I looked up when the orange paper cup was plunked on my desk, steaming with an aromatic mixture of nutmeg and allspice.

"Pumpkin spice latte," the boss said. She was already wearing her beige trench coat and looking at me with a serious expression. "My treat. I really appreciate this, you know. I promised the kid I'd personally take him out trick-or-treating and with his dad out of the picture - " she shrugged, expressively.

I nodded. "It's okay. I know we need to submit the grant application by noon tomorrow – which means I need to get it on your desk first thing in the morning."

"It's too bad you need the paper records," she said, "Otherwise, you could do this from home."

I shrugged. "I work better in the office, anyhow. All my stuff is at home; it's too distracting."

"Thanks!" she said, brightly. "Next office lunch, you get to pick the place."

"Sure," I said.

She walked to the door, turned, waved, and stepped out. I was alone.

I sipped my latte as I worked on completing the application. Pumpkin spice isn't really my thing, but it had been a peace offering, of a sort, and besides, I was thirsty. The application process was . . . not fun. The application itself sprawled across eight PDF pages, not counting the mandatory submissions of maps, photographs, and a written description of the project. Eight pages of bizarre questions, including what we'd written in one particular box on our last twenty-five tax returns. That's where the paper records came in – we have a decent electronic filing system at the office, but it doesn't go back that far. Apparently, everyone who worked here prior to 2007 was a total technophobe, because that's when the electronic records start. Anything earlier than that, you have to go down and dig out the actual, paper files.

I had gone down to the file room in the afternoon, with my boss and our co-op student to help me. The file room is located in the basement. The building is more than a hundred years old, and the basement is poorly lit and lined with tall shelves and stacks of cardboard banker's boxes. It also smells funny. It isn't a smell I can identify; it isn't mould, or mildew, or even the smell of a damp concrete floor and sodden cardboard boxes. It's a strangely warm smell that sneaks in around the edge of your nostrils with hints of old cabbage and decaying mouse. I don't like being down there, but it's bearable when daylight is pouring in through the barred window wells and you've got two other real, live human beings with you. We had dragged the relevant files up to my desk, and now I was pouring over them.

I worked diligently, but by the time I was ready to proofread my work it was pitch black outside and my latte was cold. Pumpkin spice tastes worse when cold. I was pretty pleased with the application; I'd picked attractive photos, labelled all the maps, and the little essay I had written describing the project was a work of linguistic art, if I do say so myself. I was pretty confident, when I started proofreading, that I would make it home in time to watch the midnight movie.

I was on page four when I noticed the blank space. Right there, dead-centre in the table of financial information, was an empty cell. It was supposed to contain a four-digit number from our 2004 tax return. I turned to the pile of file folders on my desk, and flipped through them again – and again. Every return between 1996 and the 2007 return that was duplicated in our electronic system was in one of those files, except 2004. I felt my heart sink.

I considered just giving up, going home, and letting my boss sort it out in the morning. I badly wanted to go home. I could hear the wind whistling outside the office window, and I wanted to watch that movie. Instead I downed the last of the latte – cold and slightly gross – hung the lanyard with my keycard around my neck, and headed downstairs.

During the day, you can take the stairs all the way down to the basement. After hours, though, the staircase doors on each level lock behind you and don't respond to the key cards – unless you want to use the door on the ground floor that lets out right to the street, you're stuck in the staircase. Safe in case of a fire, but set up to keep people from wandering the building. If you really need to get somewhere, though, the elevators can still take you there if you're willing to run in front of a million hidden cameras. Only one of the elevators runs down to the basement, though. Unfortunately for me, it happens to be the elevator that's original to the building.

Before I came to work in this building, I never understood why elevator operators used to be a thing. Any idiot can use an elevator, right? Not this elevator. It's a metal cage inside a filigreed metal tube. You run it with a lever that you turn to make the elevator go up and down. It's easy enough to get it to move, but it's really hard to get the elevator to stop at a specific point without overshooting. If – and given how clumsy I am, it's a big if – you do manage to get the cage lined up properly with the floor, there's a button to press that opens and closes the door. I suck at running the elevator.

I managed to get the door closed successfully, then grabbed the little lever. I turned it gently to the right – and it shot downwards fast enough to force my heart up into my throat. I could taste that stupid pumpkin spice latte at the back of my mouth. Trying to stop myself from puking, I turned the lever back to the centre but overshot, forcing the elevator back towards my floor. I wrestled the lever until it was just a hair to the right of centre, and the elevator crawled downwards. The pace was painfully slow, but at least I was going in the right direction, and not completely nauseated.

I crept past the ground floor. Almost all the lights were off down here, with just the emergency lights on. I knew that if I stopped the elevator and stepped out, sensors would pick up my movement and the lobby would be flooded in warm, even light. As it was, I could see the neon sign of the bar across the street though the big glass doors. I kept going.

