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The Stairwell That Counts Down · All the Horror Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to All The Horror Podcast, a chilling space where
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: nightmares come to life and the shadows whisper their secrets.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I am Lawrence, your guide through the eerie, the unexplained,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: and the downright terrifying. Tonight, we go Below. Every office
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: tower has floors it does not advertise, levels the elevator skips,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: doors the directory forgets. But what if the building keeps
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: adding them while you sleep? What if the stairs only
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: go down, and they are counting? So dim the lights,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: hold your breath, and prepare for a journey into the unknown.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: This is all the Horror Podcast, where fear is our
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: favourite story. Tonight, the stairwell that counts down. My name
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: is Priya Nair, and I am the night auditor for
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: the Meridian Exchange Tower in the Financial District, twelve floors
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: above ground, three below. Parking, storage, plant. I know this
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: building the way a priest knows a prayer. For four years,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: I have walked every corridor between midnight and six, checking doors,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: signing logs, making sure the tower sleeps the way towers
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: are supposed to sleep. The job has one rule nobody
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: wrote down. You finish the round, Everything we see, whatever
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: you think you see on the monitors, you finish the round,
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: because the building settles, pipes knock, and tired eyes invent things.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: I believed that completely, until the Tuesday after the clocks changed,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: when the stairwell started counting. It began with the basement log.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Every night I signed the clipboard on sub-level 3. The
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: lowest floor, plant room, boilers, the smell of oil and
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: damp concrete. That Tuesday, the clipboard was already signed. My name.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: My handwriting. Timed at 3.17. In the morning. I was
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: holding the pen at... 1-4... I stood there, staring at
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: my own signature, timed nearly two hours in the future,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: and I told myself the dayguard was playing a joke.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Except the dayguard cannot imitate my handwriting, and the ink
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: was still wet. I checked the plant room. Everything normal.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: I checked the elevator. The panel showed twelve, eleven, all
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: the way down to B3. And below B3, nothing. Just
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: brushed steel. I rode it back up to the lobby
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: and finished the ground floor checks, and when I looked
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: at the stairwell door on the mezzanine, the little wired
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: glass window showed darkness, which was correct, because the stairwell
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: lights are motion-triggered. I had walked past that door four
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: minutes earlier, and the lights had been on. Stairwells do
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: not turn their own lights off with no one inside.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Motion sensors fail dark, not lit. I know this because
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: I wrote the maintenance request the last time one failed,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: and I remember the electrician explaining it while he replaced
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: the unit. They fail dark, Someone had been in that
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: stairwell four minutes ago. Someone who moved triggered the lights
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: and then stopped moving entirely. I opened the door. The
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: lights came on. The stairwell was empty. Concrete steps going up.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Concrete steps going down. The smell of dust and old paint.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: And painted on the wall of the first landing below
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: in yellow paint I had never seen before. was a number.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Thing four. There is no B4 in the Meridian Exchange Tower.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: There are twelve floors above ground, and three below. I
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: counted them the way you count your own fingers when
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: someone tells you that you have eleven. I spent the
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: rest of that round in the security office, pulling old
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: incident logs. I do not know what I was looking for. Reassurance, probably.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: A record of a prank, a paint spill, anything ordinary.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: What I found instead was a gap. Eleven years of
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: nightly logs, bound by quarter. Complete, except for one. The
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: fourth quarter, eleven years ago, was missing entirely. Not chopped out,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: not misfiled. The shelf slot was empty, and the dust
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: in it was undisturbed, as though nothing had sat there
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: for years. In the quarter before the gap, the last entry,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: dated a Tuesday in December, was written by the night
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: auditor before me, a man named Onqua. Three lines. Mezzanine
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: stairwell paint reported to maintenance. Second occurrence. Requesting transfer to days.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: There was no record of any transfer. There was no
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: record of a concours at all after that date. No
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: resignation letter. No forwarding address. Just my own hiring paperwork.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Starting the following... January. Night audit. Same round. Same quote.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: I sat with that logbook until dawn, and I understood
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: something I did not want to understand. I was not
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: the first person to see paint in that stairwell. I
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: was only the first person in eleven years. I did
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: not go down. I want that on the record. I
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: am not a curious person. Curious people do not last
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: four years on night audit. I closed the stairwell door.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: I locked it with my master key. I wrote up
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: the paint in the incident log as possible vandalism. And
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: I finished my round. The rest of the night was quiet.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: I signed the B3 clipboard at 3.17 in dry ink.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: over my own wet signature from two hours before. And
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: I did not think about what that meant. I refused
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: to think about what that meant. Wednesday. The paint was gone.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Scroped clean. The concrete paler where it had been. The
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: maintenance log showed no work order. I asked Lido, the
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: evening cleaner, a man who notices everything and says nothing,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: He looked at the landing for a long time and said,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: there was never paint here, and walked away, and he
