 I slammed the basket of files down on the desk. I couldn't help but feel rage stab through me. Sitting on the small desk in the old record storage was nearly two hours of work that would now need to be refiled. Dr. Dimwit, one of the long line of Dr. Dimwits who worked in this hospital, had sent out an email 10 minutes ago saying he no longer needed them. No apology, no explanation, just a dismissal of need and the negation of all my work. It didn't matter that I'd spent two hours sneezing in the dusty archives looking for them, just like it didn't matter that I'd now have to put them away again. Now that he no longer needed them, they were essentially dead to him. I left them on the desk next to the basket labeled to be filed and walked towards the top of the stairs. Dr. Dimwit would inevitably need them again the second I refilled them, so I'd let them sit here for a couple of days to be sure. Since I was one of three people who had a key to this room, I was pretty secure in my notion that they weren't going anywhere. I stepped to the head of the stairs and flipped the lights off. The darkness in the file room gathered behind me as I prepared to descend. I've been working at the hospital for about four years and patient records was by far my favorite post. I'd spent my first year in food service, bussing trays and pushing piles of dishes into the sanitizer before taking a custodial position that I immediately hated a day after starting. I thought that food service employees were treated like shit, but housekeeping was the pits and shits pun intended. When a patient records position became available six months later, I jumped at the chance and never looked back. When I started, there were three people per shift, plenty of work to go around, and a supervisor who was less hands-on and more work from home. My days were spent pulling files for doctors, integrating old files back into the current format and maintaining records as best I could. 90% of my job, though, was finding files for the Army of Dr. Dimwit who worked here. This was the part of the job I liked best. I know that might sound weird, but it's the truth. I lived for the thrill of the hunt. I loved finding hard-to-find files and finding missing records became my passion. I'd sort through files for hours as I tried to find that one elusive patient file or that one bit of misplaced paperwork and the thrill of discovering it made me feel great. I felt like Indiana Jones or Laura Croft as I searched for the unfindable treasure and unearthed it from obscurity. In the first six months, I became the go-to guy for finding hard-to-find files and I took a small amount of pride in that honor. Six months in, however, the department suffered a significant overhaul. It turned out that the supervisor had been doing less work from home than we thought and more embezzling company funds, so they fired him and put a much more hands-on boss in his place. His first order of business was to cut the department down to himself, his secretary, and three file clerks. It wasn't even a question of whether or not I'd be asked to take one of those positions. I'd received two kudos since I'd arrived for work going beyond what is required and when the request for the second shift file clerk hit my desk, I wasn't surprised. The second shift was the shift that got shit on the most, had the largest workload, and the worst hours. The job would be harder with only one clerk per shift, but the work was rewarding in its own way. The small raise I received paid my bills with a nice chunk left over every month for myself. The job had many low points, but my least favorite part among them was going into old record storage. Old record storage was a little rum up an old flight of concrete stairs and what the maintenance guys call the South Mes. It's full of metal shelves that might as well have been made of razor blades that are stacked with boxes that stretched all the way back to the 1960s. Once or twice a year, they purred some of the oldest ones, but they keep putting new files in their place, so the load up here never seems to go down. I don't hate the space, it's cozy, the smell of old paper is comforting to me, and it's also where I find most of my hidden treasures, so I never mind going up there for a hunt. The problem is going back down a continually running set of bulbs lit the stairs themselves, but the light switch for the record room is at the top of the stair. When you get to the top, you have to turn on the light, and when you leave, you have to turn off the lights and walk down the stairs as the dark presses in behind you. Now I'm no coward, even as a kid I was never afraid of the dark, but something is unsettling about having the darkness so close behind you. You can't see what's back there, and your mind plays all sorts of tricks on you as you descend the stairs. Is there something lurking in the dark, waiting to pounce on you, someone waiting for you to get midway down, so they can push you? It also doesn't help that the concrete stairs are treacherous, and one false step would send you bumping and scraping all the way down to the bottom. I couldn't tell you when I started counting the stairs as I went down them, but it had become a sort of game I'd play with myself over time. Get down all 23 stairs before