Page 120 of The Staircase in the Woods

At their feet, Nick lay, his body in a tangle. Still breathing. Moaning.

What they’d find when he awoke, Lore did not know. But first, she had something she had to ask Owen, didn’t she?

—

“Why did you say that?” Lore asked Owen after having pulled him off to the side, leaving Hamish to watch over a slumped-over Nick, his hands and ankles bound with electrical tape.

“What?”

“To Nick. You said Matty wasn’t dead.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“You know that? You’re sure of it?” She wanted to grab him and shake the answer out of him. But suddenly everything felt so precarious, sodelicate,that she instead just stood there, quietly quaking.

“No. I’m not sure. I just—” He hesitated. “The house got in me. It’s been getting into us all lately but before? When I hurt myself, it…itreallygot in me, Lore. I don’t even know where I ended and its walls and hallways began. And there was this moment when I understood the house. Where I knew what the door I was about to open would show me. Almost like I could feel it, or like I could control what came next. And somewhere in there I just felt like…Matty wasn’t here. That it hadn’t killed him. It showed Nick what it wanted to show Nick to break him. I think…Matty got out.”

Hope, cruel hope, hope so bright it blinded her, burst forth in her chest. It felt dizzying. She felt buoyant and sick. “If he got out—”

“It doesn’t mean he got out the right way, Lore. This place will let you out if you serve it. We saw that with Nick. It…could be that way with Matty, too.”

That hope went supernova. Bursting so bright it burned the universe, flaming out into a dark, dead lump. Of course. Ofcourseit meant Matty might not be Matty anymore. He might just be…like Nick. Like the house. A monster carrying its pain into the world and using it to make more pain.

“Maybe we can find him. And save him.”

“First we have to help Nick.”

The cooling lump of hope in her heart forced her to ask the question: “Can we? Help him, I mean. You were out there on the edge, Owen. So close to falling over it. We got you here in time but Nick—it’s been in him for, shit, we don’t even know how long. Months?Years?When did he find a staircase? When did he go up it, take the place into his head and bring it back out? He’swith the house,” she said, gesturing to Nick. “He is in the house and the house is in him.He is itsagent. Poisoned by it for so long it’s hard to know where the poison ends and where Nick begins.” She crossed her arms. “How do we fix that?”

“I think you’re going to have to table your discussion,” Hamish called to them. “Because somebody’s waking up.”

72

The Possession of Nicholas Lobell

The awakening did not arrive well, or easily, for Nick. At first, his stirring was slow and restive—little hypnic jerks coupled with moans and mumbles that grew louder and louder with each utterance. But then, his eyes wrenched open, as if by invisible fingers, and he screamed an unholy sound. His head ratcheted back on his neck and through his upturned mouth, the words poured out of him in a raging river:

“WhyamIherewhatwhatwhereizzitpleaseputmebacktherewhyWHYWHY.IneeditneeditneedityouliarliesMattyMattyIsawMattyfuckyouFUCKYOU.”

Slurs erupted from him. Slurs punctuated by screams. Hideous profanities as his head whipped back and forth—screaming about how he wanted to fuck Lore in the ass, how he’d shove his cock in Owen’s mouth, how he’d slit open the bellies of Hamish’s children and piss and shit and ejaculate inside their chests.

Then his body seized up for a moment before unlocking itself in a thrashing wave of movement—his bound hands swinging left and right like a loose pulley, his heels kicking down on the ground,wham, wham, wham,his head hammering back into the wall then knocking into the drywall studs, back and left and right, back and left and right, his entire body caught in this earthquake of rage and panic.

They had to pounce on him and hold him still. His head spun on his neck far, too far,impossiblyfar, and he opened his mouth and sunk his teeth into the meat of Owen’s shoulder. Owen cried out,stumbling backward, blood already sliding down to his elbow, clinging to the underside of his forearm. Then Nick drove the top of his forehead forward into Hamish’s eye, and it rocked Hamish, though still he held on, using his shoulder to press into the side of Nick’s face, bolstering it against the wall so it couldn’t move. Lore, meanwhile, fumbled for the electrical tape, and clumsily, desperately managed to unwind some and start to get it around Nick’s mouth. Owen got back in there, and helped her hold his head up as she wound it around and around. It didn’t manage to cover his mouth—the tape was too thin for that. Nick bit at it, but that did little good—the tape was, for now, too thick, unyielding to his teeth. At the end of it, it wound around enough times, pressing into his mouth like a gag.

He hissed like a lizard and stared at them. Hate effulgent in his eyes. His nostrils flared. His cheeks puffed out with rapid, shallow breaths.

But he stopped thrashing.

Carefully, they each backed off. The crawlspace did not afford them much room, so they flanked him to the left and to the right. Lore and Owen on one side. Hamish on the other. They knew it would be easier to go out there, in the house—but the house was the house, and it’s where it got into Nick.

He needed to be here, they believed.

Was it possible to free him from the house? To evict it? None of them knew, but if it was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen in here.

—

Something had crawled its way into Nick—the entity. The demon. Thehouse.It was easy to see when you knew to look for it. His eyes, open and glassy, sometimes showed flashes of strange wallpaper, or cracked window glass, or tarnished spigots. In Lore’s peripheral vision, she could see his skin rippling like living wallpaper. His tongue, a staircase. She couldn’t see them when she looked head on. But looking just away…he was a human-shaped structure, crackling and crunching as it thrashed in its bonds.

---