Once a serene shoreline, the coast was now in chaos. Angry waves crashed onto the beach with a fierce determination, only to retreat back into the tumultuous ocean. The once-peaceful wooden boardwalks trembled and occasionally splintered under the powerful winds. The heavy rain flooded nearby streets, turning the area into a watery mess. As night fell, the storm continued its ruthless attack, causing even the sturdiest beachfront buildings to quake. The wind howled like a savage creature, showing no signs of slowing down.

As the raging storm battered the coast, whipping up a frenzy of rain and sea water, the currents ripped up a wreck buried deep beneath the bay’s surface. The force of the waves tore away parts of the decaying vessel, hurling them towards land. Pieces of rusted steel and broken cargo littered the shore as the storm raged on past sunset. However, most of the debris remained unnoticed amid the chaos and destruction of the Nor’easter. Only a few foolish souls braved the elements to witness nature’s spectacle. The remaining residents of the coastal town had already left or remained inside their homes and apartments to ride out the tempest.

Amid the storm, a dutiful lady continued her duties inside the lobby of The Neptune, a converted hotel turned into an apartment complex. The building was past its prime, but it was her home and office. The howling wind buffeted the windows and rattled the bronze front door, but Chastity paid little attention. Her focus remained on her smartphone. The historic building weathered many Nor’easters over the years, so the woman worried more about the steady drain on her phone battery. The power went down several hours before, leaving the residents of the city in the dark and Chastity stuck behind the desk.

Normally, she was the landlord and leasing agent. However, the storm warnings sent many of the older residents to disperse inland to weather out the storm in hotels. Chastity hunkered down to ride out the fury with the few remaining residents. She had little choice but to remain at the lobby desk since her night clerk failed to show up. Not that she was angry at the man’s choice. After all, it would take a heartless person to complain about an employee unwilling to put their life in jeopardy over a part-time job.

Over the course of the evening, several of the residents made their way down to the lobby. They wanted company after the power dropped. Amid the awkward discussions that centered on the storm, they invariably asked for updates on when the power would come back. Chastity smiled despite wanting to tell them to check their cellphones or call the power company.

One man kept showing up in front of the counter that night. Ben Truedell, who had an apartment overlooking the bay, was an ex-sailor. The jovial older man with thick gray hair and a scar along his cheek appeared worried despite his attempts to joke with Chastity. It was his habit. The man almost always came down from his apartment during the storms to chat with the people on duty. Sometimes he would stagger down before telling the staff wild tales of his adventure across the globe on nights like this. However, Ben would grow serious after a while. He once told Chastity to never sail during a Nor’easter. When she asked the reason, he only shook his head.

“These eyes have seen too many things. Remember that every vow you break will always come back to you. That’s why I stay on land now,” Ben said with an air of resignation.

A sudden gust of wind and rain struck the outside glass while she thought about the conversation. It gave her a chill for no reason. Chastity sighed. Out of habit, she looked up at the round metal wall clock, yellowed from the years of smoking inside the building. Below it sat the old switchboard, which became a display piece behind the marble front counter. Since the clock ran on electricity, it still showed the same time, seven forty-two. While she realized the chances that the power would come back soon were slim, the woman stayed in the lobby during the bulk of the storm.

She got out of the chair and stretched, tired of losing to the online game. Chastity let out another sigh as she checked the time on her wrist phone. It was almost one o’clock, and she debated going to her apartment. Except for her, the lobby remained deserted.

As she lifted her arms over her head to stretch, she frowned. Watching the cold wind-driven rain, blown in from the open sea as it beat steadily against the glass, the woman realized her predicament. She was reluctant to leave, knowing as soon as she did, one of the residents would call her or come by her apartment. The thought of running through the swirling gusts of water cascading among the buildings along Front Street to get to her car suddenly had an appeal. She smiled to herself at the insane thought.

If the lights come on, it won’t matter now!

With a yawn, the woman stepped away from the counter and went into a small nook where the coffee station rested on a tiny refrigerator. She grabbed a clay mug with the building’s name printed on it, then poured water from the coffee station tap. Fortunately, the water remained hot enough for tea. Dipping a tea bag into the mug, she debated staying in the building against the idea of going home that night. So absorbed in her thoughts, she did not look up when someone pushed open the front door of the hotel.

A gust of cool and damp air blowing into the lobby and sending marketing brochures across the counter and to the floor suddenly pulled her from her thoughts. Chastity looked up, surprised she saw no one by the front door. Annoyed, she left her mug on the table and hurriedly walked across the marble floor to close the door.

