Page 110 of The Staircase in the Woods

…And Yet So Far

“Did you hear something?” Hamish asked.

They’d just left an eerily long hallway—no doors along the side, only one door at each end. And just as they’d come through this door…

He turned, the door already closing behind them.

“No,” Lore said, her voice distant even in her own ears.

Ahead of her waited a room so messy it verged on a hoarder’s labyrinth: dead plants and open, half-eaten boxes of butter round crackers and shit bought from cheap Chinese internet companies (spatula, blouse, spice grinder, Hummel knock-offs, Bluetooth headphones) still in their packaging. Most of it mounted on tables and on the wrap-around couch. The room, dim at the edges. At its center, the glow. A flatscreen sat on a cheap Walmart-bought TV stand, and it pulsed and flickered with images: scenes of war, of White House insurrection, of rallies and red hats, of the man with the face like a melting citronella candle, of transgender women made to look demonic, of a border wall going up, of starving migrants in a sun-fucked desert, of a big redXflashing cartoonishly over a vaccine needle, of red-cheeked froth-mouthed white men thrusting tiki torches forward into the dark night as if to burn away anything that wasn’t white and bright like them, all of these images and more, flashing faster and faster, melting into one another as if turned into AI-generated soup, and there—there!—Lore saw herself in those images, didn’t she? A static pulse of her own face, cartoonishly edited, an image she’d seenof herself online, manipulated by mouth-breathing chodes who made her look like a blue-haired bug-eyed Karen.

In front of the TV, a woman sat watching. A sludgy woman, melting into her recliner, a blanket over her lap, a scraggly white cat in her lap.

Hamish stepped in and said, “I thought I heard—”

“Shh,” the woman barked at them.

“I hate these ghosts,” Hamish said.

“She’s not a ghost,” Lore answered.

“What?”

“Laurie,” the woman said, her voice raspy. “Is that you? Tell your friend to be quiet. I’m watching something.”

Watching something. Fox. OANN. Newsmax. Their logos juddered on the screen, before spraying into broken glitch pixels.

“Laurie?” Hamish said, his voice cautious. “Wait. Lore. Is that—”

“It’s my mom.”Finally,she thought with grim irony.A room for me.She was, in a weird way, starting to feel left out—like, wow, don’t I get a room, house? Where’s my torment? Just one book on a shelf? She’d started to come around to the idea that the wholehousewas her torment, because she’d been left alone so long and so often—practically the prototype for the Gen X latchkey kid—that to be wandering through an empty loveless house was a perfect reminder of how dead and undesirable her home life had been growing up. But now,now,here was a room just for her. No dead bodies, no torture porn, no blood, no horror but for what flashed on that TV screen. All of it beamed into her mother’s glassy, unblinking eyes.

“We can go—”

“No,” she said, stiffly. “I can take it.”

“Laurie,” her mother barked. “I said, be quiet. Just take a seat. Or make me something, will you? One of them little pizzas.”

Hamish watched Lore carefully.

“It’s not her,” Lore said. “I know that. But it’s not a ghost, either. My mother’s alive. If you can callthis—” She held out her hands as if to demonstrate the pathetic realm in front of her. “Alive. Whatfucking irony, Ham. All my life, my mother stayed out of this house, leaving me alone. Off with some guy, off on some trip, off at work, and me at home, just having to figure shit out. Toilet broke, I figured it out. Needed food, I figured it out. Raccoon got trapped in our screened-in porch, I figured it the fuck out. But then, finally, late in life, Mom comes home, and what does she do? Plants herself in a chair, and downloads this shit into her brain day in and day out. Brainworms feeding on brainrot. Fuck. She came home, but then went away again. She’s here, but she’s still not here for me.”

“Lore, I’m sorry.”

A pulse on the TV—Creel’s face again, frozen like a halted Zoom call, half his face in a dissolving glitchy mess.

“And shestillhas shit taste in men,” Lore said.Get it together, Laurie.Her mother’s name for her. She had to shake it free from her head.Not Laurie. Not Lauren. Lore.“Whatever. Look. She bought a bunch of dumb stuff from the internet. Temu or Alibaba or some other garbage. Let’s go through it. I bet we’ll find a charging cable, maybe a flashlight, in there.”

“Lore, we don’t have to do this—I don’t know what’s going on here, but your mom, we can just try another door—”

“I’m cool. It’s not real. It’s just the house fucking with me.”Right? That’s what this is, isn’t it? It can’t be real. Just a game. Just a simulation.“Hey. You said you heard something? Before we came in?”

“Nothing, I guess,” Ham said. “I thought maybe it was Owen, but…”

“We’ll find them, Ham. I promise. Now let’s go through this shit so we can get out of this room and get back to the crawlspace before our brains turn to treacle.”

Treacle,she thought. That word again. It made her think of Owen. And it made her realize that she missed him very much. She hoped wherever he was out there in the house, he and Nick were doing okay.

63

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