The Missing Floor - Chapter 1 - The Gap Between Six and Eight

I noticed the missing number the night I moved in, standing alone in the elevator with cardboard boxes stacked at my feet. The panel was brushed steel, worn smooth by decades of fingers, and the buttons were arranged in two uneven columns. One through six were intact. Then there was a clean jump to eight.

No scratched-off circle. No sign of removal. Just an absence.

At first, I assumed superstition. Hotels skip thirteen. Hospitals skip four. Maybe this place skipped seven for some outdated cultural reason. But there was something about it that felt deliberate in a way that superstition never quite achieves. Too precise. Too clean.

The elevator rose with a low mechanical groan. When it passed between the sixth and eighth floors, I felt the slightest pressure change in my ears, like descending underwater. The car slowed just a fraction longer than it should have.

I told myself that old buildings hesitate.

I would repeat that lie often.

The superintendent, Mr. Hargreeve, was waiting for me in the lobby when I came back down to return the dolly. He was tall, stooped, and smelled faintly of disinfectant.

“Excuse me,” I said, gesturing back toward the elevator. “Why does it skip seven?”

He stared at me as though I had asked something deeply inappropriate.

“There has never been a seventh floor,” he said, carefully.

I waited for him to smile. He didn’t.

“Did they remove it?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “There was never a need.”

That answer stayed with me long after I unlocked the door to my apartment on the eighth floor. The unit itself was fine—quiet, clean, slightly outdated. But the ceiling felt lower than expected. Not physically, perhaps. Emotionally.

That night, while unpacking, I heard something through the vent. A deep, slow sound, like air moving through lungs far too large for the space they occupied.

I shut off the lights and listened.

It stopped.

I slept poorly, dreaming of stairwells that bent inward and hallways that closed behind me as I walked.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model