Page 117 of The Staircase in the Woods

The crawlspace was safe. The house couldn’t get you here.

You could get to the crawlspace through many of the rooms in the house, but not all of them. Yes, the crawlspace existed behind every wall, but that didn’t mean every wall was something you could get through. Cinder block? No way. Drywall? Absolutely.

Excursions were necessary, though. Food, water, a shower now and again. Excursions, then, couldn’t be deep into the house. They were from the crawlspace only—open the crawlspace, go into one room, never deeper. Then back into the crawlspace.

And you never did italone. Horror movie rules applied: You were alone, the monster could get you. And the monster was all around them.

Out there, the food replenished over time. (Like in a game,Lore noted, and Owen thought again how this place was like a simulation—maybe not one of bits and bytes, but one that ran on a program of hate, designed on the human-made locally sourced artisanal blueprint of horror. Lore also worried that maybe they shouldn’t eat the food. Same as you shouldn’t in all the myths of other lands, fairy places, and strange realms.Too late,Hamish said, eating Spam out of a can.)

—

Time passed in the nightmare house.

Days turned to another week, to two, to three. A month, now gone.

Excursions outside the crawlspace made it clear how different the crawlspace was. In the crawlspace, you might feel the house’s presence at a distance—especially while you slept. Like wolves waiting in the dark past the firelight. But in the house? That meant leaving the firelight. That means the wolves could start to hunt you.

And oh, could they ever feel the house hunting them. It was a presence. Sometimes it was far away, creeping up on them like a stalker. But eventually it surrounded them. Pressed in on them at every side. Not a physical thing you could see or touch but still, itfeltphysical. Like the way certain noises made your heart race, like the way heat could feel oppressive and smothering.

Then, of course, it had its tricks. Whispers in the vents. Laughter behind the walls. Ghosts of victims, ghosts of murderers, those who’d killed themselves, those who’d died from grief, those who’d perished under the weight of a difficult and unloved life, those who’d killed for the same reason, those who’d tortured because they were themselves tortured, on and on. A dead boy whose scalp had been peeled back. A woman bruised from head to toe, reaching for them, calling for help. A father straight out of the 1950s with the Ronald Reagan hair and the pipe in his mouth, his salmon pants and trim cardigan spattered in the blood of his family.

None of it real. All a show.

And they’re not even ghosts,Owen told them.The house is the ghost. The people are just the house’s memories. What it saw. What it felt. People being monsters to one another inside the walls of their home. A place that was supposed to be safe but wasn’t. So the houses went bad and joined this place. This is like Hell, but not for you, not for me. This is the hell of bad houses. Where broken, hate-poisoned places go after they die.

(Hamish said, “See, I told you this was Hell.”)

—

They watched for Nick. They used the eyeholes that had been cut out—and they cut their own when they could. They listened at the walls. They left messages for him in the rooms around their crawlspace. Messages that they loved him, and were looking for him, and to let them find him. Please, please, please.

And yet, there was no sign of him.

Which made them worry: Had he already gone again? Owen told them that the house said it would let him go if he let it in. Before they pulled him into the wall, he’d seen a door. Was that his exit? ClearlyNick had already been allowed to leave once. Had he escaped the house once more? And to what end? “To bring more people like us back into the house,” Hamish said.

Lore added: “Maybe worse than that. Maybe to go out there and make more bad houses. More tragedy, more terror. Spread the pain like cancer. Like metastasis.”

68

That Mortal Wound

They had hope. But even in the crawlspace, a place safe from the house’s intrusions upon their sanity, they could feel time scraping it away, like meat off a bone. More days, more weeks passing. The food, odd and inconsistent. Their sleep, stitched together with fraying thread. Hamish said he’d never see his family again, and at night he wandered the crawlspace, crying out in sadness, and yelling in anger—at Nick, at the house, and most of all, at himself. Lore feared she’d never make another game. But she didn’t cry or scream, she just grew empty and cold, and Owen could feel her pulling away. Taking notes and marching the crawlspace like a sentry. Hoarding items. Watching and waiting. Owen, for his part, just felt lost. Sometimes he tried to talk to Hamish about better days, but Hamish didn’t want to reminisce, said it hurt too damn bad. He tried to talk to Lore about their new game they’d make when they got out, but she blew him off, said she had things to do. So Owen, for the most part, fell silent. The house was not in their heads here, but it had still done its job. It was emptying them out. First of hope. Then everything else could go, too, drained out like blood from a butchered deer.

69

The House Always Wins

Soon, they would come to hate one another.

It wasn’t there, yet.Hatewas a strong word, Owen knew.

But the road was straight, and the destination was clear.

They spent so much time together in the tight space of the crawlspace, Hamish said he felt like a “trapped rat.” They had to wander that between-space, finding ways into the house from time to time, looking for food or items or just a space to breathe. Necessary, even though it meant the house could whisper its hate in their ear and show them yet another tableau of human pain. And they had to do it together—it was, after all, one of the rules. But spending that time together was increasingly an act of agitation and irritation. They didn’t have much freedom from one another. They were bound together, a chain gang of friends.

Being together so much in such a terrible place made them not want to be around one another anymore, not at all. It may not have been hate, no, but it was certainly not friendship, not anymore. They sniped at one another. Argued. Insulted. Wandered the spaces as if they too were ghosts of the house. Lore even hissed like an animal sometimes, as if she’d gone feral. Whatever warmth they started to again feel toward one another had gone cold—summer into a hard winter. Owen felt the resentment in his belly building, and even sensing it, he couldn’t quite do anything about it. His forgiveness for Lore was short-lived, and he wanted to punish her for what she’d done to him—treating him like he was expendable, a resource to be used andnot a friend to have or a person to love. He was angry again toward Hamish, too, for the way his friend had changed—Lore told him one night about how Hamish had literally died from an overdose, and at the moment, he felt such immense sadness about that. Sadness that was now a kind of disdain, for how weak it was that his friend had done that. How pathetic. How much he’dchanged. And coming out of those addictions just gave him new ones: addictions to a church, to his family, to working out, to his self-image.

Sometimes Hamish prayed out loud. Lore told him to shut the fuck up.

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