Page 138 of The Staircase in the Woods

A lighter.

A Jack Kenny whiskey–branded lighter.

“Burn again, bitch,” Nick said, then struck a flame and pressed it to Shawcatch’s face.

Fire crawled down the thing’s body like a dozen burning spiders. Shawcatch screeched, a garbled, tinny shriek, dancing backward with a wobbly step—Nick fell to the floor, released from the thing’s grip, a keening gasp howling from the monster’s mouth as it pawed at its neck. Everything then seemed to go slow and fast at the same time: the Shawcatch Thing, spinning around, flames dancing upon it. Lore helping up Owen. Hamish helping Nick. Nick juggled past the Shawcatch Thing, and as he did, he gave it a swift kick toward the other side of the room—it screamed and crashed into a couch, where the fire handily leapt to the fabric, then to the wall. Flames bloomed inside this house, great heaving flowers of it searing the air, catching the carpet on fire, the drapes, the walls, everything.

All as they pushed open the door stuck in the far wall and tumbled through it, into—

84

The Great Egress

Into a forest.

It was day. It had rained. The air was humid and stuck to them like wallpaper. Somewhere, a songbird babbled. A squirrel scurried away.

The door behind them, a door hanging in the middle of the air at a cockeyed angle, snapped shut—

And disappeared.

Their luggage sat around them.

This was where they had entered the staircase. But now that staircase was gone, as was the doorway.

They had escaped the house.

Though it, perhaps, had not escaped them.

85

The Covenant

Six months later, they met again.

This time not in Pennsylvania, not in New Hampshire, but rather, just outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

The first stop: a little coffeehouse café called the Oasis.

They made small talk, catching up. Owen and Lore had been meeting every couple weeks, working on their game—they pulled out of their stall, got development moving together. (Nick asked if they were fucking, and they refused to answer, which told everyone all they needed to know.) Hamish had The Talk with his wife, told her that he’d been cheating on her. He spent a couple weeks in a motel, then they decided they were going to try a marriage counselor on the way to what at the time seemed the inevitable divorce lawyers—but during the counseling, it came out that Hamish had once died. A fact his wife never knew. And she hadn’t known about his childhood, either—losing his friend Matty. It was enough, it seemed, to engender in her a specific kind of sympathy. She was angry at him still, but he was back in the house. And talk of divorce was off the table. For now.

Nick, for his part, did not, in his words, “have shit going on.” Said he’d taken a new job at a local garden center—“none of that Home Depot shit”—and liked it. Also was seeing, to their absolute shock, atherapist. “I’m on drugs, now,” he said, almost chipper, shaking a bottle of lorazepam at them like a baby rattle.

They got to the end without talking about their nightmares, buteventually, it came up. It was Owen who brought it up. He asked them if they were all having them, and they were. Nightmares about being in the house, wandering it endlessly, aimlessly. All that horror, all that pain. Owen asked them if it still felt like they were there, sometimes, in the house. Lore said sometimes when she was falling asleep, it was like her legs were walking her way through it, and then she took a wrong step down a strange staircase, and it always woke her up. Hamish said that for him it was just the bathroom, the one with the broken mirror. He dreamed of it constantly. Nick, for his part, just shrugged, said, “I just dream of you fuckin’ weirdos. And it’s nice. But then I dream of Matty, too, and…” He sniffed. “And that’s why we’re here, so I think we should get down to business. So, where’s this house?”

—

The house was about five miles south of where they had coffee, in a town called Fitchburg. It was a farmhouse off of a back road called Oak Hall Hill, a road lined in spots with old bent oaks—though no hill to be seen.

The house was red, and looked like a sister to the black barn next to it. A pair of bent, corroded silos sat behind, and all around were fields—corn, mostly, or just scrub. The driveway was stone, but had long gone without renewal, and so pockets of weeds were sticking up. An old beater-ass Ford pickup sat parked. The sunlight flickered through the turning blades of an old tin windmill.

They let the engine of Hamish’s rental car idle for a bit.

All four of them sat. Nick up front with Hamish. Lore and Owen in the back.

“This is it?” Hamish asked.

“It’s what the investigator gave us,” Lore said, looking at the map on her phone and the printouts in front of her—they’d hired a private investigator to look for Matty. He had, after all, supposedly made it out of the house—with the house still in him. Doing its work. Carrying its, what, message? The investigator found someone going by Matthew Shiffman living here. Took some photos, and the evidencewas pretty convincing that it was their old friend. Amazing that he’d…been here the whole time. That felt extra cruel somehow. That he’d made it out and hadn’t ever thought to find them. Then again, if what the house had said was true, then why would he? He thought they’d abandoned him. So he abandoned them.

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