Page 5 of The Staircase in the Woods

And it was supposed to be theirs.

Not his, not hers.

Theirs.

Of course, Lore went off and did it all, didn’t she? Conquered the world. Hunter-Killer, hungry for that streak. And all he’d conquered was a shitty apartment and an endless series of dead-end jobs.She left me behind,he thought with no small bitterness.She’s living our dream. Without me.

Though, of course, it was way worse than that, wasn’t it?

He needed to pack, but instead he stood there, paralyzed.

Looking out the window in his apartment meant looking at algae-stained brick. He sometimes searched for patterns in the brickwork: faces, animals, landscapes, anything to help him not doomscroll on his phone and get lost in an endless loop of bad news. He stared now, trying to find something to take his mind off tomorrow, but the only pattern that emerged from the smears of seasick green and the lines of rust-red brick was a staircase in the middle of nowhere, leading to nothing, calling his name.

4

Lore

May 30

Seattle, WA

The cursor, aptly named, for it cursed her. A blinking line in the empty white void, mocking Lore from the laptop screen sitting on the kitchen nook table. At the top of the document, a name:hitchhikers_guide_thru_hell_DESIGNDOCv1usethisone. A placeholder name, obviously, even though it was (or rather, would become) a game aboutliterallyhitchhiking your way throughliteralHell. Lore didn’t know what it would end up being called.Glitchhikerswas already a game. She likedBitchhikers,but that didn’t really mean anything except sounding edgy for the sake of edgy, and besides, ByteDog wasn’t going to publish it with that name. They wanted to call itHellhiker,which she hated.What if I make the player protagonist a witch, and we call itWitchhiker? she’d asked. They’d all made a face, the same face, a sour, just-tongue-kissed-a-dead-fish face. So, not that, then.

Cursor, cursing her. Blank document, a hole in the universe.

The document always started off blank, she knew. Day one, every document was blank. Problem was, this wasn’t day one.

The document had been blank for six months.

In her hand, a single capsule, the color of sawdust. Lore got water from the fridge dispenser, popped the capsule, drank it back. Something to open her up. Keep the ants in her brain moving, keep them lined up and productive.

She needed it. They’d paid her a lot of money for this game.

And so far, she had nothing to show for it.

It’s fine,she told herself.You’re just fucked up about Nick.And fucked up about having to travel today. And fucked up about having talked to Owen. And seeing Hamish soon. And then Matty…

You’re just fucked up is the answer,she knew.

Still. She’d never had this before. Never had real writer’s block or coder’s block or art block or any kind of block. Sure, maybe for an hour. Maybe,maybea day. But more than that? Nah, never. There was always a way through. Shoulder to the door, fist through a window, hard head slamming forward into drywall, whatever it took. Lore knew she was fucked in a lot of ways, but this was never one of them. And these little microdose motherfuckers, they were one way to clear her mental pathways.

They hadn’t worked this time.

But they could. They would.

She’d do work on the plane. A change of perspective, in her head and out, would help. And maybe, in a weird way, seeing the others would fix some shit, too.

Still, that capsule she just took? It was her last.

Time to cook,she thought in her best Walter White voice.

—

I need a big kitchen,Lore had said when she was on a hunt for a house.A chef’s kitchen,she added, emphasis onchef’s,even though she was no such thing. This house, a Craftsman-style home in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, fit the bill with its broad-shouldered kitchen, which was good because Lore loved to cook, even if she didn’t love to eat. Cooking was sensual, tactile, beautiful; eating was crude, sticky, texturally upsetting. The feel of it in her mouth made her shudder as if she were sucking down spider eggs and broken glass. She liked meal replacement shakes and breakfast cereal. Everything else could go. But cooking—an act of arrangement and creation—brought her, well, notjoy,exactly, but something resembling satisfaction. She didn’t eat her food. She didn’t play the games she made. Didn’t read her own writing or ever look through her sketchbook. What she made was for others.

True for most things, but not all things.

Like, for example, what sat out in front of her now:

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