. Took me a half hour to find the fucking place.

Nestled skinny between two buildings, Carlisle is a big brutalist thug, hiding out so it can sneak-attack you. It feels like an assault on the senses when you first lay eyes on it. It's tall but not wide, it towers into the sky but I half expect I could wrap my arms around it and meet my hands on the other side. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, and could have sworn I saw a dark figure staring down at me out of one of the giant, fifth-story windows.

Or maybe it was just a tall building and I'm fucking with you. One of the two.

I shuffled through the automatic doors and punched the “Up” button for the elevator. No stairs here. Good. I always feel guilty taking the stairs, like people expect me to walk more when I just came in from the 100-degree heat. Fuck that.

I glanced at my watch and turned up my music. My thoughts turned to the conversation ahead of me. Fuckin' English class. That asshole couldn't teach a shark how to swim. Now I had to retake the damn course, and it wasn't even my fault. So I'd missed a few days. So I'd missed an assignment or two. Big fuckin deal. But would the advisor listen to me? No. He'd smile and nod and then screw me over. Of course I knew that. But I had to try to talk them out of it. I didn't want to lose my scholarship, and I sure as shit didn't want to deal with my parents.

I glanced at my reflection in the glass to my right. My shaggy hair was combed (it's never combed), I was wearing bright colors (I usually wore black), and I had a tie that was probably going to strangle me to death before this damn elevator arrived. Had to look good to impress the big wigs.

“Oh hi Jaime,” came a voice behind me, distant through the fog of the soundtrack to Pacific Rim. I turned around.

Well shit. It was my English professor, Mr. Ramsbotham. He waved a little, then thought better of it and brought his hand down. He had to remember he'd failed me. I switched off my music.

“Hi Mr. Ramsbotham,” I muttered. “How's your summer been?”

“Good, good,” he said. He was looking at his feet. The room seemed to get even hotter. I pulled at my necktie, and suddenly felt very foolish for wearing it. I could feel my confidence leaving me. What was I even doing there? It had been months since the grade had been entered. Did I really think they would do anything? Even if they wanted to, they probably couldn't. I hadn't even e-mailed ahead of time. I'd just waltzed up to this big fucking building with my tie and my nice clothes and my straight hair and thought maybe they'd listen just because. I was disgusted with myself, and was about to just leave when

ding ding Going Up

The elevator arrived. A busty woman walked out and nodded to Mr. Ramsbotham, who nodded back. I slipped into the elevator, punched 2 and slid into the corner, trying to make myself small.

Mr. Ramsbotham walked in and glanced at the keybad. “Looks like we're going to the same place!” he said brightly, as the doors closed. I muttered something about how that was Cool, and did my best to look at everything in the small, cramped space but him. I craned my neck up, and noticed that there was some kind of weird orange liquid draining out of the top of the elevator. Great. Then I noticed the inspection sticker.

Next Inspection Due: July 27th, 2013.

“Huh,” I said under my breath. It would be just my luck if I got trapped on this thing with him.

With a wheeze and a great gnashing of gears, the elevator door slowly slid closed. It seemed to take way too long. And then …

Nothing. It just sat there.

We stood in silence for a few moments, waiting. I could tell what he was thinking, because it was the same thing I was thinking. This thing better fucking move, because I swear to god, I do not want to be stuck on an elevator with this guy.

And, just like that, the ancient elevator lurched up so forcefully that it sent me pinwheeling, flailing my arms to keep steady. Mr. Ramsbotham grabbed my arm and steadied me.

“It does that sometimes,” he said, a smile on his face that seemed to suggest that that made it all okay.

Ding Ding

We had reached the second floor. I took in a deep breath. This was it. The moment of –

Ding Ding Ding

Mr. Ramsbotham frowned as the elevator kept rising.

“Does it normally do that?” I said, cocking an eyebrow. He shook his head, and punched the emergency stop button. Nothing. He punched it again. Still nothing. We kept rising.

I could feel sweat rising on the back of my neck. The clothes were confining. I'm not claustrophobic, but this was unreal. This had never happened to me before. I shoved Mr. Ramsbotham out of the way and pushed the emergency stop over and over again, I hit the Firefighter button, I hit everything, but we kept going up.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” I shouted as we stopped at the very top, suspended on the seventh floor.