the monster kills you and win your life. What fun. So I started down the stairs, the pervasive darkness seeming to push at my back. I counted to eight. I stopped. I thought I heard a noise on the top landing, but I shook it off. The old stairs made lots of weird noises, and the paranoia I was feeling was due to the darkness at the top. I considered looking back, but some little voice in my head said it was best not to. Looking back was not allowed when you played the stair game. 15, 16, 17. It almost seemed like I heard a low rumble behind me, but I shrugged it off as the air handlers tuning up. 21, 22, 23. I reached the bottom, opened the fire door, and walked out into the hallway that led back to my cubicle. Once again, I had won the game and was allowed to go back to work. I allowed myself a mental back pat and went back to my walled off piece of personal space. The rest of the day went by in the same monotonous repetition, and when 1130 finally got here and Lisa came in to relieve me, I grabbed my bag and went home. That was the first night I dreamed about the stairs. There weren't 23 steps in my dream, though. Each step I took led to another, which led to another, which led to another step in the endless staircase. As I climbed the endless stairs, I could see something moving in the blackness at the top, and its form was hidden by the shadows and made all the stranger by its unknowable self. It seemed feline, a long, sleek body with an oddly small head that I was sure housed rows of sharp teeth. I climbed and climbed all night long, never seeming to pass the midpoint. But before I could reach the top, my alarm went off. I was tired that morning, but I shrugged it off and had an extra large cup of coffee when I got to work. I was greeted by an email when I sat down to start my afternoon, and I was unsurprised by the contents Dr. Dimwit did indeed want some of the files he'd asked for in the first place, and had sent a list of eight patient files he wanted on his desk by six o'clock this afternoon, or suffer ye the wrath of a man who wears pajama clothes to work and has a God complex. I sighed. This shit never changes. I grabbed the black canvas bag from beside my desk, the one I use for transporting confidential files and took my key to the door that led to old record storage. I felt a sense of deja vu as I mounted the steps, but thankfully they did not morph into an endless staircase. I counted as I climbed, but I found my eyes wandering up to the inky blackness at the top of the stairs more than it usually did. At stair 15, I stopped and squinted into the dark. What was that? I wondered, sure, that something moved in the soupy darkness ahead. Had it looked feline, no, I told myself, as I tried to shake off the terror that threatened to bubble up. I was seeing things due to my overactive imagination and a bad night of sleep. So I finished the climb, taking them two at a time and flipped the lights on with a quick, decisive stroke. Nothing. There was nothing at the top of the stairs except sharp metal shelves and paper that was older than I was. I sorted through the files on the desk and quickly found the eight files that Dr. Dimwit wanted. I put the rest in the 2B filed basket and put the rest in my canvas bag. That done, I moved to the head of the stairs and flipped the lights off as I prepared to descend the staircase. My brain sent an immediate message to run down the stairs and get this over with, but I wasn't about to slip and break a leg just because my imagination was working overtime. So with a calm and easy gait, I descended the stairs and counted as I always did. One, two, three, four, five. What was that noise? That sounded an awful lot like claws on concrete. Maybe just a quick peek back to see, no, no, no, this is silly, safely get down the stairs so we can deliver these files. Eight, nine, okay, that was definitely something walking to the landing. I hope it lets me get to the bottom before it jumps on me and tears my head off because stop being stupid and just walk down the stairs. 15, 15, 16, I could almost hear it preparing to leap on me and as my mind quivered in silent fear my rational brain tried to reign in this newfound fear of the dark. 22, 23, I took the last few steps two at a time and as my feet hit the landing I opened the door to go out into the hallway. Once I was out in the lighted corridor, I felt pretty silly about my dangerous descent. I turned to close the fire door behind me when it slammed shut hard enough to ruffle my hair. I stood looking at it in disbelief that had been weird. I shrugged it off though as an odd air current and turned to leave. When I went to take a step though, I came up short. That's when I realized that the slamming door had trapped my messenger bag in the corridor beyond and I'd need to free it from the closed door if I wanted to get back to work. I hesitated for a moment, remembering the door slamming as though someone had pushed it, but I shook it off and threw the door open a little harder than I'd meant to. It opened on an empty hallway and my bag swung free and thunked against my leg. I shook my head, becoming disgusted with myself and this new found cowardice and lifted the bag to make sure none of the files had spilled out. When I brought it out into the light though, I