Page 91 of The Staircase in the Woods

He told her a story then. How after high school, he went to Virginia Tech, nearly flunked out, was an absolute party boy. Got hooked on half the drugs available to him. Ate poorly. Looked like hammered shit. And then one day, he was at a party and took too much of something and…

And he woke up in the hospital.

After having been clinically dead.

“And I just started to think…I died, I never came back to life, and this is our home now.”

This is our home now.

That gave her the shivers.

But it also filled her with a special kind of rage. In her was an orchestral crescendo of anger, but alsomotivation. A swell of music like when you were about to kill the final boss. Matty’s message came to her, again, the one he had carved into the door: DON’T LET IT IN. And then, DON’T LET IT WIN.

They’d let it in.

But they didn’t have to let it win.

“We’re going to get out of here, Ham. We found the entrance to this place, and if there’s an entrance, there’s an exit. I’m sure of it.” Shestood up with a grunt. Her knees cracked and popped. It only occurred to her now how sore her legs were. She shot out a hand. “Come on, let’s do this.”

Hamish nodded, and she helped him stand.

“Sorry again,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too.”

“Yeah, but—your nose.”

“It’s all right.”

“Broken, maybe.”

“Then it matches the rest of me.” She turned and looked at the scattering of mirror shards and the busted mirror hanging broken on the wall.

“I’ll try not to punch stuff,” he said with a dark, dire chuckle.

“Yeah…” But she paused. A spark of destruction lit in the darkness of her wandering mind. “Well. Now, hold on. Let’s not be hasty. Maybe it’s time tostartpunching stuff. And breaking things.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it. We’ve been meandering through this place, aimless. It’s not getting us anywhere. It’s like a ride we’re buckled into and it’s just…wearing us down.”Remember the warnings. “This place hates us. We’re supposed to remember that. It hates us, Hamish.”

For the first time in—what, days? She saw Hamish’s eyes brighten. That same spark in her was now in him. “We should break shit.”

“Yes. Yes! We’ve been playing by its rules. Circling the drain. But this is likeMinecraft,man. We can destroy this place. Start smashing it to pieces. What happens if we break the walls? What’s behind them? Where doesthattake us? If this place hates us? Then maybe we need tohate it back.”

51

Agita

They were cycling rooms again. It was how they moved through this place, Owen and Nick. When at a doorway, they stepped through and back again, triggering the rooms to cycle. Then they waited till they found the right room—or, at least, the right kind of room. Place to eat. Place to piss. Place to rest their head. Safe places—as much as they could guess at, anyway.

But it was wearing on them. Grinding them down.

Owen could feel it. The endlessness of it. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. It felt like madness. Doorways and staircases and dead rooms. By now, he was chewing his nails in secret. They were ripped, jagged things. Hangnails and ruined cuticles. They hurt. Nick had seen it, but blessedly had said nothing.

Presently, the room they were in seemed safe. A laundry room from 1992—easy to know that, since there was a calendar on the wall, one with normal family things written in the calendar blocks.Valentine’s Day dance. Church bake sale. Barbecue at Bob’s. Only awful thing in this room was the bloody bedsheets in the washer. It gave the air a faint coppery stink competing with the oversaturation of hyper-clean chemical laundry smell. Otherwise? This room was quiet as they hopped in and out of the doorway, then closing the door and reopening it again to see what the randomizer gave them.

On the sixth time, it gave them a bedroom where a filthy-looking orange lump of a cat was eating a dead woman’s face. She lay there onher back, and the cat ate from her head like it was Fancy Feast. Wet, smacking sounds. Gore clinging to its whiskers like morning dew on onion grass. It made little happy sounds,mow mow mew mow,as it gorged.

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