Page 72 of The Staircase in the Woods

A smell scurried through the opening to meet her. An antiseptic smell, but something else, too. Something sour—the pickling brine of sweat, piss, and sickness. Like what you might smell in a hospital room. The cleaning chemical scent was strong, but not strong enough to beat back the perfume of death.

“Ready?” she asked.

They were.

And with that, she stepped into the room.

—

Lore went in. Then Hamish.

Owen was next.

He stepped forward—

Gazing into the dark, a darkness slowly lit by the thin blooming light from Lore’s and Hamish’s phones. He saw furniture, like a dresser. A bedpost. A bed.

Owen stood in the doorway. Not going through. Not yet.

Because the smell hit him then—

It was a grotesquely familiar scent. It hit him deep, like a hand thrust into water, stirring up mud. That bleach smell, the way it didn’t cover up those ill odors, the rancid tang, but underneath it all, a smell of shitty dark instant coffee, the kind you might put on a bedside table and never drink, because you couldn’t drink it, because you were too full of meds and your body puked up anything you put into it anyway. And as the lights of Hamish and Lore turned to converge on the bed, and the shape of the person lying within it—

No.

Owen panicked—

He took a step back and slammed the door.

“What the fuck?” Nick asked, pushing past him.

“I—I—”I know that room. I know that person. Dad. That was Dad.“It was just reflexive, I didn’t mean to—”

Nick opened the door.

The dark room was gone. No bed, no smell.

The next room was now a playroom, by the looks of it. Sunny-yellow walls. An IKEA-looking low shelf on the one side, full of toys. Another shelf on the other side, full of picture books. In one corner, a cozy white recliner, like for a parent watching over a child, maybe even for a nursing mother. And in the corner next to it, a Christmas tree, ratty and dead, a carpet of dead brown needles littering both thefloor and the unopened gifts tucked beneath its now brittle branches. No Lore. No Hamish.

“They’re gone,” Nick said.

No, no, no—no no no.

But Nick said it again: “They’re fucking gone. Owen, what did you do?”

41

New Room, Who This

The lights from their phones swam through the dark. The room here felt humid, thick with that sour diaper smell, with the odor of human rot—and as their beams converged, Lore and Hamish found themselves looking at a broken twig of a man, buried under covers, the weak flashlights illuminating a gray face that seemed more like a mask of skin gently and awkwardly laid across a skull than a face. The eyes rotated in the skull. Breath wheezed.

Then they heard it—

The click of the door behind them.

Lore and Hamish spun as it closed.

Hamish didn’t understand, but Lore instinctively did. The door closing meant something, she knew that now, same as it had when it closed in Marshie’s room (though who had closed that one, she did not know)—

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