Page 53 of The Staircase in the Woods

Not his knife. Not the Schrade Old Timer. This was a boning knife, the thin blade curved like her returning smile.

“Why did you have a photo of that knife? The Old Timer. I…I had one just like it.”Just, juuuuust like it.With the red on the blade and everything.“I don’t understand. You have to help me understand.”

She took a step toward him. Then another.

A trail of red, viscid footprints behind her.

“Knife,” she said again, holding up the blade so that the metal caught the glow from the blinking string lights.

“I wanted to be loved, too. I wanted to be something to someone.”

Her smile dropped again even as she stepped closer. The next words were like the grinding of a millstone. A grinding, crushing sound.

“We can d-d-diiiiie together, ugly and alone.”

He nodded in agreement.

He felt something shift inside his mind. Almost like the air around him when he stepped off that staircase into that hallway. Inside him, his mental furniture shifted. Rooms moved and doors opened.

Owen was about to step toward her—

When someone grabbed him and dragged him backward through the door.

33

The Rotten Cake Room

Wham. It was Hamish and Nick who closed the door and held it fast, Nick fumbling at the knob for a lock—a lock that ended up just being one of those little turny things. He engaged it just the same.Click.

Lore, meanwhile, was the one who pulled Owen through the doorway and into this dusty, musty dining room with the rotten cake smell and the cheap-ass wood paneling. She spun him toward her and found his gaze lost to a horizon that wasn’t there. “Owen, what thefuck,” she hissed at him, and then snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Ping? Hello? You there?”

“Yeah,” he said, though he sounded unsure about that. “Hey.”

“Are you okay?”

A small nod. “Yeah.”

Bullshit. You’re not okay.

“Owen.Owen. Why did you stay…?”

Behind her, the other two were panicking. Lore looked over, saw blood spreading out underneath the closed door. Pooling between the feet of Nick and Hamish. The doorknob rattled. The girl’s fingers squirmed under the door like searching worms, sliding through the thickening blood, twisting through the red muck.

And then, like that, they were gone. Sucked back under the door.

The blood vacuumed back into the room, too—reversing course, rewinding like a movie. No blood, no fingers, no rattling knob, nothing.

Silence, long and cold, waited for them.

“I think she’s gone,” Nick said finally, his ear pressed against the wood.

Hamish pulled him back, giving him aWTFlook. “These doors are cheap, man. One of those…fucking fingers might punch through this shit like an icepick into your ear. So be careful, damn.”

“She also had a knife,” Owen said quietly, as if to himself.

Lore told Hamish to stay there at the door, just in case. Nick, too. Owen, though, looked fragile. Not that he didn’t always look a little fragile, but something in there had really cracked his plaster. What was the deal about the knife? That was maybe a conversation for another time.

Instead, she ushered him into a chair. “You should sit.”

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