The Marble Game

The night shift at Meridian Contact Solutions was always quiet after midnight. I worked on the fifth floor of a refurbished 1970s office block on the edge of Birmingham’s industrial quarter. The building had been modernized—glass walls, LED lights—but the bones were old. The elevator, in particular, was a relic: a cramped metal box with mirrored walls and a control panel that hummed like a dying refrigerator.

At 3 a.m., I decided to take my break. My name is Eleanor, and I had been staring at a wall of ticket queues for seven hours. The break room was on the ground floor, and I grabbed my phone and a lukewarm coffee, slipping into the elevator on the fifth floor. I pressed the button for the lobby. The doors slid shut with a pneumatic sigh.

The elevator beeped—once, twice, three times. That was odd. There was no one else in the car. I assumed it was a sensor glitch, a common quirk of the old machine. I shrugged and leaned against the back wall.

Then the air turned cold. Not the stale, recycled chill of an office AC, but a pervasive cold that seeped through my blouse and settled in my bones. The LED lights above flickered, buzzing like trapped flies. The elevator didn’t move. I checked the floor indicator: it still said 5. I pressed the button again. The beeping continued, more insistent now, as if the elevator were counting something.

I looked into the mirrors, hoping to see the doors part, but the reflections seemed to stretch deeper than they should. The glass showed me a version of myself—slightly distorted, my face longer, my hair darker. I told myself it was a trick of the light.

Then I saw him. A boy, maybe seven years old, with skin the color of old paper. He stood in the corner of the elevator, but in the mirror, he was right behind me. He clutched a small gray ball. When our eyes met in the reflection, he smiled—a wide, unnatural grin that cracked his pale face like dry earth. He lifted the ball and bounced it once. It made a hollow thud.

I spun around. The corner was empty. I pressed the emergency call button, but the line crackled with static. The boy reappeared in the mirror on my left, now crouched, the ball resting on his palm. He started rolling it back and forth, watching me with eyes as black as polished coal.

‘I’m not playing,’ I said, my voice trembling. But the boy giggled. A high-pitched sound like marbles clinking.

The elevator jolted, and the doors opened. But instead of the bright lobby, I saw a dark corridor with peeling wallpaper. The carpet was stained, and there was a faint smell of damp ashes. A sign on the wall read ‘B2’ in peeling letters. I had never seen a basement level in this building.

The boy’s voice slipped through the silence. ‘Aren’t you going to play?’ He was now standing in the corridor, ball in hand, a step away from the elevator. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

I slammed the ‘L’ button, but the doors closed slowly. Through the narrowing gap, I saw him toss the ball into the elevator. It rolled to my feet. I looked down: it was a human eye, milky and filmed over. I screamed and kicked it away, but it rolled back, always returning, as if the floor were tilted.

The elevator dropped. I felt my stomach lurch. The lights went out, and in the black, I heard a soft thud, thud, thud—like a child bouncing a ball against the walls. The mirrors became cold, thin sheets of ice. I pressed my back to them, and the cold seeped through my clothes.

When the lights flickered back on, we were moving up. The floor indicator climbed: 6, 7, 8. But the building only had seven floors. It stopped at 8 with a soft ping. The doors opened onto a hallway identical to the one I’d seen before, but with numbers wrong: room numbers reversed, doors ajar. From one doorway, a pale hand emerged, holding a ball like the one before. It dropped it, and it thudded toward me.

I kicked it back into the hallway and hit the ground floor button repeatedly. The doors closed. The car plunged, but this time, the descent was smooth. The lights steadied. The cold receded. When the doors opened, I was in the lobby—bright, warm, filled with the hum of fluorescent lights. The security guard looked up from his crossword. ‘You okay, love? You look pale.’

I didn’t answer. I walked straight to the vending machines and bought a coffee, but my hands were shaking so badly I spilled it. I told myself it was a hallucination, a drop in blood sugar, a trick of old wiring. But when I looked down, there was a gray marble rolling on the floor by my feet.

I left the building that night and never went back. I quit over the phone the next day. But sometimes, in the quietest hours, I hear a soft thud in my apartment. And when I glance at a mirror, I catch a flicker—a small boy, holding a ball, waiting for me to join his game.