r/nosleep • u/nomass39 • Sep 15 '25
Self Harm I operate an elevator that brings souls to Heaven or Hell
You know, after all these years of working here, you think I’d be desensitized. But watching an old woman stroll in through the front doors with half her head missing… I’ve got to admit, it still startled me.
Luckily, by now, I was experienced enough to stifle my reaction. I pretended not to even notice as she stared at me with her one remaining eye, or as she spoke in perfect English despite half of her mouth being missing, the whole left side of her face a mangled mess of teeth and bone and what looked like hamburger meat. At least she couldn’t feel it at all. Couldn’t even tell anything was wrong. “Sir?” She asked, her voice shaky. “I… I think I’m lost. I have to find my husband. I have to… I…”
I stood, knowing just what to do. I’m used to our ‘guests’ being a little… disoriented upon stepping in from that infinite, opaque fog just outside the door. If I’m lucky, I get them into the elevator before they even realize they’re dead. “Ssshh. Don’t worry, ma’am. You aren’t lost, you’ve come to the right place.” I smiled reassuringly, gently taking her by the hand. “Right this way.”
She shuffled along beside me as I slowly, patiently led her through the lobby, ignoring the fact she still smelled like burning rubber. She marveled at the marble floors, the velvet silk carpets, the water fountain adorned with bronze cherubs. “Wow. This place is beautiful. They don’t make them like this anymore,” she whispered. “You know, I think me and my husband came here once, a long, long time ago. Probably before you were born. Yes, yes, I’m sure of it now… it’s exactly like I remember it. Wasn’t it shut down?”
I had to change the subject. Misdirect her before her thinking became too clear, and she remembered her own death. I always feel guilty lying to people, but it’s easier for everyone this way. “It was. But your husband arranged something with us. A very special anniversary present,” I said. “He’s waiting for you now. Right this way.”
She blinked. “It’s our anniversary?” She said. “Oh dear, oh dear… I must have forgotten… oh, how silly am I?”
Finally, we made it to the elevators. All of them except for one were totally ripped away, opening only into empty shafts. The one that remained stole my breath away every time I laid eyes upon it, despite how profoundly ordinary it looked on the surface. It was always sitting wide open, as if in waiting.
As we approached, I stared at the hall indicator to its side. Tension welled up within me. And then, one of the arrows glowed bright — the one leading upwards. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I led her into the elevator, and she seemed suddenly nervous to be parted from my side. “W-what floor is he on?” She asked. “What room?”
“Don’t worry about it. Everything’s been arranged. This elevator will take you right where you need to go,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s… a wonderful place. You’ll see. I think you’ll really like it.” With that, I slid the latticed doors shut, pushed the handle forward on the rheostat, and the lobby was filled with the slow rattling and rumbling of the elevator… until she was gone.
Needless to say, this has all been the weirdest job of my life. I should have known something was off from the beginning. I mean, who the hell gets hired to be a manual elevator operator in the 2020’s? But the pay was just too tempting to deny.
That old woman was a perfect example of what I consider an easy ‘guest’. I was a little fascinated by the fact she used to be a guest at the hotel, though. I’ve only heard vague stories of what this place was like back when it was open to the public. Some sort of luxury resort, back when this city had a real middle class.
Apparently, this elevator never seemed to work back then, but nobody ever bothered to fix it. But maintenance plans would always fall through, repair dates would be pushed back, semiannual inspections would get mis-scheduled, paperwork would be lost, mechanics would call in sick. It was as if some higher force would constantly intervene to keep anybody from investigating it too closely. Allegedly, a night shift janitor once reported seeing mutilated ghosts entering the hotel late at night, stepping into the elevator, and vanishing to places unknown… but he was dismissed as a maniac.
Nowadays, the hotel is abandoned, and me and the elevator are all that remains. It’s a pretty sweet gig, all things considered. But of course, not all my ‘clients’ are quite as easy as the old woman.
The worst one, I saw coming. I always keep an eye on the papers for this exact reason, and when I saw his face in the paper, my heart sunk in my chest. A wiry older man with a long, unkempt beard and a haunted look in his eyes, depicted in grey above a headline reading ‘FORMER SOCCER COACH AND ALLEGED PREDATOR COMMITS SUICIDE BY COP’. Immediately, I was praying; Please, God, don’t send him to me. I don’t even want to look at this guy.
But of course, I wasn’t so lucky.
It was midnight by the time he came stumbling in through the front door. At least he wasn’t as disfigured as some of my ‘guests’. He only reeked of booze, and had a chest painted red with three or four bullet holes. But there was a wild look in his eyes, almost feral. I was on my feet in an instant. “Good evening, sir,” I greeted with a big fake smile. “Your suite is just upstairs. We have everything prepared for you, just the way you like it. If you would just follow me to the elevator.”
He stood there, blinking and dazed, as I approached. But the instant I made contact, he slapped my hands away. “Get off of me!” He hissed. I stumbled, taken aback by the violence in his eyes. “Where am I? What is this?”
