Page 115 of The Staircase in the Woods

His father gurgled.

Owen laughed around his painted, gooey fingers.

The room spun and drifted. He felt dizzy and alive. Inside him,rooms built onto rooms onto rooms. He felt the new occupant moving in. He was the house and the house was him. A house of hate, a house of love. He laughed and thought about which part he could renovate next. Get rid of that old radiator (teeth) or hammer down those stuck-up nails in the floorboards (toenails) or rip down those nasty old curtains (ears). He fell toward a door, a door that wasn’t there before, a door in the wall, and he wondered,Did I make that, did I make that door, is it a doorway into me?But then hands reached out from the darkness, the arms stretching, the fingers long and probing. He fought against them, struggled to get away, but they were too fast and too many. They gripped his arms. He thrashed. He tried to bite. But the arms, they were strong, and he was weak—and before long, they dragged him into the wall even as Owen screamed and screamed and screamed.

66

The Art of Self-Destruction

Time passed after they pulled Owen from that room and into the crawlspace. He was soaked in red—his own blood. Oozing from his chewed fingertips, but worse, from the sores and scratches in his arm. In one spot, he’d literally pulled a Band Aid–sized strip of skin clean off; the muscle lay exposed, glistening crimson. It took everything she and Hamish had to get him into the wall.

They didn’t have much by way of first aid—just a bit of gauze, a bunch of painkillers, a tube of off-brand Neosporin. Stuff they’d gathered over the last few days since seeing the copy (because that’s how she thinks of them, as copies, not as ghosts, copypasta, creepypasta) of her mother in that room.

They did what they could with his injuries. Thankfully, all the screaming and thrashing about stopped as soon as he came into the crawlspace. Like one of those videos where a tornado appears, rips shit up, and thirty seconds later is gone again, replaced by the serenity of clear skies. He hit the crawlspace and his body sighed and sagged; he moaned and fell into an unconsciousness so deep Hamish said, “I think he’s dead.” But a pulse still fluttered fast in his neck.

Hamish offered to go out and look for more medical supplies, but that was a fraught mission. Already Lore knew you couldn’t go alone out there—and worse, though you could always make it back into the crawlspace, the passages between rooms were themselves a labyrinth, and so Hamish might have a hell of a time finding her andOwen again. And they couldn’t leave Owen alone, could they? Maybe they could’ve. But she didn’t want to.

So, time passed. They waited. Slept when they could on the pillows and blankets they’d pulled in here. At one point, they found a string of Christmas lights on an old dead Christmas tree in a nursery, and Lore pulled them in here, and plugged in using an outlet on the other side of the wall—the inside of the house.

The lights twinkled.

Owen stirred, moaning, but not waking up.

Hamish said, “Where do you think Nick is?”

“I dunno.”

“You think he’s okay?”

“I dunno, Ham. I really hope so.”

—

While Hamish slept, Lore stayed up. She was a natural night owl, a habit born from years of insomnia—her brain would not quiet itself and so she often used it to work. It was trained to stay awake, to remain ever vigilant, especially when there was some kind of game design issue or story question she was working on. Her mental teeth worked every problem like gristle, at the cost of rest.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead,she always said.

Blatantly, vibrantly awake, she talked to Owen. Not because she wanted to work out the house’s puzzles or win this game—rather, it was just because she needed tosay some shit. Needed to talk it out. And okay, fine, it was easier for her when he was unconscious. And she was awake anyway, right? So she sat down, plopped his head in her lap like she used to do sometimes, and babbled.

“So, I saw my mom. Not my real mom. She’s still alive outside this fucking place somewhere. But the mom I saw here was…just like her, the real her. For so long she left me alone and it fucked meallup. And now she’s alone because she pushes me away, hates what I am because the TV tells her to, and…it’s bad for her, dude. Being alone like that. And it was bad for you in the house. And I bet it was bad forMatty. Fuck. Alone. Alone, alone, alone. Always thought that was my superpower. Latchkey kid. Didn’t need anyone or anything. Didn’t need Matty, didn’t need you, didn’t need the Covenant.

“But the Covenant, it was everything. We were interlocking pieces and it made the whole of us stronger, I think, but then…I pissed off Matty, or Matty pissed off me, or whatever, and he went up those stairs and then, that was it. He was gone. The Covenant…” Her voice gave out. The words, dissolving.

“Friendship is like a house,” Lore finally managed to say, Owen’s head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness, too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”

“We were just kids,” came a groaning croak from Owen.

“Owen.” She pushed her forehead against his. He felt hot, like he was fighting off a fever. “You’re awake.”

“I guess.”

And he’s been listening the whole time.

“Sorry to have woken you.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m…” This was hard for her. She had to willfully unclench her jaw to get the next bit out. “I’m fucking up the new game. The one Iwas working on before we came in here.Ourgame. The one we came up with. I’m fucking it all up. I can barely get anywhere on it and they paid me money and I will have nothing to show for it. And part of the reason why is that I know deep down it isn’t just mine, it’s ours, and it needs you. And Ihatethat it needs you.” She sighed. “But it does. It really, really does.”

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