A car park has six floors and the stairs between them are counted, painted, and numbered on the wall at each landing. Going up the north stairwell there are eight flights. Going down, after midnight, there are nine, and the ninth is between four and three, and it has no number, and the people who have been on it have come out on three not remembering it.
I am a night attendant in a multi storey car park and I use the north stairs because the lift is slow.
The stairs.
Six floors. Two flights between each, a half landing between them, so eight flights from the ground to the top and eight back. Every landing has the floor number painted on the wall in yellow, a foot high, and the half landings have nothing.
Going down after midnight, between four and three, there is an extra flight.
How you notice.
You come out of four onto the landing, painted 4. Down a flight to the half landing. Down a flight to what should be 3. It is a half landing. Blank wall. Down another flight, and that is 3.
Nine flights. The building is not taller. Three is where it always is.
What has been checked.
Counted, by me, walking, a hundred times. Going up, eight. Going down before midnight, eight. Going down after midnight, nine, and only in the north stairwell, and only between four and three.
The camera. There are cameras on the landings and none on the half landings. On the camera on 4, I go through the door and down. On the camera on 3, I come out. Between the two, the time it takes me is the time nine flights take, not eight, and I have timed it.
The extra flight itself. I have stood on it. It is concrete, painted the grey the others are painted, with the yellow handrail and the light in the cage on the ceiling. The light is on. It is a flight of stairs. It is colder, which a person would put down to the stairwell, and it is quiet, which a person would put down to the hour.
The people.
Members of the public use the north stairs after midnight too, the ones parked on the upper floors coming back from the clubs. On the camera on 4 they go in, and on the camera on 3 they come out, nine flights later, and some of them, on the camera on 3, stop. They come out of the door and stand still on the landing and look at the wall, at the yellow 3, for a long time.
I have asked three of them, on their way past my booth, whether the stairs were all right. Two said fine. The third, a woman in her twenties, said there was a landing with somebody on it, sitting on the step, and she had said sorry and stepped round, and then she asked me what floor that would have been, and I said there was no landing between four and three, and she said she knew that, she parked here every week, and that was why she was asking.
I asked her what they looked like. She said she had not looked. She said you do not, on a stair, at night, at somebody sitting on a step.
What I have done.
I sat on the extra landing one night, at half past one, for an hour.
Nobody came down. The light in the cage hummed. At about two, from the flight above, which is the flight from the half landing, which I could see the bottom of, a foot came onto the top step. A shoe, a man's, black, on the top step, and stopped. And the light in the cage went off, and I sat in the dark with that shoe on the step above me, and the next thing I remember I was on the landing on 3, standing, looking at the yellow number, and the camera on 3 has me coming out of the door at ten past two and standing there for four minutes.
I have no memory of the last flight. The woman had none either.
What is done about it.
The stairwell is signed at the bottom, since last month, as closed after midnight for cleaning. It is not cleaned. People use it anyway because the lift is slow, and I watch them go in on 4 and come out on 3 nine flights later, and the ones who stop on the landing and look at the number, I count, and it is about one in five.
What I do.
I work nights.
I take the lift now. The lift is slow and it stops at every floor whether or not anybody presses, and on the way down after midnight it stops between four and three, at a floor that has no button, and the doors do not open, and it waits the time it waits at a floor, and goes on.
I do not know what is on that floor. I know it is bigger than a landing now. And I know that when the lift stops there, the display above the door shows a number, and the number is not a number I can read, and it is the same one every night, and I have started to think of it as the floor's name, and to feel that I am being told it.