The Symbol of the Tenth Floor
written by: Saint-Lazare
When he first walked through the door of my tattoo shop, my first thought was that he had been let out of an adult version of the Animaniacs Acme Labs. Think about the missing link between Pinky and The Brain if they played prog metal music to conquer the world.
Damon Underlig.
Fake black hair, real black leather jacket, trousers way too tight for a forty-year-old, especially one with a twink frame. Some friends had dragged me to a concert of his band Elegy once. Decent tunes, little guy syndrome. During the whole night, he had not stopped yapping between songs, squirting double entendre word salad like an AI situationship built by a firm of satanic marketing. He served Prince Charming of Darkness, with a whole side of camp.
On his first visit, though, I discovered that outside of his shows, he had puppy ice blue eyes and an anti-businessman awkwardness. The silk in his voice had almost an analgesic quality, but I had been around the tattoo and rock worlds for too long not to guess that the side effects included anal bleeding. In a nutshell, this dude’s appearance called for affectionate sadism, but no true masochist reached the level that he had. Behind his endearing Donkey smile, the Mephistophelian sparkle in his eyes betrayed him. And I worked for him. The Devil and his valet. He did not end up at my shop by chance.
“I a-do-re what you are doing here at Skincraft,” he told me, his index finger tapping my portfolio as if he were stimulating an invisible clit. “It is totally the esoteric style I am looking for, but your pieces have something truly unique, primitive. I like it raw like that. You and I, that’s kismet. But what’s your secret?”
“Lucid dreaming,” I answered.
At the request of his quizzical eyebrow, I expanded on my answer. I had made a name for myself thanks to my singular technique. I put myself into a state between conscious meditation and deep slumber, and I inserted myself into this uncanny time slot in which most people experience sleep paralysis. However, I was able to move in this neural hallucination, in this secret space. No detail fell into the abyss of my memory, and when I woke up, my notebook waited for me on my bedside table, and I wrote down and sketched everything I had seen. All my tattoos were based on my lucid dreams, and I had reserves for many more, if they found takers. Yet, Underlig did not want to dip into my archives, he wanted something new, just for him.
“I want you to go as far as you could in there, and bring me back a symbol no one else had seen before.”
He looked dead serious, and he had the money to prove it. I resisted a chortle, and accepted his tattoo request. We had a deal.
My body knew the ritual. That same evening, I put my notebook next to my head, with the pen on the cover, lay on my back in bed, and, taking one last look at the crack running across the ceiling with its watercolor aura of dampness, I took a deep breath as if diving into apnea. My vintage flip clock read 11:59PM. At the click of the slip flap, my eyelids fell like two heavy curtains. I dozed off, but then, I became aware that my duvet was slowly sliding down the bed. Without opening my eyes, I studied the room, plunged into darkness, knowing the position of every piece of furniture and familiar object. I knew that it was now 3PM, and that the paralysis demon was casting its lustful gaze on me. He did not frighten me, all I had to do was reach over and switch on the bedside lamp, and he would vanish. In the orange light, I got up, and headed for my bedroom door.
It opened onto a narrow corridor with a carpet of alternating squares of grey and apple green in different patterns. In my socks, I stepped into it. Spreading my arms, I could touch the walls and feel the glossy softness of their varnished plastic. Doors at regular intervals, and glass walls revealing empty rooms. This floor, for some reason, copied the business building at my old university. I rarely found anything of interest here, so I hurried to the elevator. The door opened in front of me with a chime, and I twirled between the metal partitions to face the call buttons. They went up to the tenth floor. I had never been up there before, contenting myself with the first four, which were various hotel corridors I had stayed at for tattoo conventions I attended. I explored the empty rooms, populated by surreal abandoned objects. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I would see a cluster of bright colors floating in the air at intersections or through a bathroom doorframe, before disappearing. The inspiration for my designs. Trippy and peaceful. My index hovered over the tenth-floor button. Go as far as you could, had said Underlig. The tenth could not be much different, I thought with a shrug. I pressed the button, and the artificial voice began to recite its numbers like the beads of a rosary.
On the fifth floor, the elevator hiccupped with a metallic squeak, and the doors opened. I recognized the short corridor of my former student flat. I remembered that the light was switched on by an occupancy sensor, yet the space remained dark, revealing only the greenish glow of the security light. At the end of the corridor, a mischievous face watched me out of the corner of his eye, at floor level; fucking Henry the vacuum cleaner.
