Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Tenth Ward ·
The Lift That Paused
A lift operator logs thirty-three minutes holding level at a floor his panel has no button for, while the maintenance sheet for the same night disagrees.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Stan Colley, lift operator"
I operate the passenger lift in the Tenth Ward offices, the tall block by the bus station, and I will state what is in dispute between two signed books: on the night of 2 November 1987 the cage held level, with nobody in it, at a height the panel has no button for, from three o'clock until three thirty-three, the stretch the night staff call the Thin Hour, and whether that counts as evidence depends on which book you open.
My rounds are quiet. The panel is marked B, G, and one to twelve. Six of those landings never open, 4, 7 and 11 among them, taped over years back, call lights dead, no traffic, no complaints. You stop level, the doors never part, and you go down again. I logged it as faults for my first month and was told the tapes are maintenance, so now I mark those stops held, no entry, and the log accepts it. The regulars never ask after the taped floors; the shutters have outlived most of them.
The night in question I was on the late relief, alone in the cage from twenty to three. At three o'clock exactly by the lobby clock the machine lifted off G and brought the cage to rest, level to the half inch, at a height the dial could not name. The floor number aperture stayed dark. Through the gate was plaster and a skirting board, no door, no landing lamp, no call press on the wall outside, a stretch the drawings show as solid from grid to grid.
There was no button to press, so I did the one thing the rulebook allows at a floor not on the panel, which is nothing. I sat on the stool with my hands in my lap. The cage held as if set on chocks, no sway, no creep. A lift that holds properly is silent, and I listened for the brake's little tick and got none of it for thirty-three minutes. At about ten past three I did put my ear to the gate, once. Nothing came through, not a draught, not a voice, nothing that a rulebook would let me call a person, so I sat back down and kept my hands where rules could see them.
At three thirty-three, by the lobby clock again, the cage came down to G of its own accord, level and unhurried, and opened on the ground floor as if nothing whatever had been asked of the machine. I logged the hold at 03:00 to 03:33 and had it countersigned at the lodge by Elsie at ten past six that morning. The panel clock above the buttons, the round white face, has been dead since before I had the post and reads 03:33 at every hour of every day. That night of all nights the dead clock was right, which the foreman calls an accident of arithmetic, and I call what I like.
Against my book stands the electrician's maintenance sheet for the same night: machine standing at G on inspection, brake pinned, no calls recorded. The counterweight log agrees with him. Both books carry signatures, nobody alleges a forgery, and the numbers simply do not meet. Mr Dunthorne says a dead clock is no witness, and he is right by the letter. The letter does not explain why the cage sat level at a floor with no button and no door, the one night in five years the dead clock happened to be telling the truth.
So it is disputed, and will stay disputed: the lodge holding my time-book at one corner, the works holding their sheet at the other, and me on my stool in the middle. What neither book will answer is the plain part of it. Who was the brake set for, at a floor that has no button and no door, for exactly thirty-three minutes on the second of November, and what, in all that time, wound the clock?