Page 98 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Games have crawlspaces?”

“Kinda?” She made a face. “It’s not a one to one. A lot of times you can see excess programming artifacts there—though other times you might just fall through the universe and die, or worse, break the game.” Which made her wonder:Had they just broken the game?Since she was behind him, she nudged him forward. “Let’s keep going, see where we end up.”

“It’s darker ahead,” he said. And it was. What light they got from the hole in the wall behind them did not travel far beyond this corner.

“All right. My phone’s almost dead, but…yours still good?”

He hesitated. “I…shit, it’s out.” He sounded suddenly sad. Pathetic. “I was looking at pictures of my kids and my wife, Lore, I know, I know, I’m sorry—”

“Okay,okay,hey, it’s—” Again, Lore doing the hard work of actually having to be calm and nice and not just laying into him. It was hard for her—but easier in the crawlspace, somehow.Like the house can’t reach us here.Was that insane? It sounded insane. It also felt very true. “It’s fine. You’re fine.”

“I am sorry. I just needed to see them—”

“Really, I get it.” That was a lie. She didn’t get it. Not remotely. Lore was an island. She did not feel the urge to look at photos of other people from her life for a host of reasons: because they were gone when she didn’t look at them, in some cases, and in other cases, because it was too painful to remember them, an acknowledgment that they mattered to her and she didn’t do enough to show them. “I still have a little juice.”I wish there was a charger I could find in this god-forgotten house maze. It was what it was. She got out her phone and powered it up.

Nine percent left on the battery.

Good enough for now. Flashlight on, they continued forward, turning right at the junction.

The boards creaked underneath them. The walls, too, seemed to groan a little on both sides—like the sounds of a creaky old ship at sea.

Ahead, something was there on the floor. Trapped by the meager light.

As they got closer, they saw it more clearly. It was more snack trash: this time, an empty bag of Lay’s Hickory BBQ chips, with packaging old enough to drink. And next to that bag? A pair of sneakers. New Balances, ratty, torn on the sides, the soles worn so far down they were smooth.

They stank. Like dust and time and, well,foot.

“These aren’t programming artifacts,” Hamish said. “Matty…”

“Matty wore New Balances.”Gray, just like these.They each had their signature footwear back then, didn’t they? Nick wore janky work boots. Hamish had his Birkenstocks. Owen went through pair after pair of black Chucks. And she was an early adopter of Doc Martens, baby. Black leather, yellow thread.

“We don’t know that they’re his.”

“No. But…”

“Lore, every room is filled with shit. Some of it’s trash, or old foodor…a room full of booze bottles. I don’t know who they belong to or if they belong to anybody. Except maybe the—the people we see.”

“The ghosts, you mean.”

“Ghosts.”

“Ghosts, or illusions, or whatever they are. They’re something. They’re not people. Not people-people.” She clicked off her phone light for a moment to conserve battery. “They’re all dead or half dead or insane. They’re as ruined as the rooms they inhabit. This is a haunted house.”A haunted house,not like one that was really, actually haunted. But one that was put on, created,stagedfor Halloween. A haunted house attraction. Which was, in its way, a kind of game, wasn’t it? Enter. Move forward through the rooms. Exit. That was a thread she wanted to pull on. But so were these shoes. “These sneakers are old. Like, late nineties old. What if Matty was in here, too? He could’ve found this place, same as we did.” But now, hope that Matty was still alive dimmed. How could he be? All they were finding of him were remnants. And even if hewerestill alive in here…he’d be older, like they were. And almost certainly broken, deranged, a mess of a man lost in this labyrinth. But then, an enticing thought—

What if he got out?

What if he found an exit?

If he had, why wouldn’t he have found them?

None of it made any sense. Lore, frustrated, felt like it was all there in front of her, but she couldn’t put it together.

“Hey.” In the darkness, she saw Hamish shift suddenly. Like he wasdifferently alert,if that made sense.He’s looking at something. “Yo, what the hell’s that?” he asked.

She turned to look back down the crawlspace channel.

Farther down, a little prickle of light. Shining in a small, faded beam from the wall. About twenty feet or so. Lore lowered her voice, not that it mattered much now. “Let’s go check it out.”

“Lore, what if we can’t get back to where we came in?”

---