Page 37 of The Staircase in the Woods

Tonight she’d taken two.

She’d never taken two. They were dosed for one—a good dose, an averagenormal persondose. But two of them. This was, in the parlance, aheroic dose.

It terrified her.

Excited her, too.

Because who knew what would happen now?

23

Ascent, Descent, and Memory

This is what Lauren would remember about that night:

She was going to do it. She was going to go up the staircase with Matty, and whether this was to join him or spite him, she didn’t yet know. No matter what, she was better than him, and like the song sang,Anything you can do I can do better.

But then, the staircase loomed large in her vision, and also in her mind, as if it had gone beyond the real and had entered her skull—like a tumor pulsing there in the meat of her mind. It was tall and black and made of shining bones, bones of copper and bronze, bones of polished wood. She didn’t know where her friends were. (They’re here,a small voice told her, a voice she could not trust.) All she could care about was the stairs, and as she watched them, they seemed to grow before her, extending both up and out and toward her like an unfurling tongue slick with eager spit, the air stinking of bad breath and rancid oranges—the stairs went up, not a stairway to Heaven but somehow up and into Hell, as if they were beneath that demonic kingdom, digging their way into its belly like a sharp stone, and here she knew, sheknewthis was just a bad trip, none of this was real, and this was like the first time she’d dropped acid, when she’d been happily watching the fleur-de-lis of old wallpaper bloom like living flowers, meanwhile chewing her thumbnail and the skin around it, and suddenly she realized,I’ve gone too far, I’ve bitten the nail off, the whole tip of the thumb, my thumb is gone, and I am chewing it, eating it, I’ve become Owen—but the guy who sold her the acid, he said,You startto have a bad trip, all you gotta do is remember one thing: “I’m on drugs.”And so she’d written it on an index card then, and looked at it, and that’s what it said in big capital letters, “YOU ARE ON DRUGS, DUMBASS,” and she looked at her thumb and it was fine, all there, not even a spot of blood. And now, seeing the staircase loom larger and meaner and darker, she repeated that to herself in a small whisper: “You’re on drugs, you’re on drugs, you’re on fucking drugs, you’re in drugs, youaredrugs”—shit, things wereunspooling,and now something else was here with them. Hell made manifest. Hell as a structure. Hell with corners and walls, Hell with hands, Hell with wallpaper and doorways and shuttered windows, the latticework of that demonic architecture constructing itself piece by piece, like invisible hands making, fuck, what were those old toys, those old fucking toys her mom had in the garage—Tinkertoys,right, right, Lucifer’s own Tinkertoys, constructing themselves in front of her.You’re on drugs, drugs, you’re on acid, you dropped acid, you dropped, dropped, dropping—

And then Matty was at the top, and he was happy, and Owen was asking him not to go, not to jump, and Nick and Hamish were just fucking around, barely watching any of it, and she saw the black tunnel open up at the top of the steps, a hole in everything, a hole in the universe, and she tried screaming the words,Do none of you see this?but it came out small, the squeaked chatter of a panicked vole, “do-none-of-you-see-this,” spit on her lips, orange oil in the air, smoke from somewhere—and she cried out to Matty but it was late, too late, too too late—

—

This is what Owen would remember:

When he walked up out of the woods, toward the staircase, he followed Lauren. He tried talking to her as they went, but she just laughed like she’d heard a joke from someone who wasn’t there, and then she traipsed on ahead. When they got there, to the stairs, Matty was already on the second step. Doing a kind of Gene KellySingin’ in the Rainbit, la-dee-dah, dancing up one step at a time. Asking, “Who’sgonna do it? Who’s coming with me? Hamish? Nick?” But the two of them were monkeying around, not paying attention. And Lauren—she was suddenly goggling at the staircase, her jaw slackened, and Owen thought,She’s on drugs, shit. She loved dropping acid when she could get it. It hit him then: Maybe that’s what she and Matty were fighting about?

It was then that Matty turned to Owen—

“Owen. Buddy. C’mon. Let’s climb the creepy stairs.”

Beneath Matty’s feet, the floorboards groaned like a child in pain.

Owen’s mind raced.Everyone thinks I’m a coward. I am a coward.I’m always scared about everything. They’re just steps. Just a staircase. Creepy, sure, but that’s all in my head. I can do this.

Matty didn’t even need to sayI dare you.

Owen remembered stepping up there onto the first step.

How cold the banister felt under his hand.

How the wooden step seemed to sag at first—and then rebound, as if it was lifting him up, encouraging him toclimb, climb, climb.

The air around him seemed to go still.

Matty kept climbing.

Owen took a few more steps.

The banister, colder. The stairs, almost with a cradle’s rock now, trying to urge him forward and upward.

Lauren, behind him, mumbling something. Babbling.

Hamish and Nick, still on the ground, grabbing each other’s necks, sack-tapping each other, howling with laughter and fake outrage.

Matty, up there, reversing his way up the steps, looking backward at Owen, grinning the way only Matty did: a big toothy smile, happy because his life was excellent, happy because he was good at nearly everything he did, happy because his future was presented to him like a delicious buffet of food with all the best cuts of meat and tastiest treats—and as he waved Owen up, as he stepped toward the topmost step of the staircase, Owen thought bitterly, cruelly,You may be smiling, dude, you may have it all, but I don’t think you have Lauren. Matty must’ve hurt her, rejected her, that’s what Owen told himself.And for a moment, he felt superior. He felt supreme. It felt right and righteous to be angry toward Matty.Must be nice to be you, you prick, he thought coldly.

Even as Matty said to him: “See, I knew you could do it, Owen.”

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