I was a little surprised as I descended into the basement. The lights were on. All of them. I scanned the floor anxiously as I approached it – if the lights were on because a rat had triggered them, I was going back upstairs and giving up for the night.

It's easier to line up an elevator at the bottom of the shaft, and I managed it without any rats springing into sight. Still, I was cautious as I made my way down to the file room door. Then I stopped, confused. I fingered the keycard hanging around my neck, but I couldn't find the little plastic sensor panel to scan it. There was no way they'd leave the file room unlocked, but we had gotten in using our keycards in the afternoon. It isn't like any of us had a physical key to anything in the building – only the maintenance guys have those.

I probably spent a good two minutes staring at that door and trying to find the panel. Finally, though, I tried something that should never have worked. I reached out with my hand, grasped the knob, and turned. I gasped when the door opened.

The lights were on in the file room, too, which was even weirder than them being on in the hall. It must have been the lateness of the hour, but the light seemed much more welcoming now than it had been in the afternoon – a soft, warm glow, like the lights they use in the lobby. I walked in and stopped; someone was whistling "The Monster Mash".

"He-hello?" I called.

The whistling stopped. "Over here!" called a welcoming, masculine voice.

I walked between the shelves and came out in a cheerful square of light. A grey-haired man was sitting at a desk, typing on a bulky laptop.

"Sorry to bother you," I said. "I thought I was the only one working late tonight."

"No worries. I have a lot to do tonight." The man said. "You must be new; I'm the archivist."

"Hi," I said. "I'm not that new, but I work up on the third floor. I don't get down here much."

"That explains why we've never met," he said with a smile. "As I said, I'm pretty busy – whatever you're looking for, I can find it faster than you can."

I brightened. "Tax records from 2004?"

"Easy-peasy," he replied. "But I can't let you take them off the floor. Financial stuff is too private. Hopefully whatever you need fits on one of these." He handed me a yellow post-it note and a pencil.

I thanked my lucky stars that I was only looking for a three digit number. I nodded. I also did not mention the pile of file folders sitting on my desk on the third floor.

The grey-haired man walked off between the rows of shelves and I followed behind him like an over-eager puppy. He walked right past the area where I had grabbed the other files – clearly the 2004 files were in a different spot. We turned down one aisle, then another. It would have taken me a million years to work my way through the file room all the way to this corner. The man stopped abruptly, and reached out a meaty hand.

"Here we are," he said, pulling out a thick folder. Now, what are you looking for?"

"Um, box  one-zero-nine-seven-six?" I asked.

The man flipped a couple of pages. Then he smiled. "Would you believe it's 1234?"

I almost dropped my pencil. "You're kidding me."

"Nope," he said, tilting the paper so that I could read the number off of it for myself. "It's 1234."

"Guess I won't be needing the post-it," I said.

The man frowned. "Write it down anyhow. You might forget it, between here and the third floor."

I laughed, but dutifully wrote down the number.

"Thanks," I said.

"No problem." He replied.

I shut the door behind me, as I left, and rode the elevator back up relatively successfully.

The next thing I knew, my head was pillowed on my arms, and I could hear my boss's voice.

"Don't tell me you pulled an all-nighter!" She said as she shrugged off her trench coat. "No grant application is worth that. Nothing at work is worth that!"

I rubbed my blurry eyes, and realised that I was still at my desk, the PDF application open on the screen in front of me. The blank cell in the table had been filled in – 1234.

"I guess I fell asleep," I said. "Here, I'll e-mail you the draft application."

"Thanks. Now you're going right home to go to bed," my boss said.

"Maybe I should." I agreed. "Just don't forget, the application is - "

"Due at noon. Don't worry. The rest of us have got this. You go." The boss said.

I stood up and grabbed my jacket. "Hey, boss? How come we didn't ask the archivist for help yesterday?"

"Archivist?" she asked, hanging her coat on the coat tree beside her desk. "We don't have an archivist. How long have you worked here? Two years?"

I nodded.

She continued "Yeah, two years. We did have an archvist, but he was gone before you started here, and we never hired anyone else in the position." I must have looked confused, because she said, "He always used to work late, you know? Had a heart attack one night down there in the file room, and nobody found him until the next morning. Dead. Anyhow, don't be like him. Go home and get some sleep."

Zipping up my jacket, I nodded. "I probably dreamed it all," I said. But as I turned to go, something on my desk caught my eye. A pencil, and beside it, a bright yellow post-it note, with four digits scrawled on it. 1234.

Written in response to Halloween Vault prompt No. 13 - see https://www.wattpad.com/1136167281-halloween-vault-2021-prompts or the external link