Page 64 of The Staircase in the Woods

Then Nick wandered off again, back toward Lore.

“I dunno,” Owen said, once they were out of earshot again. “It seems like Nick has been trying to figure this out for a long time. All those emails? He’s been trying to get us to look for Matty since forever. He’s been trying to tell us something, and…we didn’t listen. He just wants to find Matty.”

“Yeah. Okay. Maybe.” Hamish sniffled. “We good, though?”

“You and me, we’re good. But this place—we’re not good here. Something’s wrong with this house. Something is rotten.”

“If it even is a house.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

—

Page after page of hate.

That’s what Lore was looking at. It wasn’t her book. Well, itwas—on the cover, and some of the pages in the book, especially pages toward the front? Yeah, those were hers. But then—one page had a series of tweets about her. Another page was a Reddit thread, again, all about her. Forum posts supposedly about her game but really about her quote-unquote “mannish face.” Gross memes using photos of her to make her seem crazy, ugly, insane. A naked porn-star body but with her face deepfaked onto it. Then, most hateful of all, awful reviews of her games, her books, her art. One stars, fuck her, commie leftist bitch, crazy whore, I heard she fucked this guy, fucked this girl, I heard she’s Antifa, I heard she’s a dude, she’s bi, she’s trans, she’s a liar, a narcissist, a thief, she didn’t even write these games, she stole them,she stole them—

The fucking nerve of these people, it made her want to vom a hot rage geyser all over the page—

“Yo,” Nick said, hand on her shoulder.

She reflexively closed the book fast—it snapped shut like a crocodile’s mouth. “Jesus. What?”

He shot a conspiratorial look over his shoulder.

“You and me, we get it,” he said.

“Get what?”

“Why we’re here.”

“Nick, just spit it out. I don’t want to play games.”

“You ran up those stairs. Owen was right. You did not hesitate. I got us here and you were off like a shot, and I just wanted to say, I see you. Okay? I see you, and I appreciate you. I know we weren’t always the closest in the group, but—”

“Nick.”

“But I’m just saying, I admire you, and I admire that you went up those stairs and did the right thing. Those two over there, ehh, I don’t know about them.”

“Nick. Listen. Nick. You lied to us, and maybe it was for a good reason—”

“It was. You can see that!It was.”

“—but this is all pretty fucked up, and I’m not interested in this little whisper campaign thing you’re doing right now. I’m kinda pissed at those two and maybe they’re pissed at me, and honestly, I’m real pissed at you too right now because all of this is screwing with my head in a big, big way. And so like I said, I have no interest in playing—”

Games.

Games.

Lore looked at the book in her hand.

Quietly, she slid it back onto the shelf.

“You strokin’ out?” Nick said.

---