The Realty Tower stood as a somewhat unremarkable fixture in downtown Youngstown"s skyline, a product of mid-century optimism whose once-modern facade now looked decidedly dated, even a bit weary. Its twelve floors housed a rotating, often transient cast of law firms, accountants, vaguely defined consulting agencies, and the occasional struggling non-profit, while the lower levels clung onto a few dwindling retail tenants fighting against the tide of online commerce. Kevin worked as a city-wide courier, a job that granted him intimate, if fleeting, access to nearly every office building downtown, including the mundane Realty Tower, which featured on his route at least two or three times every week.
He knew the building reasonably well, or so he thought he did. Twelve floors above the lobby, according to the slightly worn, brass-plated directory prominently displayed near the elevators. His usual pickups and drop-offs were for firms located on the 7th, 9th, and 11th floors. He typically used the elevators – a pair of slightly temperamental lifts that groaned under load – occasionally opting for the echoing concrete stairwells if he was just going up or down a single level. It was, by all accounts, an unremarkable building, just another stop on his daily, often hectic, route through the city.
He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he first noticed something was fundamentally off about the Realty Tower. It wasn’t a sudden revelation, but rather a slow dawning, a series of fleeting moments of cognitive dissonance, subtle mismatches between expectation and reality that initially seemed easy to dismiss. One afternoon, waiting impatiently for the elevator in the slightly worn lobby, he idly glanced at the call panel beside the doors. He pressed the button for 9, his usual destination that day. As he did, his finger brushed against another button positioned just below it, a button he swore hadn’t been there moments before – a worn plastic square labeled “SB” for Sub-Basement. He frowned, puzzled. He’d never known the Realty Tower to have a sub-basement; the regular basement level (B) housed building storage, maintenance workshops, and the boiler room. He looked again a moment later as the elevator arrived with a soft ding. The “SB” button was gone. Just the standard B, L, 2 through 12. He shook his head slightly, figuring he’d misread it in the dim lobby light, or perhaps it was just a trick of light reflecting on the worn, scratched plastic surface.
Another time, taking the stairs down from the 7th floor to save time, he automatically counted the flights as he descended. He expected to take six flights of stairs to reach the lobby level from the 7th floor. But as he pushed through the heavy fire door onto the lobby level, slightly out of breath, he realized with a jolt that he’d only descended five flights. He paused, confused, looking back up the stairwell. Had he miscounted? He glanced back at the stairwell door he’d just exited. It was clearly labeled “Lobby.” He must have simply zoned out during the descent and lost track. Still, the discrepancy felt odd, leaving a small residue of unease.
The real weirdness, the kind that became impossible to ignore or rationalize away, began when the discrepancies became more blatant, more frequent, and more architecturally impossible. One Monday morning, heading up to deliver an urgent package to the law firm on the 11th floor, he stepped into the elevator and his eyes immediately fixed on the floor selection panel. It clearly, undeniably went up to 13. There was a distinct, slightly newer-looking button labeled “13” positioned directly above the familiar “12”. He stared at it, his mind racing. The Realty Tower didn’t have a 13th floor. He knew it didn’t. He’d been up to the 12th floor countless times; it was unequivocally the top floor, housing a small accounting firm and some vacant office space. He hesitated, a strange mix of curiosity and apprehension warring within him. He was tempted to press the phantom button, just to see what would happen, but his delivery was time-sensitive. When he rode the exact same elevator down twenty minutes later, after completing his delivery, the panel stopped at 12. The “13” button was gone, leaving only a blank space where it had been. He felt a distinct prickle of unease crawl up his spine, a disturbing sense that his memory and the building’s physical reality were momentarily, inexplicably out of sync.
