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Kavya’s internship at the architectural firm had consumed her. Every night, she left the glass-paneled office on the 23rd floor after midnight, the last flickering fluorescent keeping her company. One rainy Wednesday, she stayed even later, finalizing a rendering. When she finally shut down her computer, it was 2:17 a.m. Even the cleaning staff had vanished.
At the elevator bay, the usual set was under maintenance. An orange barrier stated: “OUT OF ORDER UNTIL FRIDAY.” Resigned, Kavya took the staircase downward, but by the 20th floor, exhaustion dragged her to a standstill.
Then she noticed another elevator at the east wing—a freight one, smaller, unadorned, and unlogged on any employee map. It stood open invitingly, dimly lit within. Desperate, she stepped in.
There were no buttons. Only a keyhole next to a black glass panel.
“What the hell?”
Before she could back out, the doors hissed shut. The lights flickered. The lift began moving.
Slowly.
Downward.
Her phone lost signal halfway through the descent. Time stretched. Minute blurred into minute. She heard a soft tapping from somewhere above—at first like water droplets, then more… deliberate. Like fingernails.
After what felt like ten minutes, the elevator thudded to a stop. The doors opened.
The corridor outside was dimly lit, walls coated with age and grime, interspersed with faded signage in no recognizable language. Odd symbols marked each door. The air smelled old—like wet paper and dust sealed for decades. No sounds, only the faint buzz of some distant power source.
She turned back to find that the elevator was gone.
Not closed. Not waiting.
Gone.
Behind her: only wall.
She spun again toward the corridor. A low tone rang out, pulsing through the concrete walls. Then, a door ahead opened. Inside, fluorescent lights blinked on, one by one.
Against better judgment, she stepped in.
The room resembled a waiting area—mismatched chairs, a crooked reception desk, a fishbowl with dead plants instead of fish. On the wall, a sign read: “You Will Be Acknowledged In Order Of Persistence.”
A man sat in the farthest corner, motionless.
An elderly woman in hospital scrubs stood by the wall, whispering to no one. Her lips moved: “He who remembers is remembered.”
Kavya’s breath caught. She stepped back toward the door, but now light bled underneath it—a changing glow of red and blue, like emergency lights underwater.
She didn’t try to leave.
Instead, she approached the receptionist desk. On it sat a thick register, its cover leather-bound and cracked. The names inside were scrawled in different inks, some blotched or smudged, but all followed the same pattern:
“Anita Desai – Aug 2, 1993 – Room 6”
“Farooq H. Adenwal – Oct 20, 1968 – Room 3”
“Kavya Singh – [unwritten date] – [no room]”
Her name.
Already there.
As she stared at her partially written entry, an overhead speaker clicked on.
“Room 5 is now ready. Miss Kavya Singh, please proceed.”
The door beside her opened on its own.
Inside: mirrors. Floor to ceiling. Each showed different versions of her: as a child, an elderly woman, her sleeping, her staring back at her as she currently was now…but blinking off-rhythm. One mirror flickered and showed her standing beside her own corpse, grey-skinned and frozen inside the freight elevator. Another showed her colleagues gathering around her empty desk, puzzled.
She tried to run, but the door disappeared behind her. A voice reverberated from within the mirrors.
“When space refuses to remember your absence, you remain in places people forgot to build.”
As panic suffused her, she backed into a mirror…and fell through it.
She awoke in another waiting room.
A different color scheme. More mirrors. Fewer people. A younger girl crying in the corner. A clock where the hands twisted backwards.
The receptionist this time looked like her mother—but with no eyes.
“Still not acknowledged,” she rasped.
Kavya now understood. This level wasn’t on any blueprint. No architecture firm had designed it. It existed only in forgotten intervals, in the negative spaces of construction. A level created by oversight, but preserved by memory. It housed the lost. The misplaced. The persistently unacknowledged.
Somehow, she’d entered a place not rejected by the world but never listed in it.
And here, time’s rules bent toward erasure. The longer she stayed, the less real she became.
Each door she walked through led to waiting rooms more abstract, less rooted in reality. Some rooms had no walls. Others had doors that bled. The receptionist aged with her face. The others began to forget their own names.
Until one day, perhaps weeks later, perhaps minutes, an elevator reappeared.
Inside was a mirror. It showed her desk at the architectural firm. The time was 2:19 a.m.
It asked, in fluorescent scrawl across the glass:
“Should we remember you?”
She pressed her forehead to it and whispered, “Please.”
In her building, the freight elevator was found again. A cleaning crew pried open the stuck doors weeks later after noticing a strange hum. Inside: nothing but an old architectural rendering.
Of a 24th floor.
Approved. But never built.
Yet every blueprint now showed one extra page.
And in the list of employees on the building’s lobby wall, one name at the bottom had its letters smudged—just enough that no one could quite remember her face.
