Chodba bez čísla, časť 5: Hlas z výťahu

The Unnumbered Corridor, part 5: The Voice from the Lift

The Story Begins

Nora noticed the flicker first. The ceiling light at the end of the stairwell jumped once, as if someone had quickly shut and opened their eyes. Then the whole floor went dark.

The dark did not last long. Maybe two seconds. Maybe three. But that was enough.

Between the lift and the cellar door, a corridor appeared where there had not been one during the day. It was narrow, longer than it should have fit inside the building, and its walls were a faded green. Doors without numbers stood on both sides. A weak amber light flashed over the brass handles.

Nora already had her notebook in her hand. She kept it in her jacket pocket for moments like this, because in that strange corridor phones often had no signal, and besides, you could not write on a phone in the dark.

“It’s here again,” Ben whispered.

Filip did not answer. He was staring at the lift doors. They were not fully shut. A gap as thin as a finger stayed between them.

Just then, a quiet crackling sound came from above the doors.

Krrr… shhh… krrr.

The lights came back on. The unnumbered corridor vanished so fast that Nora did not manage to write down a single thing. Only the ordinary hallway of the old building remained: cracked tiles, a notice board with rubbish-sorting signs, and a lift with worn grey doors.

But the crackling did not disappear.

Ben slowly lifted his head. Above the lift hung a small metal grille that none of them had really noticed before. It might have been a fan. Or an old bell. Now a weak, broken hiss came from it.

“Is that a speaker?” Nora asked.

Filip stepped closer, but did not touch it. “Looks like one. Old buildings used to have house radios. Or intercoms. Sometimes they were used to announce that the water was off, or that someone had left the door open.”

“And after fifty years, it switches on by itself?” Ben’s voice shook a little, even though he tried to smile. “That sounds very technical.”

“Technology breaks,” Filip said. “That’s its main hobby.”

Nora gave a quick smile, then opened her notebook to a clean page. At the top she wrote: Lift, evening, flicker of light. Under that, she added the time from the watch on her wrist.

The hiss suddenly grew louder.

Krrr… “…please… do not throw away…”

The sound jumped, as if someone had torn a tape.

“…names…“

And then there was silence.

All three stood very still. Even the lift was quiet. From inside the building came only a distant thump of pipes.

“Did you hear that?” Nora asked.

“Please, do not throw away names,” Ben repeated softly.

“Maybe: do not throw away names,” Filip corrected. “The first word was not clear.”

“It was please,” Nora said, and she wrote down both versions. She put a question mark beside them. “The voice sounded like a recording. It was not a person who is somewhere in the building right now.”

Filip knelt by the lift doors. He noticed an old dark button next to the call button. It had no label, only a tiny hole in the middle.

“This probably comes from the original system,” he said. “Maybe everything was connected. The lift, the entrance, the pram room, the laundry room… Wires like that often are not ripped out completely. Someone just disconnects them and forgets.”

Ben frowned. “I’ve heard that voice before.”

Nora stopped writing. “Here?”

“No. In Mrs. Richterová’s story.” The boy turned toward the stairwell, as if the right memory might be hiding near the dark railing. “She told us about a man who used to help in the building. Not the caretaker… more like a man who could fix doors, lights and the radio. She said he carried a screwdriver in a leather bag.”

When Things Start to Change

“Do you remember his name?” Nora asked.

“Only a bit. Mr… Varga? Or was Varga someone else?”

Filip shook his head. “That does not tell us much yet. A voice can sound like almost anyone who is over forty.”

“It was not just the voice,” Ben objected. “Mrs. Richterová said that man knew Klara. And that he always got angry when someone said old things had no value.”

Nora looked at him. Ben remembered stories in a special way. While she wrote down facts and Filip watched wires, he kept the tone adults used when they said a name, and the sad spaces between the sentences.

“What exactly did she say about Klara?”

“She said Klara was always writing things down. The names of people who lived in the building. Who had a dog, who could sew, who lent books. Mrs. Richterová went quiet when she said that.” Ben adjusted the strap of his dark backpack. “Then she said Klara did not want everything to disappear during the rebuilding. But I’m not sure if she meant the rooms or the people.”

A soft click came from the ceiling. All three went silent.

Nothing else happened.

“Okay,” Filip said, straightening up. “If it is a recording, it must have some trigger. A power cut, a shake, a change in voltage… or that dark button. Something woke it up.”

“And if it is a message?” Ben asked.

Filip was quiet for a moment. “Then we still need to know when it plays and why.”

Nora closed her notebook halfway. “We won’t press anything unknown. We’ll wait. We’ll write down the conditions. If it happens again, we compare the words.”

“That’s the plan?” Ben looked at the dark gap by the lift doors.

“It’s better than the plan where we stand here and scream,” Filip replied.

“That was not my plan.”

“But you would definitely scream very precisely.”

