Page 71 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Well I didn’t close it.”

“Fine,” Owen said.

“Fine.”

Now, Nick peeked in. “Can we hurry this up? Hearing you piss makesmegotta piss, so ándale, ándale, let’s move.”

Lore nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Jeez.”

It struck her then—them coming into the room seemed to chase away those dark thoughts. Like cockroaches when you turn on the light. Skitter, skitter.

And the door, drifting closed without her touching it…

This place wants us to be alone.

Lore hurried up, flushed—the toilet worked, and so did the sink. The water was clear, had no smell. She cupped some in her hand and took a sip, and it tasted minerally and metallic but not like poison. Lore cast one last look at the words across the broken mirror shards, then she hurried out of the bathroom, a chill chasing her back toward her friends.

40

You’re Not Scared of the Dark, You’re Scared of What’s in It

“Everyone have their phones out and powered on?” Lore asked.

They did. They also each checked again to see if they had any service—

Still nothing.

No way out, and no way to reach out. Fine.So we push through. But pushing through had to be smart. They had to have strategy. Not like Nick, wanting to just bum-rush every room. If this was really like a game, like a dungeon, they needed to take it room by room, and do itslowly. Check the corners. Check for traps.

Lore always thought that in movies and games, the characters never did the right thing—more to the point, they never did thesmartthing. It’s why she loved tabletop role-playing way more than video games, even though she was more a video game designer by trade. (She would gladly have designed pen-and-paper RPGs instead, but the money there was lower than Lowly Worm. She could not afford cool cross-body bags and magic shrooms and bougie-ass sex toys on the pennies tossed at her feet by the RPG industry. Not their fault, of course. Mostly.) At the game table, you could bring strategy, you could make plans, you could trycrazy shitto help solve a situation or just stay alive. So here, in this situation, she knew they had to do this the smart way.

It would not behoove them to go stumbling around blind, here more than anywhere. But moving ahead with lights in front of themwasn’t enough. Not in a place where a dead girl crawled out from under a bed.

The plan, then, was this:

She wanted lights in every direction.

They’d walk forward in a diamond configuration.

Her at the front.

Hamish and Owen behind her to the left and to the right.

Nick at the back.

They’d point their lights in their respective directions: forward, left, right, and behind them.

Their last problem, and this was one she could do nothing about:

The light from their phones’ flashlights was a weak, sad thing. They offered pale, wan light—thin like moonlight. But it was better than nothing. She asked Nick if he had his Zippo, and he flinched. “No,” he said. “I, uhh, I lost it.”

“Okay, no lighter,” she said, taking a deep breath. “This is what we got. Let’s do this.”

She opened the door. It drifted open, the unoiled hinges whining.

The room ahead was pitch black.

Her heart pounded as she stood on the verge of darkness. It felt mad to be so scared of it—she’d long conquered her fear of the dark, like most adults, even though sometimes she still felt that little twinge of primeval fear, atweakof certainty that something was hunting you in the shadows. That was the funny thing about a fear of the dark: you weren’t really afraid ofit,but rather what lurkedwithin it. A perfect emblem of the fear of the unknown.

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