Page 25 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Fuck off,” he said, but it was a playful fuck off, not afuck offfuck off.

“You’re moving like treacle.”

He grunted. His legs felt like hot rags spun up and wrung out. His knees felt like hard rocks wrapped up in those rags, too. “I’m just trying not to break a leg. Or my head. Or touch poison ivy.” Still, he gave himself a little push, though. “And I don’t know what ‘treacle’ is, Laur.” (Laur, just the short form of her name. For now, at least.)

“It’s—I think pudding? It’s a Britishism. I read it in a Pratchett book. It’s like, molassesy, but I think you mine it out of the ground? I don’t fucking know. It just means you’re slow.”

“I know I’m slow.”

“Do you need your inhaler?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. He had asthma, but a particular kind—exercise-induced asthma,they said. He found out he had it when he nearly collapsed, wheezing, during gym class last year when they had to run a mile. He also found out that he had some kind of knobby knees situation—“growing pains,” they said, but then they also said it was called Osgood-Schlatter disease? This kind of exercise—hiking up a steep, steep trail—was fine for his asthma, but shitty on his knees. They throbbed with their own horrible heartbeats.

“Just making sure, dude. Don’t want you dying out here, because I need my writing partner. I can’t do it alone.”

“Thanks, Laur.”

“Oh, hey, dude.Dude. Listen. I thought of a new game idea.”

Owen stuck out his lower lip and used it to blow the beads of sweat gathering on his upper lip. “Oh yeah?”

“So, like, get this—it’sPokémon,but instead of catching cute little Japanese critters, you’re out there trying to catch Lovecraftian nightmares and pit them against one another—”

Owen laughed. “Right, so you throw your ball—”

“Or yourobsidian prism trapor yourvoid sphereor whatever—”

“And you catch a frolicking Nyarlathotep—”

“Nyarlathotep, I choose you!” she chirped.

More laughter. “Oh my god,totally. And it doesn’t just have to be Lovecraftian stuff. Imagine it with cryptids. Skunk ape, Mothman,a wild chupacabra goat-sucker appears,and then you could—”

Ahead and above them, Matty Shiffman called.

“Laur! Hey!Laur!C’mere! You wanna see this!”

“Shit,” she said to Owen. “Hold that thought.”

Then Lauren pushed past him, hurrying back up the hill to meet Matty up there. Leaving him all by himself.Again,he thought, somewhat bitterly.

—

Owen kept going. Slowly, now. Not in a hurry because—

Well. Just not in a hurry.

But only ten feet ahead, he found Hamish there, bracing himself against a paper birch, sweat dripping from the long oily coils of his hair.

“Fuck, man,” Hamish said, breathing heavily. “This fucking sucks.”

“No kidding.”

Owen reached behind his own backpack and pulled a glass bottle out of one of the side pockets. It was a mango Snapple. Half drunk, but not yet piss warm. With a bit of a flourish, he handed it to Hamish.

“I present to you—nectar of the gods,” Owen said.

“Fucking fuck, thank you.” Hamish uncapped it and took a huge swig.“Wahhh,”he said, a guttural gasp of refreshed satisfaction after having gulped more than half the bottle. “So, you bummed?”

---