Page 67 of The Staircase in the Woods

Owen sighed.

And he shut his eyes, too. A valiant, if worthless, endeavor.

38

The Voices

The voices were soft at first, so soft they almost sounded like nothing at all. But as Owen pressed himself deeper into the couch, those voices pushed their way into his head like fingers through soft dough. They were everywhere. Worse when he pressed his ear to the couch; there, they seemed to vibrate louder, bullying their way through the atoms and molecules of the leather. They came from below. From the sides. And even from somewhere up above.

He assumed they were just a dream, some hallucination as he skidded across the surface of sleep like a flat stone skipping across a still pond. Sleep could be like that for him sometimes: He would lie there, and just as he started to dip into sleep, he’d pop that perfect bubble and tumble into some terrible dream space, plunging into nameless nightmare before waking suddenly, his heart hammering.

These voices, though, conjured in him a peculiar kind of nostalgia: when you’re a child, and you’re hearing adults talk in an adjacent room, but they’re trying to keep quiet enough not to wake you. You cannot hear their words, only the soft murmur and mumble of the voices themselves. And in that sound, you can detect emotion, you can hear the rhythm and the rise and the fall, but you can’t make out what they’re actuallysaying. In his case, those moments usually, maybe always, ended with his father yelling at his mother. Then a door slam. Then her crying, still softly, because she tried to keep her sobs a secret. So as not to wake her one son.

Finally, Owen inhaled deeply and sat up, his eyes open.

He still heard the voices.

Hamish was in the crook of the sofa, where it bent, and he too was awake. Looking up and around. The look of someone hearing something.

“You hear it, too?” Hamish asked, quietly.

“The voices?”

“Yeah.” Hamish sat upright, rubbing his eyes. “It’s like when my parents had a fight. Man, they fought all the time. Night and day.”

Owen nodded. “Mine didn’t fight that often, but when they did…” It was mostly his father who yelled. Mom just…went along. He never hit her, never hit Owen. It was always just words, but that whole thing about sticks and stones was a lie. Words hurt as bad as a fist. Maybe worse. Because a fist, maybe you excuse that as oh, he couldn’t help it, he’s just an animal, a primate, his blood was up. But someone cuts you with words? Calls you names, tells you how little they think of you? That bypasses all your armor. A razor sliding across the meat of your heart.

One time, though, his mother came hurrying up the steps as he was going down, and she stopped him midway. Her face was streaked with the runoff of ruined makeup. Her nose rimmed with snot. Mom was usually quiet, usually sweet, didn’t say much, didn’t take up much room, rarely had a bad word to say. But that day, she said in the coldest, cruelest tone, “I hope he hangs himself. He’s miserable enough to do it. You’ll see.”

And Owen remembered nodding along with that. Agreeing with her. And a little part of him felt like maybe, justmaybe,things would turn around after that—maybe Mom could stoke that little fire in her belly into a proper bonfire. Maybe she would fight back. For herself and for Owen. But it didn’t happen. After that day, the fire went out and she mostly melted into the background again. Then, when he was in college, came the car accident. A pickup truck T-boned her Chevy Malibu at an intersection—a car she hated but that Dad hadbought for her—and she died at the hospital that night. And a few years after that, Dad died, too. Not of suicide, like his mother had hoped. Cancer. He remembered visiting him then and—

He flinched at the coming memory, and cut it off at the knees.

He felt along the ridges of his ears, found a hair there, plucked it. A tiny spike of pain felt clarifying. He wanted to pluck more. He wanted to dig a finger deep into his ear, scrape out the wax. Then stick a pencil even deeper, puncturing the drum. In the fullness of blood he wouldn’t be able to hear the voices through the walls. Owen gritted his teeth; he needed to shake it off.

So he stood up and walked to the wall next to the closet where they’d come in. He pressed his ear to the drywall. The voices were louder this way, but he still couldn’t make anything out. Two people? Three? A man, a woman, at least. A laugh. Then, agitation. Not a happy laugh. More babble and gush. More from the teachers and parents inPeanuts. Womp womp womp womp.

“I think it’s coming from this direction,” he hissed to Hamish, who was on the other side of the room, at the end of the couch near Nick’s head.

But Hamish said, “No, I hear it here.”

Owen went over and listened.

Sure enough, more voices there. Same voices? He couldn’t tell.

“Fuck are you two doing?” Lore asked, plodding over, yawning.

“You don’t hear it?” he asked her.

“Hear what?” she asked, but then she seemed to take a moment. Her head tilted and her face tightened in concern and confusion. “Are those voices?”

They said yeah. Voices.

Lore blinked. “There are people here. Other people.” Hope bloomed on her face. “We have to find them. Where are they?”

“I think they’re…everywhere,” Owen said.

Murmur, mumble, hum, and babble. Muted susurrus of conversation.

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