Ready…flex…shift. He was back in the chair. He washed his hands and used the hand sanitizer he had become obsessive about, knowing he was surrounded by germs and illness. When he backed the wheelchair out of the restroom he saw it. At the end of the short, dim corridor was an elevator door. He had been all over this part of the old tower but he never knew there was another elevator outside the big bank of six elevators at the center of the building. Now here was this: a small set of unmistakable elevator doors. The buttons were black and stuck out half an inch, something from the fifties maybe. This whole end of the corridor smelled like dust. He wheeled his way there and pressed the down button. He was surprised to hear a distant motor whirring.
The car arrived and the doors pulled back, revealing a long, narrow space. Unlike the spacious cars at the main elevators, this could fit at best one bed, maybe not even that. Whatever the small, rogue elevator’s purpose, it didn’t look as if it had been used much for years. Unlike the hospital, it had a distinct sour smell. A single fixture in the center of the ceiling provided light; it held a hundred dead bugs. The floor was broken linoleum, the color of dying winter lawn. The walls were linoleum bracketed by long metal strips. Once the walls must have been as white as an old nurse’s cap, but now they were fading, too. A dozen prominent scars told of years of banging carts and beds against them. Will wheeled the chair in and turned around. Down the hallway the main corridor of the hospital was known and safe. He looked at it a long time, keeping the doors open with his hand. Finally, he let them close with a creaky bang. He pressed the old black button that read B, and the car lurched, making a deep, echoing clang, then found its footing and began a smooth descent.
The door opened on the blackest dark he had ever experienced. The little overhead light of the elevator barely penetrated past the threshold. A musty smell assaulted his nose. The door started to close as if it didn’t want to linger in such blackness. Will dug into his fanny pack and pulled out the small flashlight he had kept in it since long before it became his bag of provisions in the hospital. Powered by two C-cell batteries, it was enough to illuminate a few feet in front of him. Still, he hesitated and stayed in the elevator car, keeping the door open. Ahead of him was a ten-foot-deep space with scuffed gray walls and rubber mats over a broken gray linoleum floor. No light switch was visible. Then the space made an abrupt right turn.
