Page 74 of The Staircase in the Woods

What the fuck was that thing. What the fuck.

He fumbled with the doorknob as he turned the lock.

“What was that thing?” he asked Nick.

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”

Owen backed away from the door. He nearly tripped on a toy—a stuffed plushie, a fuzzy blue dog with floppy ears. The stuffed dog started barking. A garbled sound, as if through a tinny speaker. It started off fast, too fast,ruffruffruffruff,but then began to slow and dissolve—rufffff ruuuuuuffff gggkkkkrrrhhhhkffff—before the sound died out. Owen, heart now hammering against his breastbone like it was a punching bag, kicked the dog and it thumped against the wall.“Fuck. Fuck.” Finally, he said, “So they’re really gone. Lore and Hamish.”

“Yeah,” Nick said quietly. “They’re gone. And we’re gone.”

“Yeah.Yeah.” Owen pushed the heels of his hands so hard into his eyes, he saw the universe exploding into greasy streaks of white light. He staggered over to the chair and sat in it, pulling his knees up to his chest and hugging them. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now. How are we going to find them again? There’s only one door out of this room, and it…it doesn’t go where we need it to go. This was your idea. Your idea to find those steps, to get us there, to go up them. So you tell me, Nick. What do we do now? Nick.Nick.”

But it was easy to see in the way that Nick searched the middle distance with his stare that he had no answers.

“I don’t know, Zuikas. I honestly don’t know.”

43

The Sick Boy’s Kitchen

They waited for a while in the Dying Man’s Bedroom. Sometimes they stared out at the kitchen through the open door. Sometimes Lore closed that door and waited.They might come through still,she told Hamish.We shelter in place. Like I said. We wait for them. But time bled out. The clock was ticking. The smell of this place was starting to overpower her. Hamish said he couldn’t take it either, said he was going to puke if they had to stay in here.

So through the door they went. Into the kitchen.

Lore closed the door after she stepped through, then opened it anew.

No more Dying Man’s Bedroom. On the other end of the door now waited a different bedroom. This one, almost boudoir-like—Lore would’ve thought it Victorian if she hadn’t spied an electronic alarm clock on a bedside table.

(The time read00:00,blinking red.)

“It shifted,” she said. Trying to hide the confusion and despair in her voice.

She turned around to regard this new room.

This kitchen: a little dining nook area off to the right, just behind them. Proper kitchen off to the left, sink along the far wall (where there should have been a window, she could tell), fridge and range on the other side. It was a country-style kitchen, powder-blue cabinets and a cheap laminate countertop, and white shelves everywhereoffering tons of random junk (little ceramic chicken tchotchkes and various kitschy egg timers, Precious Moments figurines, fake fruit, a jar full of rubber bands and twist ties). At the far side of the room, another door.

And in any other house, that door might have been anything from a pantry to a trash closet to a way into a garage, but here, there was no way to predict. It would go, most likely, to another room in this ever-shifting mismatched nightmare house.

It was a house, wasn’t it? Had they seen any room that was not a room from someone’s home somewhere? House, apartment, condo, whatever. All of it, places people lived. No cubicles, no factory floor, no museum displays, none of that. Everything was a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and so on.

So far, at least.

This place couldn’t be infinite. It had to loop back around, right? Had to be some way to get back to Owen and Nick. Problem was, she couldn’t communicate with them. The best move was for one of their groups to stay in place and the other to move in the hopes of finding them, but determining who would stay and who would search was impossible. They might both stay in place, or they might both roam this domestic labyrinth.

And whatwasthis place, anyway? As in, why did it exist?

Where did it come from?

Was it evenreal?

It felt real. Looked real.Smelledreal. Even now she could smell odd kitchen smells. The scent of burned cookies. The odor of a trash can gone off. The slick stink of too much cleaning spray to try to cover up something foul.

These rooms are all ruined somehow.

Dead fish, rancid cake with a thumb in it, dead girl, now this.

What waited for them here in this kitchen? In the next room? In the next after that? She could feel, even now, thatpressurein her head, the one that told her to go out on her own—just leave Hamish here,she could tell him she’d be back, then forge on without him. It felt like a thought someone else had put there. But at the same time, it made sense. She did well on her own. Always.

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