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: has not met my eyes since. But the stairwell had changed,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: I felt it before I saw it. The steps going
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: down from the mezzanine. I've climbed them a thousand times,
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: twelve steps to the first landing, then twelve more. That
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: night there were thirteen. I counted four times. Thirteen steps,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: each slightly shallower than they should have been, as though
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: the staircase had stretched to fit something in. And on
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: the wall, where the paint had been, someone had scratched
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: into the concrete with something sharp. Not B4. Just the
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: number four. And, beneath it, fresher the plaster dust still
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: on the floor below, the number five. I called my supervisor.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: I am not proud of this, but I called him
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: at two in the morning and told him the stairwell
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: was wrong. He came in, bless him. He actually came in,
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: and we stood in that stairwell together while he counted
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: twelve steps, twice. and showed me the wall, which was clean, unmarked, concrete,
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: and asked me, gently, when I had last taken a
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: night off, four months. I had last taken a night
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: off four months ago. He suggested I take the rest
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: of the week. I said I would think about it.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: He left. The wall had numbers on it again before
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: his car reached the corner. I watched them from the
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: lobby monitor. I watched the four and the five scratch
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: themselves into the concrete with no one in the frame.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: The timestamp said 2.41. The stairwell was empty. The numbers
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: appeared anyway. One stroke at a time, like something writing
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: from the other side of the wall. I should have
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: stayed in the lobby, I know that. But I am
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: an auditor, and auditors verify. So I took the elevator
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: down to B3 to check whether the numbers had spread.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Whether the lower stairwell door showed anything. Whether any of
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: this had a physical source I could photograph and hand
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: to someone sane. The elevator had other ideas. It stopped
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: at B3. The doors did not open, the panel light
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: for B3 went dark, and the car kept descending. I
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: felt it in my knees, that unmistakable sinking, and the
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: floor indicator, which was no display below B3, went blank,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: and still we went down for perhaps ten seconds, perhaps twenty.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Time behaves badly in a sealed box. Then we stopped.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: The doors opened. Beyond them was darkness and the smell
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: of wet concrete, stronger than anything on B3, and into
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: that darkness the elevator lights spilled just far enough to
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  Speaker 1: show a wall, ten feet away, blank concrete with numbers
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  Speaker 1: scratched into it. not four, and five. A column of them,
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: floor by floor, descending, twelve, eleven, ten, all the way
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  Speaker 1: down to one, and below the one, still being written,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: as I watched the plaster dust falling in the elevator light,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: a zero. The doors began to close. I did not move.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: I could not move. And just before they sealed, from
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: the darkness beyond that wall of numbers, something knocked. Three times. Patient.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Like knuckles on wood. Like someone asking to be let up.
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  Speaker 1: The elevator rose to the lobby on its own. The
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  Speaker 1: doors opened. The panel showed L, innocent as morning. I
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: walked out on shaking legs, and behind me the doors closed,
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  Speaker 1: and the car descended without a passenger, down past B3,
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  Speaker 1: down to wherever it goes when no one is watching,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: and it did not come back up for the rest
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: of the night. I found Lado in the loading bay
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: at five, smoking with hands that shook. I told him
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: what I had seen. The numbers, the elevator, the column
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: counting down to zero. He listened without interrupting. And when
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: I finished, he said something I will carry for the
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: rest of my life. He said, Wukongkua showed me the
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: same wall eleven years ago. The same numbers. He counted
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: them for me. All the way down. And then he
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: asked me to do something. he asked me to forget
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: his face he said if you ever see me in
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: this building again after I am gone do not speak
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: to me do not follow me however I ask then
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Lido dropped his cigarette and ground it out and said
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  Speaker 1: I have worked here 20 years I've never taken the
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: stairs not once and he walked back inside and I
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: never saw him again either When I came back Friday,
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: his locker stood empty. No notice. No goodbye. Just an
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: envelope with his keys. Exactly like the one I would
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: leave myself the next morning. That was the night I
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: broke my own rule. I did not finish the round.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: I sat in the lobby with every light on and
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: watched the stairwell monitor until six. And at 5.50, ten
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: minutes before the day guard arrived, the stairwell door on
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: the mezzanine opened by itself, slowly, the way a door
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: opened when someone is being polite. And a clipboard slid
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: out across the floor and stopped in the middle of
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: the corridor. I retrieved it on legs that did not
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: feel like mine. It was the B3 clipboard. And on it,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: in my handwriting, in wet ink was a new signature.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Timed at 3.17. Dated tomorrow. I took Thursday off. I
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: slept fourteen hours. I told myself the building was getting
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: to me, that four years of nights had finally caught up,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: that numbers on walls and signatures from tomorrow were exactly
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: the kind of thing a tired mind invents. I almost
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: believed it. I came back Friday feeling almost human, and
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the first thing I did was check the stairwell, in daylight,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: with the dayguard beside me, and... It was perfect. Twelve steps.
