Page 41 of The Staircase in the Woods

Of being alone, when you weren’t supposed to be.

The silence always felt loud. The air always felt empty and cold, like you were stranded on another world, with no one coming to get you. It wasn’t just that it was lonely—it was that she always felt like the last person alive.

And the memory of that house—of being alone and lonely and crushed by an empty world—was the same thing she felt upon transitioning fromtheretohere.

—

Where, then, was here?

Lore stepped off the staircase—

Then the smell of must and dust and mold—

Then a crinkling crackle in the deep of her ear forcing its way through her eustachian tubes, pushing so hard they might just burst—

The wave of emptiness hit her, pressed in on every inch of her, grew inside her like a widening, deepening hole—

And finally, a sharp, involuntary breath in—

Lore held that breath deep.

She stood still. Flexed her fingers, as if to make sure they were still there, and attached. Wiggled her toes, too, in her boots. Then she felt her face, just to make sure—well, she had no idea why it wouldn’t be there, or why her fingers and toes would not be attached, but everything was where it was supposed to be. Except, she supposed, her entire body.

Because her body was not in the woods.

Lore stared ahead at a hallway.

At the end, a door. And another door to her left.

Along the right, a long stretch of wall papered with a menagerie pattern in faded greens and blues—she spied peacocks and hares and butterflies, and in other places pairs of eyes staring out from behind dark foliage. The paper peeled in places, curling in strips like leprotic skin. Patches darkened with water stains.

At the top, someone had crudely carved a message in erratic slashes of wallpaper:This Place Hates You.

A chill clawed its way up from her feet, a centipede winding its way toward her scalp.

She tried to remain present, tofocuson what had happened and where she was, but a question slipped through—

Why did you do it?

Why did you go up those steps?

To find Matty,she told herself.

Half true, she knew. Half a lie, though, too.

Focus!she chided herself.Where are you, Lore? Look around.

Okay. The floor beneath her was dusty, creaky wood. Chipped and scratched, as if by the unkempt claws of a big dog.Or wolf,she thought.

Above her, a flush-mount light fixture of cracked, dirty glass, held in place by a mount of leaves and vines of brass. Of the three bulbs inside, one was burned out, and one flickered incessantly, ticking and clicking with the sound of a moth tapping against a window.Tick tick. Flit. Buzz.

The door straight ahead of her and the door next to her were both made of wood stained dark, like the deck of an old ship soaked with seawater and blood. Simple metal doorknob. Each looked old, older than the knobs that had replaced whatever had been there first.

The door next to her had an additional detail that summoned in her a strange surge of nostalgia—

Three cartoony scratch-n-sniff stickers sat in the center of the door. Roughly the height of a child, eight or nine years old. One a slice of watermelon, one a lawn mower, the third what she thought at first was an inflated pink balloon but then realized, no, was a blown bubble, like from bubble gum. Each had a goofy face, bucktoothed and goggle-eyed. Lore took a thumbnail and scratched it across all three,kkkt, kkkt, kkkkkt, and then stooped to sniff—

The smell of rot hit her. A roadkill dead meat smell somehow intermingling with the pickled odor of an old folks’ home—crushed squirrel, stale pissy diapers, the sourness of age. And as if to make it somehow worse: a whiff of bubble gum just after.

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