The 13th Floor
Have you ever seen a hotel with a thirteenth floor? Have you ever wondered why there isn’t a thirteenth floor? Well I found one and now I know why there isn’t one.
Before I can get to the main story with all the juicy stuff, you are going to have to sit through a boring little introduction of my life and who’s in it, and how I live it. I have a best friend named Alex and he is about the only person I can relate to, and he is the only one who I can live with for more then a few hours without socking them in the face. Alex is one of those kids who know every thing there is to know about paranormal activities; basically he is a nerd. He devotes his whole life to the study of unexplained things. Now I am not talking about why little Jimmy hasn’t showed up for school unexplained. I am talking about like people disappearing or strange events that happen in a house. He is so devoted to his paranormal studies that even during school he always has his face buried in a book about some new haunted house, which is weird because he still manages to get good grades. He has no social life, and I guess that’s why we get along so well, I mean neither of us do have a social life, so we can kind of relate in that way.
Now, a little about me; I am sixteen and just recently got my drivers license, but I guess that doesn’t matter because I would still drive without it. I don’t care about school and I don’t get along with anyone except for Alex. My parents left me when I was three and from then on I haven’t been the apple of anybody’s eyes.
Before I forget to mention him, we have a cameraman that shoots all of our adventures while we live them. We picked him up some time ago on one of our trips. He is a bit strange and likes to pull practical jokes on people, but he is not afraid of anything; I mean you could put a gun to his head and pull the trigger and shoot a blank and he wouldn’t even flinch.
Alex and I have a weekly schedule. He goes to school, studies hard, and gets good grades. I, on the other hand, go to class only when I feel like it, but even then I usually sleep through it. But on the weekend we have the same schedule. Alex, our cameraman, and I go to the newest place Alex has researched, whether it is a ghastly graveyard, a creepy old house, or the thirteenth floor of a hotel. We go and document the place for a thrill.
On past trips we have had some scary and tragic moments. We have also had some boring uneventful, waste of time trips (kind of like watching a golf tournament).
On one special trip to a college campus we had a tragic loss. We were exploring the supposedly haunted room 333. We had been there for about half an hour or so when we discovered our cameraman was gone. He had simply disappeared. After a few nice minutes of searching we gave up and called the police. At first they thought the call to be a prank, but after a few minutes of Alex talking to them, they agreed to at least check it out.
When they finally arrived (about an hour later) they had some donuts and coffee. I guess they didn’t believe us, but they decided to have a good look around any way and maybe find our friend. The moment we opened the door we felt a spine-tingling rush of cold air. We took a few steps in and turned on our flashlights because for some reason the power didn’t work in there. We decided to split up, Alex and I went to the bedroom and the cops went to the kitchen. Not even a step into the room we heard the cops scream loud enough to shatter glass. Instinctively we ran as fast as we could to get to the cops in danger. When we arrived, there was an eerie glow from the skylight above and directly in the beam of light from the moon was our cameraman, hanging from the ceiling from a thick brown rope. His mouth was wide open looking kind of like the two dumbfounded cops.
On the table next to our deceased friend was his camera, and by the camera was a note. The note said two single words, “watch me.” We sprinted faster than lightning back to the supply truck with all of our equipment, while the cops stayed stiff as a board. At the truck we watched the tape and on it, all we saw was a bunch of blurs but what we heard was another story. The tape told us to go to a hotel in Stonewall, Kansas and at the hotel enter the elevator from the main lobby at 11:11 and go to the thirteenth floor and there it said we would find a surprise. Then with a fuzzy sound and a click the camera went dead.
Wanting to know what the tape was about we planned our trip for September 30. We decided to get there at about five and explore a little first.
When we exited the truck we gathered up our camera gear, because now we have to record this stuff by ourselves, and ventured in. We decided to start low and work our way up. In the basement, which was labeled maintenance, we didn’t really see anything out of the ordinary. Mostly it was just pipes and other normal basement/maintenance paraphernalia. We got bored of seeing the same stuff and headed back to the elevator. All of the other floors were normal except for in the elevator there was no button for the thirteenth floor, but we decided to look again at the instructed time.
At 11:11 we got back in the elevator and looked to see if there had magically appeared a way to get to the thirteenth floor and sure enough there it was. In the back corner there as an old-fashioned rod sticking out of the elevator floor that could control where the elevator went, and on that lever there was one destination asigned; the thirteenth floor.
When we got to our final destination and the doors opened into a magnificent ballroom before us, and in it was a party. Not young parties that you think of today, but an old dancing party like you only see on television, and there in the middle of the crowd was our supposedly dead camera man. Of course we thought it was one of his jokes, so we decided to confront him and give him props for the intricacy of this prank. As we moved to him he moved away, always keeping his distance from us. Even though he just kept moving, we kept moving with him. He led us straight to the stairs which we hadn’t taken the time to notice. Once we got to the door we flung it open just in time to see the door a flight of stairs down slam shut. We practically jumped the whole flight of stairs getting to the door.
On the other side of the door we noticed a similarity to the basement; in fact it was the basement. We had miraculously skipped all the floors in between, but that didn’t matter to us. All that mattered was that we caught our cameraman who was running more and more toward the end of the basement. Eventually we got to the spot were we turned around earlier that day and then we entered a narrow strip of walkway, and on either side of us were holding cells. To make things even spookier we felt a damp chilly feeling all around us and as we ran by the small chambers of peril we would see glimpses of past prisoners, but upon a second glance we would only see emptiness.
At last our little refugee ran into a dead end and paused a minute. We thought that we had him but he turned into the last cell, which was dumb because that was even more confining. We both lunged into the darkness of the imprisonment chamber and noticed that he wasn’t in there. We didn’t realize in time that it was a trap and the door shut with a loud boom that made the loudest thunder shake in its boots. On the outside we saw our old partner laughing menacingly and pointing the camera at us and saying, “This is the last little trip to the unexplained for these two.” and placed the camera down for the next to come to find. Then he just disappeared into the thin dark air.
Impetuously frightened we searched for a way to escape. We scratched our nails on the wall to the end of their lives. We dug with our hands until our hands were raw and our fingers wore down to the bone. Knowing there was no way of escape we calapsed to the floor sobbing in a fit of fright. Alex realized that there was no chance and grabbed in his pocket for something, and out he pulled a knife. He reached to plunge it into himself in a last resort of escape when I noticed a hole under the bench. I quickly grabbed the knife from him and pointed the hole out to him.
He frantically crawled to the hole and began to enter, it was a tight squeeze but it was our last hope of escape. Still holding the knife I followed him. I kept the knife close by for protection of what could come next.
As we ventured on down the tunnel it started to get gradually steeper. After it got so steep that we about decided to turn back, but fearing what might be waiting for us back at the hotel we decided to continue on. As the oxygen got shorter in supply we started to become more worried about if we would ever make it out with our lives.
All of a sudden I heard Alex scream and as he continued to scream it sounded like he was moving away at a rapid pace. So I wielded the knife before me for protection against what ever got Alex. As I moved forward I found a hole, but too bad for me I found it and went down it; straight down it.
After about 5 seconds of falling I realized that if I ever hit the ground I would die anyway. I guess it was planned, but why would our cameraman set us up, or was he really just that sick? Well what ever it was I decided I didn’t want to know how the rest of the story would turn out so I plunged the knife into my heart and………..