Stairs

• Horror
• Short story
• Fiction

								
	You’ve been climbing the stairs for a long time now — just how long, you can’t be sure. There are a large number of clocks, several at each landing, but you can never read them. Your legs are sore and tired, but no more so than they were hours ago. You’ve been out of breath for a while now, but it never seems to get any worse. 
	You see another landing up ahead. At first, the landings gave you hope. Maybe one of them would have a door, someone to explain what was going on, something to tell you whether or not you were close to the end, that there is an end to whatever is happening here. By now, however, the landings don’t do much other than give you something to think about on your way up the next flight of stairs.
            All of the staircases are identical. All of the landings are identical. Were it not for the strange objects on each landing, you would no doubt feel as though you’d been climbing the same set of stairs for eternity.

	The landings have all been equally bizarre. This one holds three items: two clocks on the far wall, which have no numbers and endlessly spinning hands, and a life-size clown, which stands in the corner furthest from the next set of stairs. You can’t tell whether the clown is mechanical or human. It is dressed in black and wearing silver glasses, and you reflect briefly on the fact that you’ve never seen a clown in either funeral attire or eye correction before. The buttons on the clown’s suit are silver, and as you look more closely you see that each of the five of them reflects a face, slightly distorted — as though seen as reflections on the back of a metal spoon, for example. You glance behind you, knowing that there will be no one there, and your anxiety deepens as the empty landing behind you confirms you suspicions. You look back at the clown, who seems perhaps to have moved a little closer while you were turned away. The reflected faces on his buttons are mundane, though varied: a young white boy, a middle-aged black woman, a tan teenage girl wearing a headscarf, an Asian grandfather, and a blond, brown-eyed baby. None of them are smiling, nor do they look particularly unhappy. You step back and take in the clown as a whole. He stares straight ahead. He feels alive, but you can’t detect any movement of the chest that would indicate breathing. You speak, but he doesn’t. The button faces remain motionless. Eventually, you decide to climb the next flight of stairs, which stretches like a skyscraper in front of you. As you start up the staircase, you sense the clown turn his head to watch. You don’t look back.

	The next landing holds four clocks, an enormous live turtle, and a stuffed ladybug. One of the clocks is perpetually in shadow, even though the landing is brightly lit. It is impossible to read no matter how much you strain your eyes. Two of the clocks have numbers that flow around the clock faces in dizzying patterns, and the last has hands that follow your eye movements, so that they are in the center of your gaze no matter what part of the clock face you are observing.
	The turtle is crawling slowly around the landing. It’s the diameter of a car tire, but not tall enough to climb the stairs. On the back of its shell, a large painted eye watches you. You extend your hand and the turtle sniffs it briefly, then loses interest and resumes its circular journey.
	The stuffed ladybug appears to be perfectly normal.
	When you run out of things to think about, you start climbing again.

	This time, there is a small snowglobe in the center of the landing. Golden light shines on it from nowhere, as if an invisible spotlight is hidden in the gray ceiling. The snow in the globe rises and falls in an endless cycle. Inside is a statue of a small Scottie dog, mouth open and legs splayed as if in the middle of play. At its feet is a red bone toy, chewed and worn. Behind the dog, attached to the glass, is a clock. It faces inwards, and the curvature of the dome makes it impossible to read. You walk to the back side of the globe, hoping to read the clock from behind, but the clock’s back is opaque. In a fit of frustration, you kick the globe. It stays upright. It does not break. The clock remains unread. Your toe hurts.

	A wooden fence a little taller than a pencil held upright takes up almost all of the next landing. You wipe sweat from your brow as you approach, glancing for a moment at a clock whose numbers rotate slowly with the hands. The enclosure on the floor holds a miniature street being worked on by a Lilliputian construction crew, who complete the image with construction vests the size of postage stamps. Tiny pickaxes are swung up and back down, diminutive shovels scoop and unload dirt, and digging machines the size of coffee mugs crawl across the packed soil. After watching for a few minutes, you realize that the work is never-ending. The pickaxes simply sink into the blacktop without making a dent. Each person digging a hole scoops each shovelful into his neighbor’s pit, who then scoops the same dirt back into the first trench. The machines roll back and forth, but never actually change the landscape.
            The tiny figures take no notice of you, even when you shout at them in frustration. After a bit, you try reaching into the pen, but a stinging pain bites your hand as though there is an invisible electric dome over the space. You watch the tiny beings and their useless toil for a few more moments. You wonder how long they’ve been doing the same things with no result. You wonder how long you’ll HAVE TO.

	There is a poster on the wall at the next landing. It depicts the dangers of smoking via large red letters and a picture of a woman coughing. Each time you look away and then back at the poster, the woman’s eyes have changed position. You experiment with this for a while, noting that her eyes never meet yours. You’re not sure you want them to.
Under the poster is an ashtray with a smoldering cigarette resting inside. You’ve never been a smoker, but any activity that doesn’t involve climbing more stairs would be welcome at the moment. You pick up the cigarette, and it immediately extinguishes itself. When you set it down, it relights. You try several different ways of smoking it, but it goes out the instant that any contact is made. The woman in the poster somehow looks as if she’s laughing now, rather than coughing.
	The three clocks on the opposite wall have numbers that get smaller the closer you are. They are impossible to read. You sit beneath the clocks for an indeterminate amount of time, thinking about what to do next. Finally, you come to the conclusion that you have at all the previous innumerable landings: there is nothing to do but keep going. You heave yourself up the next staircase.

	The door is white. It has a panic bar like those on a door at a school. It has a sign painted on it in large green letters that says “EXIT.”
	Above the door is a clock. The clock is perfectly ordinary. It reads 9:52. After your initial excitement at finding a clock you can read, you realize that the time means nothing -- you don’t know when you started climbing the staircases.

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