Page 78 of The Staircase in the Woods

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Shelter in Place

It was Nick who wanted to keep moving, Owen who wanted to stay where they were. “We gotta go, we’re not gonna find them under that dead-ass Christmas tree,” Nick said, incredulously, in the way that Nick often spoke—like he was angry, dismissive, like he thought you were fucking stupid.

“Listen, Lore was right. This place isn’t a game, but it might belikeone. Games have rules. This place might have rules, too. The rooms move, yeah?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So we can’t just walk out there and expect to find them. It’s a maze, but it moves. But maybe it moves in apattern.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “What?”

“Think about it. They shift. The doorway leads one place, until it doesn’t. But maybe it cycles through. Maybe it eventually ticks back to the same room, forming the same pathway. Like on a clock, like a carousel going around and around. Maybe it goes through a set number of rooms until it returns.”

“And how long does that take?”

“Well, I dunno. That’s why we wait. We wait and see.”

“You want to just sit on your hands. It’s bad enough Matty might still be out there. But now we’ve lost two of our friends—”

“They lost us, too.”

“—and you just wannasit herelike a dildo.”

“Better than running off half-cocked. Like, say, I dunno, chargingup a set of evil nightmare steps into a, a, into some evil nightmare dimension—”

Nick raised his head and laughed a tired, rancorous laugh. “Here we fucking goagain. Just say it, Owen. Say it. You blame me. Fine. Blame me. I don’t care. I did what I could do to do the right thing. Theloyalthing. For the Covenant. For our friendship. ForMatty. I always did! But you, you little prick, you were always too scared, scared like a little mouse, trapped in your stupid nowhere life, living in Lore’s shadow, to ever come out and do somethingbrave,to do somethingright.Well, not me. I got nothing, buddy. I gotno one. Matty went away and I stayed on the search, but you all abandoned him, and when you abandoned him, you abandonedme.” On that last word, he grabbed at his chest, his shirt, so vigorously that it looked like he was trying to pull out his own heart. And maybe he was.

Silence bled out between them.

“I’m sorry,” Owen said. And he meant it. “I didn’t…think about it that way. I didn’t think about you being alone. I think we—I mean, I can’t speak for the others, but I think we just wanted to get over it. Or get away from it.”

Nick sniffed. “And how’d that work out for you guys?”

Owen’s turn to laugh a hollow laugh. “Yeah. Good point.”

Another stretch of silence yawning between them. Nick kicked at the stuffed dog at his feet.

“How much did you know?” Owen asked.

“About what?”

“The…staircase. I don’t mean as a blame thing, I know you didn’t know all ofthiswas here. Or where Matty went. But obviously you’ve been looking for staircases.” Nick emailed them enough with sightings of the things, like they were Sasquatches or lake monsters. “Did you haveanyidea?”

Nick hesitated. “What? No. I mean, not really. I knew staircases showed up sometimes in weird places. Not just the woods. One time, in a farmer’s hayfield. Another one popped up out in the middle of these wetlands—a blue heron breeding ground. A lot more inforests, though. And some of them were just, y’know, regular staircases. Parts of houses built in the middle of nowhere and places that went to ruin. You put a staircase in a house, the house falls to ruin because the people die or get sick or can’t afford to live in the forest like that, and then it falls down. But a staircase is stable. Has to be. It’s a bedrock part of the house. And it’s protected from the outside world by the walls—until they fall. So the staircase stays behind, for a while at least, even as the rest of the house goes away, gets eaten by the roots and the dirt and whatever. But other staircases, they show up only for a little while. They show up. Until someone goes missing. Then they go away again. Like…like they got what they wanted. Like it’s a fuckin’jaw traplaid out in the woods, and once it snaps shut on the leg of a deer, the hunter doesn’t really need the trap anymore, so he takes it back.”

The hunter,Owen thought. It gave him a chill.

It gave a kind of agency to this situation he hadn’t considered before.

So who is the hunter here?

Who, or what, is hunting us?

Again that warning: THIS PLACE HATES YOU.

Hate was active. Vigorous. Not a passive thing—but an emotion. Something had to feel that emotion. Maybe that warning was more than something theatrical, more than something metaphorical.

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