He started paying much closer attention after that, deliberately observing the building’s internal layout on every visit. He made a point of checking the elevator panels every single time he entered one, mentally noting the highest floor number displayed. Sometimes it was 12, as expected. Sometimes, disconcertingly often now, it was 13. Once, bizarrely, the panel in one elevator only went up to 11, as if the top floor had ceased to exist. He tried checking different elevators within the building; sometimes their panels matched, sometimes they showed different maximum floors on the same day, within minutes of each other. He started taking the stairs more often, deliberately, carefully counting the flights between known floors. Sometimes there seemed to be an extra landing, an extra flight of stairs squeezed between floors where none should exist. Sometimes a landing, or even an entire flight, seemed to be missing, forcing him to ascend or descend two floors’ worth of stairs between marked landings. He tried looking at the building from the outside, standing across the street, carefully counting the rows of windows. From the exterior, it always looked like twelve floors above the lobby level. Consistent, solid, unchanging. But inside? Inside, the number of floors, the very vertical structure of the building, seemed disconcertingly fluid, unstable.
He cautiously tried asking a friendly receptionist on the 9th floor, someone he chatted with regularly during his pickups. “Hey, Sarah, this is going to sound like a really weird question, but how many floors does this building actually have?” She gave him a strange, slightly concerned look. “Twelve, Kevin. Everyone knows that. Why do you ask?” He mumbled something vague about the elevator panel looking weird sometimes. She just shrugged. “Probably just needs maintenance. These old elevators are always acting up.” He tried asking one of the daytime security guards in the lobby, a stoic older man named Frank. Frank also insisted, without hesitation, that it was twelve floors. “Been working here fifteen years, son. It’s twelve floors.” Were they genuinely oblivious to the changes? Or was he, somehow, the only one experiencing these impossible architectural shifts?
One day, running slightly ahead of schedule, he found himself in an elevator where the “13” button was present again, seemingly mocking his apprehension. Curiosity finally overriding his deep-seated unease, Kevin took a deep breath and pressed it. The elevator hummed, ascended smoothly past the 12th floor indicator, and came to a gentle stop. The doors slid open. He hesitated for only a second before stepping out onto a floor that, according to all known blueprints and common knowledge, simply shouldn’t exist. The contrast with the rest of the building was immediate and jarring. Unlike the Realty Tower’s typically dated but functional office floors, this level was dimly lit by flickering, buzzing fluorescent tubes, profoundly silent, and appeared completely empty, yet strangely not derelict or abandoned. The carpets were clean, though worn. The walls were painted a neutral, institutional grey. But there were no doors leading off the corridor, no office numbers, no signs, no furniture, no fixtures other than the flickering lights. Just long, empty corridors stretching away into shadow in both directions. The air felt unnaturally cold, still, and carried a faint, unidentifiable chemical smell, vaguely antiseptic but also slightly sweet. He called out, “Hello? Anybody here?” His voice echoed unnervingly in the dead silence, absorbed by the oppressive emptiness. A profound sense of unease washed over him, a primal feeling of being somewhere fundamentally wrong, somewhere off the map of reality. He quickly stepped back into the waiting elevator and jabbed the button for the lobby. The doors slid closed, the elevator descended smoothly, and when he glanced back at the control panel, the “13” button was gone, replaced by the familiar blank space above the 12.
Another time, several weeks later, he needed to get to his regular pickup on the 7th floor, but the elevator panel he entered skipped directly from 6 to 8. Annoyed, thinking the button was broken, he got out at 6 and headed for the stairwell. He climbed the single flight to where the 7th floor landing should be. But between the 6th and 8th floor landings, where the fire door leading to the 7th floor corridor should have been, there was only a blank, continuous, uninterrupted brick wall, indistinguishable from the rest of the stairwell’s construction. He ran his hand over it – solid, real, cold brick and mortar. There was no sign a door had ever been there. Confused and increasingly disturbed, he went back down to the lobby and took a different elevator. This second elevator had a functioning 7th floor button, and it delivered him to the familiar, bustling offices of the accounting firm without issue. Later that same day, driven by a need to verify his own sanity, he checked the first stairwell again. The fire door leading to the 7th floor was back in its rightful place, looking completely normal, as if it had always been there. It was as if the building itself was actively editing its own structure, hiding or revealing entire floors at will, playing tricks on its occupants.