saw that something had slashed the side of it. The bag had a three foot gash in the canvas that looked like a knife had cut the shit out of it. More surprising was the state of the files inside. Of the eight, four were slashed cleanly through and a fifth was nearly two thirds cut in half. I'd thought the bag might have gotten caught on something, but the files, these were not small files by any means and it looked as though someone had taken the world's sharpest exacto knife and cut five of them vertically. If I weren't seeing it with my own eyes, I would have said it was impossible. And I knew that neither my supervisor nor Dr. Dimwit would like it very much. On that account, I was right. Neither of them believed my story about pulling them from the bag that way, despite having the bag there for proof. And I was accused of vandalizing patient records. A quick check of both my desk and the mess proved that I had no way to vandalize them. And all they could do was reprimand me for carelessness and not reporting damaged files when I found them. I accepted the scolding and the angry looks from Dr. Dimwit and spent the rest of the day trying to put the files into a digital format so he could read them and make his patient assessment. My mind was in anitha and it kept jumping back to the stairs. I couldn't figure out how the bag had been slashed and by the end of the day I only had four of the eight done. I asked Lisa to work on them if she found some time tonight. She said it shouldn't be a problem. I decided that some real sleep was in order tonight and so after a hefty dose of rum and coke, I fell into bed and was asleep almost at once. The dream was waiting for me. I climbed the stairs, twenty-three or forty-eight of five thousand, depending on something or nothing, and all the while I would see it stalking at the edge of the darkness. Its long, sleek body was a bunch with tense muscles as it moved back and forth like a tiger in a cage. Tonight though, I would get to the top of the stairs, turn the light on, and nothing would be there. I would see it within touching distance once I crested the stairs, but then I would turn the light on and it would cease to be. I then turned the light off again and walked down the stairs as it stalked and hunched behind me, only to start over again when I got to the bottom. I went up, turned on the light, turned it off, and came down only to do it again. All the while, it paced and flitted in the shadowy soup of the upper stairs. Just when I thought it would go on forever, I got to the top, flipped the light on, and it sprang at me like a jack in the box and knocked us both down the stairs. I woke up screaming just before I hit the ground. My body was a wreck, my muscles were tired and aching like I had been going upstairs all night, and I could barely keep my eyes open when I got to work that afternoon. I plowed through the rest of my transcription work, a full cup of coffee always at hand, but I could feel my eyes trying to close. I snatched a few catnaps throughout the day, but every time I'd close my eyes, I'd see that thing jumping at me and sit up with a start. My boss never caught me napping, thank God, and no one wanted anything from the mezz that day. I dragged myself home at 1130 and collapsed right back into the dream, up and down and up and down and up and down the stairs. The whole time that thing was pacing and waiting in the inky blackness above or behind. I cried in my sleep, my body wanting to drop, and when I woke up, I could feel my damp pillow underneath me as the aching in my body began to tune up for the day. When I got to work, I saw a sticking out on my monitor that filled me with tread. In my boss's need handwriting, I read Dr. Dimwit's request for more files from the mezz he had written underneath it in his stupid little squiggly writing. And be sure not to ruin them this time, please. I could have happily marched to his office and fed him that sticky note, but I was too tired to argue. With a heavy heart, I grabbed my damaged bag and headed for the stairs. As I stood at the bottom and tried to press the shaky key into the lock, I thought that maybe this would be just what I needed to get past these dreams. If I could just stand up to my fears and show my conscious mind that there was nothing up there to be afraid of. And maybe I could get some sleep tonight and finally stop feeling like a zombie. The door opened easily, and as I looked up the stairs, I felt that rush of deja vu. It looked massive to me, a climb on par with Everest, but I squared my shoulders and prepared to make the climb. One, two, three. I tried not to look at the darkness ahead, but my eyes seemed incapable of looking anywhere else. Six, seven, was something moving in that darkness? Nine, ten, no, you're imagining things. That darkness is as benign as it's always been. Thirteen, fourteen, something was moving in there. I could see it. I could see it pacing and stalking as it prepared to sixteen, seventeen, leap on me and devour me on these steep death trap stairs while I climbed them to do nothing more important than dig through the past. Eighteen, nineteen. I stopped for a moment and squinted into the darkness. Did I see something? I was sure I did, but it was hard to tell by the light of these old fluorescence