Chapter Text
“When you open ReportLogger it will automatically pop up a window with a list of branch locations that haven’t contributed a report for over a month. Today it’s empty, which is great, but if there’s something on there you’ll have to call them to make sure they’re all right.”
Sal turns to frown at him. “Why wouldn’t they be all right?”
“Hm,” he says, scratching at his forehead. “Sometimes, eh, lines of communication go down. Or sometimes there are accidents we don’t hear about. Since we’re the root location we allocate funding, and we have to know if they need help and can’t ask.”
She lets him keep talking about how to log an incident report, but it still doesn’t add up. Frankly, a lot of things don’t add up about her new job. Or at least they don’t add up to what she expected, and there are some unknown variables in there. For instance: four of the five other archivists seem to be recovering from various kinds of injuries. For instance: the way Yossi and Dallas communicate over her head without speaking, in eye movements and small jerks of their heads. Tall people are the worst.
“So you should be ready to log your first report. Want to take it for a spin?”
“Sure,” she says, and opens up the secure email. It actually is a pretty cool system given how complicated it is to collect statements from 43 branch locations that apparently sometimes drop out of contact for no reason. And there’s a good chance she’ll get to help maintain it.
Yossi watches while she logs the report, which is easy, and prints the file since procedure is that everything should have a hard copy just in case. “Perfect,” he says. “You’re a natural. Now you can put it in the spreadsheet and mark that you’re reading it. Just make notes about any more research you think we’d need to do to corroborate it, and Julia will eventually look at it when you’ve marked it complete. I’ve got to run, I have an interview to do, but I can check your work when I’m done, or you can ask any of the other archivists. See you!”
So she reads.
Branch location: Usher Foundation Sioux Falls, 132 N Dakota Avenue
Instance reported by: Yelena Venarchick, via email
Location of incident: Rapid City, SD
Date received: 04-03-2006
Incident summary: An elevator that only goes down.
Description of incident:
I have a bad habit of running late for important things, so I made sure to take the early bus to my interview—that was at the Pennington County Building. It didn’t work out because the bus was delayed, so I was still running late by the time I got to the county building. That must be why I didn’t notice the “out of order” sign on the elevator. They should have put it on the door. But, if it was out of order, I don’t understand why the doors opened and the elevator moved. Whatever was wrong with that elevator, it wasn’t because it was broken.
I got in and pressed the button for the third floor, and the doors closed. I remember I noticed that the elevator smelled weird, like mildew or mold or a cave. I made a mental note to find out who could tell the cleaners, but I didn’t really think anything was wrong, even after the elevator jerked and started to move down. I was annoyed, and I pressed the 3 button again, but it didn’t start going up. I guess I figured that someone downstairs wanted to get on and go up, so I waited. It wasn’t until about a minute in, when it still hadn’t stopped at all, that I checked and realized that there weren’t any floors below the ground floor. I started looking for any of the buttons that would stop it so I could get off and take a different one, but there weren’t any floors I could tell it to stop at. I tried pushing the door open button, which I didn’t really think would work, but the doors did open. They opened to the side of the elevator shaft, which was going by so quickly that I think the elevator was just falling. And the wall wasn’t smooth, because little bits of dirt and rocks kept going ding on the side and falling in. I really panicked, then. I hadn’t wanted to press the emergency stop button before because I was pretty sure the elevator wouldn’t be able to move at all and I’d have to wait for someone to come find me. But now I pressed it, and the elevator jerked to a stop with a horrible screeching noise, so suddenly that I fell to my knees. I sat on the floor for a while. I was so full of adrenaline that I was breathing hard, because I thought I was going to die until it stopped.
Then I got up to my feet and went back over to the control panel. I was shaking. There was a button marked with a telephone symbol, so I pressed it. I wasn’t really sure how it worked, so I held it down for what felt like a whole minute before the speaker started to crackle. The interference was so bad that it took me a long time to realize that someone was actually talking. I had to ask them to repeat what they were saying a couple times, until I was panicking but I finally understood that they were saying, “What is your emergency?”
I tried to explain very slowly and clearly that I was in the elevator on the far left in the county building and I thought I’d been falling for two minutes and I needed to be rescued. The crackling voice told me to wait, so I did. The speaker went silent and I was left alone. The elevator smelled even more like dirt than it did when I got in, and the air that was beginning to leak in through the tiny crack between the shaft and the outside of the elevator, it was hot and smelled metallic. I waited for maybe ten minutes, and the elevator was getting hotter and hotter all the time, so eventually I decided I wasn’t so likely to suffocate and pressed the door close button. The doors closed with a tortured grinding sound that made it seem like the tracks were full of gravel. I tried to call back whoever I was talking to before, but I couldn’t make out a single word in all the crackling interference, not even anything that sounded like it could be a human voice. I thought to myself that I must be deep, deep underground. I didn’t like that thought, so I started pacing. I stopped soon enough, because it made the elevator swing just enough to hit the walls of the shaft, and I had this awful irrational fear that I would somehow break the cable, and the elevator would fall forever and ever, down into the center of the earth. And it would get hotter and hotter until I was cooked alive inside that metal box, without enough air left to scream.
