The Stairs Go Up

The stairs go up.

She sees them every morning when she climbs the other flights to her office. Top floor, rising higher. Roof access, she was told, but it seems to her that no one really knows what’s up there.

The stairs go up. The image of them stays with her all day. The light dims as they rise, leaving the half-way landing gloomy and forbidding. Then they turn and rise some more, disappearing into obscured darkness.

The stairs go up. She used to ask people if they’d ever been up there, ever explored. It feels like something you shouldn’t do, but there are no signs or barriers to stop you. She used to ask people, until someone asked her why she didn’t go herself. The thought worried her, and she stopped asking.

The stairs go up, and it was an odd thing to think, but she truly believed that once you were up them, you’d find they didn’t go down again. Maybe people had explored in the past. Maybe they hadn’t come back. Maybe that was why, sometimes, she fancied she’d seen shadowy movement up at the very top.

The stairs go up, but the people don’t. No one else seems to notice them when she’s not asking her questions. It’s like they don’t exist when she’s not looking at them.

The stairs go up. One night they’re in her dreams, and she’s climbing to the landing, turning, staring up into thick, suffocating blackness, and something up there is looking back at her. When she wakes she’s sweating and trembling, but unexpectedly resolved.

The stairs go up, and so will she. Just to the landing. Just to see. Because she knows – she knows – that monsters aren’t real, and that darkness is just an absence of light, and there is no sensible reason for her to be afraid. So she will go up, and then she will know.

And then she will come back down.