Lost on the Second Floor

It was another grueling day at work. The minutes had dragged on endlessly, each hour a seemingly eternal torment. Patrycja, a young woman, was finally locking up her personal cape of madness—the local bookstore—and heading home to her small oasis of peace, quiet, and respite. She checked her watch. 6:35 PM. She cursed under her breath; she was leaving later than usual.

The walk wasn’t long, weaving through familiar, winding paths. As she reached her apartment building, a passing neighbor muttered a quiet greeting before vanishing into the evening gloom. Patrycja stepped into the lobby and headed straight for the elevator. She glanced at the scratched digital display to see where the car was, then pressed the call button. She waited. All she wanted was to be home, to kick off her uncomfortable shoes and stand under a hot shower, but she was entirely too exhausted to take the stairs.

The red number on the screen stubbornly displayed a 5. It felt like an eternity had passed, yet the elevator refused to descend to the ground floor. She checked her watch again—6:45 PM. A loud rumble from her empty stomach tipped the scales. The display remained frozen on the five, as if the mechanism had died right there in the shaft.

Defeated, she turned to the stairwell. A flickering, buzzing fluorescent light on the landing greeted her reluctantly, casting unnaturally long shadows against the peeling walls.

First floor. Ugh... almost there, she thought, pushing her heavy legs up the worn, concrete steps.

Second floor. The light here began to dim, as if the upper levels were sucking all the electricity from the bulbs. In the distance, she could hear the muffled sounds of someone’s argument, but right now, she only cared about reaching her front door. Even if bombs started falling from the sky, the only thing that mattered was getting home.

Step by step, the leaden weight in her legs became unbearable. Suddenly, she stopped, squinting. On the wall, instead of the painted number for the third floor, there was a chipped, scratched number 2... She brushed it off as a stupid prank. Maybe some neighborhood kids had scraped the paint off. Irritated, she pushed through the heavy fire doors into the hallway.

The long, dim corridor sent an unprompted, icy shiver down her spine. But she knew this building inside out; the lighting here had always worked on a wing and a prayer. She walked up to number 83 and pulled out her key. The door looked familiar, though the texture under her fingertips felt oddly rough, different than usual. She slid the key into the lock. Turned it. A perfect fit. Her momentary doubt vanished. She pressed the handle and stepped inside.

She froze.

Everything was wrong. Instead of light vinyl flooring and her minimalist glass coffee table, her feet sank into a thick, burgundy carpet covered in swirling, Persian-style patterns. The entire right wall was consumed by a massive, dark, high-gloss wooden wall unit, its glass display cabinets reflecting her own bewildered face. In the center of the room sat a sofa upholstered in a coarse, brown fabric, and in the corner hummed a bulky, convex CRT television. The air smelled entirely different—heavy, a suffocating mix of ancient dust, mothballs, and floor wax. This wasn’t her apartment. Yet, her key had fit perfectly. It was as if, in a fraction of a second, she had stepped back into the deep 1980s.

With trembling hands, she grabbed her smartphone to call her mother. The screen pierced the gloom, but in the top left corner, a cold message flashed: No Service. The signal was gone, as if this room had been completely severed from the modern world. Her eyes darted to an old rotary phone sitting on a cabinet, but when she picked up the receiver, it offered only a dead, heavy silence.

She should have run. She should have screamed, or bolted back out into the hallway. But the sheer exhaustion—both physical and mental—was so overwhelming that her brain simply refused to cooperate. The circuits responsible for fear had completely burned out.

It’s just a dream. I fell asleep on the bus, or I’m still walking up the stairs. I’ll wake up in my own bed tomorrow, she thought, her mind numb.

Running on her last fumes of energy, she collapsed onto the scratchy, brown sofa. Curling into a ball and ignoring the sheer absurdity of the nightmare, she instantly plunged into a deep, black sleep.

The next morning, her mother called Patrycja to see how her day went. The receiver only echoed with a steady, unanswered ringing. When, hours later, the anxious woman called the bookstore, the manager told her that Patrycja had never shown up for her shift.

Panicking, her mother drove straight to the apartment building. She had a spare key. She took the elevator up to the third floor, walked down the bright, well-lit hallway, and opened the door to number 83.

She found an empty, modern interior. The light vinyl floors gleamed in the morning sun, there wasn’t a speck of dust on the glass coffee table, and the faint scent of Patrycja’s favorite perfume lingered in the air. The bed in the bedroom was perfectly made.

It looked exactly as if Patrycja had never crossed the threshold of her home last night.