Page 90 of The Staircase in the Woods

She did the only thing she knew to do.

Lore pumped her knee into his balls.

—

It did the trick. The air went out of him. The fight, too. He whimpered and staggered backward, and the mirror glass fell from his hand. After a while, Hamish calmed down. He sat down on the floor, his back against the base of the couch.

Lore sat next to him.

(She made sure the mirror shards were nowhere near them.)

(Just in case.)

Her nose had stopped bleeding. It throbbed, though, like it had its own heartbeat.Bub-bub, bub-bub, bub-bub.

“You hit me,” she said.

“I know.”

“The fuck, dude.”

“Iknow.”

She let loose an angry, guttural, exasperated sigh.Yuuuuggghhh. Words tumbled out of her. “I think this place is fucking with you.”No, asshole. She corrected herself: “Withus. It’s making me think that I can do this all alone, that I don’t need you. But then—then!” She wagged her finger in the air as if she were manically lecturing an audience. “Then I realize, no, that’s just me. That’s just my fucking brain, wanting to shoulder all the burden and do all the things—reap the reward, but eat the pain. The house isn’t putting that thought in myhead. It just turned up the volume. And I bet it’s doing that with you, too. Finding all those bad thoughts inside you and making them louder, and louder, andlouderagain. Am I right?”

Hamish, pale and sweaty, his hair a muss, gave her a weird look. “Maybe.”

“Y’know, I’ve not…” Here she cleared her throat, because sometimes the truth wanted to get stuck there instead of working its way free. A bird trapped in a net. “I’ve not been particularlygoodat caring about other people. I mean—I care about them when I think about them. I guess I’m not good at thethinking about thempart. I just hyperfocus on myself. Eyes on my own paper. I trust, falsely, foolishly, that everyone else has their shit together and just as I don’t need their help,theydon’t needmyhelp. And…they do sometimes need my help. And—” More truth that didn’t want to come free, like she was holding in vomit and knew she’d feel better once she puked it up but still tried really hard not to puke it up. “And sometimes,I need their help, too. So I’m sorry I haven’t been really here for you.”

“You’re fine. It’s fine. I’m just…dealing with things.”

Lore couldn’t help but laugh. “Ham, we’rebothdealing with things. We’re trapped in a fucking maze of horrible rooms. But I’ve been treating it like a puzzle, like it’s something fascinating, and pretending that it’s not absolutely goddamn fucking awful. And it is awful. It’s so awful.” Saying that out loud made her feel it all the more keenly.This place is awful. She felt it under her skin. And on it, too, like a thin layer of emotional, spiritual grease. Filthy with it. She’d heard stories about those poor bastards social media companies hired—first in America, later in other countries, because of course, fuck those people, right—whose sole job was to go through all the horrendous, heinous, awful shit that saturated social media. Not just the trolling and the doxxing and the death threats. But like, the realdarkshit. Videos of beheadings. Child porn. Animal abuse. Nightmares from the deepest, most fucked X-chan mines. It broke those people. Broke down their walls. Shattered the foundations of their minds. That’s what was happening to them in here. It’s what thehouse wanted. The house was torturing them with the torment of others.And sometimes, with our own torment, too.

“Dude, I—I think this is Hell. I think it’s my Hell. A real, actual Hell.”

“Of course, a mediocre white man would think it’shisHell—maybe it’s my Hell, you ever think that? Maybeyou’reinmyPurgatory.” She saw him flinch. Lore’s words opened another wound. A little part of her knew that she wanted to hurt him—in part to get revenge for their conversation in the car, in part because she was always having to carry weak men, carry them and accommodate them and soothe their tender stupid hearts. (Like Owen,she thought, cruelly.) But in part it was something altogether worse. If she pushed him hard enough, maybe he would finish the job she’d just interrupted. Maybe he would kill himself. Then she could be rid of the baggage that was Hamish. That was a dark and terrible thought that sickened her, particularly because it camefromher. She cautioned herself:If you push too hard, you will break him. That’s not what you want.

A cold realization struck her:It’s what the house wants.

She sighed. “It’s not Hell, Hamish. I don’t know what it is. Not exactly. But it’s real. Not some afterworld. It’s a real place and we are stuck the fuck in it.”

“How do you know?” It was strange how much he sounded like a child asking that. Like he was lost and looking for reassurance.

“There’s not a holy book around that says Hell is up a mysterious staircase in the woods. And besides, we’re here together. Hell seems to be a lonely place.”

He regarded her carefully. “You might not be real.”

“I wish I weren’t real, Ham. Then I wouldn’t be here. But I’m real, and I’m really here, in this…this very real place.” She gave him a hard stare. “You know, though, since we’re doingreckoningsright now…I am poly, pansexual, and despite the pronouns, I really do feel more at home in a body that isn’t supposed to be explicitly male or female.You were cool about stuff once. Easy-breezy, full of love, accepting of all things and all people, and now—now you’rethisguy. The guy who thinks this is Hell. It’s not even the Creel thing, it’s just—I thought you were better than that. I need you to be better than that.”

His eyes shone with tears. “I know. I’m sorry. I just—things happen in life, you go through some shit and you start to get scared, you start looking for answers, and sometimes you find—” He wiped his eyes. “You find the wrong ones.”

Lore gave him some side-eye. “We all went through some shit, Ham.”

They were both quiet for a while.

“I died once,” he said, abruptly.

“Uh.” She gave him a look. “Say more, please.”

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