Floor 14,997

Floor 14,997 is a corridor floor of the middle-upper register, designated under the Ninth Recension as a held interval: a floor that is listed, numbered, and staffed, but which no expedition has ever entered from either direction. It lies, by the survey of Holloway (Fiscal 3,188), somewhere above Floor 9090 and below the unnumbered landing the porters call The Turnstile. The floor's principal holding is the Register of Intervals, a bound ledger of 14,997 ruled pages, of which 14,996 are blank.

Description and access

Floor 14,997 presents, from the stairwell, as an ordinary landing: a lintel stone, a numbered plate in the standard oxidised brass, and a door of the kind issued to custodial floors after the Door Consolidation of Fiscal 2,904. The plate is legible. The door is not.

Three access attempts are recorded in the expedition log of the Sixth Ascent, all conducted in the winter of Fiscal 3,201. The first party reported the door "answered to the handle but declined to move." The second reported that the handle had been removed for maintenance and would be restored "presently." The third party did not reach the landing; its account is filed with the Bureau of Unreached Places and is sealed for a term of nine hundred years, which expires in Fiscal 4,101.

"The interval is held, not occupied. A held interval is not a failure of the stairwell; it is a promise the stairwell has not yet been asked to keep."

— Concordance of Vertical Claims, Ninth Recension, Annex 12, clause 4

The Register of Intervals

The floor's sole catalogued object, the Register of Intervals, is unusual in being an object whose location is known and whose contents are not. It was deposited on Floor 14,997 by the Order of the Middle Ledger in Fiscal 2,876, at which time it was described in the deposit receipt as "a register of floors that are between." The receipt is countersigned by a clerk whose signature has been the subject of a two-century dispute; the Paleographic Office holds that the signatory is Clerk Ondrey Vasp, while the Office of Seals maintains the hand belongs to Vasp's successor, Clerk Ilma Vasp, and that the difference is material because only the elder Vasp held authority to deposit registers above Floor 10,000.

The single inscribed page, page 8,441, contains one line: See below. No page below has been found to contain anything, and a marginal note in a later hand reads, in full, "This is the difficulty."

The naming dispute

Whether Floor 14,997 is properly a floor at all is contested. The Fourth Recension provides that "a floor which cannot be entered is a landing, and a landing is not a floor," a clause inserted at the urging of the Guild of Stairwrights after the Dispute of the Ninety-Ninth Landing. The Fifth Recension reverses this without comment, holding that "a landing, being numbered, is a floor; a floor, being unentered, remains a floor."

The practical consequence is a standing disagreement over whether the Register of Intervals may be cited in proceedings before the Chamber of Minor Claims, since the Chamber admits only documents deposited on floors. The Chamber has heard the question eleven times and deferred it eleven times, most recently in the matter of Holloway v. the Middle Ledger, where the presiding Librarian recorded that the court "does not propose to resolve what the stairwell has declined to."

Staffing and maintenance

Floor 14,997 is assigned a half-post: a single keeper, Keeper Anselm Rook, who holds the floor on alternate quarters and whose duties consist of attending the landing, confirming the plate, and reporting any change. Keeper Rook has filed 214 reports. All 214 read "No change," with the exception of the report of the second quarter of Fiscal 3,344, which reads "No change. The lamp requires trimming."

Visitors are not permitted to knock. The prohibition appears in the Standing Orders of the Corridor Floors, clause 19, and is not explained there or anywhere else in the Orders.

See also

• Surveyor-Adjutant Mern Holloway
• Bureau of Unreached Places
• Order of the Middle Ledger
• Standing Orders of the Corridor Floors
• Floor 9090