Suddenly, I felt a presence beside me, and an icy sweat instantly drenched my back. Apart from the shy colored entities, I had never come across anyone in these liminal spaces. The elevator doors hissed shut, and it continued its ascent. The bass pulsed through my stiff body, and my tattoos formed pockets of ice beneath my dermis, just at the thought of this foreign, invisible presence. Finally, the machinery reached its final destination, and the doors opened again. In the vibrant aura of the cabin, I saw the start of another corridor, with off-white walls and matte black doors, just before all the lights went out. I felt a breath on the back of my neck. Like a spring, I leapt into the darkness. A voice echoed inside the metal box, velvety, at once strangely familiar and outlandishly playful. “Are you sure you want to go there?” The end of the question got muffled by the closing of the elevator behind my back, and, with shaky legs, I groped for support to catch my breath.
Then I noticed it. A symbol. Lines drawn in a pink neon glow, blurred by the distance. What Underlig had paid me to bring back to him. All I had to do was get close enough to memorize it, and wake up to draw it. Despite the visual snow, my eyes began to acclimatize to the half-light, and with my attention fixed on the symbol, I began to move in its direction, one hand following the wall.
After about ten steps, I noticed a vibration in the partition under my palm. Something was rubbing against it in an adjacent room. My mouth went dry as I listened. Scratches ricocheted around me, in the ceiling, and to my left. They were answered by other sounds, like a huge cube of jelly sliding against the plywood. The further I went, the more a subtle cacophony seemed to be triggered by my presence. A humming that gave me the heebie-jeebies. Moans from phonatory systems with tissues that seemed coarse and distended, yet terribly intense, alluding to supernatural sizes. The whole thing formed a blend of noises evocative of preternatural coituses and of demented music, with an increasingly frenetic rhythm that undermined the density of the walls. They seemed about to collapse like a house of cards, leaving me at the mercy of whatever was concealing behind them. One last look at the symbol, and I turned around, running towards the elevator, which could not have been far away. My lungs on fire, I sprinted, but my brain could not lie to me. It had noticed that all the doors were gone, and that the space in front of me was now infinite. There was no exit. Without the elevator, I did not know how to get out of my lucid dream: I had never encountered this complication before. Stopping short, I felt there was more space around me; I was no longer in a corridor, but in a huge room, where I could make out pillars and sections of wall protruding erratically in the faint glow of the neon symbol. Fuck, the backrooms exist, I thought, terrified. Something that cosplayed as a human voice suddenly came from an invisible loudspeaker, sputtering and incomprehensible. Screeching, dissonant music. Then a cackle, but this time close to me. The same one I had heard once in the night as a child, hidden under my sheets. Out of the corner of my eye, something approached with inhuman speed. I passed out.
Screaming, I woke up in my bed, my duvet as wet as a mop. The symbol imprinted on my retina shone one last time, and I had the reflex to grab my notebook and draw it as quickly as possible. I found a light switch. No notebook. I looked up and saw that my ceiling was perfectly smooth, with no cracks and no damp patches. Everything in the room was foreign to me. And then I saw the mirror in front of me. In the reflection: Underlig. His body spasmed violently, and I bent over to vomit a stream of acid.
In the street, people looked at me as if I had just come out of an insane asylum. Panting, I found the way to my shop. I was greeted by a faded for sale sign in the window. The inside was empty and dusty. The name Skincraft could hardly be read on the sign. I bawled uncontrollably, falling over on the pavement, catching my head in my arms. That was when I noticed it. The fresh tattoo on my upper arm: the symbol in pink neon.
From then on, every night, I took the stage. I could discern remnants of the pandemonium I had heard inside the corridors of the Otherworld in the music being played by the band Elegy. But my body no longer belonged to me. A flesh-and-blood puppet, twirling between the fingers of invisible and malevolent forces. My mouth let out lyrics and words with ambiguous meanings, which put the audience into a trance, as some souls disappeared with a final flicker in the dark room. Absorbed. Consumed.
One evening, a spotlight fell on him in the crowd. Damon Underlig. A fiendish grin on his face. He stretched his arms back gracefully, as if to demonstrate that he was enjoying his freedom. Finally, he said something. I could not hear him over the roar of the fans, of course. But I was able to read his lips.
“So… Who is the pathetic Looney Tunes character now?”
- The Symbol of the Tenth Floor - October 12, 2025
