Page 96 of The Staircase in the Woods

Owen stood in the room, with Nick just behind him, and he scanned the space, looking for—

Well, for what, he didn’t know.

But his mind returned again and again to games.

Video games.

Growing up, it was nearly all he and Lore did.

They played them, talked about them, wrote fanfic of them, and eventually…wanted to design them. Those designs still lived inside him, somewhere.

And he was thinking about them now.

Lately, aside from stupid time-wasters on his phone, he was pretty into indie games. He’d really taken to playing ones that were, in essence,spot the anomalygames. A new subgenre, of sorts. Games likeI’m on Observation Duty, Exit 8, Peculiarity Room,andThe Inverted Lighthouse.They were more than just walking simulators, more than just interstitial backrooms shit. The goal of these was simple enough: spot the anomaly. The consequences for not? Death, usually. You did not survive the night if you did not see and identify what had changed.Exit8made it creepier not by raising the stakes, but rather lowering them: You, the POV protagonist, walked down a well-lit, well-rendered subway tunnel, with one man walking past. As you went around the corner, the scene repeated, and you had to scrutinizeeverythingto answer the question: Had something changed? If it had not, you could keep walking forward and it would take you tothe next area. (Which, admittedly, was just the same areaagain,but this time, the number of the area went up by one, all the way to eight.) If you saw an anomaly, like a face reflected in the subway tile, or the man walking past now grinning instead of frowning, you had to turn back around and go back the way you came—in which case, the number of the area went up, and you were one step closer to being able to leave. If you missed an anomaly and went the wrong way? It would all reset. You were trapped in this shiny, bright liminal space.

It unsettled Owen to the core.

And it reminded him very much of where they were.

This was a house that shifted rooms, and there were clearly rules on how to cycle those rooms—and now, they’d finally found a repeat room.

It felt like a blessing.

More to the point, it felt like he haddone something right,like he had made the correct move, spotted the right thing, gone the correct way, performed the proper sequence, up up down down left right left right A B select start, and now he was rewarded with the prize of revelation: They werenotin an infinite prison. This house had finite rooms. It was not on a repeated loop, not exactly, but there were ways togetrooms to repeat.

Now Owen stood in their first repeated room. Marshie’s Room.

Bloody handprints. Glitching computer. Spice Girls on the wall.

Plastic phone. Feather pens.

And maybe, just maybe, a dead girl under the bed.

“What are we doing here, Zuikas?” Nick asked.

“I’m just…looking around.”

“For what?”

For anomalies,he thought, but didn’t say, because it sounded insane and because it meant he’d have to explain the whole video game thing,andbecause Nick would have the patience to hear exactly none of it. To Owen, the question became, had something changed in here? Was there something to see that was different, and could that unlock…something else? Anything else?

An exit?

That might not be the case. He wasn’t seeing anything, really.

But he still felt there was something to learn here.

And he wanted to take the time to learn it.

This might not be a game,he knew.

But it still could be a simulation, couldn’t it?

That felt crazy to believe, but he’d long had the nagging suspicion that…everyone and everything around him wasn’t real, that the reality of reality was too good, too perfect, that there always seemed to be a narrative that the world and its people neatly slotted into. And coincidences were strange—so-called glitches in the Matrix were a fun joke, but you looked for them, you found them, and once you found them? You had to wonder if it wasn’t a fun joke anymore.

He never necessarilybelievedthat all of life was a simulation—but it was a sort of comforting, modern, almost techno-spiritual view of the world, right? It provided a kind of faith-based structure. Instead of there being a Heaven or Hell or ghosts or demons, you instead believed that you were a part of a created,manufacturedworld, and that there had to be a real world, atrueworld, beyond it. A place both after and around this one. And now,now,he and his friends were in, what, a smaller version of that? A simulation inside the simulation? A smaller shard server? A game running a game, like someone designing and runningDoominside ofMinecraft? Or was the real world real, but this was fake?

Owen wasn’t sure.

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