Floor 8

amarantine-amirite:

I don’t believe in superstitions about the 13th floor. I don’t believe in superstitions from Asia about the 4th floor either, for the exact same reason. Both superstitions are crap. In my experience; however, the floor you really need to watch out for is the 8th floor.

Most people would read this and think that I was just being weird. I got that. Here, 8 is just a number. And in Asia, 8 is a lucky number.

But, in my experience, bad stuff always seems to happen on the 8th floor. I don’t know why, it just does.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what I’m talking about:

The first time it happened was when I was 11 years old, and I had to issue an apology to one of my mother’s friends. I literally remember everything that happened. I remember my mom’s swearing because we were stuck in traffic due to a yogurt truck flipping over. “Nuala, what made you think that was an appropriate thing to say to Darlene?”

I sat there blinking. “I didn’t know that she’d get so upset.”

Mom’s side and angrily slammed her hands on the steering wheel. “Nuala, you don’t know, and you can’t know, which is why if it doesn’t sound like something you should say, then don’t say it! It’s not that hard!”

It’s not like I made a joke about Darlene’s weight or anything. I just said that her bottle of breath spray kind of looked like a tiny vial of blood. “Your comment about her breath spray really brought up bad memories for her! Think about that before you ever mouth off again!”

It took us three and a half hours to get to the office building where Darlene worked. “Hello” my mother greeted the secretary, “we’re here to see Darlene Tunney”

“Ah, yes,” the secretary replied, “her office is on the 10th floor.” She opened the drawer in her desk and looked at it. “Unfortunately, we’re out of guest passes, so I’ll take you up in the elevator myself.”

Mom glared at me the entire elevator ride. And it was all for nothing, too. We never even made it to the tenth floor. Once the elevator got to 8, it dropped three whole floors.

Mom gasped. The secretary peed herself. I laughed.

I had no idea that that incident will be comparatively tame compared to the next encounter I had with the eighth floor. My second encounter happened when I was 14 years old. Back then, I had a friend named Lydia. Lydia would always drag me into these political conversations whether I wanted to talk or not. It always ended the same way. I would say the wrong thing, and she yell at me for being “a bad person”.

This encounter with the eighth floor started very simply: Lydia tried to drag me into this conversation about abortion.

The conversation came about as follows: Amy told us that her boyfriend prom-posed to her with a wheel of laughing cow cheese that had “will you be my prom date or is this too cheesy?” written on it. Everybody else in the room squealed. Everybody, that is, except Lydia. Instead, Lydia rolled her eyes and sneered derisively. “Yeah, that’s hilarious,” she said sarcastically, “I bet that cow wasn’t laughing when you killed it to make the cheese.”

Nobody dignified that with a response. In fact, everyone just sat there and blinked.I distinctly heard somebody else say, “Lydia, you don’t kill a cow to make cheese.”

Lydia kept right on going. “Yeah, but to get the cows to make milk, they force the mother couch to get abortions. Us feminists fought tooth and nail for the right for women to have an abortion, don’t support people who are going to make us regret it.”

Yikes, I thought, she’s gone off again. I just hope she doesn’t drag me into this, because I don’t want her screaming at me. Just when I thought Lydia was going to drag somebody else into this, she turned over and looked at me. Uh-oh.

“Nuala,” she asked me, “what do you think about this?”

I have no idea where the conversation was headed. “The dairy industry?”

Lydia side and smacked my forehead. “No!” she barked, “Abortion, stupid.” Oh, balls, I see where this is going.

I knew it. I knew it was a trap. Are you Lydia was going to wind me up until I said the wrong thing. I ultimately decided that I wouldn’t say anything at all. Instead, I ran away.

That wasn’t enough to stop her. When I started running, she started chasing me. “Nuala, don’t you dare walk out on me,” Lydia barked as she picked up her pace.

I didn’t stop. I walked out the room and down the hall, and Lydia followed. I went up the stairs, and I could still hear Lydia following me. “This isn’t a joke!”

“No“ I said, “this is a trap.”

I ran and ran. Lydia chased and chased. Right up until we got up to the 8th floor.

The eighth floor started with just a simple doorway, but it led to a maze of halls. One hallway just led to another long hallway. It felt like if you turned the corner, you would just keep going. I didn’t even know where Lydia was anymore. All I knew was that I found myself going around in a red brick wall, Memphis pattern carpeted floor circle. The whole experience felt like the nearest you could get to being stuck in an infinite loop. The many exits heralded by the light up exit signs probably lead to nowhere; or if not nowhere, somewhere worse. In fact, as I ran, I found myself half expecting something on the wall or something that said “don’t follow the signs”.

Over the course of passing in between stripes of shadow and light through abandoned office floors, I lost track of Lydia. I couldn’t hear footsteps, I don’t even think she still followed me at this point.

Two minutes later, I bolted past one last glowing exit sign before I entered the void of darkness. Three minutes later, I fell through a hole in the floor, landing right in the middle of a wedding. I guess you could say that was also the time that I crashed my first wedding.

I didn’t think I’d have another encounter with an eight floor after that. My prom after-party proved me wrong.

Our prom after party wasn’t sponsored by the school, so that meant we had our prom after-party at a veritable castle of vice. The less we say about the debauchery, the better. I couldn’t take anymore of the insanity, so I left.

I spent my prom after party walking up the stairs of the building And walking around on all the floors. Most of the floors consisted of the usual crap: hallways, offices, desks, a few pieces of abstract art; nothing all that spectacular. But that all changed when I got to the eighth floor

The 8th floor didn’t have rooms. It didn’t even have hallways. The eighth floor only consisted of one, really big room; roughly 20 feet deep and 80 feet wide, with a little red door at the end. I couldn’t help but notice all the garbage on the floor; from broken glass to bent scrap metal. I walked in a little further, trying not to step on anything. I got about halfway in when I noticed a skeleton of a cow by the eastern wall.

I very quickly noped out of there. In fact, I don’t even think I continued exploring the rest of the building. And it wasn’t because the eighth floor was dirty. No,I saw something move that made me suspect that the floor was haunted. Couldn’t make it out at first. I suspected that whatever moved wasn’t actually real, and just an illusion. Then I saw it move again. This wasn’t an illusion; this thing was real.

I saw the source of the movement when I looked over my back shoulder: a five-foot-tall shrimp-like creature that crawled out of the little red door at the end of the room and headed straight towards me. I bolted.

And it’s not just me, either. I know a lot of my friends are the same thing about the eighth floor. I guess that really means the eighth floor is bad news.