L'esprit de l'escalier
With apoelogies to Poe
This story originally appeared in Open Pen in 2018
We were talking, me and Suzy-Sue, about why ghost stories are a thing at Christmas, when we got on to what scares us really. I said oh, playing out the same issues in every job, hometown, relationship; subconsciously finding people who let me play out my patterns as I let them play out theirs, being stuck doing this. Each New Year’s Resolution really a cover story. Stuck especially those times I thought I wasn’t, that I was breaking the cycle, realising too late the breaking out was just another, subtler way of staying in. For these cycles to be the pattern of your life, winding round and round till your last breath—so you won’t know that you have lived. Suzy said spiders.
Bringing us back down to more everyday fears, Roger, who’d been listening while he dish-ragged the postgrad bar, said why don’t you girls try the 8-Block stairs. What’s haunting them I said. The stairs he said. I said that’s the setting. Sue said so what’s the story. He told us it wasn’t any ghost story as such. Undergrad students in 8-Block had come up with a dare.
What you did was, at night, walk from whichever floor your room was on, down to basement level. Except, before you started, you had to stand still, so all the motion sensor lights blinked off. Then you walked down in the dark, saw how far you got, saw if you could reach the bottom.
But, whenever the lights come on, he said, you see something. Like what. Just something the stairs show you.
Hoping for a story of our own, we left Roger to shutter up and crossed the grounds to 8-Block, with its glass spine of a stairwell and two or three lit rooms—the only students, bar us, who’d not gone back for the holidays. Hands like blinkers on the glass, I pointed out the abandoned entrance hall. I’d started back across the grounds when Sue swiped us in, telling me if and when I shat myself I could get another ride home. She led the way to the stairwell doors: as in our block, there were four flights per storey, eight steps each, diagonally enclosing the walled sides of a cuboid; other than that, pipes and an outer banister, roughened brickwork. Picking off a piece of plaster oddly made my pulse run faster, so throwing it at Sue I asked her: Is it me or did something just…? Her face paled as she stopped to listen, then, with a mock-offended laugh: Fuck off mate.
The way upstairs was dark, the way downstairs we’d already illuminated. Trying to hint at my reluctance, I weighed either option with a shrug in my voice: we could take the lift and start from the top, which would mean we’d do the dare properly, or we could save a lot of time by going from ground floor to basement levels. Faintly and despite my chatter, next I said it didn’t matter: pick the former or the - lateral thinking - the third option, whichever option. From somewhere above, from one of those lit rooms, there clattered down a laugh. Wincing like I was dragging myself out of a whirlpool, I said we could even pretend we’d gone either up or down and just get out of here. I waited for her decision, holding open the doors to the stairs, telling myself I only did so to dampen our echoes. Deafening with childish laughter, she went down, and I crept after
Clicking fingers at the rafter with the motion sensor light. Step by step, at first, then three-in-one I steeply started leaping, Bounding round the corners keeping Suzy from my line of sight. Half for balance, half for feeling concrete’s weird and half-appealing Smooth and pocked, almost congealing surface did I touch the walls. But to vent a rising tension did I call to Sue and mention Being scared? Her condescension made me doubt my wherewithal… Tense because the steps kept going, levels’ minus numbers growing— Hear the student pranksters crowing, giving us the runaround! Yet for quarter of an hour we’d ravelled round this sunken tower When my instincts overpowered: “Take us back to solid ground! “Peek and cringe round every corner. What was that?! We could’ve sworn a Shadow moved! We tried to warn ya someone’s coming. Be prepared!” At that urgent mental screaming, ‘leaps and bounds’ took on new meaning: Looking back I came careening, knocking Suzy unawares. Getting to her feet, she knuckled brick-dust from her eye and chuckled Shrilly (courage in me buckled): “Let’s try going back one flight.” We ascended, smiling, slowly - smiles to prove our shakes were only Self-aware playacting shows; I whispered, “Something’s not quite right.” For the steps went up unceasing; plus the doors were gone, releasing Not just fear but woe, decreasing both our paces to a crawl. Thinking that it might transpire problems for our stairway mire I went lower, Sue went higher (Make it crash and reinstall?) Suzy would find “nothing more than ceilings, steps, and walls and floors and Lights-” she paused as if to swallow back her interrupting frown. By herself, so faintly humming, gaining height while I’d been plumbing— Sure enough I’d met her coming up; she’d met me coming down. Panic sent its prickling flushes down my arms, in upward rushes Through my brain, a surge that pushes reason into manic prayers: Had I piped up even forty, thirty, twenty flights before, we Might have had a chance to bore free from the mineshaft of these stairs… Could it be, though, locomotion moved the stairs like wind moves ocean? Might this superstitious notion save us from our plodding plight? Like a treadmill minus motor, we were boat and frightened boater Drop an anchor and we ought to pin the water, hold it tight. So we slumped down on a stooping step or other, worn to drooping By the trampling and the looping of a million drawled footfalls. Firstly, nothing, only distant roaring as of non-existent Thunder, but then quite insistent: Windows, and an entrance hall! Frightened, hopeful, we departed - just like that, the trap outsmarted! Grabbing Sue, I laughed wholehearted; she played quiet; I played the clown. Peering back into the building with the morning sunlight gilding Banisters and pock-marks filled in gummily, she kissed my crown, Held her lips there, started crying - What had been most horrifying? Knots that tie from their untying? - “Yes,” she sighed into my hair. Roger, doing inventory, sensed we had a scary story. “Hardly clothed ourselves in glory…” More than that we didn’t share. Life went back to ‘something’ normal, as a lover’s passing scorn will Leave behind a vague, informal threat that disarrays your nights. What that threat was would elude me; Suzy offered doctors whom she’d Used for “dizziness” she shrewdly put it so I wouldn’t bite. Nothing bodily effected anything, and yet I texted: “Aren’t you feeling unprotected? Can’t you sense it?” / “Not at all.” Though I couldn’t say it plainly, truth insisted from the way the Rhyming nightmares nightly plagued me: Somehow you are still enthralled. Suzy tells me that we’re freely living, moving. Can’t I feel the Blatant substance of the Real she points to as we drive through town? Smiling in her car politely, only words I say are “Might be!” Concrete white and grey inside me, spiritually rust-pipe-brown. Years pile up without real changes (surface merely rearranges) “What’s today? The blues or rages?” reads a text - see, Suzy cares! Don’t mind her, I’m past offending: whether climbing or descending, Walking circles, never-ending. I’m OK—I’ll take the stairs
Merry Christmas!