Page 45 of The Staircase in the Woods

With that, they stepped into—

—

Instant vibe: 1990s teen girl bedroom. Owen knew, and liked, that gender expression didn’t necessarily mean this was one thing over the other, but in the nineties, that spectrum was much narrower, and to him, this felt very much like a girl’s room—forgotten, wrecked, lost, ruined. Spice Girls and TLC posters, both pocked with dark mold at the corners. Queen-sized bed with fuzzy peach comforter and heart-shaped pillows. A white corner desk held an ancient desktop computer with a chunky CRT monitor on it—the glass of the monster cracked, the desktop tower on the floor having fallen over in a tangle of its wires, like a soldier who’d died in a pile of his own guts. Dolphin lamp, chipped. Christmas lights strung up along the room’s edges—on and sparkling, not in a steady pattern but rather in an erratic flicker with no rhyme or reason to it. And there, on the bed:

A plastic clamshell phone, the kind that showed off its neon innards.

He had had a phone like that once. Used to talk to Lore on it for hours. Which his father hated. Of course.

This phone was off its cradle, a coil of phone cord connecting the two.

And yet, even off its cradle—

It still rang.

Ring, ring.

Ring, ring.

“Don’t answer it,” Hamish said.

“We have to answer it,” Lore said.

This place hates you,Owen’s brain told him.

Hamish sniffled, blinking back tears. “It makes me sick. Something’s wrong here, and I don’t think any of us should answer it.”

That feeling in Owen’s gut deepened, too. Now it was a bundle of worms, a wad of them slithering all over one another, pushing, pushing, crawling through his middle like it was just dirt. Owen nodded and said, “Hamish might be right.”

“Jesus,” Nick said. “I’llanswer it—”

But Lore was already stepping forward and reaching for the phone.

She picked it up, still holding the receiver out in front of her—

It stopped ringing.

They all shared disconcerted looks. Owen gave her a slight nod—because at this point,might as well, right?She nodded back.

And then brought the phone to her ear.

“Hello?” she said into it.

Owen did not hear what was said on the other end.

But he knew what he saw.

He saw Lore’s eyes go wider. Her mouth opened just a little and a small sound came out: an ill-stifled whimper. “What? What are you saying? Talk to me.I can’t hear you. I can’t—” A spike of shrill sound, like a machine screaming, erupted abruptly from the phone’s receiver, and Lore flinched away from it and threw the phone to the bed. She held her hand over her ear, wincing.

Owen raced over to her. “You okay?”

Lore backed away from the bed—and by proxy, the phone—and pressed her back against the TLC poster, then slid down the wall till she was sitting on the floor. She stared off at nothing, still holding and rubbing her ear.

Nick loomed over her. “What was it?”

She shook her head.

“Lore,” he repeated, snapping his fingers. “Who was on the phone?”

---