“Alright,” said Mr. Ramsbotham. “Let's not panic.”

“Fuck you!” I said, as I began to pace from wall to wall, Mr. Ramsbotham jumping out of my way. “This is not cool! Not cool at all! I just wanted to talk to my advisors! I didn't sign on for this shit!”

Mr. Ramsbotham's reply was all cool under pressure. “Why did you want to talk to your advisors, Jaime? Was it about my class?”

“Of course it was about your class!” I said. And then something in me broke a little bit.

“Why'd you have to fail me anyway?” I shouted, rounding on him, pointing an accusatory finger at his chest. “I'm smart! I know I am. Everyone's always told me that. I write good. I made As in High School! I missed a few classes –”

“You missed fifteen classes.”

“But I did well on the essays!”

“You plagiarized one of them.”

“Only because you wouldn't tell me what I missed in class!”

“Which is the exact policy I have on my syllabus.”

“UGGGH,” I groaned, throwing my hands up. “You've got an answer for everything, don't you? But you don't know my life! You don't know the shit I have to put up with! You should account for shit happening, you know?”

I knew I must have sounded insane. A mad teenager raving about his grades to a college professor while they were stuck in an elevator. If he wanted he could probably have me remanded to the Crazy House for Boys or something.

Speaking of which, this next part is gonna to sound kinda crazy, but stay with me.

Mr. Ramsbotham was about to say something when we both heard a ding and felt the floor move. For one brief, shining moment, we shared an intense happiness that at least something was happening.

Then we both realized the elevator was going up.

“Um,” said Mr. Ramsbotham. “UM.”

“How can we be going up?” I said, my eyes buggin out. “How can we be going up? We were already on the top floor! Right?”

Mr. Ramsbotham slowly tuned to face me, and thee was something different in his eyes. Something sinister. Something totally freaky.

“Oh no,” he said. “All of the faculty were warned about this. It must be ... the ghost of James Carlisle!”

And suddenly, the rapidly moving elevator came to a screaming halt, before plunging down.

I could almost feel my stomach migrating into my throat. Of course there was not handrail, and suddenly, inexplicably, I began to float upwards.

“I thought they disproved this shit on Mythbusters!” I screamed, because I thought I was going to die and what would you say in a situation like this? I turned too look at Mr. Ramsbotham, who was –

Oh shit. He was crawling on the ceiling.

“That's not normal!” I said, then almost laughed, because nothing I'd seen in the past five minutes could be categorized as “normal.” And that's when Mr. Ramsbotham's back split open and a demon crawled out, with eyes black as night and a writhing, silver tongue forking out of a gaping maw filled with a thousand sharp teeth –

*

“Hold up, hold up,” Tom says, raising his hand. “I was on board til the demon thing. What the fuck is that?”

“I swear it's all true!” says Jaime, defensively. “The forked tongue and everything. Will you let me finish? Because it so happened I had a knife in my backpack, you know, for knife fights --”

“Nah man,” says Tom, who's almost doubled over with laughter. “I thought you were serious about some of that, but come on. You were just too chickenshit to go talk to your advisor.”

“No, it really happened!”

“If you'd just said you got out of the elevator eventually and didn't feel like hanging around, I'd have bought it,” says Jon, standing to one side, arms crossed. Then he snorts, and says, “Actually I'd probably still call bullshit.”

The wind picks up and Jaime shifts nervously from foot to foot. “Come on guys,” he says weakly. “Just let me finish the story.”

The other guys shake their heads and start laughing about something else. But not Jaime. He draws his coat tighter and shakes in the wind, and waits for what's coming. Because he knows what you and I already know so well.

Nobody gets out of the English department alive.

//

Thank you, thank you. This is how I write fiction. You'll notice it's not very good, because I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish here. I just started writing, and threw together an ending when I got bored (you'll notice how the paragraphs get shorter and shorter as it goes along. This is because I get bored with writing fiction very easily).

But I am serious about those elevators. They are freaaaky. And in case it's too small to see in this image, the inspection sticker is totally out of date. The upshot is that I'm probably going to die in one of these things some day.