The Escalator That Went Up Forever

The shopping centre near my office has two floors. I know it the way you know a place you've eaten lunch in three hundred times: ground floor shops, first floor food court, a single escalator connecting them, forty seconds top to bottom. I could ride it blindfold.

On a wet Thursday I stepped onto the up escalator carrying a sandwich I hadn't paid for yet — I'd grabbed it to read the label in better light, an innocent little theft I was about to correct upstairs. The escalator rose past the first floor. I noticed without alarm; sometimes you drift. Then it passed a second floor I had never seen, a mezzanine of shuttered units, and kept climbing. A third. The handrail hummed under my palm. The sandwich sweated in my grip. I turned to look back down and the escalator fell away beneath me into a perspective far too long for a two-storey building, a silver river of steps descending into a haze.

I did not panic, which frightens me now. I felt the calm you feel in dreams, the acceptance of impossible architecture. Ninety seconds, my phone later confirmed, though it felt both longer and like no time at all.