After she shut it, she turned, nearly slipping to the floor. Looking down at the watery, muddy tracks leading from outside into the lobby. Confused, since she had seen no one enter, the building landlord looked around curiously. For a moment, she didn’t see anyone in the lobby at all. Then she spotted someone standing near the elevator at the other end of the room.

The tall figure was leaning against the wall, appearing to wait for the elevator to come down, and the person seemed to struggle to stand upright. The figure wore a shapeless black raincoat that hung heavily on their body, so long that it nearly touched the floor. With sleeves too long for their arms, the appearance immediately warned Chastity.

A vagrant!

Her thoughts went to the homeless encampment a few blocks away. She drove by it earlier that day, but the woman assumed the police had already forced them to a shelter before the storm. Staring at the figure, Chastity hesitated, unsure how to proceed. The mental illness of such people left her worried for her safety despite her belief in helping such a person. Worse for her, if something happened, the storm outside would delay any police response.

The weight of the situation settled heavily on her shoulders as she watched the person in the black raincoat turn to look at the stairwell. She guessed it was a man given his height, which made her even more worried. Her job was on the line if he went upstairs and started knocking on doors, but something inside her hesitated. It was a gut feeling, an indescribable reluctance to confront this stranger who seemed to hold power over her. The lobby around her felt suffocatingly still and silent, like the calm before a storm. Just behind her, Chastity heard the steady shower of rain pattering on the large window behind her, mocking her hesitation. With trembling hands, she pulled her keychain from her pants pocket, which contained a small bottle of pepper spray. Then she took a step forward, determined to do her job.

With a flash, the electricity suddenly restarted inside the building, causing her to jump. As she stood there, the elevator door suddenly opened. The old-fashioned wrought iron elevator door opened and the man leaning against the adjacent wall limped inside. As the door closed behind him, he didn’t turn around. Chastity finally spoke up.

“Hey, you! Wait a minute!”

Frustrated concern filled her face as she hurried across the floor, nearly slipping again on the muck leading to the elevator. When she got to the elevator shaft, the open iron design allowed her to see the swaying steel cables. The sound of the elevator motor down in the basement hummed. She stepped back, considering her options.

“He knows they’re waiting,” a hollow, guttural voice escaped from the elevator.

While it bothered her that the stranger walked through the lobby without being seen, Chastity was more worried about leaving her station. For her boss, rule number one for the late shift was to remain in the lobby area.

The elevator motor suddenly stopped, and she looked up to see the arrow on the dial pointed to the third floor. Chastity heard the steel doors far above her opening. Almost immediately, she heard a scream. A heart stopping wail that came through the elevator shaft sent shivers down Chastity’s neck. She immediately headed to the stairs.

Winded from the climb to the third floor, Chastity looked around as she got closer to the elevator. The doors were already closed, and the occupant continued his journey to the top floor. The woman hurriedly scanned the area and finally noticed movement by a large pot holding a fake plant. Chastity wanted to sigh in relief when she saw the pair of tennis shoes slowly moving, and she hurried over. She found a young, terrified woman in a fetal position behind the plant. She recognized the tenant, who was wearing a green jumpsuit.

“Miss Wallace, what happened? Did you see a man inside the elevator?”

The distraught woman stared at the landlord with wide eyes before she started rambling incoherently.

“I — was coming down to the lobby. When the elevator door — opened.” She suddenly looked over at the elevator.

“But — it — wasn’t a man. It — didn’t have any face!”

Chastity crinkled her face at the scared tenant. Sympathy quickly displaced the instant urge to laugh at her and she held her tongue.

“It’s alright, it’s just a homeless man who got past me. Let me get you back to your apartment.”

Chastity helped the woman to her feet. They went to the tenant’s apartment as the landlord told her she had police coming to help. The sounds of the elevator stopped when they reached Wallace’s door. Both women looked back at the wrought iron elevator shaft, where the cable wobbled.

“There’s no need to be frightened,” Chastity continued. “Something was wrong with him when I saw him in the lobby. I’ll make sure he doesn’t scare anymore of our tenants.”

After doing her best to reassure the woman, Chastity went back to the elevator. While she looked at the dial over the door as it showed the lift on the next floor, the owner debated. Finally, she pulled out her cell phone and called 911.

Chastity headed to the stairwell again, while the digital voice told her to hold. Then she stopped and returned to the elevator doors. The cell signal dropped when people went to the stairs because of the old thick walls. The woman did not want to meet the strange man in the black coat while stuck in a dead zone.

