Are You Taking the Elevator?

Finally, the elevator descended to the ground floor. After school and an hour of playing basketball, a two-minute wait felt like an eternity. The elevator greeted me with flickering lights. With my legs covered in a thin layer of dust, I stepped inside and pressed the button for the 13th floor, resting my aching back against the cold metal wall. As the doors began to close, they paused briefly, as if in reconsideration. Another man entered, wearing a cap that obscured his face. I sighed inwardly when he pressed a button for a floor two levels above mine.

Eight more floors to go. I glued my eyes to the floor, as any polite person would do in a lift. The basketball was locked firmly between my arms; I ran my hands along its textured surface. Seven more floors to go, and now I noticed from the corner of my eye that the man was starting to sweat profusely. He adjusted his cap nervously; his legs shuffled towards the door instinctively. Strange, the lift wasn’t close to his floor yet. 

Six floors to go. Wait a second, his legs. I looked closer. The lights of the lift had stopped flickering a while ago. Light spread through every corner of this cuboid, quite annoyingly. It illuminated the man and shone brightly in his recently polished shoes. But the light forgot one thing to give to him. A human’s lifelong companion - his shadow was absent.

No living creature could do that, except a vampire, probably. Shadows and reflections are strangers to them.

I had one more floor to go. Oh crap, there was a vampire. How irritating. A sudden jolt from the elevator meant that my floor had arrived. As I took two steps to exit, the man made unexpected eye contact with me. From beneath his cap, I could see his eyes frozen in disbelief—and fear, too; interesting. I walked out calmly.

_____

Oh God. Who or what had he just been with? The lift took about 32 seconds to reach his floor — the most stressful 32 seconds he had ever experienced. The man shivered as he got out of the elevator; he hoped never to see that kid again.

His worst fears were confirmed when he saw the child’s reflection as it leaned against the mirror— A dusty orange ball hovered ominously above the floor.

There was no reflection.