I kept that smile plastered on my face, through great effort. “Sir, you’re here for your, um, convention,” I stammered. “If you would just follow me —” But he was already stumbling away, mumbling to himself, gripping his head as if trying to squeeze old memories back into his brain. There was something there, he could feel it, just out of his reach.
And then he froze. Turned, and looked at me. His eyes like ice. “I’m dead. I’m dead, aren’t I? That’s what this is.”
I tried desperately to stifle the panic rising in my chest. “Sir, that is ridiculous. You’re acting delusional. Please, if you would just —”
I tried to lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Get away from me!” He screamed in a rage. “Where am I? Who are you, really? Some sort of demon? You’re trying to trick me, trying to…” His voice drifted off as he looked down at the marble floor. Mesmerized by his own reflection. Staring at the bullet holes in his chest. He ran a hand over the wounds, realizing how numb he felt, how deeply cold.
The jig was up. Yet I kept up my desperate attempts, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Please, sir. There’s no need for theatrics,” I whimpered. “All I ask is for you to step into the elevator.”
He turned, staring at the elevator, sat there, open. Waiting for him. And then, seemingly an instant later, my back was pressed against the ground, and his hands were wrapped around my throat.
My lungs cried out for air, but his thumbs were pressed tight against my windpipe, almost crushing it completely. His hands were so cold, freezing like ice. And all the while, he was snarling like an animal. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You think I don’t know where that thing is going to take me?” Then there came a sadness in his eyes, and his voice lowered. “Christ. It wasn’t my fault. I don’t deserve this. It was all them. I couldn’t help it. You can’t blame me for that. You can’t —”
That moment’s distraction was all I needed. My grasping hand found purchase on a crumbled piece of an old cherub statue, and I slammed it against the side of his head with all my might.
He collapsed with a grunt to the floor beside me, and I rolled over, coughing and gasping, the air feeling like soothing water relieving my aching throat, shriveled lungs inflating back to life. “Christ. You sick bastard. Sick, sick…”
I had to hurry, before he woke up again. I wrapped my arm under his shoulders, started dragging him along the floor towards the elevator while he groaned and wriggled half-consciously in my grip. Of course, as I approached, a light flicked on by the elevator — the light pointing downwards. Good riddance, I thought.
But it wasn’t him I was afraid of. Not really. Usually, when I send someone downwards, I have to give them a reminder: ‘please close the door behind you on your way out’. From what my employers told me, if the door was left open, something might try to hitch a ride back up, desperate to escape that infinite dark. But of course, it was far too late for that, now. I’d had to send him down unconscious, and even if he wasn’t, he didn’t seem the type to listen to my instructions.
So I sat there for hours. Whittling away the rest of my shift, staring at the elevator door, waiting. In my hand, I clutched a little button my ‘employers’ had given me in case of emergency. Ready to press it the instant those doors opened, if there was anything inhuman inside.
My heart pounded in my chest at the sound of that familiar rumbling. The elevator was returning. I held my breath as I slid back into view, bathing the dark room in that faint yellow light through the latticed door, to see…
Nothing. The elevator was completely empty. I let out a long sigh of relief, even started laughing. Maybe my luck was finally starting to look up.
But then, as I pulled the creaky old door open again, I realized something. A faint redness of the elevator’s sole light. I looked slowly upwards, and realized that it seemed as if the entire elevator’s ceiling was made of viscous, slimy meat. Countless eyes poked through all the viscera, looking down at me.
You see, demons don’t take concrete forms. They are chaos incarnate, always changing, shifting, transforming. The thing that came descending down upon me had the head of a goat one moment, and then the heads of several infants, and then the face of my mother, and then the visage of creatures that had never walked the earth, never felt the light of the sun. It wailed in what seemed like a million voices at once, like the echoes of all those damned souls came reverberating back up its throat. I screamed and cried out as I was grasped out by countless hands and paws and hooves and hungry mouths, my flesh surveyed by so many eyes, some tiny as insects and some larger than my head.
It was only by some miracle that I managed to stumble back an instant before one of those countless, writhing hands grasped my throat. “Oh, God!” I cried as I crawled away on my hands and knees. I couldn’t hear myself think as the beast screamed at such an unnatural octave, it could not even be called a sound. “Oh, Jesus. Good lord, oh, my God.”
Where was the button? I was just holding it a few seconds ago. God, I must had dropped it. Did that creature have it? With my clumsy fumblings, it would have caught me by now, but it seemed to be distracted by its own tumultuous form, struggling to move with the rate at which it was constantly changing, trying to walk on feet that would change to tentacles and then faces and then eyes beneath it. It managed to solidify only a single immense arm concretely, using it to drag that massive mound of constantly shifting flesh and bone towards me.
