The Riser on the Fifth Floor

During my stint with a provincial repertory company, we were staging a grand historical drama at the old Cervantes Auditorium. The building was a relic from the 1920s, with creaky floorboards, flickering chandeliers, and a freight elevator that had been out of service for years. On the final night of a grueling tech week, we were loading out the set after a successful performance. The cast, mostly college students, were exhausted but exhilarated. Among them were five of us girls tasked with hauling a massive wooden riser up to the fifth-floor storage room.

We started up the narrow service stairwell, our footsteps echoing on the worn linoleum. The riser was heavy, and we were laughing nervously, trying to keep our spirits up. As we climbed past the third floor, the air began to change. It grew colder with each step, until our breath became visible. Goosebumps prickled our arms despite the sweat from the effort. One of us, trying to break the silence, began humming a tune from the show—a jaunty Spanish melody. But the hum seemed to twist in the cold air, becoming a dissonant drone that made our skin crawl.

We reached the fifth floor, a dim corridor lined with sealed doors. The storage room was at the end, near a broken window that let in a sliver of pale moonlight. As we set the riser down to catch our breath, we heard it—a low, rhythmic thumping, like something heavy being dropped overhead. But we were already on the top floor. The sound stopped when we fell silent, but started again, more insistent. We looked at each other, eyes wide, and without a word, we bolted for the stairwell.

But the stairwell door was locked. We rattled the handle, panic rising. The thumping grew louder, closer, as if something was descending the stairs from above. But there was no above—we were on the fifth floor, and the roof access was locked. I pressed my ear to the door and heard a faint whispering, a chorus of voices speaking in a language I didn’t recognize, but somehow understood: ‘You shouldn’t have brought that up here.’

We fled down the main stairs, taking them two at a time, not daring to look back. We burst into the lobby, gasping, and found the rest of the cast packing up. They asked where we had been, and we tried to explain, but they just laughed, saying we were letting our imaginations run wild. However, when we went to retrieve the riser the next day, it was gone. The storage room was completely empty, and the door to the roof, which had been locked, was now ajar, revealing a dark stairway leading up to a low-ceilinged attic we had never noticed.

We never spoke of it again, but sometimes, when I’m alone in a quiet building and the air turns cold, I swear I can hear that humming—and the thumping, waiting for someone to carry that riser up one more floor.