that hung and hummed above me. I started climbing again. And while I wasn't sure I couldn't see anything, I couldn't be sure I wasn't either. Twenty-two, twenty-three. I lifted my hand out, shakily, and flipped the switch on, expecting to be pounced on any minute as the shapeless mass, nothing. Just old records and metal shelves, same as always. I let out a thankful sigh and felt silly now that I stood in the light of the overheads and looked around like a furtive mouse. Of course, there was nothing up here. Where would it hide? The room was long, but it was narrow and lacking in places to remain unseen. I scolded myself as I unpacked boxes and slowly unearthed the files Dr. Dimwit needed. After an hour, I had them all secured within my satchel and ready for transport back to the land below. I moved to the top of the stairs and prepared to descend. I stood there, frozen for a few seconds, my hand hovering over the switch. I considered just leaving the lights on. Surely someone would see it and turn it off the next time they were up here. If Lisa found it on, she probably wouldn't even tattle on me. I knew, though, that Dave would say something if he came up here and found the light on. Dave wanted my shift bad, he hated early mornings, and he'd see this as a perfectly good reason to tattle on me and take my shift. No, I thought, and my hand flipped the light off. I needed to do this, I needed to rediscover my courage, and more importantly, I needed to prove to myself that I could still do it. As I always did, I counted, but it was less of a game and more of a talisman at this point. Say the incantation to keep the dark at bay. One, two, three, four, there was a loud sound as something pushed a box off the shelf. No, I thought, I just hadn't put it back right, was all. Nothing could be up there, nothing could hide up there while the light was on. Seven, eight, nine, okay, that sound was not my imagination. I heard claws settling on the landing above me, a space I'd occupied not 30 seconds ago. I could see it there in my mind as it crouched and made ready to spring. Even as I thought it, my mind railed against such an idea, you're silly, it's just the echo of your shoes scuffing the stairs. There's no monster at the top. Ten, waiting to leap down on me from its high perch, and eleven, rend me into pieces where I stand. No beast of the darkness whose soul 12 purpose is my demise and the continued nightmare existence of the last few days. Thirteen, but there is. God help me. There is a creature up there. I can feel his eyes as they bore into me. I can hear his panting breath as he waits for just the right time. I can almost hear his malice and his madness and his hunger and his delight and feelings too primal and alien to be felt as anything but insects on my flesh. Fourteen, pop. I nearly jumped as a soft snapping sound whispered like a cannon shot above my head. I felt my footing become shaky, but I settled my feet again and looked up to the hanging cage over my head. I laughed a little as I realized it was just the sound of a light going out above me. I thought to myself that it was about time one of them buzzed out. The light they cast had a yellow tint and I sometimes like to think that those bulbs were probably older than I was. God help anyone who was on these stairs when my blood ran cold for a moment. When they finally burst and left some poor soul in the dark. That's when I broke the rules of the game. For the first time in three years I looked behind me and my breath hung in my throat. There it was, crouched on the landing at the top of the stairs. It was far worse than I'd ever imagined. It had the sleek feline body and long claws that I'd imagined. But that was where its similarities to a cat disappeared. Instead of fur, it was covered in glistening black chitin and as it switched its hips in preparation to leap, its plates rubbed together without making a single sound. It didn't seem to have eyes on its featureless face, but it did have a gaping maw full of sharp teeth that seemed constantly made damp by a blotchy red tongue. It saw me seeing it somehow and it smiled at me with those steak knife-sized teeth as it flicked its head at the light cage above me. The other bulb popped with a little musical tink and I was left in total darkness. 15, 17, 19 I started running, taking the stairs two at a time and the flying leaps were probably all that saved me. It let me get three long steps down before it hit me in the back with its full weight and I fell the last four steps. Even though it was only a few steps, I fell hard and the concrete stairs skinned me up good. I pulled my body into a ball as I fell and while my head and organs were mostly spared, my arms and legs were gouged and ripped by the semi-stone of the unyielding stairs. I landed on my side on the bottom stoop and again this may have saved my life. Before I could even think to sit up, the creature screamed and leaped from the middle of the staircase. It was either too eager for the kill or overestimated its jump because I heard it plow through the drywall and slam into the pipes and steel beams beyond. I got to my feet and felt for the fire door. I found the handle somehow and when I wrenched it open, the creature screamed and flailed out with its long claws. Caught me in the