The Ninth Floor

Lao Zhou had been fixing elevators in this building for twenty years.

An eight-story apartment block from the eighties, gray and weathered, its hallways permanently steeped in the smell of old cooking oil and mothballs. The elevator was one of those ancient relay-controlled models, its doors groaning open and shut like an old ox catching its breath, always jolting at the sixth floor. Lao Zhou could find every screw on that control panel with his eyes closed.

The call came in at eleven-forty at night. Someone was trapped in the elevator, stuck between the seventh and eighth floors.

Lao Zhou rode his electric scooter over and knocked on the elevator door on the ground floor. "Anyone in there?"

"Yes." A woman's voice, muffled, like it was coming through something thick.

"Don't worry, I'll get you out," Lao Zhou said, heading into the machine room with his toolbox. The indicator lights on the relay cabinet were jumping erratically. The limit switches for both the seventh and eighth floors had triggered simultaneously—which made no sense. There was at least three meters between floors.

He didn't dwell on it. He manually reset the system and leveled the car at the seventh floor. The doors opened. A woman stood inside, mid-thirties, wearing a dark blue work uniform, her hair pulled back tight. She stepped out and glanced at him—too calm for someone who'd been trapped in an elevator for half an hour.

"Sir," she said, "did you see that button?"

Lao Zhou leaned in and looked at the panel. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Above eight, there was another button.

Nine.

He rubbed his eyes, convinced he was seeing things. The button looked different from the others—slightly darker, worn smooth at the edges, polished to a shine as if it had been pressed thousands of times.

"You pressed the ninth floor?" Lao Zhou turned to ask.

The hallway was empty. No footsteps, nothing. The woman was gone.

Lao Zhou had been fixing elevators in this building for twenty years. He had taken apart every single panel and cleaned every button. The building had eight floors, and the elevator panel had eight buttons. Never more, never less.

He reached out and pressed the button for the ninth floor. It lit up for a second, then went dark. The elevator didn't move. Instead, the display above the panel flickered and showed something he'd never seen before—not a number, but a symbol, like an upside-down version of the Chinese character for "door."

Lao Zhou pulled his hand back.

The next morning, he went to the city construction archives.

The building was constructed in 1984 by the city's Third Construction Company. The blueprints clearly showed nine floors. But the construction log stopped abruptly after the eighth floor was capped. Tucked behind it was a handwritten note in rushed, slanted script: "After the eighth-floor cap, a structural collapse occurred. The ninth-floor framework suffered severe damage. It has been decided to seal it off permanently."

Lao Zhou turned the page. There was a black-and-white photograph of the accident scene. Scaffolding lay twisted on the ground, and several workers stood on the rubble. The caption read: "On the day the eighth floor was capped, the ninth-floor scaffolding collapsed. One worker fell to his death."

In the center of the photograph, standing at the front of the group, was a man in a dark blue work uniform, facing the camera.

Lao Zhou stared at it for a long time.

The man looked exactly like him.

He closed the file and sat in the chair, smoking a cigarette. Outside the window stood that gray old building—eight floors, no more, no less. On the top-floor exterior wall, there was a patch of cement that was slightly different in color, as if it had been added later. You wouldn't notice it unless you were really looking.

That afternoon, he went back to the building. The elevator was the same as always, doors groaning, jolting at the sixth floor. Eight buttons on the panel. Seven floor numbers, and an "8" at the top.

No nine.

He stood there for a long time, then pressed eight. The elevator climbed slowly, jolted at the sixth floor, and kept going. When the doors opened on the eighth floor, the hallway ended in a sealed concrete wall, exactly as the archives had described.

Lao Zhou didn't step out. He hesitated.

Then he pressed a spot just below the eighth-floor button.

His finger sank in slightly, like it had found the edge of something. The shape of a button, smooth, polished by years of use.

The indicator light came on.

The elevator began to ascend.

Lao Zhou's hand hung in midair. He hadn't pressed anything. The elevator was moving on its own, slowly passing the eighth-floor limit switch and climbing higher. The steel cables made a sound he had never heard before—like many people talking from very far away.

The doors opened.

Before stepping out, he glanced back at the panel. All nine buttons were lit, perfectly aligned.

The hallway was lit, though he couldn't tell where the light was coming from. The air smelled of fresh plaster and wet cement, clean and sharp. No cooking oil. No mothballs. The corridor stretched longer than any floor he'd ever seen, both walls gleaming white, the floor laid with that eighties-style terrazzo, spotless and untouched.

At the far end of the corridor was a door.

Pinned to it was a construction progress sheet, dated: September 17, 1984.

Lao Zhou walked to the door. He stood there for a long moment, then raised his hand and knocked.

From inside, someone knocked back three times, matching his rhythm exactly.

He didn't knock again.

As he turned back toward the elevator, he noticed a mirror on the hallway wall. In it, he was wearing a dark blue work uniform and an eighties-style hard hat.

Just before the elevator doors closed, he looked through the narrowing gap and saw the door at the end of the corridor open a crack. An eye peered out at him from the sliver of darkness.

It was his own eye.

The elevator descended to the ground floor without stopping. By the time Lao Zhou stepped out of the building, the sky was darkening. He looked back at the top floor. That patch of mismatched cement stood out starkly in the last light of the setting sun.

His phone rang. The property management office.

"Zhou, the elevator at Building 8 in Cuiyuan Complex is stuck between the seventh and eighth floors. Someone's trapped inside. Can you take a look?"

Lao Zhou stubbed out his cigarette and got on his scooter.

As he pulled out of the complex, he caught a glimpse of the eighth-floor windows in his rearview mirror. A curtain shifted slightly, as if someone was standing there, watching him leave.