Page 68 of The Staircase in the Woods

Nick slept through it all, because of course he did.

In a whirl of motion, Lore stalked to the pair of doors at the far side of the room and threw both of them open. They remained what they were: one an entrance to a small bathroom with shattered mirror glass everywhere, the other a dark room, with just the barest of shapes outlined in the black.

The voices came from neither.

Hamish shuddered and moved around Lore to shut both the doors.

“Sorry,” he said, defensively. “In here, open doors feel…weird.”

Like a threat,Owen thought idly.A cruel promise.

Lore moved back to the other side of the room. Ear to the wall. Then she started pounding on the wall. “Hello?” she called. “Hello!”

But the voices continued, unabated, no response.

So she pounded louder, and yelled louder.

Nick, at this point, snorted awake. “Jesus fuck,” he grumbled.

Lore dragged over a chair and started yelling at the wall, the ceiling, just saying,Hello, can you hear us, are you there?over and over again, and she hit the ceiling one last time and—

The voices paused.

Then:

Mumblemumble

Murmurmumble?

Mum

Mrrm

Womm wemm numm!

Suddenly, the voices erupted. A man yelling. A woman ending his tirade with a dire scream, the kind of scream that was one of fear and torment and pain—then, finally, athud. It shook the room.

Silence in the aftermath.

They all looked to one another before Nick interrupted with: “What was that? Were there people? Are there other people?” He struggled to escape the trap of the couch but finally managed to stand. “We need to go. We need to go and find them, they could know Matty—”

“I…don’t think so,” Lore said.

“What?”

“We don’t know what that is. Orwhothat was,” Owen said.

Hamish pointed at Owen as if to say,Yeah, exactly. “Last voice we heard came out of a dead girl with her throat slit.”

“And those voices we just heard? They didn’t sound friendly.”

“But one of them was a woman. And she could be hurt.”

“She could bedead,” Nick said, bluntly. “Or dying.”

Hamish had anof courselook on his face. “God. It’s them. It’s the people who owned this house. That sound, the thump…”

He didn’t have to finish the thought. They all understood what that meant. The father of the house killing his wife. As one, they again turned to look at the bloody glass sculpture on the bookshelf.

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