Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Meridian Tower ·
The Weight on the Stair at Meridian Tower
A caretaker at a Meridian Tower block hears a heavy tread on the fourth step of the emergency stair every night at eleven, and the weight coming up the stairs is always a little more than a single person.
The emergency stair at Meridian Tower has forty-four steps between the sixth and the eleventh floors, concrete with a rubber nosing and a steel handrail painted the same grey as the walls. Dorothy Akin has been the night caretaker for eleven years, and in that time she has learned every creak in the stairwell. The landing door that sticks in the damp. The third step, which rings slightly when anyone steps on its outer edge. The fourth, which does not ring at all.
On the first Monday in September she heard the fourth step give.
It was a deep, soft dip under a heavy foot, the kind of sound a loaded trolley makes when it crosses a threshold. Then the step creaked back into place, slowly, as if something had shifted its weight. She stood on the landing with her torch and listened. Nothing else moved.
She checked the stair at eleven the next night, and the night after. It was always the same. At exactly eleven o'clock, the fourth step dipped under a weight that was not quite a person's, and then the stair above it began to take the load, one tread at a time, slowly and carefully, as if someone were climbing with a very heavy case.
Dorothy did not go up to look. She had been told in her training never to confront anyone in the stairwells after dark, and she had never needed to. She stayed on the ground floor and listened to the tread come up, past the seventh floor, the eighth, the ninth, until it reached the landing outside the tenth. There it stopped. And a moment later, very faintly, she heard the tenth-floor door open and close.
Nobody lived on the tenth floor. It had been empty since the last tenant left in 2009, and the lease had been sold twice.
She told the building manager, Mr Feld, who laughed and said the stairs settled at night, that was all. She told the residents' committee. A woman on the eighth floor said she had heard the tread too, and that it sounded like someone trying not to wake the children. A man on the sixth said he had seen a shape on the stair once, a broad figure in a long coat, carrying something on its shoulder, and that when he looked again it was gone.
In October, the weight began to change. Dorothy heard it on the fourth step at eleven, and then, a few seconds later, a second weight on the same step, lighter, quicker, following. Then a third. By the end of the month, the tread at eleven had become a procession of small sounds, each one dipping the fourth step in turn, climbing up past the sixth floor with a soft, patient rhythm, like a family going home together after dark.
Dorothy has stopped counting them. She now leaves the emergency door propped open on the ground floor and sits by it with a flask of tea. She is not frightened of the stair. She is only aware, each night, that the weight coming up it is growing, and that it always stops at the tenth, and that she has never once heard it come back down.