I pushed the door open button again just for something to do, but they wouldn’t open. I tried to imagine the technicians coming and prying them open with crowbars. All I could picture was standing there listening to their muffled voices and the sound of hammering until they gave up and left me still trapped inside. After that I used the call button again and again, about every five minutes. Sometimes I could make out the person on the other end telling me to stay calm and wait for help to arrive. Or maybe I imagined it, maybe I built a voice out of the crackling static that would say what I wanted to hear. Most of the time I couldn’t even manage that, and I just listened to the noise like it was a radio in the air raid bunker that would tell me when it was safe to come out. I even tried calling 911 on my phone, but I didn’t get any signal down there at all. Hours passed. Sometimes I almost felt calm for long stretches of time, until I would suddenly realize again that the elevator was growing hotter and I had no way out and I knew I imagined the voice telling me that help was coming. And then I would scream until my throat was worn out and my eyes were sore.
I’ll skip past the rest. I’ll skip past the ten hours I spent inside that elevator, watching my phone’s battery tick down and praying to any god that would hear me. I remember it was almost eight at night by my phone’s clock when I heard the scraping on the top of the elevator. My first thought was that something had come. I stood in the furthest corner from it and held my handbag tightly, like I could really fight whatever was able to pry the top off the elevator. I listened in terrified silence to the scraping and banging noises and then suddenly a panel fell in onto the floor with a deafening clang.
“Sorry about that,” said a voice from outside. “You okay in there?”
I told him yes, I was okay, and then I was so relieved I started crying.
I don’t remember how I got back up into the lobby. I think they made some kind of temporary harness for me. I do remember clutching my phone so hard it dug into my hand, and checking the time compulsively just like I had been for ten hours. I caught the exact moment it came back into range of the cell towers and changed from 8:17 PM to 10:54 AM. So no, I don’t have any evidence that I spent ten hours there. I could have been hallucinating all of it. But I don’t think I was. I wish I’d asked them how they found me… did they feel the awful heat from the core of the Earth washing over them as they worked to free me? Did they feel the pressure of billions of tons of earth pressing in on them in that elevator shaft and fear they would never be free?
I didn’t ask. All I know is that I’m never getting into another elevator as long as I live.
Follow-up:
I was able to interview a worker at the Rapid City elevator monitoring group and one of the fire department employees who rescued Mrs. Venarchick (transcripts attached). According to their testimony I have reconstructed the timeline from their point of view. The monitoring group received an alert from the county building at 10:04 AM on March 27 and immediately called the fire department, whose people arrived on the scene at 10:27. If Mrs. Venarchick is correct that she returned to the lobby at 10:54, this would leave just under half an hour for them to locate and free her. The monitoring group worker further said that the audio quality of the call was, as Mrs. Venarchick described it, exceptionally poor, and he was not able to understand anything she said.
Recommendation: none. This is equally likely to be a fear-induced delusion and a genuine unexplainable occurrence, and as Mrs. Venarchick points out she has no evidence to corroborate her version of events.
B.K. 04-16-2006
Sal looks up from the monitor in a daze and is surprised to find herself looking at a white plaster wall rather than the acoustic panelling of an elevator. It certainly felt real, reading it. It felt so real that she was sure for just a moment that she would come back to herself and be trapped miles and miles underground. She spins her chair to face away from the computer and pushes her glasses up, rubbing her eyes. Maybe she can just… come back in a little bit. She needs some water.
She stands on unsteady legs and goes to the bathroom, where she spends way too long sitting silently in the stall before she realizes she really should get back to work. When she returns to the computer Yossi is standing next to it, peering around the corner. “I’m here,” she says, raising a hand. “Sorry, I don’t know how long you’ve been waiting, I just… incident reports are a lot.”
He grimaces. “You got a real one on your first day? Talk about bad luck.”
“What?”
“The, uh, I guess the ones that really are supernatural, they’re different. You can tell when you read them. They take it out of you.”
“Yeah… yeah, they do. Sorry, what am I supposed to do with it now?”
“Write up a short suggestion for what kind of research we’d need to do to confirm or deny it. And this isn’t official procedure, but Julia appreciates it if you can head it up with what the person was afraid of.” Seeing the confused look on her face he leans over the chair to skim the incident report that’s still on the screen. “This one’s claustrophobia. There are a few other categories that we see a lot of in the real reports. Fear of the dark, disaster, contamination, that kind of thing.” Her eyes drift down to the screen, where Yelena Venarchick’s terror still seems to bleed out into the air. She startles when a hand lands on her shoulder. “Hey, don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. We won’t put you on witness duty until you’re ready for it, okay?”
Sal can’t imagine having to hear someone talk about something like this in person. She sits down again and, with shaking fingers, writes up her summary to send to the head archivist.