Excerpt from The Nudge, by Night Vale co-creator Joseph Fink

A hotel employee tells a waiting guest the history of the building while they wait for a famously slow elevator. The house began as a simple country home for a wealthy couple. After the husband died under circumstances the family kept quiet, the widow began building obsessively—adding long looping hallways, lounges for parties she never threw, and staircases leading nowhere. “She built like she was trying to hide herself within the very design of the house, like if she built enough, she would build her way right out of her grief.”

Eventually the expense and loneliness became too much. She gave the house to an institution of higher learning, which assembled a faculty of professors desperate for work due to questionable research or untidy behavior. The building was utterly unsuited for a university—hopelessly remote, impossible to navigate, especially for drunk young students. One student was lost permanently after stepping through an elevator door that opened onto nothing. But the widow had a specific problem she wanted the academics to solve: she believed her husband’s death had been a message from God, so urgent and inscrutable that only a human life could carry it. She wanted them to tell her what the message meant. None of them could. “There is no message to a human death except that life ends,” the employee says, “and most of us choose to never look down.”