This time Ben really smiled. Still, the tension stayed in the corridor like a cold draft.

They moved closer to the stairwell, where they could see both the lift and the entrance door well. Nora drew a simple map in the notebook. She marked the place where they had stood during the first blackout. Filip pulled a small flashlight from his pocket, but did not switch it on.

“If the lights go out again, we do not shine it at once,” he said. “Maybe it would disturb things if the system is sensitive to electricity.”

“And if that corridor appears?” Ben asked carefully.

“We do not go into it,” Nora said. “We stay by the stairs. If the sound changes into something that makes no sense, we go one floor up and call Mrs. Richterová.”

Filip nodded. “Great. We have an escape route, light, and an adult on the phone. That is almost professional investigating.”

“Almost?”

“Professionals probably also have biscuits.”

They waited.

First, a woman with a shopping bag walked up the stairs. The children held the door for her and did not explain anything. Then somewhere on a lower floor a dog barked. The minutes dragged by so slowly that Nora began to feel that the whole plan had been useless.

Meanwhile, she noticed something else. Above the speaker grille in the wall was a small, almost invisible wheel. An old logo: a circle with three short lines inside it, like sound waves.

“Filip,” she whispered. “Look at the sign.”

The boy narrowed his eyes. “Radio. Or a house announcement system. I saw something similar in my aunt’s old school. It had a central box and speakers all over the building.”

An Important Moment

“So if there is one here, there could be others?”

“Exactly.”

At that moment the light above them faded.

This time it did not go out all at once. First the bulb by the stairs turned into a dull orange dot. Then the corridor sank into a dark blue shadow.

Between the lift and the cellar, the unknown corridor stretched out again.

Nora felt her heart beating in her throat. Even so, she gripped her pencil tighter and stayed where she was. Beside her, Filip quietly counted the seconds. Ben stared at the grille above the lift.

Krrr… shhh…

The speaker crackled louder than before.

“…if anyone can hear this…” said a calm male voice. It sounded tired, but clear. “…leave the wiring connected. Klara knows where to send the messages…”

The hiss sharpened so much that Ben flinched.

“…the building will change. The walls will be torn down, the doors moved, but the names… the names must not be lost.”

Nora wrote so fast that her pencil scratched across the paper.

“…Mr. Varga… the box by the common room… the second panel…”

The voice disappeared for a moment. In its place came a distant ding, as if someone at the end of the invisible corridor had pressed a lift button.

Then the recording continued only briefly.

“…for Klara. For those who stay and listen.”

The lights came back on.

The unnumbered corridor vanished. The grey lift doors shut with a soft thud, and the grille above them went quiet.

None of them spoke at once. Nora had her notebook open, and the words on the page overlapped because she had written in almost complete darkness.

Ben let out a breath first. “Mr. Varga. I knew it.”

“Was he the man from the story?” Nora asked.

The boy nodded. “Mrs. Richterová called him Mr. Varga. She said he fixed everything that other people wanted to throw away. And she said he let Klara use the old radio box when nobody was looking.”

Filip ran a finger just beside the metal grille, still without touching it. His face no longer looked amused. “That was not a random fault. Someone left a message here. Maybe on a tape, maybe in an old unit. The blackout somehow starts it.”

“He said box by the common room,” Nora reminded him. “And second panel.”

“The common room is the locked room near the pram room now,” Filip said. “At least I think so. There used to be a notice board and an old storage room beside it. If those same wires ran there…“

“Then there could be another speaker there,” Ben finished. “Or another voice.”

Footsteps sounded from the hallway above. All three automatically backed toward the stairs. It was not fear of something that wanted to catch them. It was more the feeling that they had just heard something that was meant to stay hidden for a long time, and now they needed a moment of ordinary light.

Nora read the notes aloud. Filip stopped her twice and corrected a word he had heard differently. Ben added the last sentence, the one about those who stay and listen. When they compared their memories, the result was a fairly exact fragment.

It was not the whole recording. They still did not know who had switched it on, or how it had reached them after so many years. But they knew enough to check something.

“Tomorrow we ask Mrs. Richterová about Mr. Varga,” Nora said. “Not everything at once. First the common room and the old system.”

“And the demolished wing,” Filip added. “If he said the doors can be moved, maybe there were more panels there. Maybe one survived the rebuilding somewhere nobody is looking.”

What Comes Next

Ben looked at the lift one more time. Now it looked like only an old machine with scratched doors. Even so, he already knew that in its walls a voice might be waiting, the voice of a man who had vanished from the building long ago, but did not want to vanish from memory.

Nora closed the notebook and pressed it to her chest. On the last line she wrote: Second panel. Box. Wing plan?

Then they went downstairs together. Above them, the lift stayed silent. Only the small metal wheel with the sound-wave sign glinted for a moment in the bulb light, as if pointing the way to the next clue.