The Third-Floor Buttons Press Themselves at 4 A.M.

I run the night desk in an office tower, twenty-two floors, and my domain between midnight and six is a bank of monitors and a system log that records every door, every lift call, every card swipe in the building. On a good night it's the most boring job in the world, and I like boring.

The third floor has been sealed for renovation for over a year — stripped, dark, hoarded off, the lift programmed not to stop there, the floor a dead zone on my monitors showing nothing but a locked hoarding and the occasional skittering shadow of dust. Nobody's been up there after hours in months; the day contractors leave by five and the floor is locked down for the night.

Every night at 4 a.m., the third-floor lift call button presses itself.

I see it on my panel: the call light for floor three, illuminating, at 4 a.m., give or take a minute. The lift, which is programmed to skip three, doesn't go — but the call registers, and the log records it, cold and specific: 'Lift call, floor 3, 04:00,' night after night, a request to descend from a sealed dark floor where there is no one to press a button, logged by a system that does not lie and cannot be fooled by a draught.

I did the diligence. Checked the wiring with the day engineers, who found nothing. Watched the third-floor lift lobby on the one camera that still covers it — the feed shows the dark lobby, the call button, and at 4 a.m., the button lighting up, pressed, with no one in frame, no movement, nothing, just the button depressing itself in an empty sealed lobby and the call registering on my log. I have the footage. The day staff have seen it. Nobody has an explanation and the renovation, tellingly, keeps falling behind because the contractors, I've gathered, don't love that floor.

The building's old — this was something else before it was offices — and I did what you do, I asked the oldest security guy, semi-retired, who's worked it forever. He wasn't surprised. Someone 'used to want the lift at four,' he said, in the tone of a man passing on a known thing, and wouldn't say more, and looked, for a moment, like he'd rather I hadn't asked.

So now, at 4 a.m., when the third-floor call lights up my panel, I don't investigate anymore, and I don't send the lift, and I don't feel the need to explain it to the day shift who've stopped asking. I just note it in my own log, the way you note a tide: 'Floor 3 called, 04:00, as usual.' Whoever wants the lift at four has wanted it a long time, and will go on wanting it, and my job is only to sit at my desk and let the button press itself and not, whatever happens, decide to go up to three and hold the doors.