The Forbidden Button Above All Floors

Edith Wright stood by the lift in her apartment building, twisting her long auburn hair around her fingertip and biting her lip in thought. The rusty metal door stood ajar, revealing the dim, flickering interior of the lift. It was the kind of place where residents exchanged casual nods and murmurs, but the recent buzz around a particular button had stirred something much deeper than casual curiosity.

“Have you heard about the Legend of the Forbidden Button?” Bloomingdale Towers residents had muttered in the hallway, their eyes wide with a mix of fear and excitement. “It’s real, and you don’t want to mess with it.” Platitudes typically lost weight in the maelstrom of urban living, but something about the tone had snared Edith’s attention.

Earlier that week, she had sat at the end of a table at the café in the lobby, overhearing a group of tenants discussing how one unlucky bloke, Louis, had vanished the last time someone dared to press that forbidden button. They spoke in hushed tones, claiming it led to a nonexistent floor — the long-forgotten thirteenth, lost during the building’s construction in the early sixties. The man was supposed to have simply disappeared in front of his friends, his laughter replaced by a heavy silence as the lift doors slid shut.

Edith didn’t believe in urban legends, not really. She had always thought them to be old wives’ tales meant to scare children. But the pull of the unknown gnawed at her already restless mind. Pressing that button became not just a curious thought but an itch she couldn’t scratch.

Edith had already endured more than her fair share of monotony — work at the call centre stifled her ambition, and her social life had withered to the occasional meet-up with distant friends. On the night she decided to confront the button, her heart raced, not entirely from fear. She wanted something different, something tangible to challenge her life’s mundanity.

With the echoing emptiness of the lobby behind her, she stepped into the lift and pressed the button for her designated floor. The lift jerked but ran smoothly enough, taking her to the six. She scanned the panel in front of her; the fabled button was marked, crudely scratched with a “13” that seemed to shimmer slightly under the flickering fluorescent light.

“Just one press,” she whispered to herself, the thrill sending prickles down her spine. She laughed at her own silliness, but the thoughts swirled in her mind. Reality hung heavy in the air as she pressed it, the unyielding click echoing in that metal tomb.

As the lift shiced upward with a grind, she felt an unsteady lurch that made her grip the metal railing. The lights overhead flickered violently, and her heartbeat squared itself against the pounding of steel walls. Suddenly, the lift halted with a shudder, lights extinguished.

“Great,” she murmured, her voice breaking the thick silence. She pressed the button for the ground floor, but nothing happened.

As her mouth went dry with dread, the metal doors creaked open, and she was greeted not with a bright hallway but with a black void. Disorientated, she peered out. No walls, no floor. Just darkness, an inky abyss that seemed to stretch on indefinitely.

Heart racing rapidly, she stepped back, and before she could give in to impulse, she retreated, pushing the button repeatedly to return to safety. Just as suddenly as it had stopped, the lift jolted back into action. She emerged onto her floor, reality crashing back in.

“That’s it,” she told herself, feeling wiser and unwilling to indulge that folly again. But she couldn’t shake the sensation that something was fundamentally altered — an unsettling understanding. She hadn’t merely pressed a button; she had forced the universe to shift in ways she did not comprehend.

In the following days, Edith observed a strange loneliness settling over the building as residents whispered nervous chatter down the corridors. The whispers turned into frantic discussions when Louis’s family came looking for him. Tenants grew anxious, staring vacantly into the lift. She heard hushed conversations; some warned others to avoid it, reminding them of the legend. But curiosity licked at her heels.

Then she heard something that sent an icy tendril of fear up her spine. Caleb, the wiry young man from the fourth floor, had been pulled into the legend’s orbit. He had ventured into the lift just the day after Louis’s family had left with sorrow stamped on their faces. Everyone feared he might have pressed the elusive button, too. That evening, as Edith made her way to the lift, she overheard another tenant.

“Caleb never came back. It’s worse than we thought,” someone gasped, eyes darting at her as if she were a witness, “The button… it took him.”

She felt sick from the pressure, a heavy weight of dread enveloped her. Should she speak out? Warn them? She felt a grip of guilt wrapping around her heart for having pressed it.

But a new temptation swirled as night fell. She dreamt of that void, of shadows that beckoned from its depths, eager to take her in. The days pressed on, but it was impossible to forget that night in the lift. Each murmur in the halls caused her stomach to churn, and each glimpse of the empty lift tugged at her soul.

Eventually, just when nerves reached breaking point, Edith returned to the lift. The air was heavy and laden with anticipation, and this time it felt as though the world held its breath with her. She stepped inside, feeling something flicker up her spine — dread mixed with an unquenchable desire.

She pressed the button for the thirteenth floor again. For a moment, she thought it would bear a normal descent. But as she rode the steel beast upwards, an omen unfurled. The weight of memories crumpled around her, distorting the lift’s walls until she grasped the reality: Caleb was an echo of the past, a season slipped away.

The doors opened again, and swallowed like a long-lost dream, the darkness surged. With a trembling heart, she felt the grasp of familiarity cradle her.

This time, she stepped forward into the void. The reason people vanished, it echoed in her mind — they had succumbed to the allure, a thrilling escape that drew them ever deeper. What if they hadn’t truly disappeared at all? What if the legend conspired to keep them as part of this dimension, a fresh catch for residents, offering a twisted sense of community?

By the time Edith’s true nature shifted and she started fading — a ghost no longer tethered to her body — it felt blameless, inevitable even. She hadn’t just succumbed; she’d become part of it, the legend that would rise anew.

Back in the real world, the lift doors opened to an empty hallway, ready for the next curious soul drawn to that forbidden button above all floors. Only the flickering lights told a story, one not lost to time, destined to be whispered about for generations, as past residents faded into the allure of dark emptiness.