Page 61 of The Staircase in the Woods

“We need to stay here in this room for a bit. We’re safe. We need to rest a little—”

“No way,” Nick said. “We pick one of those doors, and we go find Matty.”

“None of us are good right now. We need a minute. And we need to stay together. No arguments.”

Nick groused, but he gave a pissy thumbs-up.

“Everybody, take a few beats. Just, um, just be quiet. I need to think. Maybe rest my eyes a little,” Lore said. “Everyone go to your corners. Chill out. Take a nap or something. We will regroup in a bit.”

And Lore wandered away from them. She had to. She needed some space alone just to let her brain work. Alone was always how Lore worked best—without distraction, without nonsense, without other people’sbullshit. She needed that clarity to figure out how they were going to get out of this place—

This place without windows, without exits.

36

Examinations

Now, amid the sea of greige.

Nobody talked to one another. It wasn’t hard for Owen to vibe the raw feelings in the room. It was like a telepathic frequency buzzing in the air, lines of black electricity linking them all, transmitted in dark looks.

Owen wanted to go look at the books on the bookshelf, but Lore was already over there, and…he didn’t want to be near her now. He felt like shit for throwing her under the bus like that. But he felt like shit, too, for what she said to him, and how she’d been ignoring him for years, and how she’d usedtheiridea without ever asking him, and, and, and…

He wanted so badly to chew his fingernails right now. Not just the nails—he wanted to bite into the tips of his fingers, eating the tops off like bits of carrot. The urge was intense, and he realized suddenly he did not have his trazodone—the one drug in a long litany of drugs he’d tried over the years to blunt those urges. So now it was, what, willpower he had to rely upon?That’s not going to go well!he thought, madly.

Instead, he chewed his tongue. Bit into it like it was jerky—not hard enough to draw blood. But it might be swollen later.

He looked over at Nick, who sat there, also restless, his jaw working. Nick was intimidating. Like sharkskin, you rubbed him the wrong way, you bled. One drunken night, Nick had told Owen, “I’m just jealous of you, Nailbiter,” but Owen figured that was bullshitbecause what was there to be jealous of? Nick had a great relationship with his father, even if his mother had passed on years before. Nick didn’t seem to have cares or worries—he did what he wanted, without fear.

Over the last several years, Nick emailed the group again and again, talking about Matty, sending them links to some Reddit thread or another about staircases people found in forests, swamps, deserts—about doors in the middle of nowhere, or furniture that just showed up somewhere, or whole houses. Owen, he realized now, was the only one who actuallyrespondedto Nick, even if it was just head-patting, over-polite, placating condescension. And he also realized now that maybe he and Nick had more in common than he knew. Nick really had no reason to be jealous. Neither of them had their shit together. Neither of them had done anything at all with the time they’d been given.

Owen hazarded a look at Hamish, who sat there, head slumped back, mumbling something to himself. A prayer, maybe. God, he was a Christian now? That tracked, he guessed. Back when they were kids, Hamish was, in his words, “just spiritual, dude, no organized religion for this guy.”

Do I want to be him instead of me?Owen wondered.

No, he did not.

Do I want to be like Lore?

Successful but cold, driven but alienated?

Owen didn’t know.

All he knew was that right now, he wanted to be alone. Somewhere in a dark corner, chewing his fingers down to the literal bone.

But being alone right now…

Didn’t seem smart. And certainly wasn’t possible, anyway.

Instead, he went to look at dead fish.

Owen didn’t know anything about fish, or aquariums. He had a hamster once; it escaped its glass-walled prison and got into their walls and died, creating a smell that made his father so mad, he swore up and down to Owen that they would never again get a pet of anykind, because the death of any pet would just be a grave inconvenience to the man. In college, at Sarah Lawrence, in the short time when Owen and Lore got an apartment off campus, they had a cat—a silky black shadow named Invader Zim who bit them all the time. And at no point did he ever have fish.

(Owen told himself he was simply not capable of sustaining another life.)

(He was, after all, barely capable of sustaining his own.)

The fish in the tank numbered thirteen, and they consisted of varieties he’d seen before, though only one he could identify by name: angelfish. Two of those floated at the top. Flakes of them falling away like fish food—fish eat the flaky food, fish die and become the flaky food. He wondered if the other fish—fish once golden, once black, once silverish-see-through, fat fish, skinny fish, tiny fish—would eat that mess if they were still alive. He suspected they would. That was the world they lived in.

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