legends · 6 min read ·
Exit Signs
A driver cannot find the exit of a car park whose signs point only down.
**Carrow Street Parking — Level Map (current)**
Levels: P1 · P2 · P3 · P4 · P5
Exits: 4 (stair A, stair B, lift core, ramp to Carrow Street)
Total bays: 412
*Please remember your level. Exit signs are illuminated for your safety.*
· · ·
I came down to the car at 22:50 because I had left my bag in the boot and a meeting had gone badly and I wanted to be home before midnight. The car park was on Carrow Street, five levels under a glass office block, and I had parked on P3, bay 118, which was the bay I always used.
I went down the stairs. I always took the stairs, because the lift smelled of cold oil and made me feel shut in.
The stairwell was painted pale green and lit by a row of fluorescent tubes that buzzed at the same pitch. Each landing had a red EXIT sign over its door. Each sign said the same thing, in the same font, with a small green arrow pointing down.
On P2, the sign above the door was an arrow pointing down.
On P1, the same.
I reached P3 and stood at the door with my hand on the bar. Through the wire glass I could see the first few bays and my car's silver roof, and I was about to push when I saw that the red sign above the door was new. It had a second arrow, under the first, pointing down again.
It said *P4*.
The garage did not have a P4 in the stair. P4 was on the far side of the building, through the lift core. I had been to P4 twice. The stairs stopped at P3, and the floor below was the ramp.
I went through the door anyway, into the bays. The lights were the same. The silence was the same. My car was there, where I had left it, with its interior light showing a faint orange through the back window, as if someone had left it on.
· · ·
I stood beside the car and tried the lift call button. The panel lit up when I touched it, a little warm under my finger. The number above the doors counted down from five, pausing at each level.
*P4.*
The lift doors opened onto an empty concrete space, and the back of the lift was painted with the same red EXIT sign.
I walked to the nearest stair door, a few bays down, and pushed it open. Inside, the same pale green paint. The same buzzing tubes. The same sign above the door, its arrow pointing down.
I went down. I counted the landings without meaning to. There was no P4. There was no landing with a number at all. The stairs went down and down, around the shaft, and each door I passed had the same sign and the same bar and the same faint sound of cars moving on the level beyond it, though I could hear no engines.
After six turns I came back to a door marked P3.
I was too tired to think about why that was frightening. I pushed through it into the bays, and there was my car, with the orange light on in the back window, and a man standing beside it.
He was wearing a grey office coat and holding a set of keys. He looked at me without alarm. He looked very like me at that hour, after a long day, a little worn at the collar.
"You're late," he said.
"I'm on P3."
"You're on P3," he agreed. "You always are, when you come down the stairs. You get out on the wrong level and walk back up to the car."
I looked at the stair door behind me. The sign above it said *P3*. The sign above the other stair door, twenty bays away, said the same.
He held out the keys. "Take the lift," he said. "It's quicker."
· · ·
I didn't take the lift. I got into the car. I started the engine and reversed out of bay 118 and drove to the ramp, because the ramp went up to the street and the street was where I wanted to be.
The ramp went up one level. Then another. Then the signs on the wall said P2 and then P1, and then I was on a turn of concrete with the car's lights on the wall and nothing else, and the exit signs were all pointing down.
I drove up. I drove down. I passed P3 twice more, my car in bay 118, my own reflection in the windscreen with the lights of the car park shining through it.
At the bottom of the ramp, a barrier had been lowered across the lane. I stopped the car and wound down the window. The air was cold and smelled of brake dust and old rain.
Under the barrier, on the concrete, a line of white paint had been laid out in an arrow. It pointed back the way I had come.
I got out and walked to the barrier and lifted it, because there was no one to tell me not to, and when I looked up the ramp, the red EXIT sign at its top was lit. The arrow beneath it pointed down.
I went back to the car. I left the door open. I sat in the driver's seat with the engine running and my hands on the wheel, and I looked up the ramp at the sign, and I counted, in my head, the levels I had driven past.
There were five. There were six. I got to seven and stopped, because I could see my car's taillights ahead of me on the ramp, a long way up, moving slowly away.
· · ·
The security guard found the car at 06:10, parked at the foot of the ramp on P1 with the engine off and the door open. The driver was asleep in the seat with his coat folded over his lap. He was holding a set of car keys in one hand, though the car had no key in the ignition.
"You've been down here all night," the guard said.
"No," said the driver, without opening his eyes. "I was only on P3. I was trying to get out."
The guard looked at the ramp. The lights were on at the top of it, and the red sign was lit, and the arrow below it pointed down.
On the back window, through the orange glow of the interior light, someone had written in the condensation: *P7*.
The guard checked the level map. It showed five levels, and a small, neat note at the foot of it, in the same typeface as the rest.
*Please remember your level. The exits are where you left them.*