Page 58 of The Staircase in the Woods

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Tena.m.

Nobody was eating. Or drinking. They were back at the camp now. The fire had gone to dead gray ash. Everything looked sad and empty and ruined.

“It’s gotta be simple,” Nick said, of the story they needed to tell.

“I don’t see why we need a story,” Owen said again.

“Because of the Satanic Panic. Because of the West Memphis Three. Because just last year, remember in Perkasie those three kids who went missing? Kids younger than us. They were killed on a turf farm up there by a couple of twenty-year-old pot dealers who lured them there and stabbed them, chucked them in a fuckingwater tank. They’re gonna think we lured our very successful, most excellent friend up here and executed him. They’ll look at Owen, with his black clothing, they’ll look at me and see some skeevy scumlord, they’ll see that Lauren was high on acid and Hamish was stoned and drunk and they’ll say,Those kids killed their good friend, Matthew Shiffman, who would never drink a drink or eat a drug. They sacrificed him to the devil up there at Highchair Rocks. And god fucking forbid we say something about a mysterious staircase that came and went and took our best friend with it. That isn’tcredible,you understand? They’ll hang us.”

That sold it.

They needed a story.

It would be a simple one, they decided. Too complicated and that meant nobody would remember it, and it might strain credibility.

At some point that night, they just couldn’t find Matty. He’d taken some of his stuff and gone. They’d throw some of his things off the edge of a cliff to make it look like maybe he fell.

“We can’t do that,” Owen said. “That is a crime. That means we’re committing a crime. Right?”

Hamish agreed. He sniffed and said, “And if they think Matty is dead, they’ll—they’ll stop lookin’ for him.”

“Where do you think they’re going to find him?” Lauren asked. “Up the staircase? There is no staircase. It’s gone.”

“Maybe there never was one,” Hamish said, stammering. “Maybe we were all too drunk and high and we imagined it. Like, like, mass hysteria. A shared hallucination, you know? Weird shit happens like that. And maybe Matty reallyisout there somewhere. Lost and alone.Maybe we should just tell them. His family. The police. Maybe we should tell them he just wandered off, and they can look for him, too. We can all look for him.”

“Fuck that,” Nick said. “The cops are shit. Cops don’t wanna do that work. They’ll want to pin it on us. We have to do this right.”

Lauren agreed with him.

Owen and Hamish shot each other dubious looks.

But the train was moving. The ride was starting.

And they were all on it, like it or not.

And so, the Second Covenant was born.

35

How to Sell a Murder House

This, then, was the Greige Space Room:

It was a living room broad in the shoulders—nearly three hundred square feet, longer than it was wide (or wider than it was long, depending on your perspective), but it was big, roomy, with a high double tray ceiling and a big airplane-propeller-looking ceiling fan. The white leather couch was crisp and new. On the other side of the TV stand in the middle of the room was a sitting area with more leather chairs, these with the color and texture of faux rhino skin. The chairs, and a white marble table, were arranged around a black electric fireplace nestled in a façade of whitewashed brick. Built-in bookshelves lurked on either side, and those shelves were lined with books. On the adjoining wall, the wall they could not see when staring through the closet, was a massive aquarium. In it were a dozen fish of several varieties, all dead, so dead they were nearly disintegrating, wisps offish fiberfloating off of them. The life bled out of them, same as how the color was bled from the room.

The room had three doors:

One, the closet, which they had just come through. That door, now closed.

And off the sitting area, two more doors, one on each wall in the corner, both greige, both closed.

The room smelled like sweetly sour vanilla candles and new carpet. It was overwhelming, the smell. Like it crawled up your nose and laid eggs in your sinuses. Lore felt assaulted by it—by the smell, bythe non-color color, by the fibrous wads of dead fish. She worked at the puzzle of this place. What was it?Wherewas it,whenwas it,whywas it? It rotated in her mind, a Rubik’s Cube of all gray-beige, the lines of cubes turning and turning and resolving into nothing.

That’s when Hamish said: “Jesus. I know this room.”

They all turned to give him a look.

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