Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Meridian Tower ·
The Counting Lift
Quarterly ride log of the Block Manager of Meridian Tower, on a west-car counter that adds thirteen rides every Friday at ten past three, with nobody in the car.
- filed: "End of the quarter"
- reference: "MT/TR/22"
1. Report of the Block Manager of Meridian Tower, one hundred and sixty-one flats over the Harbour Road in Murrow, two passenger lifts and one service car, filed under Schedule R of the Keepership as the quarterly ride log of the west car, with the notes I am required to add. October has run rain down the tower's face all quarter, and the lobby grille drips on the checker plate from opening bell to locking up.
2. The cars carry trip counters, read Monday mornings and entered in this log. A ride is one run of the car between stops. A passenger is a body the landing scanners count. In an ordinary quarter the two books agree within a ride or two a week, which is the ordinary slop of a working block.
3. This quarter they do not. Since the first Friday of it, the west car's counter has run thirteen rides ahead of the scanners, and the excess falls all in one place: every Friday at twelve minutes past three in the morning the counter advances thirteen times and stops. The car's landing log shows no doors opened and no stops made in those minutes. The load plates read empty. The motor meter draws nothing. The car comes out of the minute as clean as it went in: no scuff, no wet, no mark on the panels, though the ground-floor mats stood black with rainwater either side of it.
4. Twelve minutes past three falls inside the hour the city calls thin, from three o'clock to the third minute past the half. The Block's standing order, older than my tenure, is plain about that hour: the lift lobbies of the Tower are not to be entered between those minutes, on any account, by any grade. The watchman's round skips the lobby accordingly and signs the skip in the night book. I observe the order. I observe also that in the Tower's fifty years it has never once needed a reason.
5. My own observation, the one I cannot explain: on the fourth Friday of the quarter I stood on the ground-floor landing at ten past three. On the landing, not in the lobby; I note the distinction for the record. The car did not come. At twelve past, through the shut doors, I heard the counter work: thirteen ticks, even as coins laid out, and then the ordinary quiet. The position indicator never moved off the ground floor. Whatever took those rides took them from standing, with the doors shut, at a car I could have touched through three inches of steel.
6. Mr. Fenwick, the lift engineer, stripped and tested the counter on the Tuesday following and certified it sound. His findings I enter whole, as the schedule directs for contractors' lines: the counter is not at fault; the count is not at fault; the count is correct; the rides are being taken. He offered no cause and the schedule does not require one. Per the same schedule there is no class of ride without a rider, so the excess is entered as rides, compelled as written: one hundred and sixty-nine this quarter, being thirteen on each of the thirteen Fridays.
7. The residents' stair registers hold no names for those minutes, and no resident has applied to me concerning them. There is one exception, which I enter because it is the only one: a tenant of the twelfth floor has twice left word at my office that she hears counting in the shaft on Fridays, and how she likes it she would not say. The twelfth floor stands directly over the motor room. I have noted the room's oiling as up to date.
8. Under the standing order respecting persons not elsewhere registered, a copy of this log goes quarterly to the Cantor's office in Murrow. This quarter it has returned no query. It has returned a receipt: thirteen received, riders pending. I have filed the receipt behind the log in the folder marked correspondence, and initialled the fold, and nothing else.
9. For the new quarter I ruled my log page on Monday and left the Friday lines short until they should fall due. Collecting the counter this morning, I found the first Friday's line already standing at thirteen, entered in my own hand, which I have not yet put to that page. I have ordered the car's doors kept shut overnight and posted the order at both landings. On Friday last the doors were found open again at ten past three, and were found shut at the half minute past, by which time the night book records nothing and I have entered nothing.
10. The west car stands clean and level at the ground floor tonight. It carried me up at nine this morning without a sound, and I did not think of Friday once inside it. Crossing the lobby after, I found I had been counting my steps out of it, which is not mine to explain, and which I here report and otherwise leave.