The Dumbwaiter

Going down. 

That's all Ty had been doing.

It seemed like hours. 

He caught glimpses of other rooms. Once he thought he saw Ron.  He called out, but there was no hope. Even if he could have caught Ty at the velocity he was traveling, all that Ty would have done is drag him down with him. 

How did this start? Because Ty was a jerk. 

Ty and his friends Kapri and Ron got wind that Marissa, the snobby rich girl that everyone hated, was moving into the Egeus estate, a mansion just outside of town. Naturally the group decided to give her and her family a welcoming gift. Ron brought his spray paint, Kapri brought her toilet paper, and Ty brought his lock picker. Using his lock picking skills, Ty broke into the house. When they broke into the house, however, they were so awestruck by the beauty of the house that they completely forgot about vandalizing it. They ended up playing around like children, trying to cram themselves into the dumbwaiter, messing with the elevator, spraying each other with the automated faucet. They embraced their immaturity so much that they decided to play hide and seek. Kapri was chosen to be the seeker, and the boys were left to find their hiding places. Ron scuttled off, and Ty sprinted up the stairs. He thought that Kapri might look inside the dumbwaiter, but she’d never think to look on top of it. He knew that the dumbwaiter was at the floor below the top floor, so he decided to go up to the top floor. From there he would drop on top of the dumbwaiter, which was only  8 feet below him, and wait it out until Kapri shouted she gave up. Perfect in theory but not in practice.

When Ty forced the dumbwaiter shaft open and looked down, the eight feet that he was planning on being an easy drop turned out to look very menacing. Ty gulped, and dropped the eight feet. He landed angled, and he felt a twinge of pain sent roaring up his ankle. He grimaced realizing that after this game he would have to leave to try and treat his ankle. He didn’t even want to think about explaining to his mom how he sprained it in the middle of the night. He shifted his weight to put the weight off of it. 

That weight shift may have been one of the unluckiest moves he had ever done. His phone, already sliding out of his pocket from his drop, slipped out like an oily french fry slips from a pair of bumbling fingers. It fell right down the crack between the dumbwaiter and the shaft. “No, no, no…” Ty said as his phone thunked against the walls. Now he was going to have to explain to his mom how he sprained his ankle and how he lost his phone. Well, he did have a good case on it, so maybe it survived the fall. After the game he would try and look for it.

The game. Why did he care so much about still playing? It doesn’t matter anyways. It’s hide and seek, a child’s game. Yet he still stayed rooted here, hoping that Ron’s hiding location wasn’t as amazing as his was. 

Bing! That was the sound of someone requesting the dumbwaiter. Ty hoped that it wasn’t up, because that means that he would get crushed up against the ceiling. That was the first bit of luck that Ty had this game. The dumbwaiter started to go down. It was too soon for Kapri to be looking for people, so Ty assumed that it was Ron. The dumb waiter went passed the fourth floor. Third floor. Second. First. Basement that Ty didn’t even know existed. It was here that he saw Ron, hiding behind a crate. Ty called out to him, but Ron didn't seem to be expecting him. He flinched awfully, his mess of brown hair bobbing, and then Ty could no longer see him. 

The dumbwaiter continued to go down, going faster and faster. At a certain point, Ty realized that the dumbwaiter was not being controlled. Ty knew from watching enough movies that freefalling in an elevator meant that they were most likely going to die. He didn’t take physics class to realize how that worked, but he assumed that the same would apply to dumbwaiters as well. Ty wasn’t religious, but he decided to try praying. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he said sorry to everything. Sorry for breaking into this house. Sorry for taking all of the free samples when the sales person wasn’t working.  Sorry for talking back to my mom. Sorry, sorry, sorry. 

When he thought that he said enough, he thought about what his friends are doing right now. Kapri wouldn’t give up for a while, but then Ron would get impatient and tell her where he last saw him. She would call up the dumbwaiter, for nothing to happen. They would look around the house for a bit, but once morning started  to come they would leave before Marissa and her family moved in. His friends would try to act normal. Ty’s mom would see that Ty is missing and she would hope that he just went to school early. But when the school calls to say that Ty is an unexcused absence, she would wait for him to get home and when he doesn’t, she would call  the police. The police would investigate people around him, and Ron would crack under pressure. Ron and Kapri would be investigated and then most likely sent to juvie for breaking and entering. The house would be investigated, much to Marissa’s family’s dismay, and either they would find him dead, or they wouldn’t find anything and file this under a missing person case and dismiss it forever. 

