Stairs, I Guess

You haven't truly seen horror until you've seen the Landing. And not many people have seen it. Well...not many people discuss it in open forum. The only cases of which I've ever seen haven't resulted in public discussion but upon mention, result in a horrified expression and a quick whisper 'Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Don't.' or something along the lines. Actually...quite often that exact expression. Not many have written on the subject either, but I assure you, there's a reason I'm not writing aloud.
The place is an ordinary place, though oddly enormous for its location, placed conspicuously around the faded borders of the midwest and the northeast. The Hotel is thirty-two stories high in a town with a population of less than three thousand. It finds its business though. Granted, the top twenty-two stories have been closed off. All stairwells are sealed with steel bars and the elevator buttons above floor ten are riveted from view with a brass plate over them. Luckily, for lore's sake, there is an alternative method for thrill seekers and dares. The fire escape which has a swingaway ladder on a platform at the third floor can be reached by laddering yourself to the platform and then walking the rest of the way. Although the top floors are banished quite efficiently from wandering eye, state mandates a healthy fire escape from every floor. God forbid a lone soul be trapped on the 31st floor of a building that posts very clearly that anything above floor 10 is considered trespassing and subject to the full extent of the law supposing they aren't shot on site as a suspected vandal or robber. All for the sake of the thrill.
After hearing the stories, very few people, even thrill seekers dare to live it themselves. That may give you a measure to the horror elicited by the Landing. Even the greatest ghost stories or horror tales give throngs of macabre fans and self-glorifying nobodies the desire to say they've "been there." But there is a significant amount of nobody that even says the words "I want to go," in any form of the phrase after listening to the tales behind the Landing. There are an incredibly select few, of course, who refuse to heed warnings, and I mean incredibly select. Nine times out of ten, (and I have not met even nine people who have been to the Landing, in nearly three years of research) the Horrified admit to not having been explained the terror thoroughly enough, plagued by vague images and ghost stories of a small patch of tile sitting between the thirtieth and thirty-first floor of a large Pennsylvania hotel in a small Pennsylvania town.
That's how I was explained it. That's how I decided to attend. That's how I never slept again. This is not a ghost story. If only the Landing could be explained by spirits of the dead. That would settle in my stomach. In my mind. In my eyes every night as I lie awake in terror of the sole possibility of returning to the Landing. Or of the possibility of its cancer spreading to other parts of The Hotel. Or beyond.
No, ghosts can not explain it. Nor demons or goblins or Halloween props. No, the Landing is explained only by an unmatched evil, concentrated onto a twenty or so square foot patch of concrete and tile, forever sealed from the world, forgotten. An evil which can not be contained, no matter how many steel bolts you lock on doors and brass plates you put on elevators. And that is what scares me the most. I only remember climbing up the fire escape, reaching the thirtieth floor at around 12:15. Noonish, not midnight. I was sliding back down the escape at roughly 12:16. My watch told me it was seconds but God, I felt like it had been days. As my rubber sole hit the decorated tile floor of the Landing I felt an awful squeeze on my heart. I could feel my adrenal glands pump an unreal amount of adrenaline into my blood stream telling my body "Don't you dare fight. This is flight." I obeyed. But not before experiencing the absolute horror that haunts me today. A horror so vile, it even haunts my family, though they can't explain their dread, and I can't bring myself to tell them. It permeates my life and I can't rid myself of it. I can't imagine myself without it. Normality doesn't equate tolerance, however. And nothing in my life fails to remind me of the evil I saw that day.