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.

The steps flattened out and delivered me into a food court. Not our food court. Bigger, warmer, lit that honey colour old photographs have, busy with people eating at Formica tables, a hum of cutlery and conversation, signage in a font I half-recognised from childhood. A woman behind a counter smiled at me as though I were expected. I stood there holding my stolen sandwich, and some deep animal sense told me not to eat anything here, not to sit, not to stay.

I found a down escalator and rode it, and it took forty seconds, and it put me on the ground floor of the two-storey centre I knew, by the entrance I'd come in, the rain still going. I paid for the sandwich. My hands shook so badly the cashier asked if I was all right.

I have taken that escalator hundreds of times since, willing it to climb past the first floor. It never has. Two floors. Forty seconds. But I still don't eat before I ride it, and I still look back halfway up, every single time, to check how far down the bottom is.