Page 29 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Retarded? I just said it, retard. If I can’t say it, then how did I say it?”

“It’s not cool to say it. You’re not supposed to—”

“I can say anything and everything, that’s the amazing thing about words. They’re just words. They don’t mean anything. Monkey grunts and insect clicks. Just because you’re offended by one doesn’t change my ability to say them, you fucking retarded-ass—”

“Nick,” Hamish said, and the way Hamish said it, it meant that he really, really fuckingmeantit. Like he was serious. Hamish didn’t get deeply serious all that often, but when he did, you knew it was real. Like, headbutt-a-tree real. “I’m calling Covenant.”

“Covenant. Okay!Okay. Fine, whatever. It’s not like I mean it in the bad way. I don’t sayretardedand mean actuallyretardedpeople—”

“Yeah, you fucking do. You say it meaning someone or somethingwho’s stupid. You mean it like mentally challenged, handicapped and shit. You can’t—it’s not cool. You know, Mikey Hart’s sister has Down syndrome, and she knows what the word means and it hurts her when she hears it—”

“Ugh, god, you are seriously the worst right now, Ham. You’re absolutely crushing my high. Bringing me down, man.”

“It’s fine, you’re fine, we’re all fine,” Hamish said, chuckling. It was his way of smoothing it all over. “Besides, there’s more weed where that came from, brother.” He clapped a hand on Nick’s shoulder, and the two of them got to the act of sorting the sticks and seeds from whatever weed they had brought with them.

Nick said, “Well, whatever they’re doing, Matty and Lauren are missing out.” Then he perked his head up like a startled meerkat in a nature special. “Wait one fuckin’ minute. Zuikas. You don’t—nah, it can’t be. You’re notintoLauren, are you?”

“No,” Owen said, protesting. He felt like Nick was just messing with him. Nick knew, right? They all knew. “I—no, what, I don’t know.” He stood up suddenly, the bottle of whiskey still in his hand. It sloshed around. “I have to go take a piss.”

They called after him, calling his name, telling him to come back, but he waved them off and hurried away from the firelight. He didn’t really have to piss. Instead, he wandered farther into the trees, sipping the whiskey that once burned him like a candlewick but now had just turned him numb and melty. Less the wick, more the wax. He pushed Matty and Lauren out of his thoughts and instead stood there in the darkness, listening to the night bugschacking andclacking andbuzzing. He let the night wash over him. Tried to empty his head entirely—but as it emptied out, something slipped in.

The staircase.

He’d forgotten about it, but now, it stood tall inside his mind—unasked for, unbidden. As if it had risen there, built on the earth inside him. So real he could nearly touch it, even though he couldn’t really see it, even though it wasn’t even near him. But inside the darkness of his brain, it was there, waiting. The stairs easing forth untilthey were right in front of his feet. Like a dog nosing your hand to pet him, it was as if those stairs wanted to get under the front of his foot, pushing him up so that he was upon them. Like it was begging him to come to them and climb them. It had no voice. But it was urgent. It demanded to be thought of. To be seen.

To beused.

He shook his head. Drank more. Let the whiskey push it out. But then he thought,Maybe it’s the whiskey doing this to me. Or the contact buzz from the secondhand smoke. Or a bad hot dog. The staircase was the staircase; it was weird, but that’s all it was. It didn’t have thoughts. It didn’twantanything. It was just the ruins of an old house in the middle of the woods.

Shut up, Owen. Shut up.

Stupid betrayer brain.

But even as he turned to go back to the campsite, he was almost sure he could see the staircase out there, way out there, in the trees. Rising into the dark. A shadow blacker than night, like a shape cut into the fabric of the world.

18

Lauren and Matty

The woods up here were thick, the understory forbidding, and all the two of them had was a little Maglite flashlight. Matty led the way, because that was Matty—always leading the way. Lauren hated it. And she loved it. She hated that she loved it. She always told herself she wasn’t the kind just to swoon and get giggly over some boy, to be captivated by him, to bein thrallto some dick-having member of the population, but here she was. Her small, soft hand in his, being drawn deeper into the dark forest, like the foolish girl in a fairy tale.

She wondered aloud if maybe they should turn around. “We’re gonna break our necks out here,” she said, laughing, because she was already a little drunk on the pink diabetes wine from Boone’s Farm. “Or wait, shit, isn’t there a cliff?”

“There’s a lot of cliffs up here,” he said ahead of her. No fear in his voice. “We’re on Highchair Rocks, Laur—it’s a hundred feet up on all sides.”

“That means it’s a hundred feetdown.”

He just laughed. In the darkness, his voice seemed to fall behind him, like something he dropped, something for her to pick up. “You’re a glass-half-empty type. I love that about you.”

Lauren took a fast step forward and with her free hand smacked his ass. “I thought you loved mysweet sweet boo-tay,” she said, cackling.

“Oh, I love that too,” he said, drawing her deeper into the darkness.

—

It had started a year ago. Almost to the day.

They were drunk at a party. Well, a “party”—Jeff Warnick had this big-ass open expanse of a backyard and his dad was sorta rich and his parents traveled all the time, so most weekends Jeff lit a bonfire, and whoever wanted to come over and hang could come over and hang. Sometimes it was six people, sometimes it was sixteenpeople, and that day, a Saturday in June, it was close to sixty—all moths to a flame. It was fireworks and keg stands, it was bong rips and diving boards, it was Jeff’s nutso pitbull Murray running around and humping every leg that wasn’t actively kicking him away. There was a fight at one point—a sloppy fracas between Earl Coons and Billy Boback, the two of them punching and pawing at each other like a pair of drunk bears, all over some perceived slight, something about Shannon, Earl’s girlfriend, and something about Billy being a quote-unquote “little pussy bitch pissant pussy.”

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