Don't Press the Button for the Fourth Floor

By 杏仁豆腐

This building has no fourth floor. Not on the blueprints, not on the floor indicator, not on the fire escape signs.

And yet, once or twice a month, there's a night when one more number appears on the panel in the elevator car. Whoever presses it is found at dawn on the bench in the first-floor lobby.

Setting: Koyo Building, Konyacho 3-chome | the eight hours from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

🔦 Night Shift at the Koyo Building

Behind the station in Konyacho stands a fifty-two-year-old mixed-use building. The Koyo Building, seven floors above ground and one below. A print shop on the first floor, a judicial scrivener's office on the second, a kimono sewing school on the third, storage and small offices on the fifth and sixth, and the seventh left empty. Your job is to cover these eight hours, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., alone. Three rounds: 11 p.m., 2 a.m., and 4 a.m. Twenty-six keys on the ring, in the order the tags hang. If nothing is wrong, mark a circle in the log, boil water, and wait. It was supposed to be that kind of night shift.

The One Who Teaches, and the One Who Comes

Komagata Toshiro: the senior guard, eight years on the job. Surly, but his explanations are astonishingly detailed, and he shows no mercy to anyone who skips a step. He teaches only three rules for the building. Don't press it, don't get off, don't look up. Ask why and he won't answer. All he says is that he'll remember you asked.

Yanase Fuyuko: daughter of Yanase Construction, the firm that built this building, now a part-timer at the management company. She always turns up late at night, saying she's come for documents. Her manner of speaking is quiet and polite, and her answers to questions sometimes land half a beat off. In March of the year she turned nine, she went missing in this building for three days, and she is the only one who doesn't remember how she came back.

What You Record

The numbers on the panel, from the bottom: B1, 1, 2, 3, and then 5. The fourth floor has been skipped since the building was completed. But on the paper tape of the elevator log, there are nights when a floor number "4" is printed at a time when no one was aboard. On the fire escape there is one extra landing between the third and fifth floors, and only there is the paint on the handrail new. On the patrol log sheet, there are times when a line has been added in your handwriting that you have no memory of writing. Do you want to help someone, to find out, or simply to keep the record straight? There are still six hours of night left.