Help!

New Year’s Eve seemed a perfectly reasonable time to get mildly lost in a shopping centre. I was living in New Zealand at the time, temporarily transplanted into a Brisbane suburb, house-sitting and—crucially—car-borrowing. With forty kilometres of Queensland road ahead of me and no particular plan, I drove to Caboolture, which sounded like the sort of place where things would behave themselves. They did not.
It had been raining heavily recently, so I found a shopping mall, which I assumed would be dry inside. I drove into the underground car park, always the first sign you are about to make a series of regrettable decisions. I parked, locked the car, and looked for a way in. There was no one about. No chatter, no footsteps, no reassuring hum of retail therapy. Just concrete, echo, and the faint suggestion that I had arrived either too early or too late for something unspecified.
Then I saw it: a door. On it, a helpful sign. A little man walking. An exit. Perfect. Everyone knows exits are also entrances if you believe in them strongly enough.
I opened the door. It closed behind me with the sort of finality usually reserved for prison dramas.
Inside was a brightly lit stairwell. Grubby. Echoing in a way that suggested it had opinions about my life choices.
I jogged up the stairs, because if you’re going to make a mistake, you might as well commit to it aerobically. At the first landing, I tried the door. Locked. At the second landing, there was another door. No handle. Which wasn’t very encouraging. At the third landing, same again. A door with all the warmth and accessibility of a tax office at closing time. No handle. No give. No sympathy. I paused.
Then it dawned on me—slowly, like a reluctant sunrise—that I was in a fire escape. And not just any fire escape, but one designed by someone who clearly did not want me to leave the way I came. A one-way system designed to let people out in emergencies. Not, as it turns out, to let mildly optimistic visitors out.
I went back down. At the bottom, the situation became significantly worse. It had rained heavilly over Christmas and flooded locally, so I wasn’t too surprised to find water. About a foot of it, stretching across what appeared to be the only remaining direction of travel. It looked like it had been there for a while. Water that had settled in and wasn’t going anywhere.
'I'm trapped,' I thought, which felt like a dramatic overstatement at the time but would soon prove to be underselling it. I didn’t relish the thought of spending New Year’s Eve in a concrete prison.
My phone, naturally, was in the car. Of course it was. Why bring a phone when you can bring false confidence instead?
It was hot, humid and smelled faintly of damp regret. I shouted once experimentally. The sound bounced back at me as if to say, 'No one’s coming.'
I found a flat piece of steel that was lying around and tried to prise open a door latch, the sort of thing you do when you’ve run out of better ideas and are considering a brief career in low-level burglary. The latch did not budge. I tried the wood around the frame. The wood, to its credit, was having none of it.
I paused again, this time for reflection.
I felt stupid and annoyed. Mostly at myself, though the signage wasn’t entirely blameless. I considered the possibilities. No skeletons. No bodies. Which meant either no one had done this before, or—more plausibly—they had got out. Encouraging.
I spotted a large hole in the concrete on one landing. I peered into it. Dark and uninviting, it peered back. I briefly considered climbing through it, which is exactly the kind of thought one should ignore, so I did.
I ran back down the the bottom, then, salvation. Or at least a different sort of problem. At the far end of the watery tunnel, I noticed a lit Exit sign. I stared at it. "I’m not falling for that again,” I said aloud, to no one.
But there was a small complication: I was already falling for it. Or rather, I had no alternative. It was either the tunnel or settling in and naming the stairwell home, at least for the night.
With that thought, I removed my shoes and socks—because one must maintain standards—and stepped into the water. Luckily, I was wearing shorts.
It was exactly as unpleasant as you’re imagining, and then a bit more for effort. Slippery, greasy, faintly oily. The sort of surface that makes every step feel like a negotiation with gravity. I inched forward, moving with the dignity of a man who has completely lost it.
About halfway along, I noticed footprints in the sediment. ‘Ah,’ I thought. ‘An idiot has been here before me.’ Reassuring, in a way.
I was relieved to find concrete stairs at the end of the tunnel. Proper stairs. With a door. With a push bar. Now we were talking.
I put my shoes and socks back on while sitting on a step that was only partially submerged, which is an activity best described as optimistic. My feet felt like they’d been lightly marinated.
I ascended the stairs. A lizard darted across the wall. “Don’t suppose you know the way out?” I asked. He declined to comment.
At the top, I pushed the bar. The door flew open. Light. Air. The street. Freedom.
I stepped out, blinking like a man reborn, or at least moderately rinsed. The sun was offensively bright, as if nothing at all had happened. I walked, as casually as one can after wading through a questionable tunnel, to the mall’s main entrance.
Inside, I found a café and ordered a mug of tea, because my adventure demanded a recap. I sat there, quietly smiling to myself, occasionally suppressing the urge to laugh out loud. To any observer, I probably looked like a man reflecting on something pleasant. In truth, I was replaying the moment I voluntarily entered a fire escape and nearly made it my home.
After ten minutes, all told, it diminished into a minor era.
When I left the mall, I found the car immediately. Of course I did. It was exactly where I’d left it. If I had turned right instead of left, I would have found the proper entrance in seconds.
A week later, I returned to take photos. This time, I wedged the door open before stepping inside, which felt like growth. The water had receded, leaving a clear line on the wall marking its former height—like a quiet memorial to poor decisions.
I took pictures, making sure the door stayed open.
I have never trusted a cheerful little exit sign quite the same way since.