D-0007 Where the elevator wants to go

This was compiled from a copy of a logbook kept privately by the person who served as caretaker of a condominium building in Sakaecho, Kawaguchi, together with board papers from the time and interviews with several residents. The building, put up in the mid-2000s, is fourteen stories tall, with a single elevator. The rule against leaving belongings in the interior corridors is well kept, and every floor’s corridor wears the same face.

The first record is from just after the New Year holidays of 2014. A resident of the fourteenth floor reported to the caretaker’s office that the elevator could be heard moving in the middle of the night, and the doors heard opening, with no sign of anyone getting off. The caretaker checked the footage from the security camera inside the car. On the recording, the empty car rises from the first floor a little past two in the morning, stops once on the way, and the doors open. No one gets on and no one gets off; after a few seconds the doors close and the car returns to the first floor. All the while, the floor indicator above the doors reads 13.5.

According to the logbook, the same stop went on occurring at a rate of several nights a month. Always late at night, mostly between two and four. Never twice in one night, and never in the hours when anyone rides the car. The caretaker took to noting the date, the time, and the number of seconds the doors stood open. In the early pages it is written out as, between the thirteenth and the fourteenth floor; before long the entries say only 13.5.

Inspections by the maintenance company found nothing wrong. The remote-monitoring records were queried as well, but at the times in question the car is shown waiting at the first floor, and there is no record of any travel at all. The recorder’s clock must be off, was the company’s view. The caretaker reset the clock, and confirmed that the same footage went on being recorded.

In October 2015 there was a night when it stopped with someone aboard. Another resident of the fourteenth floor, coming home on the last train, was riding the car. Somewhere past the thirteenth floor the car stopped and the doors opened. Outside was an interior corridor. The night lighting was on, the build was no different from any other floor, and in front of someone’s door, they say, a single umbrella stood propped against the wall. On the wall where the floor plate should have hung, there was nothing. The resident stood without moving; the doors closed, and the car arrived at the fourteenth floor. In the interview this resident says: I stood there thinking it was someone else’s floor. It was only after I was inside my own door that it came to me that I had never once seen an umbrella in a corridor of this building. On the record, that night is the only time it has stopped with anyone aboard; there have been none since.

From that night on, entries of a different kind begin to mix in with the business notes. Two to four, do not ride the car, goes one line, written as if addressed to himself; after a small gap it continues, the residents do not need to be told, not yet. To the board it was reported in a single line: the elevator is running empty at night, and the matter is being followed up with the maintenance company.

Among the interviews there is a resident who said that the building must have one height that was never given a number, and that in the daytime everyone simply rides past it. In the margins of the logbook’s last pages, in the caretaker’s hand, another reading remains. If it opens and nobody gets on or off, then maybe, for those few seconds, the car is being used somewhere else.

The caretaker retired in March 2016. The logbook keeps the same manner to its final month; the last pages are nothing but dates, times, and seconds. The final line reads: March 26, 2:12 a.m., 4 seconds. In the duty log handed over to the successor, the matter does not appear in a single line. The record ends there.