Dog Days - (Episode 1 of 4) - "The last ones up"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is Dog Days, Episode 1, The Last One's Up.

0:28 You learn things about a building when it empties out. I lived in mine, 11 years, and never once heard it. Not really. There's always something. A pipe, a television, somebody's dog, the elevator settling in its shaft like a held breath let go. You stop hearing it the way you stop hearing your own heart. It's just the sound of not being alone. I want to tell you about the summer.

0:57 The sound stopped. The heat came in the first week of July and it did not leave. I've lived through hot summers. This wasn't that. A hot summer breathes. It builds through the afternoon and breaks at night, gives you back a few cool hours to be a person in. This one didn't break. The night was just the day with the lights off. By the second week, the news stopped saying record and started saying dome, like the sky had been sealed shut, and I suppose it had. 99 at midnight, 104 by 10 in the morning. The asphalt went soft. The pigeons stopped flying and stood in the shade with their beaks open, like they were screaming and had run out of sound. I was on the ninth floor, top of the building, which in July is the worst

1:52 place you can be, because heat is a climber. It comes up through the floors and pools against the roof. and there's nowhere left for it to go, so it goes into you. My apartment faced west. By four o'clock the sun came through those windows like an accusation, and I'd sit very still in the one corner that wasn't on fire and try not to make more of myself, more skin, more breath, more heat. Across the hall was Edith Adler, 9c, 83 years old and sharp as the day she was born, which she'd tell you herself, usually right before she forgot where she'd put her glasses. She'd lived in that apartment 40 years, buried a husband out of it. Her hip had gone bad the winter before and she took the stairs like a project one at

2:45 a time, both hands on the rail, so mostly she didn't. Mostly she waited for the elevator. Mostly she waited for me. I checked on her. That's the simple way to say it. I'd knock. She'd call me in, I'd carry up her groceries and her prescriptions, and we'd sit and she'd tell me things. About the building, about the man on six who watered silk flowers, about her husband, who she still talked about in the present tense when she was tired.

3:17 She called me her girl. There's my girl. I won't pretend I didn't like it. I was 41 and nobody's girl anywhere else in the world, and across that hallway I was somebody's. You hold on to a thing like that, I held on to it. So when the building started to empty, I wasn't only thinking about myself. I want that understood. I was thinking about her. It went floor by floor. The Koories on three left first. The morning the power started browning out, you'd hear all the air conditioners drop their pitch at once, a long, sick groan running through the walls. And then they'd come back weaker.

3:56 The Koories had a baby. You don't gamble with a baby in that kind of heat. Then the family on six. Then the couple below me. And each time it was the same. The thump of bags in the hallway. The elevator working hard. Car doors down in the street. And then one less set of sounds in the building. One less television through the floor. One less shower at seven.

4:24 The building was emptying, and I could hear it emptying. The silence came up toward me one floor at a time, like water filling a sinking thing from the bottom. And here's a thing nobody tells you. An emptying building doesn't get quieter all at once. It gets louder first, because the sounds that are left have nothing to hide behind anymore.

4:47 A pipe ticking as it cooled, a door somewhere below banging in a draft that never reached my windows, my own refrigerator, when the power was on, labouring like an old man on a staircase. I'd lie awake and listen to the building hold itself up, and I'd think, there are fewer of us in here every night to hear it, as if the listening were a job, and we were down to a skeleton crew. By the end of the second week of the dome it was mostly the two of us, me and Edith, the last ones up. Then the elevator died, not browned out, died, The power had been coming and going for days, an hour on, three off, and one of those offs. It just didn't come back.

5:34 I heard it stop. That settling sound a building makes, the held breath. It let it go and didn't draw another. And I stood in my kitchen with a glass of warm water in my hand and did the arithmetic everybody in that building had already done and already acted on. Nine floors, no elevator. 104 degrees in a stairwell with no windows. I could have made it down. I want to be honest with you, because honesty is the only thing I have left to give this. I could have walked down nine flights and out the front door and found a cooling centre, or a friend's couch, or a bus going north, the way everyone else did. The smart ones.

6:19 The ones still alive to be smart. My legs worked. My heart worked. I could have left. Edith couldn't. That was the whole of it, that one fact. She could not get down those stairs, not nine floors, not in that heat, not on that hip. And you don't leave an old woman to cook in a tower because the elevator broke.

6:42 You don't.