What could possibly explain such profound architectural instability? Kevin, now thoroughly obsessed, dove into the building’s history, spending hours at the Mahoning Valley Historical Society and searching online archives. The original blueprints, dating back to the early 1950s, clearly showed twelve floors plus a standard basement. However, he found fragmented records and old newspaper clippings detailing extensive, apparently poorly documented, renovations following a serious fire that gutted several upper floors in the late 1970s. Could a floor, perhaps the damaged 13th floor (if it ever existed), have been sealed off, hidden, effectively erased during the repairs, only to reappear intermittently due to some structural or metaphysical quirk? He also discovered persistent rumors about the building’s original construction being plagued by accidents, cost overruns, and whispers that it was built partially over an old, unstable coal mine shaft, leading to ongoing, subtle foundation issues. Could geological shifts or settling be causing perceptual distortions, or even (impossibly) affecting the building’s internal structure in localized ways? Then there were the darker whispers, the urban legends that cling to old downtown buildings – tales of a suicide from one of the upper floor windows during the Depression, a mob-related disappearance connected to a former tenant with shady dealings, unexplained cold spots, and fleeting apparitions. Could the building be haunted, its very structure shifting and reconfiguring itself to reflect its traumatic past or perhaps to hide its darkest secrets within phantom floors and walled-off corridors?
Kevin found himself considering wilder, more reality-bending theories. Was the Realty Tower situated on some kind of nexus of spacetime instability, causing it to flicker between different possible configurations or timelines? Was the building itself, in some bizarre way, sentient, consciously altering its layout for unknown reasons? Or was it somehow influenced by the collective perception, or lack thereof, of the people inside, its floor count fluctuating based on some unconscious consensus reality, only revealing its inconsistencies to those, like him, who paid too close attention? The sheer physical impossibility of a multi-story building adding or removing entire floors was staggering, undermining Kevin’s fundamental sense of a stable, predictable reality.
The psychological toll mounted rapidly. He began to actively dread visiting the Realty Tower, his stomach clenching whenever he saw it on his delivery schedule. Every elevator ride became fraught with anxiety. Was the floor he needed going to be there today? Would he see the phantom 13th floor button again, tempting him towards that empty, wrong space? Would he get trapped between floors if the building decided to reconfigure itself mid-transit? He started doubting his own memory, constantly questioning what he saw, wondering if he was losing his mind. He tried taking photos of the elevator panels when they showed the inconsistencies, but often the photos would later show a normal panel, or the crucial area would be inexplicably blurry or overexposed. He felt like the building itself was actively gaslighting him, deliberately sowing confusion and self-doubt.
He knew the potential dangers felt real, even if they defied logic. What if he stepped out onto the phantom 13th floor again and the elevator left without him, the floor vanishing behind him, trapping him in that silent, doorless void? What if he was working on the 7th floor when it decided to temporarily become a brick wall in the stairwell, cutting off escape routes? Could the constant, impossible shifting, whatever its cause, eventually lead to a catastrophic structural failure, a sudden collapse?
He started actively looking for a new job, any job that would keep him out of the Realty Tower. The ontological shock, the persistent, nagging feeling that the basic rules of physics and architecture were locally suspended within the confines of that one unremarkable downtown building, was simply too much to handle on a daily basis. He craved stability, predictability, buildings that obeyed the laws of construction and stayed put.
On his last day with the courier company, making a final, reluctant pickup from the accounting firm on the 9th floor, he rode the elevator down towards the lobby. He glanced at the panel one last time. It showed 12 floors. Normal. As the doors opened onto the familiar lobby, he saw a young woman, probably a new hire or a visitor, hesitating before getting into the elevator he was exiting. She looked confused, anxious. “Excuse me,” she asked Kevin hesitantly, her voice low, “This might sound crazy, but does this building have twelve or thirteen floors? The panel looked wrong just now… I thought I saw a 13…” Kevin just stared at her for a long moment, a cold wave washing over him, a mixture of validation and renewed dread. He wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t just him. He forced a tight, unconvincing smile. “Twelve,” he said firmly, meeting her gaze. “It’s always twelve.” He walked quickly out of the Realty Tower and didn’t look back, leaving the unstable landmark and its impossible, shifting secrets behind him, forever wondering how many floors it really had today, and who else knew its secret.