🧱 Buildings That Remember Burrington | The Elevator
The Elevator That Opens to 1826
There is an elevator in a municipal office building that does not always travel between floors.
Most days, it behaves correctly.
It opens to fluorescent corridors.
Carpet tiles.
Recycling bins.
The smell of toner and stale coffee.
Buttons illuminate as expected.
Doors close on time.
The panel reflects the year without objection.
But there are reports; irregular, unfiled, dismissed, that on certain descents, the elevator does not arrive where it should.
It arrives earlier.
The building stands on land redeveloped three times. Before offices, it held a warehouse. Before that, records show an open yard used for storage and animal holding during early settlement expansion.
Before that, the ground belonged to Burrington.
The original street grid ended here.
You enter the elevator late in the afternoon, alone, carrying nothing of consequence. The lobby hum fades as doors seal. You press 1.
The cab descends.
A smooth drop. Familiar. Expected.
Then - between floors - the lights flicker.
Not darkness. Not failure.
Oil.
The fluorescent panels above you pulse once, twice, and the light warms abruptly to amber. Shadows deepen at the corners. The mirrored wall loses clarity, rippling slightly as though seen through heat.
You look up.
The ceiling is no longer paneled.
It is wood.
Rough beams crossing overhead, blackened by smoke. A hook protrudes from one. Something once hung there - heavy, suspended. The metal still gleams with old polish beneath soot.
You look back down.
The floor remains laminate.
For now.
The descent continues.
The number display reads 2 → 1 → G
Then hesitates.
The cab shudders - not stopping, but slowing through resistance, as if moving through thicker medium. The amber light deepens. The air changes temperature; warmer, moist, carrying scents that do not belong in sealed shafts.
Earth.
Leather.
Animal heat.
The mirror behind you clouds.
Your reflection dims, replaced gradually by darker geometry.
You turn.
The rear wall has become planks.
Vertical boards fitted unevenly, seams dark with packed dirt. The mirror persists only in a narrow strip down the center, reflecting a sliver of modern cab against enclosing timber.
The strip narrows with each foot of descent.
You touch the boards.
They are warm.
The cab does not stop at Ground.
It continues.
The panel flickers. Digits distort. Symbols appear briefly - not numbers, but scratches, tally-like, carved deep and filled with grime. They arrange themselves into a year that is not your own.
1826
The button light beside 1 goes dark.
A different indicator glows.
You did not press it.
The floor shifts beneath your shoes.
Laminate buckles outward in seams. Edges curl back, revealing packed earth below. Dark soil, tamped hard, scored by grooves. Something has been dragged repeatedly across it.
The air thickens with livestock musk and hay rot. Beneath it, iron.
Blood once dried into dirt.
The cab slows to stillness.
No chime.
No arrival tone.
The doors do not open.
They part.
Modern steel retracts in two thin sheets, sliding into frame and beyond them is not a lobby.
It is an interior yard.
You step forward before deciding to.
The threshold remains elevator; metal sill, rubber edge, but beyond lies ground uneven with churned mud and straw. Fences rise left and right, posts sunk deep, rails scarred by hooves and horns. Lanterns hang from crossbeams, flame low and guttering in damp air.
The ceiling above is open rafters and sky, though you know you are inside a building.
The yard smells of animals recently removed.
You hear them still - shifting weight, breath, chain.
You turn back.
The elevator stands behind you.
Door open.
Interior split: half wood, half steel.
The panel still reads 1826.
Voices drift from the far side of the yard.
Men’s voices. Low, transactional. A scrape of something heavy being moved. Hooves clatter briefly, then halt. A whip cracks once, not striking, only sounding authority.
You know without being told: this is Burrington ground before the river deaths. Holding yard. Transfer point. Animals kept overnight before movement into town.
The building above you does not exist yet.
You are standing beneath it.
A figure crosses between fence lines.
Solid.
Boots deep in mud, coat hem dark with damp. He passes the lantern, and light climbs his face - not clear, but human, living, tired. He carries rope looped over shoulder.
He does not see you.
Then he does.
The moment of noticing is unmistakable.
His stride falters. His eyes fix on the space you occupy, your modern outline cutting into his year. He frowns, not frightened, only confused, as if encountering a reflection displaced from its surface.
You inhale.
He hears it.
Overlay has reached sound.
He steps closer.
Each pace draws his century deeper into yours. The rafters above you thicken. The lantern brightens. The elevator interior dims behind you, its steel losing certainty.
You step backward.
Your heel meets metal threshold.
Relief - anchor - present.
He steps forward again.
His boot strikes the sill.
Contact.
For an instant, both materials exist beneath him - mud and metal and his weight depresses both. The cab shudders violently. Lights strobe amber/white/amber/white. The panel spasms between 1826 and blank.
He looks down.
At the floor that should not be there.
Then up.
At you.
Recognition travels both directions.
You retreat fully into the cab.
He does not follow.
Not because he cannot, but because his year pulls him back as strongly as yours pulls you forward. The yard strains at the threshold, timbers bending toward steel, straw scattering across laminate that has returned beneath your feet.
The doors begin to close.
Not sliding, sealing.
Wood over steel.
Steel over wood.
The gap narrows.
His face remains visible longest, brow furrowed, eyes searching, until the centuries shear apart and he is gone.
The cab jolts upward.
Violent ascent.
Fluorescent light floods back. Ceiling panels snap into place. Mirror reasserts full reflection; pale, modern, breathing too fast.
The display reads 1.
The chime sounds.
Doors open.
The lobby is ordinary.
Carpet tiles.
Recycling bins.
The smell of toner and stale coffee.
No mud marks the floor.
No straw clings to your shoes.
But the air in your lungs remains barn-warm.
And on the rubber threshold of the elevator, pressed into dust invisible to all but angle, is the clear imprint of a boot sole not made in your century.
Maintenance logs will record nothing.
Renovation years later will uncover, beneath the shaft foundation, preserved fence posts aligned exactly with the elevator footprint.
City archives will confirm that in 1826 this parcel held Burrington livestock yards dismantled the year before the massacre.
The elevator will continue to function normally.
Except on certain descents.
Between floors.
When the lights warm.
And the panel hesitates.
Final Word
Burrington did not vanish in 1827.
It remained; in timber, in stone, in foundations laid over its absence.
Some places were never emptied, only covered.
And when the present settles thin against what came before, the structures remember their first shape.
These are not hauntings.
They are overlaps.
Find the full series here: Where Time Can't Exist
- Makitia Thompson
#MindsInDesign #WhereTimeCantExist #Makitia #UntilTimeRemembers #TheDayThatBrokeTime #MakitiaThompson #MidStories #TheMidUniverse #Burrington
Comments
Post a Comment