Ty was thinking about this as he was going down so far that he thought that he might just be going to the other side of the world and he’ll pop out in Australia. He chuckled at how childish of a thought that was. 

Minutes passed while Ty and the dumbwaiter kept on accelerating. It was that same amount of minutes until something different happened. The dumbwaiter began to slow down. Ty didn’t notice it at first, but soon he realized the air rushing past his head wasn’t rushing so fast. Soon it slowed down until it was going the speed it would normally be going between floors. I might not die! Ty thought. Then the dumbwaiter stopped. 

A bright room was in front of Ty. There were beds built into the wall, an admirable triple monitor setup, freezers and barrels that Ty really hoped were full of food, a bathroom with a shower. But one thing was missing.

A door out. 

Ty thought that maybe if he stayed on the dumbwaiter long enough, it would take him back up. He waited. He waited. Then something on the floor in front of him caught his eye.

His phone. Sure it was cracked like crazy, but if he had it then he wouldn’t have to explain to his mom why he didn’t have it. He lunged forward to grab it, almost as an impulse. Suddenly a huge metal plate slammed down behind him. “No, no, no…” Ty mumbled. He ran forward too quickly, forgetting about his ankle. Pain shot up his leg so bad he cried out. As he lay down next to the metal sheet, he heard the dumbwaiter zoom up. He checked his phone to see if it was still alive. No such luck. He locked himself in the room for nothing. He weakly banged his fist against the metal plate. Then he commenced sobbing. 

Ty hadn’t cried in ages. It felt rather good to relieve the stress. He cried about dying down here, locked in a bunker. At least falling to my death would have been quick, Ty thought. Now everyone will assume that I’m dead. But really, I’ll be down here, wasting my life away. He cried until his tear glands contained no more liquid. 

Suddenly, he sat straight up. I will not die alone. I will survive together. If that makes any sense at all. He stood up with difficulty and promptly limped into the bathroom.

Five minutes later, Ty came out of the bathroom, trying to look heroic. Then he loses his posture and limps back into the bathroom, thinking. There’s got to be a first aid kit somewhere. His first guess is right. He reaches into the cabinet above the sink and grabs the kit. He limps around and sits down on one of the cots. It creaks like how Ty’s history teacher talks. He opens up the kit. Luckily for Ty, there was an instruction manual. Even luckier, it included a section on how to bandage his ankle. 

Ten excruciating minutes later, Ty limped not as badly as before to the computer. He fired it up, happy to see that there was no password to log in. He was disappointed in what he found. No internet browsers, no email, no way to purchase apps, no way to interact with the outside world. However, whoever had previously used this laptop must have been a gamer. The computer had dozens of single-player games, many of which Ty had never heard of. At least it could be a good way to pass time. There were two programs that didn’t seem to be games, though: Interact and View. Ty opened View and promptly almost cried. 

View was a program that was connected to every security camera in the whole house. The security cameras were literally stationed everywhere. If Ty wanted to, he could see the whole house. But the first screen that happened to be pulled up was of his friends.

Kapri and Ron were still looking for him. Ty looked at the timestamp -- 7:19 October 4 2020 -- and choked up even more. His friends since middle school had been looking for him for what must have been four hours. School started in almost 25 minutes. You could see rings under their eyes, even with Kapri’s dark skin color. He watched as they shouted what he assumed was his name, clicking between screens as they opened cabinets and took glances down the dumbwaiter shaft frequently. He found the unmute button eventually. “Ty!” Kapri shouted with a crack in her voice. “I give up! Please,” she got quieter. “Please just come out, Ty.” Kapri said with emotion in her voice. 

“I’m down here, guys,” Ty said as if they could hear him. “I’m trying to get out, I swear, I’m trying...” 

“Kapri,” Ron said. “We got to get to school. It starts in fifteen minutes. All we can do is hope that he didn’t ditch us. He’ll be at school, I-I promise.” Ron leads a sniffling Kapri out the door. Ty stares at the screen where his friends go out of view. Overcome with grief and exhausted, he falls asleep. 