While the woman waited on hold, her thoughts went back to the man in the black raincoat. She remained unclear if he was walking on the next floor, since she never heard the doors above her open. However, Chastity had a good idea of the incident, which frightened Wallace. She decided that the stranger, probably drunk or high, must have fallen back against the elevator wall. When Miss Wallace entered the dimly lit area and the man’s hood must have fooled her into believing the homeless man had no face.

It’s the only explanation!

She pushed the elevator button, and almost immediately, the power inside the building suddenly dropped. Chastity let out a startled cry, turning red from embarrassment, when the emergency light suddenly turned on.

That explains why I didn’t see the homeless guy in the lobby, she reasoned. The long power outage drained the batteries of the emergency lights, so she didn’t get a good view of the stranger after the door in the lobby opened.

The woman stood nervously waiting and listening for sounds above her. She knew that many of the residents left before the storm, so she decided the residents who remained would stay inside their apartments.

Chastity tapped her foot, swore lightly under her breath while hearing the same loop of a song coming from the 911 hold music. Squinting up between the open iron decorations, she saw the outline of the elevator car in the dusky light coming from the next floor emergency light.

Muttering to herself, she went back to the stairs. The lights by the entrance felt more comfortable and she could see if the stranger had come back from the next floor.

As she waited in the middle of the building, she felt a suffocating quiet aura envelope across the area. Even the lashing winds outside didn’t reach her ears. The urge to go upstairs remained, but Chastity kept listening to the voice recording for 911, convinced not to walk into danger. She looked at the phone in disgust as the time showed her it was nearly one o’clock.

Suddenly, the woman heard a heavy knock on a door which was distant, yet the echoes reached her. Chastity wandered over toward the elevator, picking up the noise of voices, indistinct.

“No, I’m not ready!”

The woman recognized Mr. Truedell’s fearful voice.

“It doesn’t matter!”

The same hollow tone she heard earlier came down the open elevator shaft. A faint clash of metal followed as the doors above her slammed shut. Suddenly, the elevator motor started, and she saw the cable loop moving.

Impossible!

Her heart pounding in her chest, Chastity frantically scanned the dark building, looking for signs that the building power came back. She couldn’t understand how the electric motor of the elevator came to life. But as she took a step forward, a piercing shriek shattered the silence, echoing through the empty hall with ferocious intensity. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end as the howl grew louder and more intense, a primal cry of pain and terror that seemed to envelop every inch of her being.

And then, without warning, the elevator car plummeted down the shaft. A gut-wrenching scream joined with the sound of cables snapping. The noise filled the air with a deafening roar and left Chastity frozen in fear at the sheer horror of it all. The echoes of the terrible scream faded into a gut-retching moan from deep within the building. Chastity could only stand there, paralyzed by an overwhelming sense of dread.

A stifling silence filled the building, leaving the woman holding her breath. After a long moment, Chastity stepped over to the elevator shaft. A door opened, and she saw Miss Wallace timidly sticking her head out of the apartment. Chastity waved her back inside, then she slowly stepped by the wrought iron cage, which protected people from entering the open shaft.

For a full minute or more, the landlord remained weakly leaning against the elevator door, staring down into the darkness below. Finally, she heard a female calling out to her. She looked down at her hand and realized the 911 operator’s voice was coming through the speaker on her phone.

“Yes, I need to report an accident in my building,” Chastity’s monotone voice replied.

It took over an hour for the police and an ambulance to arrive. As she waited in the lobby, Chastity kept going over the events of the last few hours. After hearing the police would make their way to The Neptune, Chastity went to tell Miss Wallace about the elevator. She explained it as an accident, not revealing anything more.

As she made her way downstairs, Chastity’s conscious tugged at her to go check in the elevator. However, the woman couldn’t overcome her fright. The sounds continued to replay in her mind and her hands shook so much she could barely drink the fresh tea she made.

The electrical power still had not returned to the building, but the wind and rain gradually decreased. While Chastity paced back and forth near the front entrance, none of the tenants in the building came down, even after all the noise. She assumed they remained comfortable in their beds, asleep and oblivious to what she witnessed.

When the emergency services arrived in front of the building, it was a fire truck that led the way. Sheets of rain still beat against the pavements outside. When the two wet firemen in their heavy coats hurried inside, she quickly explained the situation as well as she could. Chastity avoided mentioning the unholy screams she heard. She only stated that the stranger appeared to be a homeless person.

“There might be two people inside. I thought I heard Ben Truedell’s voice. He’s one tenant still around today.”

The leader of the truck narrowed his eyes at her statement.

“You say the power inside the building was out, but someone tried to use the elevator anyway. Did you check to see if anyone is hurt?”

