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

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 skipped once, as if someone had quickly closed and opened their eyes. Then the whole floor went dark.

The darkness 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 been none during the day. It was narrow, longer than could possibly fit inside the building, and its walls were faded green. Doors without numbers stood on both sides. A faint amber light flickered over the brass handles.

Nora already had her notebook in her hand. She kept it in her jacket pocket for moments like this, because phones often had no signal in that strange corridor, and besides, it was impossible to write on one in the dark.

“It’s here again,” Ben whispered.

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

Just then, a quiet crackle came from above the doors.

Krrr… shhh… krrr.

The lights came back on. The unnumbered corridor vanished so quickly 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 a rubbish-sorting notice, 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 faint, 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 public-address systems. Or intercoms. Sometimes they were used to announce that the water was off, or that someone had left a door open.”

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

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

Nora smiled briefly, then opened her notebook to a clean page. At the top she wrote: Lift, evening, flicker of light. Underneath, she added the time from her wristwatch.

The hiss suddenly grew louder.

Krrr… “…please… don’t throw away…”

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

“…names…”

Then there was silence.

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

“Did you hear that?” Nora asked.

“Please, don’t throw away names,” Ben repeated softly.

“Maybe: don’t throw away names,” Filip corrected him. “The first word wasn’t clear.”

“It was please,” Nora said, writing down both versions. She put a question mark beside them. “The voice sounded like a recording. It wasn’t a person somewhere in the building right now.”

Filip knelt beside 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 belongs to the original system,” he said. “Maybe everything was connected. The lift, the entrance, the pram room, the laundry room… Wires like that often aren’t torn out completely. Someone just disconnects them and forgets about them.”

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

Nora stopped writing. “Here?”

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

When Things Start to Change

“Do you remember his name?” Nora asked.

“Only part of it. Mr… Varga? Or was Varga someone else?”

Filip shook his head. “That doesn’t tell us much yet. A voice can sound like almost anyone over forty.”

“It wasn’t just the voice,” Ben objected. “Mrs. Richterová said that man knew Klara. And that he always got angry when someone said old things were worthless.”

Nora looked at him. Ben remembered stories in a special way. While she wrote down facts and Filip watched the wires, he held on to the tone adults used when they said a name, and to the sad spaces between their 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 didn’t want everything to disappear during the rebuilding. But I’m not sure whether she meant the rooms or the people.”

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

Nothing else happened.

“All right,” Filip said, straightening up. “If it’s a recording, it must have some kind of trigger. A power cut, a jolt, a change in voltage… or that dark button. Something woke it up.”

“And if it’s 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 we don’t know. We’ll wait. We’ll note the conditions. If it happens again, we’ll compare the words.”

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

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

“That wasn’t my plan.”

“But you would definitely scream very precisely.”

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

They moved closer to the stairwell, where they had a good view of both the lift and the entrance door. Nora drew a simple map in her notebook. She marked with a cross where they had stood during the first blackout. Filip took a small torch from his pocket but did not switch it on.

“If the lights go out again, we don’t shine it straight away,” he said. “It might interfere if the system is sensitive to electricity.”

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

“We don’t go into it,” Nora said. “We stay by the stairs. If the sound changes into something that doesn’t make sense to us, we go up one floor and call Mrs. Richterová.”

Filip nodded. “Excellent. We have an escape route, light, and an adult at the end of the phone. That’s almost professional investigating.”

“Almost?”

“Professionals probably have biscuits too.”

They waited.

First, a woman with a shopping bag came up the stairs. The children held the door for her and explained nothing. Then a dog barked somewhere on a lower floor. The minutes dragged so slowly that Nora began to feel the whole plan had been pointless.

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

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

The boy narrowed his eyes. “A public-address system. Or a building announcement system. I saw something similar at my aunt’s old school. It had a central box and speakers throughout the building.”

An Important Moment

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

“Exactly.”

At that moment, the light above them dimmed.

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

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

Nora felt her heart pounding 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 grew so loud 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 quickly that her pencil scratched over 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 the lift button.

Then the recording continued for only a moment longer.

“…for Klara. For those who keep listening.”

The lights came back on.

The unnumbered corridor vanished. The grey lift doors closed with a soft thud, and the grille above them fell silent.

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 was the first to let out a breath. “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 other people wanted to throw away. And apparently he let Klara use the old public-address box when no one was looking.”

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

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

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

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

Footsteps sounded in the hallway one floor above. All three automatically backed towards the stairs. It was not fear of something that wanted to catch them. It was more the feeling that they had just heard something meant to remain hidden for a very 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 final sentence, the one about the people who would keep listening. When they compared their memories, they had a fairly exact fragment.

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

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

“And about the lost wing,” Filip added. “If he said the doors would be moved, maybe there were more panels there. Maybe one survived the rebuilding somewhere no one is looking.”

What Comes Next

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

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

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