Page 86 of The Staircase in the Woods

It was in here with them now.

It lay there, still.

“Jesus fucking fuck,” Nick said, swallowing hard. “You see it, too, right?”

“I see it, too.”

Up close, it was easy to see that the bedsheet swaddling the body was once white, now stained with time, but also fluids. Blood, probably. Around the chest. Around the head and neck. The bedsheets themselves were cheap, nearly threadbare.

The dark brown stains began spreading. Shining wet.

From within, something whispered, a whisper barely escaping a clog of something thick and humid in its throat—

“They kept me and they killed me.”

“Who?” Owen asked. The word seemed to come out automatically, like it was part of a script and he had to read his line.No,he thought.It’s because I have to know. Maybe this person wants to talk. Maybe we need to listen.

“Owen…” Nick cautioned, but Owen ignored him.

“Who kept you? Who killed you?”

A gurgled hiss. A slop of sound. Then: “My next-door neighbors.”

The stains continued to spread.

“Can you tell us more?”

“They t-t-took me from my—” The body shuddered with one racking cough. The sheet above the mouth went from a red-brown to black. “Backyard. Right out from under my parents’ noses. They searched and searched everywhere but I was next door. They used me. They used me and they used me and they used me, and then when I was all used up, they killed me and hid me in the attic. Do you know how they finally ffffffound me?”

Owen couldn’t say any more. He only could shake his head no.

Something under the bedsheets tumbled and swelled. A rise andfall, something pressing underneath and then sinking again. A tightening, then a relaxing. Little shapes, little textures, like—

Like macaroni noodles.

“Owen,” Nick said, pulling on his elbow like a child hiding behind his mother, trying to get her to leave. “Owen!”

“It was the maggots crawling out the attic vent.”

The seams of the bedsheet ripped with a great tear—a bulge of raw, bruise-dark flesh bubbled up underneath it, the ribs gone gelatinous, the skin splitting as the sheet did, and even before the worms burst forth, it was easy to see their outlines under the dead flesh—

The young man’s body howled a scream past the clot of worms in its throat, its mouth under the remaining sheet stretched wide, too wide, a tubular pillar of larvae pushing free of it, and Owen was frozen, struck in horror as Nick dragged him back through the door, the maggots rushing toward them in a tumbling, flopping river—

Wham.

The door closed.

The attic was gone.

This was somewhere new.

It shifted. We did it.

Deeper into the house they went.

49

What Hell Is

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