Page 48 of The Staircase in the Woods

He stuck a thumbnail in his mouth, peeling a crescent off of it.

Nick started to walk through the door.

Hamish put a hand on his chest, hard.

“Dude. Wait.”

“I’m just checking it out.”

“We need to just stop for a second.”

Lore nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Hamish is right.” Owen felt a twist of petty jealousy:Oh, sure,he’sright, but not me for saying hey let’s stop talking about interior design eras for a minute. “If this place really does shift, then what if it does it while one of us is inthereand the rest of us are overhere?”

“But we know Matty isn’t inhere,” Nick hissed through his teeth. “And he might be that way. So I want to go that way.”

“Nick, c’mon, man,” Hamish said. “Let’s just—fuck, man, let’s just calm down, take a minute, sit down in this, uhh, this girl’s bedroom and think. Okay? Can we just stop and think?”

It was hard not to hear the panic vibrating at the edges of Hamish’s every word. It contrasted hard with Owen’s memory of him. As a kid, Hamish had always been a leaf in a stream—just happy to float wherever the water was taking him. He was the easiest going, a wad ofhuman Silly Putty eager to be molded. Life and time had changed him.

It had changed them all, hadn’t it? A small voice inside Owen said,Not really. You’re still the same, Zuikas.

“Fine. Yeah.” Nick shrugged and backed into the bedroom, going over and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Whatever.”

Owen sat at the desk.

Lore stood.

Hamish paced.

“I’ll start,” Lore said, talking it out. “We started in a forest. There was a staircase that was not supposed to be there. We walked up it, and as a result, we allwentsomewhere else. Here. In this…place, this house, this structure. A hallway that led to this room where a phone was ringing and where I heard our lost friend, Matty, on the phone. And then there was another shift. Right? The hallway is now gone. It’s been replaced with a dining room. What else? What am I missing?”

“It’s fucked,” Hamish said. “It’s all fucked, man.”

“Very helpful, Ham,” Nick said.

“And the rooms don’t really match,” Nick said. “This room is for a girl in the 1990s. That dining room? Like you said, late seventies, early eighties. The hallway and stairs and shit, with all that wood? I’d say, older, maybe much older.”

“Not necessarily,” Owen said. “Not everyone has an interior designer make one house look consistent. A couple inherits a house, an old house, they make changes where they can. Different generations inhabit the house, decorate it differently. It’s only rich people that have really consistent visions for their houses and have the money to implement those visions, right?”

“Right,” Lore said.

He felt a twitter of validation.Senpai noticed me,he thought foolishly.

“What else?” she asked.

Hamish offered: “These two rooms shouldn’t connect. Nobody is putting a girl’s bedroom right off a dining room.”

“Andsomeone’s already been here,” Nick said. “That table in there has cake on it. Half eaten. Like a family was in there chowing down and got raptured or some shit.”

As the others spoke, Owen looked at the computer lying on its side down near his feet. He leaned over and got it back upright before seeing that it was unplugged. He spied an outlet against the wall—cracked white plastic. Then he looked up. Christmas lights, blinking.

“There’s power,” he said suddenly. “Electricity.”

He plugged in the computer and turned it on.

It started to boot.

“What kind of system is it?” Lore asked.

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