Page 4 of The Staircase in the Woods

“So what? The Covenant’s been broken since…” He couldn’t finish that sentence. They’d all broken it in their own ways.

Her especially,he thought, but dared not say.

“Maybe this is how we fix it. Even a little. We gave it a name, not to make it real, but because itwasreal. Once upon a time.”

“Lore—”

“Shut up. You’re going. We’re all going.”

Dog with a bone.

He sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”

A pause.

“You think Hamish will come?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” And he didn’t. He’d last seen Hamish on that Zoom call, and nothing since. Those bridges had burned long ago, leaving only the chasm. “I dunno if you check his socials, but Hamish is different these days.”

“Seems like.”

Seems like. Sounded like Lore hadn’t been talking to him either. Which made him grotesquely, uncomfortably happy. Owen would’ve been jealous to learn they’d been talking still. That somehowhehad been the one left out. Of course thinking that just made him feel extra shitty. But what didn’t?

“Flight’s tomorrow,” she said, filling the void of silence Owen had accidentally left wide open.

“Wait, what? Tomorrow? Shit.”

“Oh, what? Got something big going on?”

You know I don’t,he thought bitterly, but didn’t say that. Instead he deflected: “I have a shift at the bookstore. But I figured you’d be the one who was busy. All the stuff you’ve got going on—I mean, it’s impressive. It’s great. I’m happy for you.” Saying those things felt likeacid on his tongue. He felt weak, like he was capitulating. Like he was just a shadow cast by her light. “Seriously, I mean it,” he added, wincing.Really gilding that lily, Nailbiter.

“Hey, thanks. It’s been good. But I can make the time for this.”

“Good to be the boss.”

“Sure.” But the way she said it sounded like she didn’t mean it. Or she didn’t like him saying that. Owen couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t comfortable enough to probe for the truth. “You saw he cc’d Matty, right?” she asked.

“He, ah, he does that sometimes.”

A pause. She didn’t know that Nick did that sometimes. Which meant—what, Nick wasn’t emailing her? Just him? Huh.

She finally said, “I can’t tell if it’s sad or sweet or just fucked up.”

“I think it’s all of the above.”

“Yeah. Well.” A sound like her sucking air between her teeth. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Owen.”

“See you tomorrow, Lore.”

When the call ended, he bit down and ripped off a half-moon of thumbnail in one go. It bled.

—

Owen looked around his apartment, which he could do from the edge of his bed. It was essentially one room, not more than five hundred square feet. Place was a mess. Not a hoarder’s mess, not a filth pit, either. Just clutter at the edges because he was trying to live an adult life in a place that was too small for it, and no amount of Marie Kondo was going to fit his existence into an apartment this miserably cramped. Didn’t help that his computer—a gaming rig, mostly, a Frankenstein monster of bartered or refurbished parts—took up a good chunk of the desk. (Next to it: a little cairn of bitten fingernail slivers.)

He stood up and went to the corner of the room next to his shitty IKEA dresser. There, under a pile of oldOmnimagazines, was a file box. He hooked it with a foot and pulled it out. The magazines slid to the floor in a pile, and he didn’t bother to pick them up. Owen kneltand lifted the lid of that box with some trepidation, as if it were the Ark of the Covenant and opening it would release the souls of the damned, eager to melt the face off his skull.

But the dead souls that awaited inside were just stacks of old notebooks from high school and from college. They were not his notebooks, not entirely—and they were not Lore’s notebooks, either. They weretheirs,shared property, or so he’d always believed them to be. All throughout school, the two of them used these books for an unholy host of purposes: to write shared stories, to design adventures and characters for D&D, to draw stupid shit and share stupider jokes, and of course to design games. Pen-and-paper games, board games, but mostly video games. Inside were maps, lines from text adventures they programmed in fucking BASIC, bits of dialogue, little sketches of everything from Pokémon rip-offs to riffs onFallout-style power armor. Half of it was derivative shit, they both knew it. But there was good stuff in there, too. Original stuff.Realstuff.

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