The Cord Down the Stairwell

The lift in the block stopped between the third and fourth floors at five o'clock. It gave one long groan, and then it was silent.

Ansel, the caretaker, heard the groan from his office in the basement. He sighed, picked up his keys and called the repair company. A weary voice told him that an engineer would come in the morning.

"In the morning?" Ansel said. "We have fourteen floors of people here."

"I am sorry," the voice said. "Nobody is free tonight."

Ansel put down the phone and went up to the lobby. Within ten minutes, it was full of people with heavy shopping bags. A man with a bicycle sighed loudly. A woman with a pushchair sat on the bottom step and refused to move. Three children asked if the lift would ever work again.

"Not tonight," Ansel told them all. "Please use the stairs, and please be careful. I will check every floor."

He climbed slowly, with a torch in his hand. On the sixth floor, the corridor lights were still on. On the seventh, everything was dark. The fault had cut the power to every floor above the sixth. The switch that could bring it back was locked inside the motor room. Only the engineer had the key.

He kept climbing. On the ninth floor, he found Edin sitting on the top step. A strange object lay on her knees.

"You are the only person today who isn't shouting at me," Ansel said.

"I would shout if it helped," Edin said. "But look at this. It was outside my door when I came home."

It was a toy robot, about the size of a shoebox. Its body was made of dented silver metal, and one arm was raised in a wave. A square of paper was taped to its chest.

Ansel pointed the torch at the note. The handwriting was round and careful, like a child's. It said, "Ninth floor landing. Press my left hand before eight o'clock tonight. Please do not leave me in the dark."

"Who would leave a thing like this?" Edin asked.

"I don't know," Ansel said. "But somebody wanted it switched on here, tonight. I am curious now."

He pressed the left hand once, and then again, harder. The painted eyes stayed dull. Nothing whirred, and nothing clicked.

"The battery is flat," Edin said. "Or the toy is broken."

Ansel turned the robot over and opened a small panel in its back. Inside there was a round socket and a label with tiny letters. He read it twice. "It says it can run straight from a charger, even with a flat battery."

"Then we need a charger," Edin said. "And we need to hurry. Look at the time."

Ansel's watch said ten past seven.

"I have a box of old chargers in the basement," he said. "One of them might fit. I will run."

He ran down nine flights in the half dark, with one hand on the cold rail. In the basement, he tried eleven chargers. The twelfth slid into the robot's socket with a small click. Then he ran all the way back up. When he reached the ninth floor, his legs were shaking, and it was a quarter to eight.

"I have the charger," he said, breathing hard. "But there is nowhere to plug it in. Nothing works above the sixth floor."

"Then we carry the robot down to the sixth," Edin said.

"The note says the ninth floor landing," Ansel said. "Whoever wrote it chose this place for a reason. I don't want to move it."

Edin leaned over the railing. The stairwell had a wide gap in the middle. The floors below looked like a stack of dark squares. She counted them with her finger.

"The nearest socket is three floors down," she said. "If a cord follows the stairs, it needs forty metres."

"We don't have forty metres," Ansel said. "I have one cord, and it is five metres long."

Edin smiled slowly. "We don't have to follow the stairs," she said. "We can drop the cord straight down the gap. Straight down, it is only twelve metres."

Ansel stared at her. Then he laughed out loud. "Twelve metres," he said. "Everyone in this building owns an extension cord. Go and knock on doors. I will do the joining."

Edin ran along the corridor in the dark. She knocked on every door she passed. A man in a bath towel gave her a long orange cord and asked no questions. A girl with a guitar found two short cords under her bed. A student with wet hair handed over one that was so tangled it looked like a nest.

"What is it for?" the student asked.

"A very strange rescue," Edin said, and ran on.

In six minutes, she came back with four cords in her arms. Ansel joined them end to end and wrapped every join with tape from his belt. His hands moved fast, but the second hand on his watch moved faster. It was ten to eight.

He tied his heavy bunch of keys to the plug at one end of the cord. Then he held the keys over the gap and let them fall. The cord ran through his fingers, hissing, past the eighth floor and the seventh. The keys swung at the bottom with a faint ring, just outside the sixth-floor door.

"Got them!" Edin shouted from far below. She had run down the stairs two at a time, and her voice echoed up the stairwell. "Now I'm looking for the socket."

Ansel waited. The robot sat on the landing, silent and dull, with its arm raised. He pushed the charger's plug into the end of the cord and waited.

"Anything?" he called down.

"One moment!" Edin shouted. "This socket is behind a plant pot. There. It is in."

Nothing happened for ten long seconds. Ansel looked at his watch. It was two minutes to eight. He pressed the left hand once, and then he pressed it again.

A small green light came on inside the robot's chest. The painted eyes began to glow, softly at first, and then as bright as two lamps. The landing, the railing and Ansel's tired face all turned green. Edin arrived, panting, at the top of the stairs just in time to see it.

"It works," she whispered. "We did it."

The robot's arm came down slowly. A clear voice came from its chest, high and light, like the voice of a child.

"Hello," it said. "Thank you for the light. I have waited a very long time. Please come to number thirteen."

The green light faded. The eyes went dark, and the robot was quiet again, as if it had never spoken. Ansel and Edin looked at each other for a long moment.

"Thirteen," Edin said at last. "But there isn't a thirteenth floor. The lift goes from twelve to fourteen."

"I know," Ansel said. "I have worked here for nine years. The builders skipped the number."

"So where is number thirteen?"

Ansel didn't answer. He picked up his torch and began to climb. Edin followed him past the tenth floor, the eleventh and the twelfth. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth, the stairs turned a corner. There was a small landing there that Ansel had passed a thousand times.

Behind a pile of old paint tins, there was a narrow door. It had no number. A thin line of warm yellow light shone under it. From somewhere behind it came a soft, steady ticking.