Page 80 of The Staircase in the Woods

I FEEL IT INSIDE MY HEAD

A chill clawed its way up her arms.

She and Hamish looked to each other, then promptly began opening all the cabinets, and in several of them, Matty had carved other—other what? Messages? Warnings? Deranged ramblings?

IT WANTS TO LIVE INSIDE YOU

YOU CAN TELL BY THE EYES

HAVE TO FIND THE CENTER

I SAW MY PARENTS

YOU WILL BECOME THE HOUSE

DON’T LET IT IN

DON’T LET IT WIN

I WANT TO GO HOME

Each of them was carved into the wood of the cabinets. The lettering was crude and hasty. And it only took a moment to see the small paring knife in the sink, the tip surrounded by meager curls of wood, like bits of bitten fingernail.

“The fuck,” Hamish said, mouth hanging open. “What does all of this mean, Lore? Jesus. It’s crazy. These messages are fuckingcrazy. Matty came in here and he went…he went nuts.”

She thought, but did not say:He didn’t go crazy.

Itmadehim crazy.

But then again—maybe he wasn’t crazy. Maybe thesewerewarnings. To them? To anyone? Was he just carving these thoughts into the doors like a message in a bottle thrown into the open ocean? Just in the hopes someone would see them?

Or did he know they were here?

“What does it all mean?” he asked her. “You’re smarter than me. By like, a country mile. What is this place?”

She heard the fear and desperation in his voice. Hamish was on the edge. Every part of him on the verge of breaking.But you’re fine,she told herself, even as she feared it was a lie. Well, sometimes a lie told often and with conviction became true, at least in a way.You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine.

“I don’t know. But I think if we can figure out what it is…maybe we can find Matty and maybe we can escape. These are his words. He came here. Maybe he’s still in here.”

“But we know he never came home, Lore. He wanted to come home and he never got to, and we’ll never get home either—”

“Fuck that shit, Hamish. I don’t believe it. Look.Look.” She tapped Matty’s message, the one that readDon’t Let It Win.“This is ourmission. Okay? We can’t let it win. He’s right. You can feel it, can’t you? The house? It’spresent. Like a—a worm crawling around inside your head, like a spider trying to nest in your ear, like that parasitic isopod, the one that eats a fish’s tongue and replaces it with itself. This place is a parasite. It’s like what someone cut into the wall in that hallway: It hates us. I can feel it now. I didn’t know that I could, but it’s there, like the sound of a chainsaw or a leaf blower in the distance. Both a sound and a pressure. The hate. Can you feel it? It’s not just me, is it?”

Hamish shook his head slowly. “I can feel it.”

“Good. So that message is true. And we’re going to do what Matty said. We’re not going to let it win.” She choked back despair, and tried very hard to believe her own words. “For now, there’s food in these cabinets. Let’s gather it up, find a way to carry it with us, and then we are going to keep moving. Somehow, we’ll find the others. Okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

Hamish pulled the meager foodstuffs—their rations, now, all of it out of date, hopefully none of it moldy—from the cabinets. Meanwhile, Lore tried to block it out, the hatred from this place. Because she really could feel it. Like hands around her throat, a gun to her head. A voice already in there. Whispering, nattering,Matty’s dead, you left him alone, Hamish is holding you down, they all keep you down, if you want to get free, you have to do this all by yourself, same way you do everything, Lore, same way you survived, same way you succeeded, you have so much work to do, so much life yet to live. Matty’s dead but you don’t have to be. You don’t have to be.She hissed at the voice, told it to shut up. But it wouldn’t. It just kept going, and going, and going.

Endless, like the house.

47

The Funeral

They weren’t welcome at the funeral.

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