Dead Men's s Boots

It amazed me that the other residents on this floor weren’t poking their heads out to add their own shouts of protest to the overall row: judging by their prurient interest in my comings and goings, it couldn’t be out of an exaggerated regard for other people’s privacy.

Something snapped in me at long last, and I walked back up the corridor to give my psychopathic neighbours’ door a dyspeptic kick. ‘Turn it in, for Christ’s sake,’ I Cakeidoshouted. ‘If you want to kill each other, use poison or something.

’

A door opened at my back, and I turned to find the woman in number eighty-three glaring at me.

‘Noise was getting to me,’ I said, by way of explanation. She just went on glaring. ‘Sorry,’ I added. She slammed her door shut in my face. While I was still staring at the NO CIRCULARS sign, I heard a ping from back the way I’d come, followed by a muffled thump: the lift warning bell, and the sound of the doors opening.

I jogged down the corridor, determined to catch it before it changed its mind.

I stepped inside, found it empty, and pressed G. Then just as the doors started to close I saw through the narrowing gap the front door of Ropey’s flat standing open. In the five minutes that I was downstairs, the neighbours could have the TV, the stereo and the three-piece suite. Irritably, I hit DOOR OPEN with my free hand and the doors froze, jerked, froze, with about a foot of clearance still to spare.

But before they could make up their mind whether to close again or slide all the way open, the entire lift lurched, the floor tilting violently.

Taken by surprise, I staggered and almost lost my footing. From above me came a sound of rending metal.

I had half a second to react. As the lift shuddered and lurched again, grinding against the wall of the shaft with a sickening squeal, I fought the yawing motion, barely keeping my feet under me, and flung myself through the half-open doors back out into the hallway. An explosive outrush of air followed me: I snapped my head round to look behind me – and saw the lift drop like several hundredweight of bricks into the shaft.

Some buried survival instinct made me snatch my right foot back across the threshold just as the roof of the car whipped past like the blade of a guillotine. The sole of my shoe was torn off completely and my ankle was wrenched so agonisingly that I thought for a moment that my foot had gone too.