₦airaland Forum

When I got the job in Owerri, everyone congratulated me like I had just won the lottery.

Good salary. Air-conditioned office. Quiet building along Port Harcourt Road. Compared to the chaos outside, the place felt almost too calm.

There was only one strange rule.

Nobody said it officially. It was just something people mentioned casually during my first week.

“Abeg, if you dey call elevator, press the button once.”

I thought they were joking.

“Why?”

One of the accountants just shrugged.

“Na so we dey do am.”

That was it. No explanation.

The rule felt so random that I forgot about it completely.

Until one morning.

It was raining hard that day. One of those Owerri mornings where the sky is dark even at nine o’clock. The lobby generator was humming because NEPA had taken light again.

I walked in half soaked, dropped my umbrella, and pressed the elevator button.

Once.

Then again.

The doors opened almost immediately.

I stepped inside, pressed 7, and went up to my office like every other day.

Work was normal. Emails, reports, one useless meeting that could have been a message.

Around lunch time I went downstairs to buy food from a woman that sells rice and stew outside the gate.

When I came back in, the receptionist stopped me.

“Did you press the elevator button twice this morning?”

Her tone was calm, but her eyes were searching my face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

She slowly picked up the phone.

“Maintenance,” she said. “It happened again.”

Within minutes two men from the building management came out of a small room behind the lobby.

One of them looked tired already.

“Which floor?” he asked.

“Lobby,” the receptionist replied.

The man sighed like someone who had heard bad news he expected.

Then he looked at me carefully.

“Next time,” he said quietly, “press it once.”

They opened the panel beside the elevator and started checking wires like something serious had happened.

But the elevator still worked.

So I forgot about it.

The next morning when I walked into the building, the receptionist looked up and froze.

Then she slowly smiled.

“Good,” she said.

“Good morning,” I replied.

“No,” she said softly. “Good… you came back.”

I laughed.

“Where else would I go?”

Instead of answering, she leaned forward.

“You didn’t take the elevator again yesterday evening, right?”

“I did,” I said. “Around six.”

The smile disappeared from her face.

For a moment she didn’t speak.

Then she pointed beside the elevator.

“Come and look at this.”

There was a small metal plaque on the wall that I had somehow never noticed before.

It looked old.

The top line read:

Elevator Installed: 2001

Under it was another line scratched into the metal.

Button malfunction reported: 17 times

Below that were names.

Seventeen of them.

As I read through the list, one name made my chest tighten.

It belonged to the man who used to sit at my desk before I was hired.

I had asked about him once.

They just said he had “left the company.”

I turned slowly to the receptionist.

“What does this mean?”

She hesitated before answering.

“Every time someone presses the button twice,” she said quietly, “the elevator always stops on the seventh floor first.”

“That’s my floor.”

She nodded.

“I know.”

A cold feeling crept into my stomach.

“So what’s the problem?”

Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.

“The problem is…”

She pointed to the elevator panel.

“…this building only has six floors.”

I turned and stared at the numbers beside the door.

1
2
3
4
5
6

That was it.

No 7.

And suddenly, for the first time since I started working there,

I realized I couldn’t clearly remember

what my office looked like.


________________________________________________________


For the rest of that day, I could not focus on anything.

Every time I looked at the elevator in the lobby, my mind went back to what the receptionist said.

“This building only has six floors.”

But I knew where I worked.

I knew my desk. My computer. The window that faced the road where buses and keke riders always argued about change.

I had spent months there.

Hadn’t I?

That evening when everyone started leaving, I waited.

One by one the staff filtered out of the building. The receptionist packed her bag and left too. Soon the lobby became quiet except for the hum of the generator outside.

Only the security man remained at the gate.

I stood up slowly and walked to the elevator.

The panel beside the door still showed the numbers.

1
2
3
4
5
6

No 7.

But my finger hesitated over the call button.

Then I pressed it.

Once.

The elevator doors opened.

I stepped inside and looked at the control panel.

Again, only six buttons.

For a moment I felt stupid standing there.

Maybe the receptionist was just playing with my head.

Maybe I had misheard something.

The doors began to close.

Just before they shut completely, I reached out and pressed the call button again from inside.

Twice.

The elevator stopped.

The lights flickered.

Then it started moving.

Up.

The numbers on the display changed slowly.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

The elevator should have stopped.

But it didn’t.

Instead the display flickered.

For a second the screen went blank.

Then another number appeared.

7.

The elevator jerked to a halt.

The doors opened.

