Page 95 of The Staircase in the Woods

53

Between

The Bottle Room was rent asunder, the wall busted wide, leaving behind a craggy mouth of dangling plaster, tufts of insulation, and broken framing studs. Bits of particulate matter hung around, floating here and there, glittering when they touched the light. The floor, too, had a few broken bottles shattered around, and the smell of spent whiskey, tequila, and gin perfumed the air.

Hamish panted. In his hand: a tall floor lamp. He took out the bulb, tossed the shade, and used the lamp and its faux brass base to bash the wall. Lore stood near him, her face still bloody, though the blood had now dried to an almost black mask on the lower half of her face—weirdly reminiscent of the face masks worn during COVID. She held a leg from the coffee table—wooden, easy for her to unscrew and use like a baton. It was powdered with wall dust.

He coughed and cleared his throat.

Inside, the wall was…well, what was expected, mostly. More framing studs. Also some pipe, some loops and bundles of wire, a few junction boxes. Hamish said he didn’t do much work on his own home these days but knew what he was looking at. And there were a few things that didn’t add up.

For one, the studs were erratic in their distance from one another. Usually studs were sixteen or twenty-four inches apart—the former for load-bearing walls, the latter a standard for every other wall. These were spaced differently. He didn’t have a tape measure or anything,but could easily see the discrepancies. One gap was around twelve inches. The next, twice as much. The third? Six inches, maybe.

The other thing, the pipes and wires didn’t make sense. The junction boxes seemed purposeless. Wires seemed to go to theoretical outlets where no outlets existed. They were designed tolookokay, in passing, but nothing really seemed to connect to anything else. And yet, sometimes they could hear running water going through the pipes. And this whole place seemed to have power.

The final thing was the kicker, though: The space between the walls, from this room to the next, was way too wide. Usually walls were six inches apart, because, he said, most homes were trying to maximize space, not steal living space from their inhabitants. But here the space was easily two feet or more. In this case, the opposing wall was raw, red brick. Dusty, pocked with time, strung with wisps of cobweb. He explained all of this to Lore, who paused for a moment to finally wipe some of the blood crust from her face.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

“Crawlspace,” he said.

“Crawlspace.”

Together, they went over into the wall breach that they had made.

And sure enough, it was not only wide enough to fit through, it was wide enough to walk down—long as you squeezed past or ducked under the pipes and wires. Lore stepped into the half-dark. Stepping into this space, the air was cooler. Thinner—in a good way, like it wasn’t thick, like it wasn’t trying to smother them. Easier to breathe. And Lore’s head felt…clearer, somehow. Like a bad hangover dissolved by a good cup of coffee and a little sunlight. That’s what this place felt like. Sunlight.

That’s when Lore saw it, and pointed. “Look.”

There, on the ground, a can.

Hamish squinted.

Asoupcan. Campbell’s, maybe.

“Whoa. Someone’s been here,” he said. “In the walls.” He didn’t say what they both hoped:Matty.

“Inbetweenthe walls,” Lore said. That felt important, somehow, in a way she didn’t yet understand. “So we know that the rooms shift. But what about the crawlspace? What…happens here?”

“Guess we should check it out,” Hamish said.

“Guess we should.” She paused. “You think Hell has crawlspaces?”

Hamish took a deep breath. “I don’t think so. You’re right. This place is something different. I feel…different here.”

“Me too. Clearer.”

“Yeah. Clearer.”

“All right. Team Crawlspace. You wanna go first, or should I?”

“Have at it,” he said.

Lore nodded. She picked a direction—right, not left, because wasn’t left the direction of evil?—and they descended into the darkness of the in-between.

54

It’s Time for Some Game Theory

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