The janitor knew, as he mopped up the sticky oil stains left from the eighteen wheelers as they idled at the unloading dock, only two bays down from the RESTRICTED zone.
The teachers knew, as they graded the final test papers before the end of school. You had to be looking up from your test at just the right moment to see one of them dart a quick gaze at the forlorn factory just at the edge of town.
The police man, Colombo, knew. He didn't believe in the Italian Mafia but perhaps it had followed his family from the war torn wasteland of Italy. His parents had told him stories of the Mafia that lurked just outside of your blind spot and would stay just in the shadow of any streetlight behind you, making the hair stand up on your arms. Maybe it was human, maybe it wasn't, but the abandoned factory on the edge of town gave him the same feeling his father had talked about around dying embers in their old home back in 42'.
The children knew. Stackville was a nice town, a decent town by anyone's standards, a place kids could ride their bikes outside at all hours of the night as long as they were quiet, a place where grandmas knit sweaters before the Aguast chill swept down from the Dakotas. Two banks, two steeples, and two factories, one new and the other ancient, reclusive and abandoned. Bike to Jennys General store, swim at Tuckers pond, jump the picket fence and grab a few grapes while old man Jones wasn't looking? Sure. But don't get within a thousand feet of the the old factory.
Why?
It wasn't haunted and the graffiti from the teens that never grew up on the crumbling walls showed that somebody had dared someone else to at least walk up to the building. No, it was the elevator, elevator 13B. Perants didn't awneser the questions their kids asked when Jonny Truman, a senior from high school, went missing four years ago, only to find his brand new cowboy boots, shredded and torn at the entrance of the old elevator, blood splattered all over the door. Colombo filed the report, the pastor said a prayer, and the whole town swept the story away under the rug. Now, every summer since, the children and adults always remember the tragic loss of such a young life. Worse, this was only one of dozens who had gone missing at the factory. Summer came, flowers blossomed, but the roses always went unpicked. They looked too much like blood.
YOU ARE READING
Elevator 13B
Short StoryIn a backwater town in Oklahoma, named Stacksville, an abandoned factory holds the secret to a meysetry that everybody knows but nobody talks about. Its not the factory, its not the people who work there. Its Elevator 13B. Haunted? No. 13B has a sec...
