Page 84 of The Staircase in the Woods

Owen shook his head and walked to Nick. “Trick? What—what’s not working, what trick?”

“The rooms changing. You’ve been asleep for a couple hours already—”

“Really? That long? Did you—”

“Sleep? No. Tried but didn’t manage it. Fuck it. That’s okay. I poked around and I checked the door, and, well.”

He did a weary flourish toward the door.

The attic remained.

The boxes, the junk, the memories.

The mattress, the swaddled body.

“Same fucking thing,” Nick said, an implicitta-daadded in his face.

“That thing move any more?” Owen asked, quietly, talking about the body.

“No.”

“Good.”

Nick sighed and eased the door shut.

“We need to go in there. It’s like the staircase—we just have to do it.”

“The staircase was the trap, the bait; once we went in, it was too late,” Owen started to say, but then something clicked. Lore talkingabout games, about rules. About how things worked a certain way. “Maybe the doors are like the staircase.”

“I don’t follow you.”

No, but we followed you,and what a mistake that was,Owen said to himself—a surprisingly acrimonious thought, intrusive on the face of it. He shook it off. “Um. So, okay. The staircase sits there, right? It sits there and waits. It waits till what—?”

“Until someone goes up the goddamn thing.”

“And then—”

Nick grinned like a fox. “And then it goespoof.”

“To us, it disappears. But really…it shifts. We don’t know where it goes. Maybe it goes only to the inside of this place. But maybe it transposes itself somewhere else—some other forest, some other tract of wilderness.”

“You think the doors work the same way.”

“Maybe.”

Nick’s grin twisted into a fresh scowl. “Yeah, but how’s that help us? Means I’m right, and we still have to walk through.”

“What if we walk through, then walk back? Then close the door and…”

“And hope the roulette wheel spins and lands us on a new number.”

“A new room.”

“Wanna try it?”

“Better now than never.”

Nick winked and grinned again, as if he knew this was gonna work. He practically attacked the door when opening it, like he had to sneak up on it—gotcha—and it swung open.

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