Page 47 of The Staircase in the Woods

To Hamish.

Hamish, who was not with them, but rather at the door where they came in.

“Hamish?” Owen called to him.

“Guys?” Hamish said. “Did anybody close the door behind them when they came in here? Because—” He did his hands in a lazy game show reveal: The door was, in fact, closed. Painted yellow on this side. Actually…

Owen stood.

“It’s not the same door,” he said.

“What? Fuck you,” Nick said, turning to look.

“It’s not. See? The door we opened—it was wood, old wood, dark wood. This is—it’s different, cheaper—”

Hamish clarified, numbly: “It’s a traditional six-panel medium-density fiberboard door, barebones shit, same kinda door you’ll find in half the middle-class homes of America.” He put his hand on it, then curled his fingers into a fist and knocked softly a few times. Lore flinched, half expecting a knock back. But none came. “So you’re right. Literally not the same door.”

At that, Hamish reached for the doorknob.

The door opened.

And Hamish cried out—a ragged bleat of shock and panic.

“What is it?” Nick asked.

But from her vantage point on the floor, Lore could already see what it was that summoned that sound from Hamish, drawing it up like rancid well water—

The hallway they came from?

It was gone.

30

The Diary and the Knife

The four of them now stood in this teen girl’s room, on one side of the door, staring across the open space to theotherside of the door, where once upon a time, there waited a hallway. A hallway they’d been in only minutes before.

And it was now gone.

Instead, they stared across the doorway into what looked like a dining room.

The walls were wood paneled. The table, covered in a plasticky tablecloth decorated in yellow flowers, orange birds, green ferns. A tacky not-really-gold chandelier hung above it, the kind with fake candles and glass bulbs shaped like flames. The chandelier gently swung back and forth, the spiderwebs attached to it swaying and stretching, but not quite breaking. The table was set with paper plates and glassware. On each plate was a piece of yellow cake and festive generic birthday icing. Half eaten. Forks askew. A few flies buzzed above.

Owen felt sick.

Beyond the table, on the far side of the room, next to a bookshelf on one side, a kerosene heater on the other, was another doorway closed by a louvered bifold door, the unfinished wooden slats cracked and crooked. A closet door, maybe.

They all stared, silent for a while. Unsure what to say, or do.

It was Hamish who eventually broke the silence: “That could bemy grandmother’s dining room. I mean, it’s not, it’s fucking totally not, I just mean—”

Lore jumped in:

“Late seventies, early eighties vibe. Knickknacks on a shelf in the corner, the cheap tablecloth, the—the wood sconces with mulberry red candles. Not just grandma energy. This is just what people’s houses looked like in the seventies and eighties, man. People who would become grandmas one day, I guess.”

Owen, frustrated, said: “Who cares whose room it is? It’s not a hallway, and more to the point,notthe hallway we used to enter this bedroom. The house, or whatever this place is? It shifted.It fucking shifted.”

This place hates you, this place hates you, this place hates you—

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