back and arms with a few frantic swipes and just as I came into the light, I felt myself jerked backward towards the den of darkness. I screamed in frustration and grabbed the door frame for more leverage as I tried to pull myself free. When the bag strap pressed hard into my shoulder, I realized almost too late that it had the bag and was using it to pull me in. I pressed the release on the trendy seat belt style buckle and as the strap parted, I turned to sneer into its eyeless face as I slammed the door and collapsed into the carpeted hallway. It rammed into it and I pulled myself up and braced my weight against it. The door made of concrete and reinforced steel bent a little as the creature slammed into it and it was all I could do to hold my pitiful body against it. I don't remember passing out, but I guess I must have because that's where my boss found me a few minutes later. He called security and got me down to the ER so they could take care of my injuries. The hospital offered to pay for all of my care and it was a good thing they did because I'd have likely sued if they'd sent me a bill. In all, I had three large cuts on my back that needed stitches, five smaller ones which they cleaned and bound, a wrist that was nearly broken and would be sore for three weeks and too many bumps and scrapes to count. One of the techs said I resembled a motorcycle rider who'd fallen off his bike on the freeway and the descriptions certainly fit how I felt. Run over and next to dead. I told security about what happened on the stairwell and they went to investigate. I doubt any of them believed that a monster was living in the stairwell of the old record storage, but when an employee gets hurt that badly on the job, there is paperwork that will need to be filed with something. They searched and searched, going up into the ceiling tiles and inspecting the hole in the wall, but found nothing other than my bag that had been torn to shreds and thrown through the hole in the wall. They were at a complete loss on how the door had been that badly damaged. And one of them said that if I'd done that to the door or the wall, that I'd probably be in a lot worse shape than I was in now. The write-up paperwork says that I fell down the stairs after the lights went out and hit my head, which explains why I thought something attacked me and why I destroyed my bag. The patient records inside, the wall and the fire door before throwing the bag and blundering out into the hallway. Even though I had no head injury, this description was passed on and went into my file as an accident. My supervisor got accommodations for his efforts to aid an injured employee, Smarmy Prick. I spent a few days recovering in a room upstairs before any of this was brought to my attention, and when it was, I felt mad enough to spit. It was absolute bullshit, every word of it, but HR told me I could either sign it and avoid dismissal or refuse and be fired for destroying patient records and fabricating an event to avoid work. They alluded to the fact that this would follow me to every job I applied for from now on. With a mark like that and a record of destroying files, I'd be hard-pressed to get another office job. In the end, I signed it and then promptly resigned. They agreed that was best, and when I left the hospital two days later, they sent my personal effects with me. Now I work in an office building where I maintain client records, digital only in this place, and I'm pleased to say that I haven't had to climb stairs since. I wish this was where my story ends, but I'm afraid it doesn't. Six months after I fell, I ran into an old co-worker at the bar while I was out with some friends. He told me Dave had stepped up and became the new second shift file clerk after I left. Eighteen months after taking the post, he was found dead in the old record storage stairwell by Lisa. Well, the guy admitted. Most of him was. They found his hands and feet along with some torn-up records and a bunch of broken glass from the overhead cage that had blown out. Not a drop of blood, though. Not on the stairs or anywhere, and it scared a lot of people. After that, the administration had decided that the stairs were too hazardous and all the old files were put into a digital format. He said the mess became storage for old custodial equipment, but none of the custodians would go up there if they could help it. More than one of them felt something staring at them at the top of the stairs, and quite a few had been reprimanded for leaving the light on. He didn't go up there at all. He confided. Even though they replaced the ballast on the hallway, the light still flickered and buzzed. He's afraid that he'll get caught in the dark and something will get him too. I hope the management seals that room up someday. I hope they tear that stairwell down and just fill in the space with something else. But given what they made me sign, I don't think they ever will. I think they know what's up those stairs, and I think they consider an employee going missing every now and then a preferable price to the wrath they would face if it went unfed. As someone who is almost its dinner, I can't say I don't feel sympathy for them. The thought of that thing finding me on a dark night would be enough to make me do almost anything too.