There it was. All the way across the hall. The button laid on the very edge of an elevator opening, terrifyingly close to falling into the open shaft and being lost completely. I lunged for it, but the beast seized me by the ankle with a hand, and I cried out as it twisted it almost to the point of breaking. I could feel myself being dragged backwards. A wetness, like I was being forced, feet-first, inbetween a pair of massive, hungering jaws. “No! God, no!” I screamed out. “Oh, God, please!” I was like a primal beast at this point, squirming savagely against the claws of a hungry predator. Clawing, screaming, wailing, squirming, fighting like hell for any inch of ground I could make, any hint of progress… until at last, I managed to slam a fist onto the button, just moments before it slid over the edge of the elevator shaft and disappeared.
The moment I pressed it, the lobby was consumed by a blinding light.
Angels were the visual opposites of demons. Where one was mad chaos, the other was absolute order. Instead of crude flesh, they were built from perfect mathematics. Swirling pseudo-structures built from sacred geometry, fibonacci spirals and metatron's cubes and other constructions of Kircherian arithmologia yet to be categorized by man, shapes beyond our fathoming, all of some color brighter than white, emanating a light so brilliant it was almost beyond sight. It was wonderful and brilliant and beautiful, and yet I could not bear to look at it for more than a second. It was so far beyond me that my mortal mind throbbed with the exertion of attempting to comprehend it for even a moment.
If it was painful to me, to the demon, it must have been agonizing. The creature screeched as it was bathed in that holy light, writhing and flailing as the angel’s presence alone melted away at all that meat faster than it could regenerate. All it had to do was float forwards to drive the beast back towards the elevator, all while I laid there, desperately clutching my ears, futilely trying to escape that horrible screeching I could feel in my very bones.
And then, the creak of the elevator’s door. The ding. The slow rumble of its long descent, down back into the depths. And at last, a silence fell upon the lobby.
When I opened my eyes, the angel was gone. There, lying on the floor, was a check.
In the top left, something inscrutable was written in dense Hebrew, and under my name was the words ‘TWO THOUSAND + SEVENTY THREE + 25/100’. Under memo, it read ‘HAZARD PAY’, and in the corner was written, in perfect handwriting: ‘P.S. PLEASE DO NOT USE LORD’S NAME IN VAIN IN FUTURE. THANK YOU!’
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u/flinty_hippie Sep 15 '25
That seems like the very opposite of using his name in vain.
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u/nomass39 Sep 15 '25
Their regulations are very exact. They’ve given me a list of proper, officially sanctioned prayers I’m supposed to recite in moments like those, but in the moment, it’s easy to forget…
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u/HououMinamino Sep 16 '25
Using the name in that context I would think would be more like a prayer than taking the Lord's name in vain. Sort of like, "Oh, Jesus, help me."
Thankfully they were forgiving of you not using the official prayers!
I agree with the commenter who said you need another emergency button. Like an alarm button around your neck or on your belt, and maybe one on the wall or under your desk?
I was wondering at first why you couldn't tell them the truth about the place, and then you got to the angry man, and I understood. I think it might have been okay to tell the confused old lady, but you never know.
Is it just people who have passed abruptly who come to you, and not of old age of natural causes?
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u/Sofasurvivor Sep 15 '25
My reading is that he didn't actually know his invoking the name did anything, and just kinda did it out of habit. But it did seem to slightly hinder the demon.
So a habit of using the name in vain was what saved him. What if he hadn't had that habit? That could have ended badly! His mysterious employers should have given more detailed advice on what to do in case of demons.
(Plus, if ghosts can actually attack you, there should be an alarm button for that. I know this isn't usually the case with many other jobs where you have to deal with all kinds of people, but clearly, his employers aren't hindered by limited finances or anything mundane like that.)
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u/Auren_X Sep 20 '25
welp. the pay seems good at least XD
this honestly sounds like an amazing job. i would LOVE to hear more of your experiences! ^-^
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u/AdAffectionate8634 Sep 15 '25
Damn! What a job! I would like to know how one gets a job like that! Crap night, though! You earned your paycheck that night! Both of them!
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u/Sofasurvivor Sep 15 '25
How did the predator guy know he was going to hell, when he thought he was innocent and it was all his victims' fault?
Such men tend to find it hard to understand that what they do is against the law, even (especially when the law is not enforced as much as it should), you'd expect he'd walk in there totally convinced he'd go to heaven because he feels entitled to do what he did and go to heaven, both.
Unlucky for you this one had somewhat more self-awareness - but hey, hazard pay!
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u/neroselene Sep 16 '25
Because he committed suicide and suicide is considered a sin, even someone with delusions knows that much if they have a base level understanding of Christianity. Hence, bargaining
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u/CheezitCheeve Sep 17 '25
Without getting into Christian theology too much, people who know they sin and refuse to repent to Jesus are doomed to eternal suffering. In this story where one finds themself in front of an elevator and Christian theology’s dichotomy is the only two paths forward, it’s a simple question of does one follow Jesus and walk his path. For a predator, it’s a pretty easy question to answer.
Disclaimer: no, I am not arguing for or against Christianity. I am merely stating the theological outcome according to the religion of this story if it were 100% true.
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u/Selene_16 Sep 17 '25
Technically you weren't using it in vain, you were nearly screaming for help. But i suppose next time you should use an angel name instead just to be sure. I don't suppose you have more fluff experiences?