6:43 Somebody had to stay. Somebody had to stay. I said it to myself in the kitchen, the warm glass sweating in my hand. I said it like it settled something. I didn't notice then. how badly I needed it to be true. I went across the hall. She had her windows open and a wet dish towel around her neck, doing a crossword in the grey light, perfectly calm, like the end of the world was a thing that happened to other buildings. There's my girl, she said. I told her the elevator was gone. She said she'd gathered as much, since the hall had gone so quiet. Then she put her hand on my arm. Her hand was cool. She ran cool. Old people do. And she said, I'm glad you're here. I don't know what I'd have done. And

7:41 something in me unclenched that had been clenched my whole life. I told myself I was staying for her. Maybe you can already hear the lie in it. I couldn't. Not then. All I knew was that somebody in the world could not do without me, and for that, the heat could have everything else. I went down the stairwell once. That first night without the elevator, while there was still water in the pipes for an hour a day, I took my flashlight down to feel what I could carry, and to see, I told myself, whether anyone else was left, whether we really were alone up there, or only mostly.

8:21 I've tried to describe that stairwell to people since, and I can't make them feel it. The heat in a sealed concrete stairwell is not like air. It's like walking into a mouth. It had weight. It pressed on my eyes. Nine flights down, my flashlight the only light in the world, and the dark above me and below me was so complete that the little circle of floor at my feet felt like the only thing that still existed. and I was making the rest up as I went. One step of reality, at a time. The doors to each floor were shut. I counted them down.

9:00 Eight.

9:01 Seven. Six. The building so silent that my own breath sounded like somebody following me, and twice I stopped and held it just to be sure it was mine. The door to the fourth floor was standing open. Open, and propped with a phone book. The way you'd prop a door if you meant to come back through it. Every other door in that stairwell was shut because people closing up a home in a hurry closed the door behind them.

9:28 It's the last thing your hands do. You do it without thinking. But the fourth floor door stood open onto a black hallway and the dark in that hallway was a different dark than the stairwell. A lived-in dark. And the smell that came out of it was not the empty smell of the floors above. I stood there a long time with my little light. I did not go in.

9:53 I'm not proud of that, and I'm not ashamed of it either. I told myself I'd imagine the rest of it, the feeling that the open door was no accident, that somebody had wanted a way back in, that somebody was, right then, standing very still, just inside that dark, listening to me listen to them. I filled my jugs at the second floor tap and went back up fast. I did not look at the fourth floor door when I passed it. I kept my light on the steps, and my eyes on my light, and I climbed. And the worst part, the part I've never told anyone until now, is that somewhere around the seventh floor, I stopped hearing my own footsteps echo. In a stairwell, your steps come back to you, bounce up and down the shaft. And

10:43 they had been, all the way down. Then they weren't. like the dark had gotten thick enough to swallow the sound before it could return, or like something below me had started climbing too, in time with me, close enough that the two sets of steps had become one. I didn't stop to test it. You don't, at a moment like that. You climb. At the top I locked my own door and stood with my back against it in the dark, breathing, telling Edith through the wall she couldn't hear me, that we were fine. that we were alone up here. That alone was the good news. We were not alone. I'd learn that soon enough. The last thing that happened that first night, I had the little battery radio going low for company. They were still broadcasting then.

11:37 The emergency station. A man's voice reading the same things over and over in the flat way they're taught. Shelter in place. Districts evacuating. north to south. Limit exertion. Drink water. Water I didn't have. He read out our district number. I remember that, hearing the number of the very ground I was standing on read out in that dead official voice, the way you'd read a name off a list. And then he stopped reading. There was a silence on the air that was not a pause. And then he said not to me, not to anyone in a voice that had stopped being official. There's no one coming for these people.

12:20 I've been told to keep reading. And there's no one. And the broadcast cut. Not to static. To nothing. To the particular dead air of a switch thrown by a hand. Then a hum. Then a recording. A woman this time. Calm. Reading the same flat words from the beginning. As if the man had never spoken at all. I turned it off.

12:47 I sat in the dark on the ninth floor of a building with one old woman and something on the fourth in a city that had read out my address and then admitted by accident in a human voice that the address didn't matter anymore. No one was coming. That was the truth of the first night and I held it the way I'd held somebody has to stay, turning it over, looking for the part of it that was good news. I found it. God help me. I found it.

13:20 If no one was coming, then no one was coming to take her north. No one was coming to make me leave. No one was coming to be needed by her instead of me. I went to sleep that night almost happy. And that's the first thing I have to confess to you. Before any of the worst ones. Thanks for watching!