Ty wakes up hours later to noise. The timestamp reads 15:26 October 4 2020. He sees people saying, “Careful!” and “Easy does it,” lifting huge boxes. This must be the movers for Marissa’s family. Ty felt like he wasn’t even a human. He was just some overseer that saw everything that happened but couldn’t do anything. After a while, that got boring, so he decided to fix himself a meal. He checked out the food and made an inventory: beef jerky, craisins, raisins, dried cherries, frozen whole wheat bread, frozen pineapple, frozen mango, frozen blueberries, frozen strawberries, frozen green paste stuff, chocolate peanut butter ice cream, frozen cheese,  peanuts, cashews, hazelnuts, almonds, and pecans. Ty decided to make a fruit salad for his meal. 

He found the movers very boring, and his mind wasn’t quite functioning at full capacity. So he decided to log into one of the video games. 

Once he was in thinking mode, he entered the program called Interact. When he opened it, however, it was just a letter almost. 

Greetings, it read. If you are reading this then that means that hell has opened the gates down to the Earth…

Basically, Ty got the jist of, the previous owner of the Egeus estate was superstitious. He paid for this room to be done so that in case of an emergency apocalypse or something, he could survive.

Ty then proceeded to try and figure out a way to open the metal sheet, by force or otherwise. 

The next few weeks proceeded to follow a roughly same schedule. Meals, watch cams of Marissa and her family (which he found surprisingly amusing, they were all too snobby for each other) and one day cops (telling him that he was right with the assumption of what would happen with his absence), play video games, then try and figure out how to get out of the bunker. The last task he had no such luck for weeks. He realized that there was no way by force to open the sheet of metal. He checked the Interactive program for clues, pressed on tiles, flushed the toilet, whatever it took. 

 On October 31st, Halloween, he went back onto the Interactive program to look for clues. Not very Interactive, Ty thought for the dozenth time. Greetings. If you are reading this then that means that hell has opened the gates down to the Earth…  

I’d like to open this gate of hell. Ty thought, clicking on the open word furiously. 

Ty heard something erupt from behind him. He flinched, because he hadn’t heard such a loud noise in ages. He looked around. Something was missing, but he couldn’t place what. Then he spotted it. The sheet of metal was gone! He ran over to the dumbwaiter shaft and went inside of it, too dumbfounded for words. The word open in the Interactive program literally opens! TY had an idea. He ran over to the computer again and clicked on the word down. He then ran over to the shaft and looked up. Nothing happened. He then realized that it took maybe hours for it to get down when he was on it. He proceeded to play his favorite game on the computer while he waited. It may have just been his heightened sense of awareness due to adrenaline, but he beat the game. He made the words TY WAS HERE with toilet paper and ate chunks of frozen pineapple. He was about to eat some beef jerky when he heard a “ding”. The dumbwaiter was down at the bottom. Ty barely saluted the place goodbye before he climbed on the dumbwaiter. It lifted him up through the shaft. 

As Ty traveled up he realized that this is Halloween. This makes this so much better.

Hours later, he spotted the basement. Then the first floor. Then the second. His nerves were so high at this point that he thought he might have a heart attack. The doors opened on the third floor. He practically sprinted to Marissa’s room. First human interaction. He opened the door quietly and sneaked in. She was on her bed on her phone as usual. He reached out and gently touched her shoulder. “Boo,” was the first word he had uttered in weeks. 

Marissa shrieked. “GHOST!” she said, sprinting through the doors and out into the house. 

 Aight, I better skadoosh, thought Ty. He found his way through the house to the front door and left the house.  

He practically screamed as he ran into town to his house. He found his way to his mom’s house. He reached out and turned the doorknob. He crept into his own house. What would he say to his mom? Sorry I sneaked off in the middle of the night, but I’m here now?

“BEGONE, SPIRIT!” His mom came flying at him with a frying pan. 

“No, no, Mom…” Ty was interrupted by his mom thwacking him hard on the head with a frying pan. 

“Wait…Ty?” Ty got the best hug ever after that statement.

Ty ended up having to go to juvie, but there he was welcomed by Kapri and Ron. He soon got out, and life went back to normal. He was slightly ashamed of his actions, in fact all three of them were, so they never did anything like breaking and entering again.

Yet, at least. You never know.