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  Speaker 1: Clean walls. No paint. No scratches. Nothing. The day guard
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: clapped my shoulder and said, Welcome back. I finished the
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: Friday round with something like relief. At 3.17 on Saturday morning,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: I signed the B3 clipboard. My pen stopped halfway through
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: my surname, because beneath my hand, already on the page,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: in wet ink, in my handwriting, was tomorrow's signature. And
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: beneath that, one line further down, in the same hand,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: two words I had not written, not yet, gone down.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: I understood, all at once, with total clarity. The building
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: was not showing me the future. It was showing me
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: a record. The clipboard does not predict. It remembers. Every
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: signature I would ever write was already there. Wet. Waiting.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: And the only signature left was the last one. The
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: building was counting down my rounds. Counting down me. I ran.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: up the B3 stairs, up to the lobby, out into
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: the street, into the rain. And I did not stop
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: until I was three blocks away, gasping under and horning.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: And that is when I heard it, behind me, from
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: the direction of the tower, counting A voice like concrete
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: settling like pipes cooling speaking numbers into the empty street. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Counting down the floors. Counting down to me. I quit
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: that morning. I left my keys in an envelope and
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: never went back. That was six months ago. But I
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: could not stop thinking about the numbers. So, in my
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: second week of freedom, I did what auditors do. I
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: went to the municipal archive and pulled the original building
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: permits for the Meridian Exchange Tower. The approved plans show
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: twelve floors above ground, and four below. Four. Parking, storage, plant,
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: and a fourth level marked only as archive, with a
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: single room drawn in the corner and labelled, the architect's
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: cramped hand. Count Room. The final inspection certificate, signed eleven
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: years ago, the same year Okonkwo vanished, the same year
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: the Bopgut Gap begins, amends the plans, Fourth basement deleted,
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: sealed during construction. Reason given, water ingress. Water ingress. I
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: stood in that archive and laughed until the clerk asked
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: me to leave. Then I went home and I did
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: not sleep for two days. Because I understood. At last.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: The fourth basement was never deleted. It was sealed. There
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: is a difference. Deleted means gone. Sealed means still there.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: with the door concreted over, 12 feet below B3, full
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: of whatever the builders found down there that made them
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: change the plans, and for 11 years it has been patient,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: scratching numbers, signing clipboards, counting down. I work days now,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: in a low building, two floors, no basement, no stairs
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: to speak of, I sleep at night, mostly. But last week,
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: a letter arrived. No return address. Inside was a photocopy
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: of a clipboard page. The B3 clipboard. My signatures, all
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: of them. Every round, four years of three 17s. and
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: at the bottom of the page, in wet ink that
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: smeared when I touched it, one final signature. Mine, dated
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: next Tuesday, timed at 3.17 in the morning. I have
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: not signed it yet. It is Sunday now. Tuesday is
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: two days away. I have spent the weekend the way
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: a person spends the days before a surgery. Putting things
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: in order. Calling my mother twice. Cleaning rooms that were
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: already clean. I keep the photocopy in a drawer. I
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: keep checking the drawer. The signature is still there. Still wet.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: Still mine. Still dated Tuesday 3.17 in the morning. Here
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: is what I have decided. On Tuesday, at 3.17 in
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: the morning, I will be awake. I will be sitting
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: at my kitchen table, and my low building with no basement,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: with every light on, and the radio playing, and a
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: pen in my hand. And if something knocks, three times, patient,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: from below, from somewhere there is no below. I will
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: not answer. I will not sign. I will sit in
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: the light and the noise until the sun comes up.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: And I will prove to the building, to the clipboard,
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: to whatever keeps the count, that a record is not
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: a promise. That writing my name does not make it mine.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: That is what I have decided. Asked me Tuesday whether
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: it worked. And so Priya counts the days to Tuesday,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: the way the stairwell counted down to her. Twelve floors above,
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: three below, and something underneath, keeping its own log. In
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: handwriting it borrowed. Check your own basements, my friends. Count
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: your own steps. And if you find your signature somewhere
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: you have never been, dated, sometime you have not reached,
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: do not finish the round. This is Lawrence, reminding you
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: that some buildings keep their own books. Sleep, if you dare,
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: but never below ground. Until next time, keep the light, son.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: This is All The Horror Podcast, where fear is our
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: favorite story.