The woman’s eyes avoided them when she said no.

“It fell from the fifth floor,” she said.

The men glanced at each other after she went silent. They assumed she didn’t want to see the carnage. The firemen recognized an unpleasant task awaited them and one of them sighed.

“We’ll go look. The emergency brakes probably failed on that old elevator. Still, someone might survive.” He reassured her with a half-smile, then turned to his partner.

“Jim, pull our extraction equipment and have the others come down as well. We might need the manpower.”

Because of her reluctance to go into the basement, Chastity pointed them to the stairs. After shw watched them hurry away, she took a deep breath.

I need to understand what happened!

She was about to follow them when a policewoman in her rain gear entered the lobby.

“Are you the woman who called 911?”

Chastity retold her story to the policewoman as the woman went over to the elevator shaft. Her radio squealed, then the voice of one fireman who was in the basement came across the cop’s radio.

“Cable snapped but the elevator brakes slowed it down. No sounds, but we might have injuries. The car hit the bottom of the shaft just below the basement level.”

Shocked at the news, Chastity hurried to the stairs. Using her cellphone light, she went down into the darkness. The woman found the partially crumbled elevator car where two men attempted to pry open the door using something they called a hooligan. After several tries, the firefighter leader called for additional tools.

“We need an E3 Connect spreader,” he spoke into the mike attached to his coat.

Chastity repositioned herself to watch the ongoing work with the policewoman, who stood next to her. She looked over at the cop, who attempted to reassure Chastity. The landlord half listened as she hoped they would discover something rational to explain all the strange events.

The dim light from the fireman’s flashlights showed the metal box leaning to the side while several cables twisted around the top of the car. As she stared at the work, Chastity suddenly remembered a time when she spoke with Ben during a storm. He looked worried that night and had been drinking. She recalled the ex-captain leaning across the counter with the smell of whiskey on his breath.

“Like I told you about taking your ship out in a Nor’easter, don’t do it, even if you’ve got the blessings of a holy man. Only tragedy will come, and the crew never forgives.”

She wasn’t sure why that memory suddenly came to her. The woman shook her head, convinced she was overthinking the events she had witnessed. She looked down at her feet and quietly gasped. Next to her feet was a muddy footprint on the dusty floor. As her eyes followed the direction of the print, another fireman arrived with more equipment. His entrance into the basement forced her and the policewoman to move out of the way.

Soon, the men got the elevator door partially opened. One firefighter pointed a flashlight through the collapsed door. From her angle, she noticed something black and shapeless inside. They saw the rubber raincoat, still glistening and soaked with water, lying over something on the floor. The fireman entered the elevator car and pulled back the raincoat, and a beam from a flashlight landed on a familiar face. Chastity went rigid with shock and horror.

“That’s Ben!”

The dead man’s open eyes sockets were hollow, black spots without the eyes. Bloody trickles of a dark substance ran down his cheeks. Chastity forced the swelling nausea back down and she felt the policewoman turn her away from the scene. She leaned against a cement footer with her hand to keep from falling over. Trying not to cry, she barely heard the radio communication going on between the rescue crew and the ambulance. Her mind continued to replay Ben’s death cry as the elevator descended to the basement. Then, the rescuer announced something about the raincoat.

“Hey, what’s up with this coat? It’s filled with mud and it’s falling apart.”

Chastity was about to turn back when she noticed another footprint in the dim light on the dust covered floor. She followed it.

“Where are you going?” the policewoman asked.

The landlord pointed at the print.

“Someone got out,” she said flatly.

“No way!” The cop pulled out her flashlight and lit up the area. Her eyes widened in surprise at seeing the trail of irregularly shaped mud prints which went off into the darkness.

“I saw those prints when the man in that black raincoat came into the lobby earlier. He’s the one I called you about,” Chastity explained.

They followed the trial to the other end of the building’s basement. The footprints led to a door which Chastity knew the maintenance crew kept locked on the outside. However, they found the door open to the alley behind the building. The landlady gave up going further at this point. She recognized the alley led either to the bay or back to the homeless encampment. Deep down, Chastity knew the answer. However, she had no intention of telling her belief to the policewoman, who returned after looking around in the falling rain.

“I’ll call this in to the station,” she told Chastity before getting on the mike.

The landlord nodded absently and walked back through the basement to find Ben’s body now rested on a gurney. Looking at Ben’s body, covered with a black bag, the woman heard his voice. It suddenly reminded her of something else the old sailor said during another storm which felt like a lifetime ago to Chastity.

“You can never escape the curse that comes from a man who has no face!”

FINIS