Page 49 of The Staircase in the Woods

“It’s like a—maybe a first-gen Pentium, by the look of it. A Gateway. Remember those?”

Lore laughed a little. “Yeah, the cow boxes and stuff.” She stood up and came over to him, stooping over and watching the screen. A Windows 95 logo booted. “Gateway, Pentium, Win95, the TLC poster, the Spice Girls—”

“So this is a teen girl’s bedroom from 1995, ’96, something like that.”

“Yeah, looks like.”

Lore put her hand on his shoulder.

It steadied him. Amazing how easily she could keep him steady—or knock him off his axis in one go.Don’t forget what she did to you,he reminded himself. At that thought, it was as if she could hear it, as if his bad thought was a short sharp electrical shock—she pulled her hand away suddenly.

In its absence, a strange, almost cold pain. Isolation and loneliness.

Lore reached over him and grabbed a pen and a small pink book. The pen had a wispy end, like the hair of one of those little troll dolls. “Feather pen,” she said. “And this is some kind of diary. It’s locked, but—”

She wrenched it open, and the lock popped off.

“Settle down, Hulk,” Owen said.

Lore shrugged. “You know me. Lore stands forLorge.” She started flipping through pages as the computer booted all the way up, took them to a garish teal desktop with big chonky icons. As Lore went through the book, Owen grabbed for the two-button mouse, moved the cursor over the icons.

My Computer, Network Neighborhood, Recycle Bin, Solitaire, Control Panel, System, and so on. “She was a Prodigy kid.” Lore, he remembered, used CompuServe. The others, AOL. But Owen, too, used Prodigy as a way to get onto some early version of “online.” Though both he and Lore also used dial-up clients to access various BBSes—bulletin board systems, hyperlocal online hubs run by users out of their homes. Lore ran one for a while called Bizarroland BBS. On a lark, he tried clicking it, but when he did, the icon turned to a spray of pixels, like graffiti painted on the wall in Pac-Man’s world. “Shit.” Then he saw another icon, down in the corner of the screen, hidden away from the others:

oldtimer.jpg

An image file.

His heart crawled up into his throat, lodged itself there.

A pulse beat kicking at the sides of his neck.

Owen clicked the file.

It opened, blank.

But then it started to render, pass after pass, an image refining itself pixel by pixel, layer by layer.

Lore, meanwhile, was chatting about the book. “Typical teen girl squad shit, blah blah blah, she likes this boy, his name is Grady, Grady with hearts all around him, Grady written in cursive, in different colors, ugh. Her name is Marsha, by the way, but she seems to go by Marshie. Marshie. That’s too cute by a country mile.Marshie.” Flip, flip. “She hates her parents—girl, who doesn’t. She thinks her mathteacher is weird. She’s sad a lot. Welcome to being a kid in the nineties, I guess. Lots to worry about, and she talks about some of it. Acid rain and ozone layer and will anyone ever love her and she’s afraid of sex but wants to have sex and—” Flip, flip, flip. “This is just a page where she writes the lyrics to TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ over and over again in an increasingly erratic—” Flip. “Oh. Oh shit. Oh no.”

But Owen was barely listening.

On the screen, the JPG finished rendering.

It was a photo. Of a pocketknife. The knife lay on its side, the blade half open, at a forty-five-degree angle. Nickel bolsters at the end, brass pins holding it together, and a little metal inlay icon that read OLD TIMER. The brand at the base of the blade read SCHRADE.

The edge of the blade was darkened. Just a little. Wet and red.

“Are you listening to me?” Lore asked him.

“I—” He hadn’t been. Not really. Not since that image came up.

“She killed herself.”

“What?”

“This girl. Marshie. I think she killed herself.” Owen felt dizzy at the thought of that. The knife in the photo. He knew that knife. He had one growing up. Used it for…well. Had she used one just like it? He understood her, suddenly. The worries, the anxieties. The unreturned love. Thatfeelingdeep down in you that you’re not good enough, not anything, that you’re just a hole to throw things into, a hole that sucks the light out of the room, out of the world. That knife, how it could open you up, let it all out…

He shook his head.Don’t think about it.That was one of those thoughts that would bore its way into him, termites chewing him to pieces.

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