My stomach dropped.

Because the hallway outside looked exactly like my office floor.

Same white walls.

Same dim lights.

Same grey carpet.

I stepped out slowly.

My desk was exactly where I remembered it.

My computer was on.

The screen glowed softly in the dark office.

Everything looked normal.

Too normal.

Then I noticed something strange.

The place was completely silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

The kind of silence where even the air feels heavy.

I walked past the desks slowly until I reached my own.

Something was sitting in my chair.

At first I thought it was just a shadow.

Then it moved.

Slowly, the chair turned.

And I saw my own face looking back at me.

Not a reflection.

Not a mirror.

Me.

Same clothes.

Same tired eyes.

Same small scar above my eyebrow.

The other me smiled.

Not warmly.

Just enough to show teeth.

Then he spoke.

“You shouldn’t have come back.”

My throat went dry.

“What… is this?”

He leaned back in the chair like someone who had been waiting a long time.

“The same mistake everyone makes,” he said calmly.

“You pressed the button twice.”

My mind flashed to the plaque in the lobby.

Seventeen names.

My voice came out barely above a whisper.

“So what happens now?”

The other me stood up slowly.

For a moment we just stared at each other.

Then he pointed behind me.

Back toward the elevator.

“The elevator is leaving soon.”

I turned instinctively.

The doors were already closing.

When I looked back at him, his smile had widened.

“Don’t worry,” he said softly.

“There’s always room for one more name.”

PART ONE:
THE PUSH


It wasn’t meant to go this way. No, far from it, this wasn’t supposed to be how it all ends, after years of being almost inseparable from Tayo, like twins from the same womb, living the way couples did, and being the envy of everyone on the street. The memory of seeing him sprawled out on that floor with blood gushing from a slash on his torso, and a knife sticking out of his chest still hunted Nneka.

At nights, she pierced the silence with her screams whenever she dared close her eyes to sleep, the horrible scene almost seemed to be on repeat every time, it all played back in the same sequence like she was reliving those moments over again.

It all began when he returned from the psychiatrist, after a session he was forced to attend, Tayo had pleaded with his family, tried convincing them that he was fine, but they didn’t believe him because he had had a mental breakdown in the past. When he saw that his pleas were falling on deaf ears, he tried running from home but his siblings captured him and bundled him into the back of the sienna, he fought, kicked, punched and struggled but he was no match for the strength of all of them combined. He was bound like a ram being led to the slaughter into the asylum.

He was administered some drugs to make him calm as he was too violent to control, he was evaluated by the psychiatrist, put in restraints and to be admitted for three months for monitoring. Nneka and most of his friends were restricted from seeing him during his time at the hospital, only family members were allowed access to him. There was no way to contact him as his mobile phone was taken from him.

To be clear, Tayo was indeed perfectly fine, he had only made a snide remark that his family didn’t understand at the time but for the fact that it was all too similar to description of his hallucinations the last time he had a mental breakdown, they had insisted he see a doctor but Tayo already being tired of the countless visits to the psychiatry and knowing that he was perfectly fine refused seeing a shrink. An act that further convinced his parents that he was definitely having a breakdown.

Three months passed and Tayo was allowed to go back home but the trauma of his stay and the effects of the psychoactive drugs he was forced to take at the hospital stayed with him. He acted normal on the surface for fear that he might be termed a lunatic and forced to go back to the psychiatry and maybe for a longer period this time. On the inside he was far from normal; the thoughts that his own family had doubted his sanity and forced him into a mental home without contact with friends for three months perpetually disturbed him.

So this time around, he didn’t tell anyone about his hallucinations when they started. The hallucinations came worse now, aided by the effects of the drugs he was made to abuse during his stay at the mental home. He moved out of the family house and refused to tell them where he was headed. His family had guessed he was probably going to be staying with friends. So they asked about him but his friends all swore he hadn’t made contact with any of them. They had even gone to look for him at Nneka’s not minding that she was staying at her parents’ and it would have been impossible to accommodate her boyfriend, but he wasn’t there either.

Tayo’s family couldn’t report to the police as he obviously wasn’t a missing person. He seldom picked up his phone when they called and only spoke for not more than three minutes every time. He vehemently refused to talk with his parents or elder siblings, preferring to only talk to Bunmi, his little sister instead. Whenever Bunmi asked about his whereabouts he always told her not to worry, that he was safe and at peace with himself.
Little did they know he was a disaster waiting to happen.

To be continued...

© IamOmegaLee