Page 137 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Man?” the Not-Nick thing bellowed, its voice no longer tinny but now warped, distorted, a boiler room rumble to it. “I am no man, you slip of meat. I am the house, and I hate you all. I was a place of promise. Not merely a house, but a home. A place of love, a place of family. The smells of cooking, the sounds of lovemaking, a child’s laughter, but that man brought back all the pain of war. Men’s heads turned to mince in their helmets. French children crushed into the mud under German tank treads. Drawers of gold teeth in a liberated camp. The starving and the sick and the dead. The pain in us was electric and alive, it flowed through us like a boiling river. It became a part of us, and we grew to love the pain the same as Nick did—the same as you will.”

The Nick Thing flung Hamish against the wall next to them. Hamish cried out, gasping, clawing at his throat. Lore looked downat Owen, the cut from the knife garish across the expanse of his forehead. He mumbled to her, “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.” Hamish garbled his own answer: “Me too.”

Not-Nick grinned and leered.

“Little pigs, little pigs, let me in.”

83

Exorcism and Eviction

Nick, the bloody penknife in his hand, stalked toward her and Owen.

“You broke the Covenant, and now the Covenant will break you,” he said, his voice singsongy.

The Covenant.

The words came out of her without thinking. There was no strategy to this, no great plan, just the desire to reforge something that had in fact been shattered. And the great hope that somehow they could free Nick from the monster that had him—that wasinhim. They needed an exorcism, but they had no holy book, they had no scripture. But they had, once upon a time, the Covenant.

Lore said, “Holy shit, remember junior prom, Nick, when you swore up and down you had a date?” Right there, Nick stopped in his tracks. The knife in his hand dripping against his shoe,pat pat pat. He flinched and scowled, so she kept going. “You said it was this girl you supposedly met at the Jersey Shore, and you two made out on the boardwalk and now she was coming to the dance, and ohh man, we were excited to meet her, but we also were like, she’s not fucking real, right? He’s just fucking with us. And what do you do? You bring her to prom except, guess what, she’s afucking mannequinthat you dressed up like afucking mermaidand you said her name was Ariel, and all night long you pretended she was real? Dancing with her and shit?”

With every word, Nick flinched, twitched, bit down on his teeth.

Owen wiped blood from his face and sat up and added: “Yeah and he glued shells to her face like barnacles and also put those plastic six-pack rings around her wrists because they sometimes trap and kill turtles, and he thought that was funny and fucked up. Which, in a nutshell, is pretty much Nick.”

“Shut up,” Not-Nick hissed at them through his radiator teeth.

Hamish coughed and said, with a forced laugh, “Remember the time we snuck into that development being built next to your house, and we stole a shitload of PVC pipe and turned it into potato guns? Fired one potato so far, it went through the window at the Quaker meetinghouse on the corner.”

Nick’s head rocked back like he’d been slapped. His eyelids fluttered.

It’s working. It’s fucking working.

Lore jumped in again:

“Dude, dude, remember that time you stole my neighbor’s golf cart, and you went up and down the street with a baseball bat, knocking off mailboxes—but you wore a fake beard the whole time? And so when the cops came, the neighbors all said it was some guy in a beard, and that stupid idiotic disguise actually worked and nobody ever caught you?”

Owen now:

“Junior year. I’m going to say a name right now, and when I do, I’m not even going to need to tell the story, because we’re all going to remember it immediately. First name: Gary. Second name: Dunderbaum.” Still, he told the story about Gary Dunderbaum, this stoner slacker burnout—a nice enough guy, but probably ate lead paint chips when he was a kid. They were in bioscience the one day and there was a test, and Gary was very, very unprepared for it, and poised to flunk the test and maybe the whole class. So Nick told him, “You know what you do, Gar? Test starts, just shit your pants. Just shit ’em up. Take yourself down to Browntown, buddy. Then you say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Carboni, I shit myself, I can’t take the test today, I need to go tothe nurse and get the set of pants the nurse keeps for times like this.’ ” They all thought that was really funny except, well, Gary Dunderbaumactually did it. Five minutes in, he’s over there sweating, red-faced, grunting as he squeezed one out—noisily. The kicker? He did it againsenior yearduring a pop quiz.

They cried laughing, retelling that story.

And it went on like that. They told increasingly funny, insane stories about Nick, because that was Nick. A wild card, an agent of chaos, a trickster spirit. But it was also about how he was always there for them. There to pick them up if they got stuck somewhere. There to be a sober copilot if one of them wanted to get drunk or get high or trip balls. Always ready to bust balls, but if anyone outside the group ever said boo about a single one of them, he’d lay into that person so hard they’d piss themselves like a nervous chihuahua and develop a forever case of CPTSD from it. Nick was really the carrier of the Covenant. Each and every time.

And with each story—and soon, each sentence, eachword—Nick looked rocked on his heels, pushed back farther and farther. A line of blood crawled from his nose. His eyes turned bloodshot. But they looked likeeyesnow. And his teeth wereteeth,and suddenly, he screamed out and Lore worried,Oh my god, this was the wrong thing to do, we’re hurting him, we’re killing him—

But then Nick was on the floor, on his hands and knees, puking.

As the automaton of Alfie Shawcatch stood behind him, raging.

The house shook. They heard shattering glass. The floor began to split.

They’d hurt it. They’d actually hurt it.

And behind him, the door awaited, rattling in its frame.We can do it. We can run for it.Escape was in their grasp. But the house, through Shawcatch, was not done with them. The monstrous puppet bent down, reaching for Nick, pulling him up off the ground—

But something gleamed in Nick’s hand.

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