“Suit yourself,” said the tall man. “Down,” he told the elevator operator.
When he was all alone on the thirteenth floor, Sydney Blake expanded his chest. It had taken so long! He walked over to the door of the staircase that he’d tried to find so many times, and pulled on it. It was stuck. Funny. He bent down and peered at it closely. It wasn’t locked. Just stuck. Have to get the repairman up to take care of it.
Never could tell. Might have an extra floor to rent in the old McGowan from now on. Ought to be kept up.
How did the building look from the outside? He found himself near another window and tried to look out. Something stopped him. The window was open, yet he couldn’t push his head past the sill. He went back to the window he’d looked out of originally. Same difficulty.
And suddenly he understood.
He ran to the elevator and jabbed his fist against the button. He held it there while his breathing went faster and faster. Through the diamond-shaped windows on the doors, he could see elevators rising and elevators descending. But they wouldn’t stop on the thirteenth floor.
Because there no longer was a thirteenth floor. Never had been one, in fact. Who ever heard of a thirteenth floor in the McGowan Building?…
Afterword
I had a duodenal ulcer and suffered horribly from it from the age of twenty-nine to the age of fifty-eight, when I finally had a partial gastroectomy—just a few years before it was discovered that ulcers were microbial in nature and could be treated by antibiotics. But I still look at this story or that by me and remember the amount of pain-time involved.
The week in which I wrote “The Tenants” was one of the worst. I typed the piece with one hand, massaging my abdomen with the other, while chugging down chalky tablespoonsful of a reasonably popular antacid of the time.
When I brought it to Horace Gold as a submission to his fantasy magazine, Beyond, he immediately commented on the white blobs on almost every page (this being before the age of the computer and printer: retyping a long manuscript then, if you didn’t have the money to hire someone, was a murderous chore).
“What is it,” he asked holding a page up to the light, “Maalox or Amphojel? I use Maalox, and this looks very much like it.”
Then he disappeared into his bedroom to read the story. He came out a few minutes later, grimacing, and called to Sam Merwin, his associate editor. “I want you to take a look at this,” he said.
I immediately felt a lot better. I had known Sam Merwin since he had been an editor at Thrilling Wonder Stories; I had great respect for his literary judgment (he had bought a lot of Ray Bradbury over the protests of his publisher) and he had always liked everything I wrote. But Sam read “The Tenants” and shrugged. “What is it supposed to be,” he asked, “something funny? Something eerie? What?”
“That’s how I feel,” Horace said. “What exactly were you trying to do?”
“Oh,” I said, picking up the story and heading for the door. “Nothing much. No thirteenth floor in a lot of buildings. I’ve always been curious about what’s on that floor.”
“Well, it’s meaningless to me,” I heard Horace say as I closed the door, and I heard Sam Merwin mutter agreement.
I sent the piece to Anthony Boucher of The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction, who, up to then, had not seen anything of mine he wanted to buy. By return mail I got a check with a bonus rate and a long letter burbling with praise over the story. “But don’t use Maalox,” it ended. “Stick to plain bicarbonate of soda.”
I called him and thanked him. Then I told him of Horace’s reaction, and Sam Merwin’s.
“Some people are color-blind,” he said. “And some are tone-deaf. You know that. Well, some have absolutely no sense of the thirteenth floor. You just have to feel sorry for them.”
Written 1953 / Published 1954