Page 36 of The Staircase in the Woods

Matty didn’t wait for their answer. He marched off into the woods.

Silence spread in his wake.

“He seems fuckin’ serious,” Hamish said finally, a throaty chuckle in his voice that was half amusement, half worry. “Maybe we should listen. It’s Matty, guys. It’sMatty. If he wants to use the Covenant like that…”

“Welp,” Nick said, standing up. “I won’t be suckered in by his Covenant bullshit, but I am definitely vulnerable to a man telling me I’m a pussy if I don’t do a dare, so I’m going with him. Follow the bouncing flashlight, I go.”

He started to wend his way around the tents and the campfire.

“No,” Lauren said, abruptly. “Matty’s right. He never calls upon the Covenant for himself, so if he wants this to be that, let him. It must be important to him, and wedothings that are important to one another.” She said it like it was an obligation—something she had to do, even if she didn’t want to.

She got to her feet, joining Nick. But as he and then Hamish went past her, she just stood there, staring again into the fire. Lauren put her hand out in front of her face, as if to feel the warmth of the flames—but it was like she was entranced by her hand. Slowly, she moved it toward the fire. Closer. Closer—

Owen got up and gently caught her wrist.

“You okay?” he asked her.

She seemed startled by the question. Or by his presence entirely.

“Y—yeah. Totally.”

He didn’t want to ask, but he asked anyway: “Is…Matty okay?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

She yanked her wrist from his grip. And with that, Lauren spun heel to toe and marched off into the woods.

Leaving Owen alone.

He didn’t want to go into the dark. But he didn’t want to be alone, either. So he did what he always did: He followed after.

22

The Trip

Lauren left the fire behind, a fire in which she saw her future—a bright unfuckwithable blaze forward, an effulgent laser, a bright beam burning everything ahead of it into cinder, where she could be anything and do anything and no one could stop her. Like Matty said:I don’t need you. You guys don’t want to come with me, don’t come with me. She’d really done a number on him, hadn’t she? She tried to imagine it: Matty, having some vision of what it would be like to be with her, to finally have them as girlfriend-boyfriend. But along she comes and tries to get him to do,gasp,drugs, bad drugs, your brain as a fried egg, your mind as a glass of OJ knocked off the kitchen table, and Golden Boy Matty doesn’t like that. He’s disappointed in her.But maybe in himself, too,she thought. Maybe that was just her fantasy interpretation. Still. It felt good. It felt right.

She stepped deeper into the forest, which throbbed around her like a shadow with its own dark heartbeat. The trees bent away from her as she walked. She could see Matty’s flashlight dancing ahead, his own mighty light with crystalline spires firing off it like searing arcs from a Fourth of July sparkler scorching lines into the night. And beyond him, she couldfeelit as much as she could see it—

The staircase. Black and made of night’s own bones.

Lauren cackled madly, nearly weeping as she picked up the pace. Owen called to her, but she chose not to listen.

—

Here was the thing about dropping acid, at least with Lauren: It wasn’t like they said, and that was why she loved it. All the movies and all the stories had it where you ate the acid and next thing you know, your world was melting and you either took a ride on some fucking rainbow unicorn bullshitoryou woke up covered in blood and found your family dead because you got so high you thought they were all bowls of Jell-O and that knife in your hand was a spoon. It was all the stupid shit Matty was afraid of—that he’d take it, and it would break him.

It would. Break him, that was to say. Just not the way he thought.

To Lauren, acid was a slow hill to climb—about an hour in, you spent a little while feeling a bit queasy, and then you got really, really awake. Onlythenthe actualacidpart of the acid started, and though she knew they called it “acid” because it was lysergic acid diethylamide, to her the name was apt in a different way. It scoured you. Burned you clean of a lot of bullshit, like scrubbing the barnacles off the boat hull that was your mind. Yeah, sure, okay, you hallucinated—trails of light off your fingertips, a Celtic knot tapestry on your friend’s wall turning and twisting like a snake, gnomes hiding in the grass, various lattices and cobwebs overlaid across the world as if you were seeing through some shared illusion and into the programming that built reality. It was what it did toyourprogramming, though, that Lauren loved the most when it came to dropping acid—

See, everybody’s own personal programming got fucked up all too easily. Other people hacked your software, inserting their own dangerous code. Bad ideas, insults, lies, all of them your brain was in danger of accepting and plugging into its own program. But acid? Acid deleted a lot of that. It went through and rearranged your own brain. Tied emotions together you didn’t realize needed to be tied. It shoved aside the intrusive code and brought your own native programming back together—no more bugs or errors. It was like defragging a hard drive. Your brain and all its thoughts and all its feelings weresuddenly better organized. More efficient. After dropping acid, Lauren always felt like she’d been…upgraded. Broken down and built back up. Clearer, cleaner, brighter, huzzah.

That was acid, for her.

Usually.

Tonight, though—

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